Sinn Fein? They have gone away, you know.

[Genocide Organ]

https://www.irishnews.com/news/northern-ireland/martina-anderson-reveals-she-had-an-abortion-so-ira-operation-could-go-ahead-O67BPMVG25HADPLJTTNBVA66D4/

That's serious commitment to the cause! Very random that it's coming out now?

I found this deeply disturbing

Be a divil if the operation in question failed. The IRA one, I mean...

[Deerstalker]

https://www.irishnews.com/news/northern-ireland/martina-anderson-reveals-she-had-an-abortion-so-ira-operation-could-go-ahead-O67BPMVG25HADPLJTTNBVA66D4/

That's serious commitment to the cause! Very random that it's coming out now?

A book to promote to bolster the pension

[Liberation]

Sinn Fein MLAS claiming water and food as expenses.

[Brendan]

Sinn Fein MLAS claiming water and food as expenses.

Same as every other politician then?

[Sportacus]

I'll give credit where it's due, Rois-Maire Donnelly speaks well as Lord Mayor and was the right person at the right time for the Fleadh. Comes across as open minded and represents a positive future for the city.

[Brendan]

Sinn Féin local to me have shot themselves in the foot (again), not only supporting but proposing and seconding a proposal for wind turbines on top of the iconic Benbradagh mountain. North Derry is already heavily saturated with these turbines and any benefit they gave to local communities with grants etc have dried up and our electric bills never get any cheaper so why are they supporting this.

Pissing off voters in their strongest voting base in the East Derry constiuency of Dungiven, there goes any chance of a second MLA seat or knocking Flegory Campbell off his perch

[Wildweasel74]

Theres enough Turbines between Drum, Glenullin, going into Ballerin, Cam Forest, Limavady road to power all of Derry. Outside Dunloy, Up behind Corkery, there vast areas of N Ireland at high level with no turbines. Road Ballymena to Larne, a wilderness, just Stands out at me.

[Milltown Row2]

Sinn Féin local to me have shot themselves in the foot (again), not only supporting but proposing and seconding a proposal for wind turbines on top of the iconic Benbradagh mountain. North Derry is already heavily saturated with these turbines and any benefit they gave to local communities with grants etc have dried up and our electric bills never get any cheaper so why are they supporting this.

Pissing off voters in their strongest voting base in the East Derry constiuency of Dungiven, there goes any chance of a second MLA seat or knocking Flegory Campbell off his perch

Would you prefer coal mines?

[Brendan]

Sinn Féin local to me have shot themselves in the foot (again), not only supporting but proposing and seconding a proposal for wind turbines on top of the iconic Benbradagh mountain. North Derry is already heavily saturated with these turbines and any benefit they gave to local communities with grants etc have dried up and our electric bills never get any cheaper so why are they supporting this.

Pissing off voters in their strongest voting base in the East Derry constiuency of Dungiven, there goes any chance of a second MLA seat or knocking Flegory Campbell off his perch

Would you prefer coal mines?

Not sure there is much coal in Benbradagh

[Wildweasel74]

Price electricty going up anyway, so its hard to see any benefit. Big mountain up above Belfast, dont see any ever put there.

[Rossfan]

I know it's Belfast Telegraph/"Irish" Indo but still....

Sinn Féin stands at a crossroads. Before it lies a choice between insularity and openness. Does it want to grow into a more normal political party, or has even limited loosening-up been exposed as a vulnerability?

The party has faced bigger choices. This isn't about whether to support violence, whether to accept the short-term legitimacy of the Border or whether to engage with the British monarchy. But the dominant focus in each of those decisions was on Northern Ireland. This choice is most significant in the jurisdiction where Sinn Féin is desperate to enter government: the Republic.

Ten days ago, Siobhán Fenton, the party's former deputy press secretary, published a book about her five years inside the party. Ourselves Alone is far from a tell-all exposé, but the publication contains enough sustained criticism for it to be a problem for Sinn Féin.

An Oxbridge-educated Belfast native with a master's degree in gender studies, Fenton would once have been a highly atypical Sinn Féin employee. When she was headhunted in 2020, the "main appeal" to her as a left-wing progressive, she told me, was working for "a feminist politician" in Mary Lou McDonald.

Most remarkably, she disagrees with Provisional IRA violence. Sinn Féin has long operated as a sort of Provisional IRA defence society. Just last month, Michelle O'Neill ignored inevitable criticism to attend a commemoration for Thomas McElwee, who was jailed for burning Yvonne Dunlop to death.

Immolating a 26-year-old mother isn't exactly the pinnacle of feminism. Sinn Féin knows this, yet maintaining the cherished memory of the IRA trumps all normal political
Speaking to Fenton, half a century after an IRA attack on the Belfast Telegraph that killed printer Joe Paton, she said: "I wouldn't ever try to defend that." Almost nobody in Sinn Féin would give such an answer.

Sinn Féin had to make a dramatic shift, not just to let in someone who fundamentally disagrees with the Provo campaign, but to then promote her to a senior role. Some members north of the Border are privately scathing about the party's operation in the Republic, seeing it as having forsaken core republican values in a shameless pursuit of power.

There is a logic to this concern. If enough senior figures disagree with IRA violence (Fenton wouldn't say whether other staff shared her stance), might there come a day when the party disowns those it long existed to defend?

When Fenton joined, the project was "exciting". When she left, it was anything but. McDonald didn't even tell her she was being ditched, leaving her to learn it from a newspaper. When she later bumped into McDonald in a corridor, the leader not only said nothing of substance, but Fenton observed that she was using the "outside voice" she deployed in public rather than the friendlier tone she had grown used to in private. Fenton had been ruthlessly cut off.

Her book is potentially damaging to the party precisely because it is not a full-frontal assault. Fenton praises McDonald's seriousness and sincerity, yet she also highlights multiple howlers for which the leader was wholly responsible.


This stance means that, for a Sinn Féin voter, it's harder to dismiss the criticisms as merely those of an embittered ex-employee.

As we learned in an extract published in the Sunday Independent, Fenton says she never once heard McDonald express any real personal view on immigration, even in private. She thought McDonald's knee-jerk response to the Dublin riots in 2023 looked "atrocious" because that crisis was "not a moment for political point-scoring or a nakedly critical potshot at a rival.

On McDonald's comments from 2023 saying she thought the average house price in Dublin should be about €300,000, Fenton, who had set up the interview, says it was "an absolute clanger" and "I had no idea why Mary Lou had decided to name a figure". Yet the party leader insisted on standing over what she had said.

Fenton suggests there is "a particular vulnerability within some elements of Sinn Féin's grassroots around believing conspiracy theories". She also reveals some advisers were "distraught and furious" at McDonald's handling of the scandal over Niall Ó Donnghaile, the party's former Seanad leader who resigned after sending inappropriate messages to two males aged 16 and 18.

By the end of Fenton's time, she says "I wondered how much I actually knew about Mary Lou or the party at all".


Sinn Féin's conundrum is that, to grow in line with its ambitions, it needs to expand far beyond traditional republicans. It had been doing this before its drop in support three years ago. But the next step is letting these people into the core of the party's central machine, and that creates huge vulnerabilities for an ultra-secretive organisation.

The temptation for traditional party figures would be to say "look what happens when you let in a woke outsider who isn't even a republican — this should never happen again".

In a hint of the internal tensions, senior TD Eoin Ó Broin has described Fenton's book as "well considered", with "insightful" reflections "made honestly and frankly", even as he distanced himself from unspecified portions.

Neither McDonald nor Pearse Doherty have adopted this stance, with the leader sounding dismissive of the work by a woman she once trusted to craft her words.

Being all things to all people is difficult with voters. It's even harder with a party's own staff.

[DaleCooper]

"When she was headhunted in 2020, the "main appeal" to her as a left-wing progressive, she told me, was working for "a feminist politician" in Mary Lou McDonald.

Most remarkably, she disagrees with Provisional IRA violence".


Hahahaha. jfc