Sinn Fein triumph is not about Irish unity

Sinn Féin has emerged as the big winner of the Irish general election. A new era is dawning in which the party that until twenty years ago was a death cult controlled by the Provisional IRA is the Great Green Hope of the Left.

But at what cost to its image as the party of Irish unity? Is Sinn Féin 2020 the new Fianna Fáil?

In 1926, Eamon de Valera, a veteran of the 1916 Rising and the civil war that followed partition, formed Fianna Fail out of the rump of the old Sinn Féin/IRA, which had refused to take its seats in the newly-established Dáil Éireann. But to show voters how serious he remained on the question of Irish unity, he proclaimed that his creation, though based exclusively in the 26 counties, remained “The Republican Party”.

In the decades that followed, “Dev” largely gave up on the so-called National Question. Government in Dublin was what mattered. Unity became a pipe dream. Later, with the eruption of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, it turned into a nightmare.

Could history now be repeating itself?

Yesterday, Sinn Fein, the abstentionist party led for more than three decades by Gerry Adams, a former IRA chief of staff, became officially the most popular party in the Republic on a platform that owes nothing to events north of the Border and everything to a demand for change among left-behind voters in what was once the Free State.

The rest of us should perhaps be thankful. Class warfare, rather than actual warfare, is the preferred way forward for the party’s new leader, Mary Lou McDonald, with her background not in the armed struggle but in European integration and resource management. It’s not that McDonald, a solid, middle-class Dubliner, doesn’t believe in Irish unity. She does, as did Dev. But following disappointing results in last year’s European and local elections, what she heard from voters was that they had no interest in unity and that if she wanted their support she had to concentrate on housing, health and the growing disparity between rich and poor.

In interviews that McDonald gave yesterday to the Irish media, neither she nor those putting the questions to her so much as raised the issue of Northern Ireland. It didn’t come up. It was irrelevant. Never had the English translation of Sinn Fein – Ourselves Alone – seemed so apt.

It could be, of course, that the true nature of the beast will quickly reassert itself. Having won just under 25 per cent of the first preference vote in what was a PR election, the party is now in government in Belfast and knocking loudly on the door in Dublin. Its supporters, though they may have given little or no thought to the plight of nationalists in Northern Ireland, have in effect added their voice to the demand by Republicans in the North for a border poll in both jurisdictions that could, in theory, lead to unity within the next five-to-ten years.

Meanwhile, the nature and makeup of the next Irish Government is anybody’s guess. Both Leo Varadkar, the outgoing Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael, and Michael Martin, leader of the main opposition party, Fianna Fáil, have described Sinn Féin as “toxic” and rejected the very idea of serving with it in cabinet.  But that was then and this is now. The prospect of political oblivion, can, like a hanging, concentrate the mind wonderfully.

If anyone has a right to feel cheated, it is probably Varadkar. During the campaign, he was presented to the electorate as the hero of Brexit, who stood up for Irish sovereignty at a time when many in the UK expected him to accept vassalage.

The only problem was that by the time the election came round, Brexit was already yesterday’s news and voters had moved on to issues closer to home. What the election was actually about, it turned out, was the feeling by a large section of the population that they and their families were not sharing in the country’s much-vaunted prosperity. And neither Fine Gael nor Fianna Fail had much to say that was new about that.

It could be that Varadkar and Martin, whose mainstream duo secured 43 per cent of first preferences, will yet combine to exclude Sinn Fein from power. But if they do, they will be taking a huge risk. The people (or a quarter of them) have made their choice and they will expect that choice to be respected, not ignored.

There will be much tough talking in the days and weeks ahead. McDonald will try to cobble a government together made up of Sinn Fein and everybody else that isn’t Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. But she will almost certainly fail, hamstrung by the fact that the party didn’t put up enough candidates to take full advantage of its first preference surpluses. At that point (assuming the Big Two haven’t already closed her out) she will be forced to turn to one or other of the usual suspects, and then the fun will start.

But it is Sinn Féin’s internal division that may ultimately prove decisive. The party in Northern Ireland is about identity. It is, first and foremost, about being Irish. In the Republic, it is about rebalancing the economy in favour of the working class. Mary Lou McDonald will attempt to reconcile the two and consolidate her position as both progressive and Republican. Just like De Valera in 1926, in fact. But Dev had the Catholic Church behind him. McDonald has only the IRA and the promise of a better tomorrow.

There will be those north of the Border who see Sinn Féin’s southern surge as proof that a united Ireland is now more than ever inevitable. But there will also be those who point to a shift in the the balance of power within the party in the direction of a 26-county domestic agenda in which, as under De Valera, they end up largely forgotten. One Ireland or two? It’s not only Unionists who are asking themselves the question.