On 10 February 2018, after more than 34 years at its helm, Irish politician Gerry Adams stepped down as the leader of Sinn Féin, the largest pro-Irish reunification party in both the Republic of Ireland and the UK-controlled region of Northern Ireland. In his place rose Mary Lou McDonald, who outlined her vision for the party in her first address, committing to “innovative and modern ways of advancing our politics.”
Three years later, Sinn Féin has made that vision a reality, breaking Ireland’s two-party system and topping the government parties in recent polls by four points.
As tempting as it may be to attribute the party’s success to the rise in populism that has dominated Europe in recent years, Sinn Féin is more than an anti-establishment populist front. Instead, the party has reimagined itself into the first alternative vision for an Irish future that the country has seen since the War of Independence. Sinn Féin has broken Irish politics, radically and permanently, and there’s no going back for the Emerald Isle.
Sinn Féin was originally founded in 1905 with a platform of Irish republicanism, a progressive nationalist ideology that was staunchly pro-Irish identity and anti-British. At the time, all of Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom, but in the ensuing Irish War of Independence, Sinn Féin legislators who refused to sit in the UK Parliament created their own rebel Irish government to support the revolutionaries.
Once the war was over, and the two sides agreed to the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which let twenty-six counties govern themselves as the Republic of Ireland and left six northern counties with Protestant and pro-British majorities in the United Kingdom, the party split over support for the new partition that divided the island in two. The pro-Treaty faction would break away to form the party Cumann na nGaedheal (which later evolved into Fine Gael), while the anti-Treaty faction would form Fianna Fáil. Sinn Féin itself continued to exist, but in a severely diminished capacity, consistently failing to win any seats in the national legislature.
Since the split, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have alternated power for almost a century, but the actual ideological division between the two parties is slim. As both parties have expanded their tent to win the most votes upon the inevitable failure of the other’s government, both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have gradually assumed a center-right political stance, with deep-seated loyalties governing party support more than actual policy.
Upon the beginning of the Troubles, a decades-long period of sectarian and ethno-nationalist violence in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin splintered into several groups, most of whom claimed the old revolutionary party’s title and legacy. However, it was the faction led by Gerry Adams, which toed the line between idealism and pragmatism, that would ultimately see success. The party sat its first member of the southern Irish legislature in 1997, and quickly became the largest pro-reunification party in Northern Ireland, leading the call to reunite with the Republic of Ireland in the Northern Irish Assembly.
In 2016, after both major parties had led a lackluster post-Recession government, combined support for the two parties hit a record low, with fewer than half of all voters ranking one of the two parties as their first preference. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil were forced to form a loose alliance to retain power, but their confidence and supply agreement only perpetuated the notion that the two parties were functionally identical. When elections were called in early 2020, Sinn Féin saw their chance to strike.
On 8 February 2020, the republicans won more first-preference votes than any other party and tied Fianna Fáil for most seats. But Sinn Féin’s victory was deeper than that; every SF incumbent up for re-election was re-elected, and the party sat 37 out of only 42 candidates for a stunning win rate of 88%. 27 Sinn Féin candidates won their seats on the first count, a rarity in a ranked-choice system, and 25 constituencies saw a Sinn Féin candidate win the most first-preference votes.
Such a stunning victory, seemingly from nowhere, begs the question: how did they do it?
In an era when “Trumpism” has become a political buzzword in Ireland and right-wing nationalism is on the rise in countries like France and Italy, some commentators have claimed that Sinn Féin belongs to that same cadre of vitriolic protest blocs, but this equivalency is misleading. Sinn Féin is no Servant of the People or Five Star Movement; their success is sticking, and brushing it aside as merely an anti-establishment “protest vote” ignores the genuine calls for reform coming from the growing Irish leftist movement that the republicans lead.
Sinn Féin has won its success and will maintain its longevity because they were able to tap into not only public anger, but also public optimism. In McDonald’s first elections as party president, bruising losses in local councils and the European Parliament called the party’s future into question.
It took less than a year, however, for the party to learn from its mistakes. Realizing that they could not run a successful campaign purely on dissatisfaction with the two major parties, Sinn Féin adopted a new campaign strategy for the next year’s elections to the national legislature, one that put people and policy at the forefront.
Irish citizens, especially millennials, are being strangled by an unforgiving housing market. Fianna Fáil proposes building 42,000 new public homes; Fine Gael proposes 50,000. Sinn Féin calls for 100,000, a three-year rent freeze, and housing to be declared a constitutional right. Ireland’s low (or, to borrow a term, “competitive”) corporate tax rates lead to many corporations using the country as a tax haven. All three parties commit to maintaining the 12.5% tax. Sinn Féin outlines aggressive proposals to close tax loopholes and demands greater tax transparency, especially with respect to multinationals. On top of that, the party’s 2020 platform calls for greater democratization of Ireland’s political institutions, immediate recognition of the State of Palestine, and, of course, a referendum on Irish reunification.
The republicans coupled these calls with a comprehensive communications platform, amplifying the party’s digital presence and making it the most popular party on social media. As sector specialists began driving policy discussions, Pearse Doherty and Eoin Ó Broin, Sinn Féin’s finance and housing experts, respectively, became household names. The party pitched itself not as a protest vote against the languorous duopoly, but as a dynamic new future for the troubled island.
The strategy worked. Young voters overwhelmingly flocked to the party; among 18- to 24-year-olds, Sinn Féin held a comfortable sixteen-point lead in exit polls. When both “major” parties refused to form a government with McDonald, who had been given a clear mandate, public sentiment only drifted further in the party’s favor. The two-party system was undoing itself at the seams.
Even recently, in the wake of a popularity boost for Ireland’s current head of government, Taoiseach Micheál Martin of Fianna Fáil, from Ireland’s vaccine rollout, Sinn Féin still holds a comfortable lead in the polls. The party has done more than win an election. They’ve cemented their position as the first real political alternative the country has seen in several decades.
Since independence, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have exchanged power on the backs of each other’s failures. A scandal would arise, the opposition would rally their base, and power would change hands. The actual differences between the parties became less about policy and more about branding. When Sinn Féin ran in 2020, they upset the balance of the system; the introduction of radically new policy proposals to the political mainstream energized a long-disillusioned portion of the population and led them to victory.
They have the infrastructure in place. And if Sinn Féin can hold on and run more candidates in the next general election, Mary Lou McDonald will be the next Taoiseach. A Sinn Féin government can no longer be viewed as the fantasies of fringe idealists, but a legitimate political possibility for the very near future.
And as McDonald leads her party to sweeping successes in the Republic of Ireland, her deputy, Michelle O’Neill, is poised to do the same with the party’s chapter in Northern Ireland. There, Sinn Féin’s main opposition, the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party, is imploding under the stress of navigating Brexit’s implications for the fragile region, with Sinn Féin polling a full nine points ahead of the unionist party. For the first time since the Troubles, the reunification of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland into a single Irish republic is a topic of serious discussion.
With economic crises spiraling out of control and Brexit casting the uneasy post-Troubles peace into doubt, republicans have found their political niche and are capitalizing on it. Across the island, Sinn Féin is pushing up against decades-old traditions and systems and finding little pushing back. Ireland’s two-party system is gone, forever, and Sinn Féin is here to stay.
Image Credit: Sinn Féin by Flickr is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Bureau of Ethical and Sensitive Reporting Chief
