Sinn Féin gathered in Athlone for its ardfheis yesterday in a state of uncertainty and disquietude that is unfamiliar territory for the party.
Relentless forward momentum has been the chief characteristic of the party’s political trajectory in recent years: from the great electoral leap forward that saw it win the largest share of the votes at the 2020 general election to the four years that followed, when support grew to rest consistently in the mid-30s.
Few could imagine the party anywhere but in government after the next election. Forward to power; forward to government in the North and in the South, forward to unity; tiocfaidh ár lá. It all looked unstoppable; in Leinster House and its environs, the consensus was clear and settled: Sinn Féin would lead the next government in the Republic. The only question was with whom.
Things started to change more than a year ago; in the first part of this year, the change accelerated and the local and European election results in May saw the party’s vote collapsing to 11-12 per cent.
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Can Sinn Féin reverse its decline in popularity before the election?
Now it awaits the announcement of the next general election, which if Simon Harris follows the political maxim to never miss an opportunity to kick your opponent when he is down, will come sooner rather than later.
The party is desperately trying to reset and rebuild. In a series of recent personal interviews, Mary Lou McDonald told the story of her own health difficulties and the serious illness faced by her husband last year. Policy-wise, the party has refocused on housing and sharpened its attacks on the Government.
But recent polls – including last week’s Irish Times/Ipsos B&A numbers – have brought little encouragement that a rebound is coming. The selection of candidates – and nothing is more important when preparing for an election – seems to be uncertain at best. The party was unable to say if and when it would be selecting a series of running mates last week. And two straws in the wind suggest the party’s problems are as deep as ever.
Straw in the wind 1: A big chunk of the country gets a lot of its news and commentary from local radio, and on most stations the important slot is the morning show, running for a few hours from 9am or 10am. On Highland Radio in Co Donegal, it’s the Nine till Noon Show with Greg Hughes. A couple of weeks ago, he interviewed the Sinn Féin finance spokesman and local TD Pearse Doherty, mostly to discuss the newly released Sinn Féin housing policy.
After the interview, Hughes read through listeners’ comments. They were almost uniformly hostile to Sinn Féin; remarkably so. “I’ve done a lot of interviews over the years with Pearse Doherty, Pádraig Mac Lochlainn and other Sinn Féin representatives,” Hughes said to his listeners. “I’ll be completely honest with you and maybe it’s just Sinn Féin supporters are not texting in but I’ve not seen such a negative reaction ... in quite some time.” He wasn’t saying, he added, that it was representative of wider public sentiment. But still.
Straw in the wind 2: Who are the voters Sinn Féin has lost? Political scientist Rory Costello of the University of Limerick looked at the voters the party lost in the early part of this year, using data from surveys carried out by polling company Red C for the National Election and Democracy Study (NEDS) at the time of both the family and care referendums and the local and European elections.
He found that for many of the voters, who were previously Sinn Féin supporters but deserted them at the May elections, immigration was a particularly important issue. Another way of putting this – for former Sinn Féin voters, immigration was twice as important as housing; for current Sinn Féin voters, housing was twice as important as immigration.
Looking at the voters who turned against the party, he found that it was predominantly those with negative views about immigration who did so. In addition, these former Sinn Féin voters, who have strongly anti-immigration views, are now very negative about the party. As Una Mullally reported this week, at a recent anti-immigration demonstration in Dublin, among the protesters’ chants was: “Sinn Féin are traitors!” Those guys are not likely to come back to the party fold.
None of this means that a Sinn Féin recovery is impossible. The party had disastrous 2019 local and European elections and eight months later bounced back to general election triumph. It achieved that with a mixture of left-wing economic populism, brilliant campaigning by Mary Lou McDonald and by appealing to a strong desire for change among voters.
And remember: one of the big facts that underlies all these recent shifts in the political landscape towards Fine Gael and away from Sinn Féin is the extreme volatility of Irish politics. Sudden swings remain not just possible, but likely in the course of an election campaign. Remember, not so long ago, people thought Sinn Féin was a cert for government; now many of the same people say a Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael return is a foregone conclusion. I think a better summary is that the latter pair are now favourites to return, but absolutely nothing is certain.
It’s rare you can pull the same trick twice in politics, and the chances of Sinn Féin repeating the 2019-2020 Lazarus act are not great. Its confidence is rattled.
But the party can start the election as one of three large-to-medium-sized parties; and campaigns are dynamic, unpredictable and volatile.
As Theresa Reidy pointed out on the Inside Politics podcast during the week, half of the voters make up their minds how to vote during the campaign. The great game has changed, for sure; but it’s not over yet, not by a long shot.
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