As history beckons for Sinn Féin, the party has much to reckon with

Such was the good humour at the Sinn Féin ardfheis in Dublin on Saturday, there was even a welcome for Shane Ross. The former cabinet minister, author of a recent book on party president Mary Lou McDonald, was in the RDS to measure the mood of the party faithful – and make sure he’s clued in for an updated version of the book already in the works.

He reported no sledging; in fact, the opposite: friendly relations seemed to be the order of the day, even with the author of the tome which has gone down poorly with Sinn Féin and prompted a legal threat from McDonald’s husband.

Invariably, party members at ardfheiseanna report a positive mood, whether or not that’s the case. But there was a genuine sense of momentum among delegates and members at the RDS on Saturday.

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One member from south Kilkenny told of how the cumann there had been inactive but was bouncing back, a delegate from Roscommon (opening Prosecco sold from the snack bar) spoke of how there were 40 attendees from the county today, up from a usual 10 that travelled pre-Covid – many of the new members were younger people, eager to go to their first ardfheis. Another had flown in from Germany, coming straight from the airport.

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The party’s outreach mechanism was in full swing. Senator Lynn Boylan spoke of how there were 51 ambassadors present. One of them, Australian ambassador Gary Gray, said he recognised huge energy among attendees while munching on a ham and cheese sandwich on the edge of the exhibition space.

It’s hardly surprising. There’s not a huge amount to be gloomy about for Sinn Féin – riding high in the polls and carrying momentum from elections both north and south of the Border. TDs and delegates worry about capturing that energy, organising and translating it into results – but in politics, those issues fall firmly into the category of good problems to have.

Irish unity was front and centre at the ardfheis – the subject of the first votes and contributions. This is unsurprising, but it puts pay to the notion that the party is trying to cloak its ambitions for constitutional change with a focus on housing, health and other policy weak points for the Government.

[ Sinn Féin puts Irish unity top of its agenda - but voters want action on housing, health and inflation ]

In her morning doorstep interview with journalists, Mary Lou McDonald argued the party’s mission is to fuse these two, to convince voters that the best way to solve social problems is through a political programme centred on constitutional change and national renewal. The foregrounding of the national question, and a Border poll, seeks to situate this as the fundamental pillar of addressing wider social ills both north and south of the Border – the “failed state” narrative that so irks the Government in Dublin.

“The question of Irish unity isn’t some abstraction away from that,” she said. “For us, the issue of working on an all-island basis, whether in terms of business, investment, innovation, education, all of this is part and parcel of addressing the social and economic needs in the here and now,” she said, speaking of how they were not “separate questions” and how addressing rolling crises faced by voters is “the driving rationale, fundamentally for ending partition and for reunification”.

It was McDonald’s first encounter with the Dublin press corps since September. Her absence from the Leinster House plinth had become a bone of contention as the party bobbed and wove through a series of negative news cycles – from Ross’s book to the conviction of its former councillor Jonathan Dowdall (who represented part of McDonald’s constituency), the charge that it uses libel threats to chill debate, and Eoin Ó Broin’s damaging suggestion that a senior civil servant should be sacked for reinforcing economic orthodoxies inimical to Sinn Féin’s policies.

Asked why she didn’t engage with Ross and his questions over how she funded renovation of her family home, McDonald painted Ross as a political enemy, saying it would be like her writing a book about the Taoiseach. That is an unconvincing answer, especially when considered in light of the party’s less than enthusiastic engagement with the author of another upcoming book on Sinn Féin, Sunday Times journalist Aoife Moore.

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The party’s approach to controversy, in part at least, is to avoid fuelling it, reasoning that feeding these stories can only risk alienating potential voters. While this leads to an antagonistic relationship with the press, the damage done inside the beltway is just that. It wants to have the conversation on its own terms, driving straight for Government weaknesses while articulating what a Sinn Féin government would do better.

One front bench spokesman spoke before the ardfheis of how they didn’t expect to focus on the Government, instead sketching out a positive vision for Sinn Féin in power. Unsurprisingly, that plan didn’t survive contact with reality, with finance spokesman Pearse Doherty telling the ardfheis that the Government was “failing and failing spectacularly” and “chipping away at the dreams of young people”.

And yet, dancing around controversy in some ways only serves to illustrate the frequency with which the party faces a range of charges, from its internal organisation and culture to the legacy of the IRA’s campaign during the Troubles, to its compatibility as a political partner to institutions of the State such as the Garda, the courts and the Civil Service.

While McDonald and others have been effusive in their praise of the Civil Service since Ó Broin’s uncharacteristic faux pas, his comments clearly betray a thread in Sinn Féin’s thinking. Namely, that there are overarching ideologies or values within the State which are hostile to the change that Sinn Féin represents and that the party in turn is hostile towards. Making emollient noises in the wake of a misstep won’t solve that.

Sinn Féin’s trajectory is the defining political story in the country and could shape the next era in the political life of the island. But even as history beckons, the party has much to reckon with.