After #GE2024 even in the south Sinn Féin remains haunted by its own largely secret northern legacy

I’ve put off writing an analysis of Sinn Féin’s fate in the southern general election on Feynman’s principle that “if you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it.” I’m still not sure I do, so only time will tell if what follows is right.

The party made two seat gains, but largely because of the addition of 14 extra seats in the 34th Dáil. All three of the larger  parties lost vote share but Sinn Féin lost most (5.5%) coming third in the popular vote, falling nine seats behind Fianna Fáil.

That it came second in seats is testimony to local performances getting second candidates home, but the loss of 116,968 first preference votes is hard to conceal. The party’s star has fallen since the heady days of 2020 when it topped the popular poll.

There were several red lights on the dashboard on the run in, the most important of which was their failure to substantially move forward in the local elections from what had been a disastrous 2019 result in June. Two failures in a row.

Locals matter because elected councillors are the pipeline for future TDs. All parties need vigorous and civilly rooted representatives to maintain their political health at the local level, and without it national success can quickly turn hollow.

Another ephemeral sign was weak attendance at the party’s Ard Fheis when the party booked itself into the same huge venue at the Technological University of the Shannon, Athlone as last year. The audience for Michelle O’Neill’s speech was very sparse.

But there are bigger themes the party need to address if it is to correct for its long sought goal of being in government on both sides of the Irish border. Yet because of the ingrained nature of habit they’ll be difficult to tackle.

Ourselves and only ourselves

Vital to Sinn Féin’s success in Northern Ireland (which relied less on achievement in government and the whole policy piece) has been the degree to which many of their voters resent a unionism that has struggled to break its backward gaze to the troubled past.

It’s been successful too in hoovering up the vast majority of nationalist votes leaving its only significant rival in that space (the SDLP) a drifting husk of the broad and broadly popular party it once was before the signing of the Belfast Agreement.

So it has become a one stop shop for almost everyone who still thinks of themself as a nationalist, to such an extent that in contrast with a divided unionism it is now by far the largest single political party in Northern Ireland.

This has been sufficient to maintain power in identity conscious [Some might say obsessed –  Ed] Northern Ireland where expectations of delivery are abysmally low. Yet this may have led to an internal view that the same opportunity was available in the south.

Whatever the message now, the party trailed Mary Lou McDonald as the next Taoiseach for much of the last four years. People who had had easy access to her before 2020 were told that now she was in line for the highest office, that those days were over.

Like Labour in 2011, they counted on mid term polling levels to materialise at the general election. Meantime, McDonald brought back the Tweedledum and Tweedledee analogy that worked so well for her in 2020. In 2024, not so much.

The key reason is that the government parties had had significant success in laying out their agenda (albeit an incomplete and imperfect one) and a defensible record on the housing issue that, again, had played very well for SF four years ago.

The flaw in SF’s strategy was getting too narrowly focused on the concerns of its core and not enough on those currently voting for its rivals. As Professor Ben Ansell observed of proportional systems:in one of his Reith lectures last year:

They force parties to speak to the whole country, not just swing voters and more parties and hence more opinions, even ones you don’t like, get represented in the heart of Parliament and perhaps also in government.

To earn a second term Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael agreed to put huge resource and legislative commitment into tackling housing, an issue that only registered as a concern among their own supporters at a measly 17%. Counterintuitive it may be, but it worked.

Sinn Féin by contrast did what they’ve been doing for most of their parliamentary career and only really spoke to its own voters, while slapping the bejesus out of the two government rivals to power. An old habit that massively misfired.

When Micheál Martin cites policy differences, he’s not making excuses for the personal disgust one might feel about how Sinn Féin manhandles internal dissenters, how it ignores HR, and its cold bloodless dealings with the victims of its wider movement.

He’s returning a plethora of attacks on him and his party with the reasonable point that SF’s long terms Eurosceptic and anti-enterprise views (a core message in SF’s ongoing attack on housing) are a profound mismatch with his own party’s position.

Martin is also exploiting a narrowcast SF scorched earth campaign that left it no options for co-operation with rivals. In Northern Ireland where coalitions are mandatory you don’t need a consensus to form a government. In the south, you can’t get in without one.

Such a deep-seated reflex is tricky to fix, not least since it’s how the party has calculated its unrivalled success in Stormont. Its bunkered leadership in Belfast will find it hard to break new ground that requires putting policy before identity.

The burden of legacy

Whilst some in the commentariat wring their hands over why Martin wouldn’t coalesce with Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil voters were clear in the exit poll how they want him to go, indicating another issue for Sinn Féin (deep unpopularity with non SF voters):

Eighty-three per cent of Fianna Fáil voters wanted another coalition with Fine Gael; just 6 per cent of them favoured a deal with Sinn Féin. Martin is clearly in tune with his party’s voters.

It is hard to calculate what effect the controversies leading up to the election had on the outcome. It may have had a freezing effect on those not already committed to voting for Sinn Féin. Even Gerry Adams has admitted it was a negative factor.

Carl Jung said something interesting about the origins of a psychological complex. It starts, he argues, as a secret one keeps from others. As it cannot be shared it then constellates a ‘figure’ within an individual’s personality that becomes a secret to the person themselves.

At some point this now well hidden ‘figure’ or complex starts unconsciously to dominate the actions of the ‘host’. Whether you credit Jung’s pyschological theories or not it seems to fit with SF whose secret inner life is largely unknowable to any outside or inside bar its inner circle.

It’s almost impossible to have a civil conversation about Provisional operations against civilians like the La Mon fire bombing without triggering a collective complex which entails getting othered by supporters and members as an enemy of the cause.

Secrecy must be maintained even when it is harmful to that cause (as in the case of McMonagle and Ó Donnghaile). Such reflexive defensiveness will have contributed to the way they have struggled to grow beyond their base in the south and north.

This is not to claim that these issues in themselves had a direct influence on the election results, but it has over many years conditioned how the party operates, regarding who it can recruit and who it can or cannot trust to keep Sinn Féin family secrets.

Others recruit from within academia (see the SDs), the media and/or individuals with a non political hinterland within the local community where they hope to stand, while SF struggled in the local elections either to attract such folks or because it doesn’t trust anyone with other loyalties.

If you join SF as a candidate (whether it is in the north or the south) you must also sign up to the strict Omertà it keeps on its own troubled past, whilst volubly questioning the record of UK state security forces during that long conflict.

As Pat Leahy notes in The Irish Times:

The observation that “the past is never dead – it’s not even past” seems especially true in Northern Ireland. More than 3,500 deaths, 34,000 shootings, 14,000 bombings and countless other acts of violence, brutality, human savagery perpetrated by all sides; thousands of people who did terrible things, and thousands more who had terrible things done to them.

The damage and trauma to an entire society from the Troubles – damage this Republic and its people were largely spared – is no small thing. It will be an important factor if and when referendums on Irish unity come meaningfully on to the political agenda. It’s the biggest single difference between the North and the South, and ignoring it will not make it go away.

He also cites the practical consequences of those years: “a suicide rate way higher than the rest of the UK and more than twice the rate in the Republic. Diazepam in the North is 3.5 times more likely to be prescribed it than people living in England”.

None of this gets talked about. Nor is NI’s housing crisis and dependence on private landlordism in working class republican areas of Northern Ireland where public sector housing is seemingly a thing of the past (not one NIHE house has been built since 1997).

All of these operations stay dark until some secret or other spurts out into the light, jarring with the party’s message of equality and humans rights: whether it’s how they mishandled the employment of an accused sex offender, bullying or the disappeared.

The Disney series Say Nothing about the abduction, killing and disappearance of Jean McConville and IRA man Joe Lynsky is chilling. But it seems to have prompted at least one Republican to accuse a Sinn Féin member of not telling what he knows.

None of this is going away. Neither Sinn Féin itself, nor the revelations. The bitter message for the party is that where voters could find an alternative they moved to Labour, Soc Dems, Aontu or anyone else without such a difficult-to-explain legacy.

Mostly they stayed at home. And in managing the fall out from their hidden inner storyteller now spilling the beans at every bend in the road they lost focus on the key things they needed to win the campaign.