Sinn Fein's '26 County' set-up imploding?

[GweylTah]

Interesting story.


ALTHOUGH the obsessively secret nature of internal Sinn Fein organisation makes it difficult to get a full picture of what is happening in the aftermath of its failed electoral ambitions in the Republic, the signs are that there is a very considerable amount of upheaval within what it terms its "26-county" structure.


Yet another Dublin councillor, Tony Smithers, quietly left for "family" reasons after the election last month, the second to depart from the South Central area where its remaining Dublin TD, Aengus O Snodaigh is based.

Smithers follows another party councillor, Andrew O'Connell who resigned from the same council electoral area, also for "family reasons" to be replaced by O Snodaigh's sister-in-law, Criona Ni Dhalaigh who was co-opted on to the council in 2005.

The departure of two out of three councillors from one electoral area for remarkably similar reasons has raised considerable interest among the other political parties in the area.

The term "family reasons" was also applied in the departure of Nicky Kehoe, who stood for Sinn Fein in the Dublin Central constituency in the 2002 general election and came within 79 votes of catching the second Fianna Fail candidate, Dr Dermot Fitzpatrick.

The decision to parachute Trinity College-educated candidate MEP Mary Lou McDonald into the strongly working class Dublin Central constituency after Kehoe's removal from the ticket - whether voluntary or not - was a disaster. Kehoe's first preference vote in 2002 of 4,972 was reduced to a vote of 3,182 for McDonald who was eliminated on the sixth count with no chance of taking a seat. Sinn Fein had to sit and watch as Cyprian Brady, whose first count vote was only 939, rose on each count to finally take the seat without reaching a quota.

Despite suggestions by Tony Gregory that Sinn Fein could have taken the seat if Kehoe had stood, the results across Dublin dispute this. The SF vote in Dublin in the 2004 European Parliamentary elections in 2004 saw Mary Lou McDonald returned to Strasbourg with 60,895 votes. In the General Election - with a greatly increased turnout across the board - Sinn Fein could only muster 34,282 votes in Dublin, a decline of around 46 per cent.

The vote almost certainly ensures that Sinn Fein's single European seat in the Republic will be lost in the next European election in 2009. The fact that the European Parliament has already directed that Ireland's 13 seats in Strasbourg be reduced to 12 because of the expansion of the EU into Eastern Europe means that Dublin will probably fall from a four-seat constituency to three seats. If that happens, as seems likely, it greatly diminishes the chances of SF holding on to its European seat.

According to sources close to the party in Dublin, the permanently tanned and tastefully outfitted McDonald is at the centre of an intense debate that has broken out since the General Election.

McDonald was also heavily promoted by Adams as the new, respectable face of Sinn Fein in the Republic, appearing alongside the party leader in photocalls as he emerged from 10 Downing Street or Government Buildings: key points in the "peace process", in which she played little or no role, according to governmental sources close to the process.

Unlike some of the traditional, working class Sinn Fein candidates in Dublin, including ex-IRA men Kehoe and Dessie Ellis, McDonald has no roots in Provisional republicanism. She moved to the party from Fianna Fail at a time when Sinn Fein's rise seemed to many inexorable. While at university she had been a Fianna Fail cumann officer in Dublin West.

In the five years before the General Election the Northern-based leadership of the party had been assiduously implementing a type of yuppification policy in the South, apparently based on the notion that fresh young candidates with no taint of IRA involvement would enhance the party's standing.

According to one source active in the party at the outset of this period, the idea was based on the successful marketing of Britain's "New Labour" under Tony Blair when left wing radicalism was pushed aside in favour of mainstream middle-ground, middle-class politics.

To this end, 17 of the 31 Sinn Fein candidates who stood in the 2002 General Election were dropped. They were replaced by 22 brand new candidates, nine of them young women, and none with any connection whatsoever with the IRA. Louise Minihan, the party official who replaced Dublin councillor Tony Smithers (a taxi driver) is an archetypical new Sinn Fein figure, youngish, blonde with no known radical or militant views.

While the Northern leadership has been making excuses that its overall vote in the Republic increased from 121,039 in the 2002 election to 141,502, this was entirely due to the fact that it fielded candidates in 11 more constituencies, standing in 42 in all.

ACCORDING to one former party member, the excuse offered by the leadership that Sinn Fein was "squeezed" by the competition between the two big blocs of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael is being rejected firmly by all but the most leadership-devoted party activists in the Republic.

This is certainly being reflected in articles being published in its weekly newspaper, An Phoblacht, which last week included analysis by three failed candidates.

Two, John Dwyer from Wexford and Jonathan O'Brien from Cork, were critical of Sinn Fein's tactics in offering itself purely as a potential coalition partner for Fianna Fail. Both represent left-of-centre positions. Another, Joe Reilly, from Meath plumped for the leadership and called for the party to rally round and "move on", reflecting the less questioning Adams-loyalist view.

According to the source, the wider debate within the party in the Republic is about whether or not Sinn Fein is a left wing party. There is, he said, an emerging rural-urban, left-right split which has never been addressed before mainly because it was viewed as irrelevant by a Northern leadership now badly exposed as being completely out of touch with political realities in the Republic.

The internal political debate, emerging in An Phoblacht, suggests that the traditional conservatism of rural Sinn Fein is running up against the left-wing views of its urban working class representatives.

According to another source, the working class party activists who stood by Sinn Fein in the days when the IRA campaign was still running and who held distinctly left-wing views, as were once espoused in speeches by Adams and others, felt completely let down by the emergence of the new breed of middle class candidates foistedon them by the Northern leadership. They are pushing for the party to move away from the centre ground of Irishpolitics to a more radical,left-wing alternative. The fact that Sinn Fein in the Republic is in disarray was hardlyacknowledged in Gerry Adams' speech to the several hundred supporters who turned up at Bodenstown last Sunday.

Adams spoke about the "front line shifting to the South", and what he termed an emerging "26-county element of our leadership". The term "26-county element" will not have pleased those in the Republic who want to see the party present a radical alternative to Fianna Fail and Fine Gael and who are increasingly concerned about the absence of any realistic policies, left or right.

Adams still seemed utterly out of touch, not just with his party in the South, but with Southern political life as a whole. His Bodensown speech was replete with the same bland offerings that served him so badly in his media appearances before the election. "Our responsibility is to sustain a vibrant economy, create opportunity, deliver equality and end poverty," he said, without giving any indication of how this is to be achieved.

Sinn Fein had suffered at the polls, not because it had no message and its machine was in disarray, but because: "this election witnessed a massive ideological offensive by the forces of conservatism in this state."

Like the leader of a cult rather than a political party, Adams seemed totally unable to believe or accept that his strategy and his personal intervention could have been at least part of the cause of the party's near collapse in the South. Despite the fact that all of Sinn Fein's smart-suited male candidates and "babe" female candidates failed to make any impression in the election, he referred to "more and more young republicans emerging as effective political leaders".

THE fact is, as the former party members observed, that the bulk of the young candidates, all of them full-time paid party officials, have third-level qualifications. With at least five years in a political wilderness ahead of them and no sign that the Northern leadership has any real idea of what to do in the Republic, many will be considering their future career options.

The signs are not good for "young republicans" in career terms. The "peace process" is over and Adams and McGuinness will no longer be able to trade on the tremendous amount of publicity this gave them. With only four seats, Sinn Fein no longer has the seats to qualify for automatic speaking rights in the Dail as it is disqualified from forming a "technical group" under Parliamentary rules.

As importantly, Sinn Fein's new breed of candidates will be less and less able to hide from the fact that much of its political advance in the Republic - the suits, the PR machine, the hundreds of thousands of high quality posters - were paid for by the huge criminal conspiracy that the IRA has become.

As the money dries up, either through the actions of the Criminal Assets Bureau and its Assets Recovery Agency counterpart in the North or by the IRA people simply refusing to hand over their ill-gotten earnings, the scope

for paying wages to future young republican leaders will reduce.

And the party in the Republic remains conclusively, as Adams said in Bodenstown, an "element", not an independent entity able to formulate and express its own ideas.

Adams' decision, almost on the eve of the election, to ditch policy on taxation decided at the party's Ard Fheis only last February showed that it is not a democratic party in any modern sense. Policy is still decided in the same "democratic centralist" way that policy was decided in the Soviet Union and East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall - by dictat from above.

Ironically, as Adams was setting out his ideas for a grand new quasi-socialist scheme for the "26 counties", his appreciative audience at Bodenstown was largely composed of Northerners on their traditional annual day out to Wolfe Tone's grave.

The event has become an embarrassment for traditional republicans who once saw it as a near religious occasion when they re-committed themselves to the ideals of the United Irishmen. The event is now more like a Twelfth of July Orange demonstration, except that the bands, all from the North, are mostly dressed in combat fatigues and black berets. This year the prize went to the Burns/Moley Republican Flute Band from Crossmaglen, named after two IRA men who blew themselves up while making a bomb in 1988.

Like Gerry Adams, few of the "young republicans" marching last Sunday will be tuned into the intricacies of fiscal or health service debates in the "26 counties".


http://www.independent.ie/unsorted/features/cracks-widen-but-eyes-stay-shut-as-sfs-26county-element-implodes-892498.html