Sinn Fein has been playing the long game for a while now. The party, which straddles the North and South of Ireland, has changed a great deal from its early days, when it did the political bidding of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). In fact, the party has changed so much it is assumed that, sooner or later, the island of Ireland will be united – at least figuratively – by a Sinn Fein First Minister and Taoiseach. The question is when though? Despite its meteoric rise in recent years, Sinn Fein remains a party of two fortunes, fortunes which vary greatly depending on which side of the border you find yourself on.
Sinn Fein is (mostly) not the party it once was. The party which has long had intimate ties to the bloody violence of the Troubles has gone through several reformations. Most recently, in 2018, it cast aside the men in grey suits (men who used to orchestrate the violent plot for a united Ireland) for two women, Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill. McDonald was a particularly remarkable choice, hailing from the leafy middle-class suburbs of Dublin, as she eschewed many of the defining characteristics of the party’s most infamous leader, Jerry Adams. As the party ventured, tentatively, away from its militarised past, it also expanded its message – and its reach – to voters who seek more than the project of unification.
Still, in spite of its bold reformation, the party remains a political creature like no other. Its softened image continues to hide a rougher, unfinished, organisation – one which all too often is unable to get its house in order. The party has been unable to put to rest a number of deeply unsettling accounts of sexual abuse within the party, while it continues to venerate figures which include outright Nazis. To this day, Sinn Fein remains a party shrouded in secrecy – one that hugs the shadows – and is exceedingly suspicious of those who seek to uncover its murky workings and structures of power. Yet, for all its continuing problems, the party’s fortunes have risen considerably with McDonald and O’Neill at the helm.
In the North, the party has grown significantly, becoming a central part of the political institutions that were forged by the Good Friday Agreement at the turn of the century. By now, Sinn Fein has risen all the way to becoming Northern Ireland’s largest party at Stormont, allowing it to triumphantly install O’Neill as the North’s first nationalist First Minister. The party has conquered more than just Stormont though, today it is also the largest party in local government.
To understand just how revolutionary all this is, you just have to look at the system the party has risen to power in – it is one steadfastly aimed at putting nationalists at a disadvantage. The party has, by all accounts, played the electoral field in Northern Ireland with great success and cemented a profound role in shaping the region's political future. But the system has also played the party, moderating and moulding it into the contours of the Agreement and its intransigent institutions. Still, Sinn Fein’s meteoric rise in the North is one to behold.
The party in the South couldn’t look more different. For years now, Sinn Fein has tried to replicate the success of its northern counterpart within its ancestral home, and it has repeatedly failed to do so. For years the party’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed, even as it softened its image, and expanded its policy offering, talking about the housing and cost of living crises. In 2020, the party topped the poll, winning the most first preference votes, but failed to field enough candidates. In 2024, as it was riding high in the polls, the party faced a calamitous set of local elections when its expected vote shattered, and crushed the party’s dreams of taking over government.
All too often, the party has been gripped by this deep inability to play the Irish electoral field, becoming a party of repeated missed opportunities.
Yet, even in spite of these repeated failures to rise to power in the South, Sinn Fein’s long game is coming into view, even if it is slowly. As of 2024, the party has broken – with the help of a fractured coalition of left leaning parties – decades of two-party dominance by Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. Sinn Fein has undeniably shifted Irish politics into a new realm, even if this shift has been far more subtle than its main aim of uniting the island of Ireland
under its governance.
After decades of work, Sinn Fein’s long game appears just around the corner. The party has managed to transform politics on the island of Ireland, even if its work is incomplete. For now, however, Sinn Fein has hit a ceiling. Its long march into government north and south of the border remains some day in the future, be it near or far. For all its struggle and strife to win elections and claim power, Sinn Fein remains a party of two halves. One whose fortunes are divided by the invisible border that separates North from South. What happens next is up to the party, and how it masters the electoral field at its feet in these two very different places.
Image: Sinn Fein/Wikimedia Commons
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