Politics

Strength of Sinn Féin position evident in confidence of its leaders at ardfheis

Tone and content of Michelle O’Neill speech at RDS on Saturday underlined status of party’s vice-president as first minister-in-waiting

Sinn Féin's Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill before delivering the speeches at the party's ardfheis at the RDS in Dublin on Saturday. Photograph: Tom Honan for The Irish Times.
Sinn Féin's Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill before delivering the speeches at the party's ardfheis at the RDS in Dublin on Saturday. Photograph: Tom Honan for The Irish Times.
Freya McClements's picture
Freya McClements
Sat Nov 05 2022 - 19:12

It was the first item on the agenda, but there was one part of the day from which it was conspicuously missing.

The motions on planning for a united Ireland were the first discussed at the Sinn Féin ardfheis on Saturday, yet in the speech from Michelle O’Neill – the party’s vice president and the North’s first minister designate – the phrase “united Ireland” was conspicuously absent.

Yes, there was talk of change; “We are now in the decade of opportunity,” Ms O’Neill told delegates – that same decade which she and other party leaders have stressed offers the opportunity to bring about a united Ireland.

But the only “unity” mentioned in her speech was that of “purpose and determination to deliver a stable power-sharing coalition that works and delivers”; not the unity created through constitutional change, but the cross-community agreement needed to restore the North’s absent institutions.

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This was a speech of a first minister-in-waiting, a “first minister for all”, as Sinn Féin has long framed it; one which spoke of the validity of – and need for respect for – unionism.

When O’Neill talked of the need to build for the future “in a way that reflects the diversity of our different but equally legitimate, allegiances, identities and aspirations” - explaining that this was why she had attended the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II - it was a significant acknowledgement from an Irish republican.

She has said this before – in the Stormont chamber following the death of the queen – but this was a deliberate message to the home crowd; there was no applause, but neither was there any heckling.

In case anyone hadn’t got the memo, this is the space the party is in now; one in which – as O’Neill outlined in her speech - she could go to the Shankill for the recent funeral of Baroness May Blood, a former mill worker and trade unionist who was one of the founders of the Women’s Coalition and a campaigner for integrated education in the North.

It was this approach that helped deliver its historic election win in the North in May – “a defining moment”, as O’Neill put it.

“For the first time, the balance of power at Stormont shifted, and Sinn Féin emerged as the largest party, topping the poll with 27 seats.”

In the campaign, it prioritized bread and butter issues over the constitutional question, and this paid dividends.

In the months since, the cost-of-living crisis has brought these into even sharper focus; speaking to reporters as the ardfheis began, the Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald linked the two, describing the question of Irish unity as “not some abstraction” away from social and economic issues.

“They’re not two separate questions, the question of changing Ireland, improving people’s living conditions, improving our public services, giving people opportunities that they’re entitled to, that is part and parcel, that’s the driving rationale, fundamentally, for ending partition and for reunification,” she said.

Ultimately, the same argument is implicitly – or indeed explicitly - at work in the North; that the cost-of-living crisis and the long list of social issues exacerbated by the “disruption, dysfunction and chaos” of the Conservative Party and the DUP which left the people of Northern Ireland in “limbo” can be solved by, in this case, the restoration of the Assembly and Executive and, in the long term, Irish unity.

Sinn Féin does not have to make that argument; the longer this crisis goes on, the more it is made for them.

[ Sinn Féin ardfheis: ‘I just think it’s time for change’ ]

Certainly, in the short term there is no certainty as to what will happen next in the North. A fresh vote before Christmas has been avoided but it could still find itself in election mode in the near future.

No wonder then that O’Neill upped the ante against the DUP, articulating what she had described earlier to reporters as “something that’s said to me regularly by people in the street”, that the “real reason” the DUP was boycotting the Assembly was because it would not serve as deputy first minister to a first minister who was an Irish nationalist – something which, in any future election, will undoubtedly galvanise nationalist voters.

Sinn Féin does not fear such an election; its expectation would be that – as long as it holds a steady course – it would at the very least hold its 27 seats, and potentially pick up one or two more.

On Saturday it was for others, not least McDonald, to talk of the “change now on our doorstep”, of “taking those final steps to full nationhood, ending partition, reunifying Ireland”.

However much Sinn Féin may feel itself on the brink of power in the South, in the North O’Neill waits to take up the role she should have been in since May, that of first minister – the first nationalist to hold this position.

Rather than unity, she can afford to talk instead of opportunity: “to look forward and imagine the future”.