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Liam Clarke: Sinn Fein is turning into Sands's dodo
Nobody can say where the party stands when hard choices must be made
The reality Sinn Fein has to contemplate after its ard fheis this weekend is that the party is in the doldrums in Northern Ireland and struggling for any kind of relevance in the republic.
Gerry Adams, the party president, is still trying to explain away its disastrous showing in the 2007 Irish general election, in which he and Martin McGuinness predicted that Sinn Fein’s success would be the big story. Instead of becoming a power broker with 10 or 12 TDs as it expected, it lost automatic speaking and questioning rights in the Dail.
“The economy may have done for Sinn Fein at that election because, as it ended up, people had a clear choice between Enda Kenny on the one hand and Bertie Ahern on the other hand and Sinn Fein was squeezed between those two monoliths,” Adams explained in a BBC interview last week.
In other words, voters didn’t think Sinn Fein provided a viable alternative to the big two parties. They still don’t. Even with Ahern gone and the “Fianna Fail monolith” in meltdown, Sinn Fein’s support languishes below 10% in opinion polls. With the Irish economy in freefall, people in search of an alternative are tending to ignore Sinn Fein in favour of Labour or Fine Gael.
As a party which has not been in power in the republic, it was ideally placed to benefit politically from the recession. Yet it has failed to do so. The seeds of failure were sown in Adams’s speech at last year’s ard fheis when the policies he advocated lacked edge or definition. Sinn Fein opposed high taxes, it backed entrepreneurs; it was pro-business and for workers and farmers.
Mary Lou McDonald, the party’s incoming vice president, came up with a similar mishmash of policies at the party conference last Friday. “Currently 90% of exports from this state are from foreign-owned multinationals. Irish enterprises must develop their export capacity. Government policy must drive this,” she said, later demanding that jobs in multinational companies be defended.
In its opportunistic attempt to tick all the boxes with every pressure group, Sinn Fein can sound like the Quakers, whose motto is “friends of all, enemies of none”. But, unlike the Quakers, nobody can say where the party stands when hard choices have to be made.
The party has fallen back on opportunism now the threat of violence has been abandoned. Bobby Sands wrote that a freedom fighter without a gun is like a bird without wings. This is not always true, as the example of Gandhi attests, but Sands was right to suggest that the republican identity in Ireland is defined by the physical force tradition. The imperatives of a violent, underground conspiracy bound the movement together; Sinn Fein’s readiness to support violence set it apart from other parties.
During the campaign of violence, republican ideology shifted several times, but its devotion to war kept the movement united. Republican economic and social policy, then as now, was strong on clichés about cherishing the children of the nation equally, but vague on detail. Debating such issues too closely was regarded as divisive and premature; the finer points were best left for when the Brits got out and imperialism was routed.
Other movements starting from this position have managed to reinvent themselves. Fine Gael and Fianna Fail both emerged from a physical-force tradition as large democratic parties with clear identities.
But the success of others doesn’t mean Sinn Fein will succeed too. The party is struggling despite conditions that favour it. Parties of the far left and far right traditionally do well in recessions when establishment thinking is seen to falter. Nationalism can also prosper at moments of economic crisis.
But to do so, a political movement needs a clear vision, must seize the popular imagination and develop policies that offer hope to the dissatisfied. This is what Sinn Fein lacks. Its history has not prepared it for the current situation. After the Good Friday agreement, failures and setbacks were not in the script. Sinn Fein assumed the glamour of the peace process, the sense of relief it engendered, and the apparently charmed leadership of Adams would pay political dividends indefinitely.
For a time the payback did flow. The party thrived by extracting concessions from the British and Irish governments in return for IRA weaponry. As its leaders shuttled between Downing Street, Dublin and the White House, the reflected glory burnished Sinn Fein’s credentials as the only nationalist party tough enough and influential enough to deal effectively with the DUP.
The process of selling the guns was played long and skilfully. But now it’s over, leaving Sinn Fein, in Sands’s image, looking rather like a lumbering, flightless dodo.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. Sinn Fein’s strategy was to move so quickly that it would never hit the ground. It would speedily enter government north and south, enabling it to squeeze unionists from both sides of the all-Ireland bodies and make the prospect of a united Ireland by 2016 look less of a hopeless case than it does now.
Adams’s strategy has come unstuck. Sinn Fein is floundering. Last week on BBC Northern Ireland’s Hearts and Minds programme, Ian Paisley Jr of the DUP touched on the sore point when he was asked what it was like working in government with Sinn Fein. “While I am not saying I would prefer to see Sinn Fein in government because they are a soft touch, I believe that, if the SDLP had more people there, we wouldn’t be able to get away with some things we have been able to get away with,” Paisley said.
He recounted instances in which his party had, as the SDLP put it, “wiped Sinn Fein’s eye”, such as the vetoing of a stadium at the Maze prison and of an Irish Language Act. He pointed out that policing and justice powers will only be devolved when the DUP thinks fit and not to Sinn Fein’s timetable. In education, Catriona Ruane’s efforts to end selection by ability at age 11 have hit a brick wall.
In the republic, Sinn Fein has never recovered from Adams’s dismal performance in a leaders’ debate during the 2007 election, where he was palpably short on policy detail compared to Pat Rabbitte of Labour and Michael McDowell of the Progressive Democrats.
It was to be the breakthrough year but, after a poor campaign, McDonald, their most able candidate, failed to get elected in Dublin Central, and the bright young prospects, Pearse Doherty and Padraig Mac Lochlainn, were pipped in Donegal. Their Dail team badly needed this new blood as much as it needed more coherent policies.
While Sinn Fein is currently on the back foot, it is still a formidable political organisation that could recover if it plays to its strengths and stops harping on about its ambiguous past. In the north, its latest party-political broadcast talks of change but leans heavily on nostalgic footage of 1916, 1919, 1969 and 1981. The 21st century hardly featured. Adams’s pronouncements have the same sepia tone, more history lessons than action plans. Since Sinn Fein can’t turn the clock back it needs to abandon heritage politics and take a long hard look at its assets. It has five seats at Westminster, but gives the DUP a free hand by its policy of abstentionism. It will punch below its weight as long as it neglects this source of influence.
In the south, Sinn Fein is seen as a northern party at a time when the north is not an issue and people have more pressing problems. It needs to identify good policies on issues that can win elections, and decide which portion of the electorate it is appealing to.
Radical surgery is unlikely to occur under Adams’s leadership. It is time for a new generation to take charge.
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Originally Posted by toxic avenger
