Sinn Féin Slows Down

The Fine Gael-Populist Challenge

Perfect leftist pitch.

By John Foster

Irish politics are hard to parse. The standard ideological rules don’t apply…until they do.

Sinn Féin is currently learning this lesson the hard way, at least as far as the politics of the Republic of Ireland are concerned.

The party had been riding a four-year high, although not, it must be conceded, without some setbacks.

In the last general election, in February 2020, Sinn Féin got more than 24% of the vote, eclipsing Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, the parties that composed the governing cartel for most of the last century.

According to “voting intention” data collected in the months after the election, their total climbed as high as 36% in the summer of 2022.

For a party that had started life as the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, one of the 20^th century’s more persistently lethal terrorist organisations.

Their political fortunes had been weighed down by this connection, on both sides of the border, but especially in the Republic.

There, the two leading contenders for political power both had significant connections to the early days of the 20^th-century republican movement.

Fianna Fáil (“Warriors of Destiny”) was founded by Éamon de Valera, a veteran of the 1916 Easter Rising and the most important political figure in the Republic of Ireland from the 1920s until he died in 1975.

Fine Gael was created in 1933 in a three-way merger between the Cumann na nGaedhael (the remains of the pro-Treaty wing of the IRA), the National Centre Party (moderate agrarian conservatives), and Eoin O’Duffy’s National Guard (the proto-fascist Irish Blueshirts).

Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael could claim connections to Irish republicanism without being connected to bombings, bank robberies, and the neurotic obsession with reunification in the short term.

At the same time, the divisions between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had little to do with ideology and much to do with connections to Ireland’s struggle for liberation.

The central issue was the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which created the Irish Republic and the Protestant statelet in the north of the country, comprising six of the nine counties of Ulster.

The treaty caused a split in the republican movement, and a brutal, year-long civil war was waged in 1922 and 1923 between the pro- and anti-treaty factions of the IRA.

While the latter was victorious, both sides created webs of supporters that formed the basis for later political parties.

Sinn Féin, too, was a stepchild of this conflict.

The IRA reconstituted itself as a military force in the 1930s, with a different and much more limited base of support. It operated in its own terrorist netherworld, in an imaginary landscape in which the British might at some point be forced to leave at gunpoint.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that the IRA began to reconfigure its conception of struggle, and it was only in the 1980s that the “ballot box and Armalite” strategy emerged.

Since 1998, Sinn Féin has firmly established itself in the political mainstream on both sides of the border.

In the Republic, the party occupies a centre-left niche, catering to a base of younger voters unconnected with the older networks of power and adversely affected by the persistent housing crisis, which has been a fact of Irish political life since the housing bubble burst in 2007.

Ireland has always had something of a landlord problem. In the 19^th century it was absentee landlords whose exploitive practices ground down Irish tenant farmers.

Nowadays the problem is speculators who buy up land to hold it for a bigger payoff later on. Meanwhile, rents have approximately doubled over the last decade, especially in Dublin.

While this is not the only issue on which Sinn Féin has traded, it’s a crucial one, especially given that they are strongest among voters aged 18 to 35. Sinn Féin has been more ready than the cartel parties to adopt approaches based on social media to better connect with younger voters.

This combination of factors explains Sinn Féin’s rise in national elections over the last several years.

It has been tempting to see this as a generational (perhaps even epochal) shift in which the party got significant and lasting traction with groups of voters not interested in or engaged with the traditional circuits of Irish politics.

However, things have changed in the last year, with support for Sinn Féin showing its limitations.

While their vote share in the local and European Union elections earlier this year was comparable to 2020 (24.1% now as opposed to 24.5% then), the results were lower than pre-election polling had led people to expect.

In the months since the election, both Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil have seen their share of “intends” decline below 20%, while Fine Gael’s has risen to over 25%.

Several factors are in play. One of these is the protean nature of Irish cartel parties.

Whereas parties with serious ideological commitments might have difficulty addressing the challenges posed by Sinn Féin, having little ideological baggage, Ireland’s cartel parties were free to pivot toward the programmatic space of their rival.

Under the slogan “Housing for All”, the current coalition, comprising Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, and the Greens, has instituted a range of strategies to address the current housing problem.

In addition to programs incentivising home construction and providing affordable rental units (particularly for students), the government has instituted new taxes on persistently vacant properties and other fiscal measures meant to increase housing construction.

This is a remarkable step for a coalition led by Fine Gael, which has traditionally had the cosiest relationships with property developers of all the Irish parties.

It remains unclear whether the ambitious goals laid out in the government’s policy statements will be met, and there is still a significant disparity between projects which have received permit clearance and those where construction has actually started.

Sinn Féin’s political success has clearly struck a nerve. But there is also another, less savoury dynamic in play.

Anti-immigrant sentiment has been palpably on the rise in Ireland, with far-right demonstrations kicking off in Dublin and incidents of violence against immigrants and people perceived as sympathetic to them on the rise.

This represents a peculiar shift in the Irish national narrative, although it could be more novel.

For decades, Ireland was a place that people left. The Irish population drain to the United States, Britain, and Australia created large diasporic communities there.

With the improvement of Irish economic conditions (as well as those in the EU more generally) since the mid-1990s, Ireland has seen immigration surpass emigration.

This has created some rather unfortunate dynamics: a discourse of pure Irishness (a myth based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Irish history) and the idea that Ireland is “full”, even though its population was nearly 40% higher before the famines of the late 1840s.

These factors, too, have depressed voting support for Sinn Féin, which is perceived to be more sympathetic to immigration than either of the cartel parties.

Although the party’s egalitarian commitments have wavered, they have not reversed themselves, and thus, these xenophobic trends have contributed to the reversal of their electoral growth.

This all represents a particularly pernicious outgrowth of the current populist trend.

Ireland, whose politics stagnated for decades, is finally in a position to exit the trench caused by the post-2007 catastrophes.

In addition, there was at least some prospect that a new force was on the horizon with the capacity to transform decades-old political nostrums.

With elections scheduled for next year, it is unclear whether Sinn Féin can continue to grow its brand of moderate leftism or whether it will be forced to shift to the right.

The latter course would represent a tragic concession in the prospect of a new Irish politics.

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Photograph courtesy of Sinn Féin. Published under a Creative Commons license.