General Election 2023: Housing Dreams and Sinn Féin Realities…

We in the South have a general election this week. The campaign has been an uninspiring one, with the three expected topics dominating debate: housing, the cost of living and (to a lesser extent) immigration. If you are under 35 and not well-off, it is the first of these which has been top of the agenda, given the extreme difficulty such people have in buying any kind of house or apartment.

Not surprisingly Sinn Féin’s impressive housing spokesman, Eoin O Broin, has been front and centre of this particular debate. Several parties have promised to build 300,000 housing units over the next five years, or 60,000 per year compared to under 40,000 at present . But only Sinn Féin have come up with an innovative plan to deliver such an ambitious target in the problematic affordable housing sector, where prices continue to be far above the levels affordable by most people of modest means.

They are promising a much more interventionist approach by the state, with one particularly interesting new twist. New owners will not own the land on which their houses will be built – the state will. This means they will not be able to sell these houses on the open market, but only to another affordable buyer (or leave them to their families). As that excellent economic commentator, Cliff Taylor of the Irish Times, points out, this goes against the time-honoured Irish practice of buying a house and expecting its value to shoot up over time.

There are housebuilding issues which such a policy will not address. Sinn Féin claim to have cleared this policy with the banks and other lending institutions, a claim which is contested by other parties. And there are serious capacity issues in the construction industry, with, for example, 80,000 new building workers needed if Sinn Féin’s (and other parties’) ambitious targets are to be met. Nevertheless, if I were a young couple in my 20s or 30s, I would be seriously tempted to allow O Broin to try to succeed where so many Fianna Fail and Fine Gael ministers have failed over the past decade or more.

So that is my one reason why I would understand people – and particularly young people – voting for Sinn Féin. But there are lots of compelling reasons why one should not vote for the former party of the Provisional IRA (and I speak here not as a typical middle-class Dublin voter but as a peace-loving non-republican from the North). I will enumerate six of them.

Firstly, there is party leader Mary Lou McDonald’s poor judgement of people. As I wrote last January when reviewing journalist Aoife Moore’s insightful book on Sinn Fein, The Long Game, the party will be hoping that voters will have forgotten her misjudgement of Jonathan Dowdall: Sinn Féin Dublin city councillor (briefly), accessory to murder as a close associate of the Hutch criminal gang, kidnapper, torturer and ‘supergrass’. When Dowdall resigned after only four months as a city councillor in 2015 (and before his criminal involvement was known), McDonald issued a statement in which she praised him as a hard worker and “a very popular and respected member of the community.”

Moore quoted one local Sinn Féin cumann member in McDonald’s home area of Cabra saying she “seriously lacks judgement. She’s not learned from this entire shambles at all. She surrounds herself with people who are subpar. In a constituency like this…that’s a foolish game. Look at Gerry Adams – he had serious heads around him. Mary Lou hasn’t a clue.”

Secondly, Sinn Féin are not a normal democratic party, with relatively transparent procedures for making decisions when in cabinet. The only evidence of how they behave in that situation of power is what they have done when they have been jointly in charge of the power-sharing administration in Northern Ireland. DUP leader Peter Robinson, who shared power with Martin McGuinness from 2007 to 2015, said of that period: “If I was dealing with any other political party…I would sit across the table and would say ‘here is the issue – let’s resolve it’, and we would sit there and try to work it out. They [Sinn Féin] will never take a decision with you in the room. It goes out into this labyrinth of an organisation. Whether it goes to Connolly House [Sinn Féin’s Belfast headquarters], whether it goes to the Dáil, or whether it goes to their Assembly group, or where in the circle of advisers decisions are made, nobody is quite clear. You will never get a decision for a very long period of time…because of the process that Sinn Féin has in government.”¹

Thirdly, would you trust McDonald if she was the Taoiseach of this country? I know democratic politicians are known for being economical with the truth, but if Sinn Fein were in power, you would be dealing with what I would call ‘turbo liars’. The party’s culture of falsehood and secrecy has been inherited from the IRA. Gerry Adams was the prince of liars: his absolute and repeated denial of his IRA past is his crowning dishonesty. In his magisterial book on the IRA, my former colleague Ed Moloney has detailed his brilliant lying in the cause of the peace process, when he continuously told the British and Irish governments one thing while telling his former IRA comrades something entirely different. One former IRA man and lifelong Sinn Féin member told Aoife Moore that “when he is confronted with any uncomfortable truth, his first instinct is to lie to everybody.” Former Fine Gael minister Regina Doherty used to say in the Dáil that she didn’t believe a word that came out of Adams’ mouth.

McDonald has inherited at least some of this untruthfulness. During an autumn of Sinn Féin linked scandals – a senior TD found guilty by a party inquiry of “gross misconduct” towards a woman member and accusing the party of getting rid of him through a “kangaroo court”; a rising star forced to resign from the Seanad because of “inappropriate messages” to a 16 year old; and party officials giving references to a former press officer convicted of child sex abuse – she repeatedly expressed her “anger” and “disgust” at such happenings. But as Pat Leahy, the Irish Times political editor, put it: “She has not faced up to the fact that several aspects of the Sinn Féin account stretch credulity, to say the least. To accept the Sinn Féin story, we have to accept as true a number of things that seem unbelievable.” That’s a polite, Irish Times way of saying: “You’re lying.”

Fourthly, in a recent interview McDonald said the “Free State establishment” needed to move on from holding her party accountable for the actions of the IRA during the Northern ‘Troubles’. As the distinguished journalist and broadcaster Olivia O’Leary pointed out: “If McDonald wants people to forget about what the Provisional IRA did, and to stop linking it to present-day Sinn Féin, why does she attend so pointedly the funerals of IRA figures?” She gives the example of the funerals of former IRA chief of staff Kevin McKenna and former IRA head of intelligence, Bobby Storey.²

I have written before about why I believe that if Sinn Fein ever gained power in this country, far from forgetting the ‘Troubles’, they would start rewriting history so as to commemorate and glorify the mass killers of the IRA. As Gerry Adams said in his eulogy to Kevin McKenna: “We will not let the past be written in a way which demonises patriots.” Foreign affairs spokesman Matt Carthy has spoken glowingly of one of those ‘patriots’, fellow Monaghan man Seamus McElwain, believed by the RUC to have murdered up to 28 people, most of them off-duty policemen and UDR men.³

Here’s a fifth reason. While continuously reminding voters that Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have been in power since the foundation of the state, Sinn Féin would love everyone to forget the century of republican opposition to this State’s very existence. Such a narrative “takes some nerve,” said Micheál Martin during the leaders’ debate last week. “Someone needs to ask the searching question. Where was the Sinn Féin movement for the last 100 years? They opposed every single thing that built this country. They opposed membership of the European Union, which was transformative. They opposed every trade deal which created hundreds of thousands of jobs. You opposed our Constitution for the vast majority of that 100 years, and you murdered gardaí and soldiers as well. For the most part in the last 100 years, you opposed the State.”

A sixth reason is Sinn Féin’s extraordinary tax policies – extraordinary for a party which likes to think of itself as left wing. They would abolish carbon taxes and would reverse excise duty increases on fossil fuels, both essential tools in any serious policy to tackle climate change (but when did Sinn Féin have any serious policy on climate change?). They would abolish local property tax, an absolutely fundamental way of taxing people’s wealth. They would abolish the universal social charge – already a very progressive tax – for incomes under €45,000. This proposed narrowing of the tax base would come at a time when Ireland’s highly successful economic model – based to a significant extent on low corporation tax to attract foreign direct investment – is looking very precarious with the advent of a tax-cutting, tariff-imposing Trump presidency in the US.

There are other reasons: Sinn Féin’s intimidatory legal actions against politicians and journalists; the chilling proposal to investigate RTE’s excellent coverage of the conflict in Gaza “and other international conflicts”; the abstention by the party’s MEP on European Parliament votes condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and the tunnel vision ‘magical thinking’ that Sinn Féin, the party of the IRA, can be the ones to win over any significant numbers of unionists to Irish unity.

As Olivia O’Leary puts it: “All of this has an air of autocracy about it.” I would rather call it “an air of Leninism”. I believe Sinn Féin’s ethical system is different from most people in this republic, based as it is on 30 years of ruthless violence in the North and a relentless drive to power in the whole island. I hope and pray that the good sense and judgement of most Irish people will not put them anywhere close to that power.

¹ The Democratic Unionist Party, Jonathan Tonge and others, pp.55-56

² ‘Sinn Fein’s approach to media inquiry carries an air of autocracy’, Irish Times, 23 November

³ ‘Two disturbing videos which show the huge gulf of misunderstanding between the peoples of Ireland’, 2 Irelands Together, 6 May 2021; ‘Sinn Féin will be re-writing recent Irish history when it gets into power’, 2 Irelands Together, 31 March 2022.

Andy Pollak

Andy Pollak retired as founding director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in July 2013 after 14 years. He is a former religious affairs correspondent, education correspondent, assistant news editor and Belfast reporter with the Irish Times.