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Post-Mortem: Sinn Féin
Read more about: Manifesto, Northern Ireland, Policy, Sinn Féin
One of the main victims of the “squeeze” on smaller parties in this year’s General Election was undoubtedly Sinn Féin who ended up losing a seat rather than making gains as predicted.
So what went wrong for the party?
Many fingers have been pointed squarely at Gerry Adams since the weekend’s result, saying that his lack of political acumen, particularly in terms of economics, cost his party dearly. There’s no denying that his performance on RTÉ’s first leader’s debates was very poor, with Adams allowing himself to be cornered on all his party’s policies and allowing his arch-nemesis Michael McDowell the space to land a few IRA-related sucker-punches from which Adams simply failed to reply.
But the fact is that Adams’ poor performance simply meant he didn’t gain any new supporters rather than alienate the ones he already has. Assuming that the debate was the party’s downfall assumes that these shows have serious bearing on the undecided mind and also assume that Sinn Féin’s voters are looking for in-depth analysis on economic issues. They’re not.
Two things happened to Sinn Féin which cost them dearly, however.
Firstly it became apparent quite quickly that the electorate at large was unimpressed by the movement in Northern Ireland. They weren’t exactly apathetic to the situation but they saw Sinn Féin’s work in Belfast as independent of their work in Dublin.
More still responded to the “haven’t we done well?” attitude with a “yes, and it’s about bloody time” type answer - something that was inspired by the months of ‘Will-they? Won’t-they?’ theatrics that became par for the course. Central issues of their manifesto, like the Green Paper on Irish Unity, became a joke on the basis of this.
Secondly the issue of Sinn Féin in Government came up; but it affected the voters in a completely unforeseen way.
Questions over Fianna Fáil’s willingness to deal with Sinn Féin were used by Fine Gael and Labour, not to limit Sinn Féin’s support but to limit Fianna Fáil’s - the thinking being that could-be Fianna Fáil voters would be turned off by that very proposition.
While Fianna Fáil managed to deflect that well enough neutralise the question it stuck in the mind of the Sinn Féin support base and they began to ask questions about their party’s prospects.
Did Sinn Féin have what it takes to be in power? Did they want their party associated with Bertie and Co.? Did they really think the party could make a difference for the better?
Suddenly that novel protest vote being cast by thousands across the country became far less trivial. No-one who voted for Joe Higgins thought it would make a difference on Government and likewise no-one who had voted for Sinn Féin really believed they’d hold the wheel of power. But when that improbability became a possibility things took on a whole different dimension - the prospect became real.
Sinn Féin’s vote suffered because they relied on the unimportant while simultaneously gaining the potential of importance. It seems now that much of their support base is built mainly on anti-establishment types that will never vote for them when power is at stake and so they must decide if they’re going to re-draw their appeal or buy into the protest vote and promise to remain outside of Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael-led power.
I think what it boils down to is that we lost the pro-FF vote to FF, and we lost the anti-FF vote to candidates who hadn’t been going around talking about how eager they were to prop up FF.
Also with everyone saying they will not go in with Sinn Fein people thought why vote for opposition.
Also people don’t like their policies
Adams is a big problem. He just didn’t have an adaquate command of the issues. McDowell tore him a new arse during the leaders debate.
Also over reliant on the doughnut Mary Lou who, lets face it is nothing more that a creation of Sein Fein head office. She is a total spoofer and has even less of a grasp of the issues than Adams.
That and the fact that Sein Fein gave encouragment to tne murderers of thousands of people and the voters tend not to like that kind of thing.
The only positive thing to come out of this election was the demise of Sein Fein.
This all looks different from my, Northern, perspective. Adams may or may not be a liability in the South but he continues to have Grade A star power among those he needs to have it with in the North. And let’s face it, the North is vastly more important to SF than the South is. Would anyone in their right mind trade 26% of the vote and half a First Ministership, with room to grow, for a few extra votes in Cabra and Cabinteely? No, they wouldn’t, so Adams is going nowhere, at least for a while.
So Sinn Fein are broken on the wheel of our partitionism - all of us, Northerners and Southerners, and even self-declared Republicans are partitionist in practice after 85 years. Irony this delicious is hard to come by!
The worrying thing looking at things from up here is that probably all our party leaders would have been torn to shreds in the way Adams was in the minor party leaders debate, had they to debate real issues rather than Taigs’n'Prods. And these eejits are running the place! And it’s virtually impossible to vote them out! That is actually quite scary.
This all looks different from my, Northern, perspective. Adams may or may not be a liability in the South but he continues to have Grade A star power among those he needs to have it with in the North. And let’s face it, the North is vastly more important to SF than the South is. Would anyone in their right mind trade 26% of the vote and half a First Ministership, with room to grow, for a few extra votes in Cabra and Cabinteely? No, they wouldn’t, so Adams is going nowhere, at least for a while.
I suppose what I’d say to that is that Sinn Féin weren’t thinking in terms of North or South, they were thinking North and South.
The fact is that they’ve reached their natural peak in Northern Ireland - that’s not to say that they cannot pick up more support, but they’ve gotten to the stage where it’s not a question of them being the biggest Nationalist party or not, it’s about how much bigger than the SDLP they are (and maybe in years to come it’ll be about how close they are to the DUP in terms of support size).
Bar slowly upping their support as nationalist communities grow, the only way is down for Sinn Féin - and they’re surely doing their best to avoid that too.
So Southern gains were a vital second tier of the Sinn Féin project and while the party won’t implode on the back of their poor performance it’s certainly a kick in the teeth for their plans. I’d be surprised if Adams was ousted from the party but he may well have moved on by 2012 - although I’m sure he would have loved to have put SF in power across the island before making such a move.
Maybe that rumour was true - he’ll continue on his peaceful path, become even more loved and get elected President just in time for the 1916 100th anniversary!