Sinn Féin faces profound change as party goes South

You have to go back 33 years to find a shift as big as this in the Sinn Féin leadership. Early in November 1986, in Dublin’s Mansion House, the party voted to end its long-standing policy of abstentionism at an ardfheis that was charged and sulphurous.

Gerry Adams had been elected president of the party in 1983. But what happened at the Mansion House indisputable confirmed the leadership of the republican movement had migrated to the North.

The debate was bitter and angry, essentially a showdown with the most prominent southern figures, led by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh. Adams, always a politician with an eye for the grand symbol, tapped Ó Brádaigh on the back as he was about to speak and shook his hand.

His rival regarded it as a Judas kiss and called Adams out on it. “I will shake hands with anybody and not just in front of the media,” he responded sourly.

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After a bitter debate, the Adams faction won the vote. Ó Brádaigh and his supporters walked out of the Mansion House and out of Sinn Féin.

Another curious element of that 1986 ardfheis was that no real distinction was drawn between Sinn Féin and the IRA. The kind of Jesuitical separation – “we don’t speak for the IRA, you will have to go and speak to them” – would come later. “The IRA freedom fighters and the Sinn Féin freedom fighters are one and the same thing,” Martin McGuinness declared to the meeting. Delegates were also told that an IRA convention had recently decided in favour of ending abstentionism. It was clear that, in the Sinn Féin of 1986, IRA figures in the shadows called the shots.

At last week’s ardfheis, Adams announced he would step down as party leader in 2018. The upcoming leadership change will confirm something that has been happening for quite some time: a shift of the party’s leadership and decision-making from North to South.

Sometime soon (and with talk of an imminent election it might be very soon indeed), Mary Lou McDonald will become party leader – or “president” to use its own terminology. Though Adams insisted at the ardfheis that there would be a full democratic process to select the next party president, at this moment there seems no other possible outcome.

When the change takes place, the bulk of the party’s personalities and energies will also be based in Dublin, as will its brightest advisers and strategists.

Provo past

Sinn Féin members also point out that when this change occurs, nobody in a leadership position in the party will have an IRA past. It’s perhaps the reason Conor Murphy, who was imprisoned for explosives offences and IRA membership, was bypassed for the Northern leadership.

With its leaders free of the “original sin” of a Provo past, the party is in a stronger position to go into a future coalition.

“Like most issues, it will be generational,” says David McCann, a Belfast-based political journalist and lecturer. “Many of the leadership figures both North and South have no direct connection to the IRA. That will increase as time moves on and the new generation steps up to take positions of power within the party.”

It took more than a decade after the 1986 decision for Sinn Féin to get its first TD elected. Since Caoimghín Ó Caoláin’s success in Cavan-Monaghan in 1997, the party’s electoral graph has steadily risen, bar a blip in 2007 when it actually lost a seat. However, it had impressive results in 2011, when it increased from four seats to 14, and in 2016, when it added nine to win 23.

But there are signs that the rise is not inexorable. As the economy has steadied, Sinn Féin has slipped a little in recent polls and its anti-austerity message is no longer as prominent.

Sinn Féin is his party, his creation, his idea. It was he who led the republican movement into politics, who schemed the entry into electoral success

Indeed, the party could end up with few if any gains in an upcoming election. It will be a seat down when Laois and Offaly are merged, and will struggle to hold in some marginal constituencies, especially Louth. Its best hopes seem to be a second seat in Donegal, as well as gains in Dublin West, Wexford and Galway West.

What the party will get, though, is an injection of youth. As its MEP Matt Carthy put it, there will be “new energy, and we will be cutting out a new space for ourselves”.

Carthy himself might stand for the Dáil if Ó Caoláin retires. He would join a raft of younger spokespeople including Toireasa Ferris, Louise O’Reilly, Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire, and Eoin Ó Broin.

In contrast, McDonald herself represents continuity as much as generational change. “A lot of those coming forward have been there a long time,” says the party’s whip Aengus Ó Snodaigh, pointing out their deep knowledge of the party structures, strategies and operations, and particularly of Gerry Adams’ leadership.

“Gerry Adams and Mary Lou are very close,” says southern political director Ken O’Connell. “They were president and vice president. Mary Lou has been involved in negotiations in the North.”

Gerry Adams’s party

That brings us to the north-south dichotomy. Sinn Féin people point out that all of their officials and politicians habitually criss-cross between north and south, becoming familiar with both jurisdictions, doing “all-Ireland proofing” for every policy. It’s a myth, they argue, that McDonald is unknown or not accepted by Sinn Féin supporters in the North.

But what about the prevailing culture of the party? Journalist and author Ed Molony, hardly a fan of Gerry Adams, makes a fascinating observation about him in the blog Broken Elbow.

“Sinn Féin is his party, his creation, his idea. It was he who led the republican movement into politics, who schemed the entry into electoral success, who plotted, persuaded, planned, inveigled, duped, bullied, lied and deceived the IRA into a ceasefire and then into the Good Friday Agreement, IRA decommissioning, the acceptance of the consent principle, the PSNI and so on and so on. And it was he who gave all the newbies their chance, who selected them and eased their way past older, reliable friends from IRA days.”

Some claim that, two decades after the conflict ended, the IRA is still calling the shots – as they did in 1986. Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin certainly believes a residual Provo influence remains. “It’s a centrally controlled undemocratic party,” he says.

During Adams’s leadership, there has been a well-known “kitchen cabinet” of long-standing and trusted political confidantes, including Ted Howell, Richard McAuley, Tom Hartley, Jim Gibney and Danny Morrison. There is no doubt that many key decisions stemmed from this group, which also included Martin McGuinness.

Critics have alleged there was another secret layer of power in the background: the IRA Army Council. There is a narrative that even two decades after the ceasefire, a small cadre of people attached to the Provos control the party. In that scenario, the Ard Comhairle and conventions merely give pre-determined decisions a patina of democracy.

As one critic asks: “is it Bobby Storey making the real decisions?” Storey – who spent 20 years in prison and played a key role in the Maze prison escape in 1983 – is from Belfast and has been Sinn Féin’s “six counties” chairman.

Ken O’Connell rejects this analysis: “Bobby Storey has a vote like everybody else. People will look up to him. He is an influential and respected figure in the party. But when it comes down to it at the end of the day, he is just one voice in the party,” he insists.

Mick Fealty of the Slugger O’Toole blog says the 10-year power-transition in power strategy suggests “internal power will be retained by the old guard in the background. Even with Mary Lou McDonald as president, the party’s ageing ‘collective leadership’ – politburo is a better term – keeps control.”

Under a new leadership, Sinn Féin can prepare for coalition

This notion of centralism is rejected by the party. “Ordinary people understand the IRA is not active, or in the leadership of Sinn Féin in any way,” says Ó Snodaigh. “We are open. We welcome new members. There is no secret group in the background controlling us by diktat.”

Ten years ago, the party’s policy platform was skeletal. Since then it has build up a corpus of work, most of it costed. That has included some big modifications of stance, including on corporation tax, and, latterly, accepting the “fiscal space”.

Middle-class vote

The party main support basis remains working class. When Carthy talks of a new space, it is targeting the 40 per cent of people who don’t vote for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. Its policies tend to favour the least well-off. “We can tap into that vote; there’s huge scope to build that.”

Part of that growth strategy is getting people who seldom vote in working-class areas to do so. But another part is canvassing middle-class areas in all constituencies, a voting group it has ignored to date.

McDonald picks up a considerable middle-class vote, and some of the party’s more recent policies – on mortgage relief, for example – could play to the concerns of this group.

In 1986, Ó Brádaigh warned that once Sinn Féin went into the Dáil they would accept the institutions of the State, accept its rulings, and accept the “Free State army”. All of that has come to pass, and Sinn Féin has accepted it. Ó Snodaigh attends meetings of Army representative groups, something that would have been inconceivable even a decade ago.

Under a new leadership, Sinn Féin can prepare for coalition. But they could have a long wait. Other southern parties have demonstrated no appetite for coalition with Sinn Féin, and are unlikely to change their minds any time soon – generational change or not.