Sinn Féin – Socialist?

The two Sinn Fein members in the Executive of that Assembly did not distinguish themselves from the other Executive parties – Martin McGuinness rejected the claim of the term time workers to a wage over the school holidays. He then spearheaded the privatisation of schools.

The Hayes Report on the future of Northern Ireland’s health service was commissioned by Bairbre de Bruin. Couched in the familiar terms of senior civil servants with their eyes on the purse strings, it recommended huge cuts in services and a massive increase in reliance on private finance. That report was welcomed in broad terms by Sinn Fein MLA Sue Ramsey. Another Sinn Féin member of the MLA, Francie Molloy (suspended from Sinn Féin last year) stated that he has no principled objection to private medicine. The Hayes Report proposed more or less what past direct rule ministers from London proposed – nothing has changed as far as social and economic issues are concerned.

Sinn Fein’s strategy is to keep the Agreement in place and get the Institutions back up. They are making significant electoral advances across the border, and have nothing to gain by a return to war. Ultimately they hope to become the largest single party in the North and to enter into government in the South. Where Socialism is intended to unify people and not divide them, Sinn Féin’s tactics of splitting the North under the guise of fighting for the rights of Catholics, could backfire and perhaps the Agreement institutions would never come back up. It could even be argued that Sinn Féin and the IRA’s fascination with militarism and ultra-nationalism brought those same institutions down in the first place. So much for left-wing politics!

Over the border in the South, the Sinn Fein leadership want to become a party of government. Because of their past they are seen to be outside of the establishment and not the same as the careerist politicians from the other parties. To try to tap the anti-establishment mood they pose as defenders of ordinary people by putting forward populist ideas and even in the case of Ógra Shinn Fein mention Socialism. The party is set to grow in the next General Election, perhaps even double its number of seats in Dáil Éireann. Apart from their work on the ground, the key reasons for their potential to grow are, on the one hand, the removal of the obstacle that the military campaign of the IRA represented to extending their base beyond the most economically depressed areas and, on the other, the strong desire for a political alternative that exists generally.

But Sinn Fein is speaking out of both sides of its mouth at the same time. As it has done in the past, populist and even Socialist rhetoric is put out for public consumption when it suits. This is then dropped when the serious business starts like the period before the negotiations with the British and Irish governments on the “peace process”. Such talk is showboating, nothing more. There isn’t a serious theoretical understanding or practical commitment to class struggle or Socialism within Sinn Fein. More than once in private conversations, long standing members have dismissed the possibility of a serious challenge to capitalism.

Yet another example of this can be seen with relation to Bin Charges in Dublin. When Dublin Corporation brought in refuse charges in 2001, there was a consensus among most of the sitting councillors from all parties to bring in the charges but, in order to try to confuse ordinary people, a deal was done whereby some of the parties would split their votes, so as to allow some of their candidates to say they opposed the charge while the vote was carried. Sinn Fein’s contribution to this charade was to have two of their four councillors vote against, while the other two were absent and to oppose the recording of the vote for the public record when that was called for by Independent TD Tony Gregory. In 2005, Sinn Féin walked out of the Dublin City Council session when the Charges were renewed. They didn’t vote against, they just abstained.

Some Socialists…