Sinn Fein election win threatens to reopen Ireland’s unfinished revolution
The triumphant surge of Sinn Féin in the Irish election may signal a political transformation on the island of Ireland. Having risen on a tide of youthful demands for social improvements in housing and health and for “change” more generally, Sinn Féin must now show whether it is more capable of effecting such adjustments than the two parties whose duopoly they have fractured. Social betterment will not be the only goal however, and the lure of the “unification’” of Ireland will remain a strategic goal for Sinn Féin.
There is however a deeper explanation for the Irish election outcome than a somewhat inchoate demand for ‘”change”. It is an explanation that has wider echoes touching on other “post-revolution societies” as well. Key to any understanding of the Irish Republic – and of certain similar nations – is the reality that its birth was induced by a political revolution that has not found an end point. The impact of political insurgency in Ireland in the 1920s – as in France in the late 18th century, Argentina in the early 19th century or Russia in the early 20th century – was not conclusive. It left unresolved issues of identity, authority and power distribution, which continue to resonate in the 21st century.
Not all political revolutions leave such leftovers in their wake, and that is not accidental or simply fortuitous. Revolutions which establish largely clarified patterns of identity and power stand the best chance of securing sustainably coherent societies. Here, the two most obvious examples are the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in England and the American Revolution of 1776-83.
Why is the Irish Republic – and the other instances cited – different? And what implications might there be for the future political direction of the Republic following Sinn Féin’s achievement last week?
The birth of the Irish Free State/Republic left as many issues unresolved as resolved. The divorce from Britain, sort after for so long by Irish republicans, was finally achieved, but messily. The aspiration to “complete unification” by the future incorporation of Northern Irish counties was, in the minds of Irish nationalists, left unsettled or postponed by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 (which established the Irish Free State).
Indeed, for the anti-Treaty “hold-outs” – for which most conspicuously read the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Féin – there could be no independence without the “North”, while for others there was a reluctant willingness to accept second best: that is, the partition of the island of Ireland. Revolutionary aspirations in Ireland sprang, as so often elsewhere too, from a national consciousness resting on conjured – sometimes even invented – narratives of difference.
Most European nationalisms of the time rose on the back of a community formed by language and religion more than geography. In this way, Ireland was not so different from others; but the Irish Civil War and its aftermath strained the cultural narrative formed in Ireland from the 19th century onwards. The two main political parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, sprang respectively from the split away from the anti-Treaty Sinn Féin and from a decision to strengthen the pro-Treaty tradition.
But the Irish Republic evolved only slowly and uncertainly as it faced existential crises born of economic challenges and large-scale migration. The decision by the Republic to remain neutral in the Second World War reinforced differences across the island of Ireland and separated the new Irish state from the continental alliances which in earlier times had been crucial to the uprising against British rule. This separation was most bitingly explored by Samuel Beckett from his redoubt in occupied France.
The immediate post-war years left the Republic no less in the economic doldrums while key constituents of national identity – the Irish language and the Catholic Church – were weakening. What eventually transformed the Irish Republic was the cross-over of two key developments from the mid-1970s onwards: accession to the then European Community and a determination to find a reasoned rather than violent way forward in Northern Ireland.
Membership of the European Union provided the Republic with a crucible in which to reshape the national narrative and advance revitalised economic goals. At the same time, alongside the UK government, the Republic also helped to bring about a new (provisional or not, according to taste) more settled status in the North. Together, they squeezed out the IRA and other paramilitaries from both sectarian communities.
In other words, the European Project and the 1998 Belfast Agreement together opened a road to a possible resolution of the unfinished revolution begun in 1916, and which concluded somewhat raggedly after the Civil War. Notwithstanding the economic crisis of 2008, the Republic seemed secure on a new path within an international arrangement that drew it closer to the UK as well as to the EU more widely.
The question now is whether, against the background of Brexit, the unexpected political eruption of Sinn Féin will disturb the Republic’s continuing political and economic evolution. Will it reopen nationalist sores with their origins in the Civil War period and make it more difficult to achieve a sustainable end point to the Republic’s unfinished revolution?
Other countries with their own unfinished revolutions have found varying degrees of sustainable political stability, even if these often prove to be more provisional than first hoped. After all, France is on to its Fifth Republic. There is every reason to hope that the Irish Republic has found its own distinctive pathway. The question is how far will the advent of Sinn Féin complicate Ireland’s continuing endeavours to bring a close its revolutionary past.