The decision by Sinn Féin to transfer one of its leading Northern politicians, Conor Murphy, from the post of Minister for the Economy at Stormont to a seat in the Seanad is a reflection of just how serious a blow the party took in the November election.
Much of the media consensus in the aftermath of the election was that it was a boring contest that changed nothing. In fact, it was a highly consequential election in which voters emphatically rejected the radical path offered by Sinn Féin, including the demand for a Border poll as a stepping stone to a united Ireland. The party’s commitment to a united Ireland is its overriding objective. The strength of this commitment has been widely underestimated in the Republic, where the party’s emphasis on housing and other social issues has dominated the coverage of its activities.
However, the drive for a united Ireland has always been the underlying motive force behind everything the republican movement does. The Provisional IRA did not wage a campaign of violence for more than 30 years to change housing policy. The strategy of the armalite and the ballot box was an adaptation to changing circumstances, but the old Fenian goal of a 32-county republic remained as the core ideology of the movement.
One of the individuals who facilitated meetings between top Sinn Féin politicians and leading Irish businesses, including the multinationals, over the past three years told me of his surprise at discovering the importance they attached to a united Ireland. “I felt they were prepared to make sensible compromises on economic policy if they achieved power but they were clear about one thing – a united Ireland is the prime objective and they will never compromise on that,” he said.
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Up to last spring there was a widespread assumption that Sinn Féin’s march to power on both sides of the Border was inexorable, hence the willingness of some business leaders to engage with the party. Opinion polls suggested it would be by far the biggest party in the Republic after the election, and that its demand to lead the government would be impossible to resist. The decline of traditional ruling centre-right and centre-left parties across Europe fuelled the view that Ireland would follow the trend, particularly as Sinn Féin had succeeded in keeping the housing crisis at the centre of political debate since the election of February 2020.
Instead, what happened was a sudden and precipitous decline in Sinn Féin support, which manifested itself in the local and European elections in June and continued into the general election. The old firm of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael held steady in the face of pressures from left and right and are now in a position to form a government without the need for a coalition deal involving a smaller party.
The failure of Sinn Féin to make the breakthrough into government in Dublin is a severe blow to its unity policy and the demand for a Border poll as soon as possible. Murphy’s move to the Seanad is regarded as an attempt to get some traction for that policy in the Oireachtas.
However, the Seanad is hardly the place to go about it. The upper house gets very little media coverage and, in any case, it is doubtful if the voters in the Republic will pay much attention to a politician who parachuted in from the North, particularly as his initial comments appearing to condone the IRA murder of Paul Quinn in Louth in 2007 have already come back to haunt him.
Of course it may well be that the primary motive for the Belfast leadership’s decision to move Murphy south is not to persuade the public about the virtues of a united Ireland but to focus the attention of the party in Leinster House on the goal, given the failure of its social agenda to drive it into power. Another factor could well be Murphy’s health. He suffered a minor stroke last year and while he insists this is not his motive for the move, it may have influenced it.
Sinn Féin’s vision of early Border polls followed by a united Ireland stands in stark contrast to the outgoing Government’s shared island policy devised by Micheál Martin. The new government will certainly not be putting any pressure on the British government to hold a Border poll in the short or medium term.
John Hume’s dictum that the future of Ireland should be about people and not territory is what underpins the Government’s strategy. It is arguable that the structures established by the Belfast Agreement actually provide for the realisation of that vision in a way that the Sinn Féin ideal of a unitary state run from Dublin does not.
While opinion polls have shown a consistent majority in the Republic in favour of a united Ireland as an aspiration they have also revealed a clear majority against measures such as changing the symbols of the State like the national anthem and the flag, never mind the extra taxation that would be required to make it work. Sinn Féin faces a stiff uphill battle to get its united Ireland agenda to the centre of political debate in Dublin and it is doubtful if the arrival of one the party’s leading figures from the North will achieve it.