On the 11th day of the 11th month of last year, Sinn Féin gathered for its ardfheis in Athlone, near as you get to the centre of Ireland.
“Bullish” hardly does justice to the mood in the conference venue, as some 1,500 delegates cheered every word from the would-be ministers in two governments-in-waiting. The sense that their day was coming was omnipresent, and unmistakable.
The party’s leader in Northern Ireland (though nobody, obviously, uttered the words “Northern Ireland”) Michelle O’Neill was there, awaiting the imminent revival of the Stormont Executive, which she would head as the first nationalist First Minister since the body was established by the Belfast Agreement in 1998.
Gerry Adams was there, in a Palestinian keffiyeh, long queues forming for him to sign copies of his latest book. The older generation of republicans, hard men and women who engaged in conflict before they made peace, and laid the foundations for the party’s political growth, looked on. They could not be displeased with their work.
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One delegate, writing his account of the event afterwards, recalled that, “stalwart Pat Doherty, former Sinn Féin vice-president, wore a quiet, thoughtful – one might even say, contented – expression on his face. And no wonder. After many years of personal struggle and hard work towards the goal of a United Ireland Socialist Republic, the idea – once remote – of his party leading Government both in the north and south of the nation seems rapidly becoming a reality.”
The party’s frontbenchers warned against complacency. “We’re not taking anything for granted,” housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin told The Irish Times. “Obviously we can’t be presumptuous,” warned health spokesman David Cullinane.
But both men – and everyone else in Athlone – could read the numbers in the opinion polls: consistently in the mid-30s, far, far ahead of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. Ivan Yates was predicting that Sinn Féin would win 70 seats; Bertie Ahern was of the view that it could win 40 per cent of the vote. Whenever the election was called, Sinn Féin was on course to win the largest number of seats in the new Dáil, probably by a country mile.
And the star of the show, as ever, was Mary Lou McDonald.
“We want to build a new Ireland,” she thundered in their keynote address after a near-delirious reception from the delegates.
“A nation home for all. A unified nation of confidence and compassion, talent and ingenuity, claiming our future, our rightful place among the nations of the world. A new Ireland. The Orange and Green reconciled. No place for racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or sectarianism. Where there is no them, only us. All of us who call Ireland home.”
Delegates fairly roared their approval. There was an edge of relief to the rapturous reception; a few weeks beforehand, she had told her story of serious health difficulties over the summer. Leinster House is a village and there had been rumours that McDonald was not well for months. But now she was back, and fighting fit. She was on form. The numbers were beyond encouraging. The organisation was fizzing. Things could hardly look more promising.
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Behind the scenes, however, events were already in train that would prove calamitous for Sinn Féin and McDonald. A few weeks before the ardfheis, party officials met Niall Ó Donnghaile, the party’s leader in the Seanad, about a complaint that had been made about him.
Ó Donnghaile, formerly the Lord Mayor of Belfast, had come south and gained a reputation as a combative parliamentary operator. He was especially active online, frequently attacking critics of Sinn Féin – a habit that continued until recent days when his social media accounts were closed down. In some ways, he was the epitome of a new breed of Sinn Féiner – young, articulate, Irish-speaking, aggressive, equally at home North and South.
Ó Donnghaile had sent inappropriate messages to a male 17-year-old party member and one other person. In September 2023, he had been suspended from the party and complaints had been referred to the PSNI, though not the gardaí. His absence from Leinster House was explained by a “mental health” crisis – a condition from which he had previously suffered but which now returned as the party dealt with the complaints against him.
The PSNI later decided not to launch a full investigation, but Sinn Féin had reached a decision: Ó Donnghaile was out. At a meeting on October 5th, this was made clear to him. He said he would resign from the party and from the Seanad – though the latter would not be announced for another two-and-a-half months. Until Christmas week, Ó Donnaghile would officially remain on sick leave from the Oireachtas.
When his resignation was announced, McDonald issued a statement paying tribute to his work and mentioning only his “health challenges”. That statement would come back to haunt her this week, when she would plead that hiding the real reason for his departure was out of concern for his mental health and fears for “his safety” if that reason was revealed. The implication was hardly subtle. That concern was still there, she said; though it no longer prevented Sinn Féin and McDonald from telling the truth.
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Ó Donnghaile’s travails were not the only difficulties beginning to brew for Sinn Féin as it prepared for that barnstorming ardfheis less than a year ago. On an as yet undisclosed date that October, an incident occurred which involved the Laois TD Brian Stanley, chairman of the powerful Public Accounts Committee (PAC), and a female party member that would lead to a complaint being made by the woman in July 2024. No details have been released about the incident, but McDonald told the Dáil that it “is very serious ... and relates to Deputy Stanley’s personal behaviour, leaving the complainant, in her words, ‘traumatised and distressed’”.
The party set up an inquiry in August 2024, during which Stanley made what is described as a “counter allegation against the complainant”, as a result of which he was advised to go the gardaí. He did not. The party inquiry was conducted throughout August and September.
By early this month, the inquiry had finished its work and reached draft conclusions: it believed the account given by the complainant and judged that Stanley was guilty of “gross misconduct”. The proposed findings were circulated to the parties and they were given seven days to make any final comment or representations. The seven days were due to elapse on Monday of this week; but on Saturday night, Stanley resigned, issuing a blistering statement in which he accused the party of subjecting him to a “kangaroo court”.
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On their own, either the Stanley inquiry or the Ó Donnghaile resignation would have been enough to plunge the party into crisis. Astonishingly, they were just two of the four controversies that McDonald was dealing with this week.
The fallout continues from the case of the party’s former press officer in Stormont, Michael McMonagle, who received references from two senior figures after being ejected from the party and placed under investigation by police for child sex offences, to which he would later plead guilty.
McDonald has repeatedly expressed her “disgust” and “anger” at what happened; but she has not faced up to the fact that several aspects of the Sinn Féin account of what happened 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 is, inevitably, corrosive of the party’s credibility; and that matters for an organisation that is in the business of appealing to the public.
Finally, the Kildare South TD Patricia Ryan resigned from the party last week, amid claims that the party was censoring her and wanted her replaced.
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None of this, of course, was publicly known when McDonald told delegates in Athlone last year that it was time to “seize the moment ... and make change happen now!”
Privately, however, McDonald was under pressure. Not long after her own health difficulties, her husband Martin Lanigan had taken ill in France and was undergoing treatment for cancer. Most politicians are good at compartmentalising their lives; but the pressure and the worry must have been intense for her. Did that stress contribute to a series of political mistakes that were about to come? Who knows. But soon after the Athlone ardfheis, things would begin to go wrong for Sinn Féin. Very wrong.
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The Dublin riots on November 23rd shocked the country; buses and trams were torched, shops looted, gardaí pursued by rioters. McDonald’s response – to stand on O’Connell Street the following day and call for the resignation of the Garda Commissioner and declare no confidence in the Minister for Justice – seriously misjudged the response of middle Ireland, which was more inclined to lay the blame on the rioters than on the gardaí or the Government. The subsequent Dáil motion of confidence in Helen McEntee was a major political mistake.
Another misstep came a few months later when Government ran the family and care referendums. Not alone did McDonald back the doomed proposals to the hilt, she promised to re-run them if they were defeated.
By now, Sinn Féin’s poll ratings had begun to tumble: the nosedive had begun.
As the numbers declined, Sinn Féiners could see that the upcoming local and European elections were going to be difficult. The party had planned its campaign on the belief, backed by the polls, that it was a 30-35 per cent party. Now that certainty was crumbling before their eyes. But even as expectations were rapidly adjusted, nothing prepared the party for the disaster that unfolded on polling day. The party scored 11-12 per cent – less than half of its 2020 General Election result and, incredibly, about a third of where its poll numbers had put its support for much of the previous year.
A painful postmortem followed, after which McDonald emerged saying that the message from the party activists was to be her “authentic self”. It wasn’t immediately clear what this meant.
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What has happened to Sinn Féin?
The truth is that several things have happened at once. Some of these are not the party’s fault; others are 100 per cent its fault. Some of them have been made worse by the party’s handling. Other could get worse still. Together they add up to the greatest crisis of McDonald’s leadership.
[ The Irish Times view on Sinn Féin’s crisis: a question of leadershipOpens in new window ]
There’s no doubt that party made a series of political mistakes which have damaged it. The reaction to the Dublin riots was clumsy and ill-judged. The backing of the Government’s ill-fated referendums was unnecessary and the promise to re-run them was bonkers.
These are just individual clangers. But they came at a time when the political landscape was changing sharply as the issue of immigration edged its way to the centre of political debate in a way that was especially challenging to Sinn Féin – which maintained a liberal line on migration but whose core working-class voters were increasingly hostile to it. Anti-immigrant protests are now noticeably anti-Sinn Féin, too, frequently denouncing McDonald and her colleagues as traitors.
Sinn Féin’s post-local election fix is to adopt a policy that will allow it to maintain support for migration while opposing any asylum centres in the localities for which they are proposed. You never know; it might work.
At the same time, while Sinn Féin was under pressure among its traditional voters on the issue of immigration, some of its newer voters – many of them energised by the party’s focus on housing – were wondering if the party was getting cold feet about all those promises of radical change.
From the simple clarion call of “change” in the 2020 general election campaign, McDonald had moved to promising voters that while Sinn Féin remained the party of change, it wouldn’t change the things that voters like – such as Ireland’s successful economic model.
But if you were a twenty- or thirtysomething, locked out of the housing market and convinced that Ireland’s economic model was not working for you – then Sinn Féin’s efforts to look like a responsible government-in-waiting for middle Ireland began to look less compelling.
So Sinn Féin’s political problems are not just tactical and short-term; they are problems of a longer-term strategic nature about where the party positions itself and who its core voters are. And as it’s trying to figure all this out, it gets hit with the one controversy after another. And all only weeks away from a general election that seems all the more likely precisely because of its woes.
Which way will McDonald turn? What can she do now to revive the party? It would be foolish to write her off. The party retains the support of a decent chunk of voters – 20-ish per cent according to recent polls – has a mostly loyal activist base and McDonald herself is a formidable campaigner. But her party is on the ropes. She has never faced a battle like this before.
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