Does Sinn Féin have a problem?
The party has led the opinion polls in the Republic of Ireland for three years but saw disappointing results in last weekend's local and European Parliament elections
This will attempt to be as impartial and dispassionate an analysis of the available evidence as possible. My starting point is this: Sinn Féin has had a lot to celebrate recently, including its vice president and “party leader in the north”, Michelle O’Neill, becoming Northern Ireland’s first ever Nationalist/Republican first minister in February, and having been the most popular party in the Republic of Ireland since the middle of 2021, more than once hitting the extraordinary level of 37 per cent of the potential vote. In addition, as I sketched out last week, it can reasonably expect to perform well in the forthcoming UK general election, and may win seven or eight seats to become the largest party in Northern Ireland in terms of MPs (although Sinn Féin MPs do not take their seats).
All of that being the case, the party’s performance in last weekend’s elections for the European Parliament and Irish local government elections has been at best muted, certainly well below the kind of support it has shown in opinion polls. And even those opinion polls tell an unhappy story over the last six months: in January, Sinn Féin won the backing of 30 per cent of those surveyed, while a poll at the end of May showed a level of only 22 per cent, level-pegging with Fine Gael, one of the three parties of the current coalition government in Dublin.
First let’s look at the numbers, because these are, at least, impossible seriously to dispute. The European Parliament elections do not indicate a catastrophe by any means, especially compared to the last round of voting five years ago.
2019: 1 MEP of 13, 11.7 per cent
2024: 3 MEPs of 14, 19.2 per cent (counting still underway)
That represents substantial growth, and makes Sinn Féin (currently) the second-largest party of Ireland’s slate of MEPs. However, 19.2 per cent is below their current national polling, and that in itself has declined in recent months. Not a catastrophe, certainly, but neither for uproarious celebration.
The local government elections make for rather bleaker reading.
2014: 159 councillors of 949, 15.2 per cent
2019: 81 councillors of 949, 9.48 per cent
2024: 102 councillors of 949, 11.8 per cent (counting still underway)
That shows that the party has repaired little of the damage it suffered in 2019. Sinn Féin’s housing spokesman, Eoin Ó Broin TD, said of that set of local elections:
Particularly in Dublin and Cork city, where our vote fell by half, we misread the strength of local independents, we misread the strength of our own local organisation… a change that had happened in the party where previously people liked to vote for the Shinners in the local election because we worked damn hard on the ground, [but] they were never sure in a general election, that had changed quite a lot and we hadn’t fully appreciated that.
The party was probably somewhat disadvantaged by the emergence in January 2019 of Aontú (“Unity”), an all-Ireland movement which combines social conservatism with Irish republicanism and left-wing economic policies, and is led by a former Sinn Féin Teachta Dála, Peadar Tóibín. That said, Aontú, which some may have felt was stealing Sinn Féin’s clothes, garnered less than two per cent of the first preference votes, only 25,660 to Sinn Féin’s 164,637.
Looking solely at the data, while Sinn Féin lost 5.7 per cent of their support, the parties who gained in votes were the Green Party (up nearly four per cent) and, more modestly, the two mainstream governing parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
Yet the picture is yet more complicated. Only months after those local elections in 2019, so chastening for Sinn Féin, the Fine Gael taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, dissolved the 32nd Dáil Éireann after less than four years of life. He had become head of a minority government in 2017 after the retirement of Enda Kenny, and was unwilling to continue with such difficult parliamentary arithmetic. However, the election, held on 8 February 2020, did not produce a decisive win, for Varadkar’s Fine Gael or indeed anyone else. Instead, the first time in the history of the republic, it became a three-way contest, with Sinn Féin providing a formidable challenge to the traditional governing parties. Fianna Fáil became the largest party in the Dáil, with 38 TDs (though one of those, Seán Ó Fearghaíl, was automatically returned as Ceann Comhairle, or speaker, of the Dáil); Sinn Féin was a whisker behind with 37 TDs; while Varadkar’s Fine Gael was another short distance adrift on 35 TDs. The results looked like this:
Fianna Fáil: 38 TDs of 160, 22.2 per cent of the vote
Sinn Féin: 37 TDs, 24.5 per cent
Fine Gael: 35 TDs, 20.9 per cent
In fact, therefore, although it had come a very narrow second under the electoral system for the Dáil, Sinn Féin had won more votes than any other party, some 535,573 first preferences from a total cast of 2,201,192.
This result suggested two things: firstly, that Sinn Féin was now an established major player in national Irish politics—it won more seats than it had done at any Dáil election since 1923—which its leader, Mary Lou McDonald, described as “historic” and “a revolution in the ballot box”. The second, which flows from the first, was that Sinn Féin would now have to think about how it might approach potential partners for a coalition government, and other parties would have to consider how they would approach Sinn Féin. Varadkar had ruled out any agreement with Sinn Féin due to “principle and policy”, while McDonald made clear her view that the situation had changed: “I do not accept the exclusion or talk of excluding our party, a party that represents now a quarter of the electorate, and I think that is fundamentally undemocratic”.
It did not happen in 2020. Some in Fianna Fáil regarded to prospect of a coalition as more agreeable than seeking terms with Fine Gael, and its leader, Micheál Martin, had blurred his position as the election campaign went on. Varadkar, conceding that Fine Gael would likely go into opposition, said Sinn Féin should have the opportunity to create a government, though his framing of that, as an obligation “to honour its promises that it made to the Irish people, to form a government led by them, to get a socialist republican Programme for Government through the Dáil and it is their duty now to do that”, suggested he was giving the party the opportunity to fail.
Pearse Doherty, Sinn Féin’s lead negotiator and finance spokesman, said he would initially focus on parties which had received a “mandate for change”. Many of the 19 independent TDs suggested they were willing to hear what Sinn Féin had to offer. It seemed a huge task, however, as they were only 67 reliably left-leaning TDs in a house of 160, clearly short of a majority; but that was also true of a potential Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael combination (72 seats) or a Sinn Féin-Fianna Fáil coalition (74 seats). No two parties could, on their own, produce a majority.
The new Dáil met and no candidate for taoiseach could be agreed, so Varadkar resigned. Just over a week later, however, the first case of Covid-19 in Ireland was reported, which dramatically altered the context. Two weeks later, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael entered talks on a potential grand coalition so that Ireland had a government to handle the pandemic, with the Greens and the Labour Party floated as potential third partners. Eventually, in June, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party agreed a programme for government, whereby Martin would be taoiseach for the first half of the term with Varadkar as tánaiste (deputy prime minister), after which they would change places. The Dáil approved the new government on 27 June.
The question, of course, is how Sinn Féin will fare in the next Dáil elections, which must be held no later than 22 March 2025. A year ago, based on opinion polling, the party could have expected to win between 50 and 60 seats, leaving them needing only a relatively small number of partners, or one major one, to form their first government in Dublin since W.T. Cosgrave formed the first executive council of the Irish Free State in December 1922. If Sinn Féin can produce anything like that performance, it will require strong political persistence by the other parties to rule out, as a matter of principle, any agreement with the party.
Fianna Fáil has already softened from a position of absolute refusal. How will Fine Gael, a party of the “progressive centre” which believes in free enterprise and has supported social policies more liberal than Sinn Féin has sometimes contemplated, deal with a Sinn Féin which could plausibly form part, perhaps even the dominant part, of a governing coalition? Leo Varadkar made it clear only last November that an alliance with Sinn Féin was “simply out of the question”, and has described it as an “ultra-nationalist, radical left, populist, euro-critical party”. In December, a Fine Gael minister, Hildegarde Naughton, accused Sinn Féin of having a “murky relationship” with law and order. Clearly, there are politicians in Ireland, as there are in Northern Ireland, who still regard Sinn Féin as “different” because it was for so long the political wing of the Provisional IRA.
All of this, of course, will only be a live issue if Sinn Féin polls strongly in elections for the next Dáil. Last weekend’s results, and its decline in the opinion polls over the last six months, suggest that is no foregone conclusion. The three questions, then are: does Sinn Féin have a problem? If so, what is it? And how does it address it?
That there is a problem is accepted even by the party’s leader. Mary Lou McDonald has admitted that she was “disappointed” Sinn Féin’s showing in the local elections.
It hasn’t been our day, clearly frustrations—anger, indeed—with government policy on this occasion have translated into votes for independents and others… We will regroup. I am sorry that we did not do better. I know that we can do better.
She was sufficiently alive to the threat that she said firmly she would not be standing down (politicians rarely bother to deny possibilities which are remote or lack credence), and has pledged a thorough review of her party to analyse the results.
What we’re going to do is review and reflect on all of those things… Everything for the review is on the table. I will lead this reflection and this process. When the going gets tough, that’s the point at which leaders step forward, they don’t step down. I lead a party with immense talent and immense potential, we don’t always get it right. We clearly have lessons to learn.
This is an interesting approach in terms of tone. It does not deny the disappointment or the relatively poor performance, but at the same time it gives no hostages to fortune nor does it admit, at this point, to any fundamental errors or unpopular and damaging policies. And, as many political leaders do, McDonald is attempting to turn her survival instinct into a show of strength; observers of Liz Truss’s 49-day premiership will know that gritty determination to carry on is a hair’s breadth from bloody-minded refusal to accept defeat and responsibility.
There is a widespread view that Sinn Féin did not handle the sudden emergence of immigration as a major political issue at all well. This has never, historically, been a contentious subject in Dublin: after all, for centuries Ireland’s major export has been its people. Between 1815 and 1914, eight million people left Ireland, many of them as a result of the Great Famine or Great Hunger (an Gorta Mór) of 1845-52. Indeed, the population of the whole island of Ireland, around 7.2 million, is still substantially less than it was before the famine (between 8.2 and 8.5 million). That is a demographic earthquake of almost unfathomable proportions.
As recently as the 1980s, immigration into Ireland was negligible, of the order of a few tens of thousands. Until 1994, net migration was in minus figures and dropped there again in the mid-2010s. Over the last decade, however, it has started climbing, at times steeply: from an outflow of 8,500 overall in 2014, it was 44,000 new immigrants in 2019 and 77,600 last year. A fifth of the current population of the Republic of Ireland was born abroad, although it is true that nearly one in three of that population originated in the United Kingdom. But the 2022 census showed, for example, 56,624 born in India, 39,556 in Brazil, 20,559 in Nigeria and 19,846 in the Philippines. Whether we like it or not, the presence of relatively large immigrant communities has suddenly become an issue.
In November last year, three young children and their care assistant were stabbed in central Dublin by a naturalised Irish citizen originally from Algeria, Riad Bouckaher. Something in the public mood snapped. That same evening, 100 protestors took to the streets, some with covered faces and armed with metal bars, and the Gardaí had to deploy 400 officers to tackle the rioting, looting and vandalism which rapidly ensued. A mob had been quickly summoned and inflamed by far-right activists, and what followed was the worse violence in Dublin’s modern, post-Treaty history. There is no doubt that much of this was manipulated by grim, politically motivated individuals and groups, but there was a genie released from a bottle, and immigration was now a live political issue.
The violence had taken place in the Dublin Central constituency of Sinn Féin’s leader, Mary Lou McDonald. She said that the attack and the rioting had sent “shock and horror throughout the community”, but, in a statement issued the following day, she stated that, while she supported the Gardaí, she had lost confidence in the minister of justice, Helen McEntee, and the commissioner of the Garda, Drew Harris. McDonald’s initial target was police funding. “Sinn Féin has been highlighting the crisis in policing in Dublin city for a long time because we do not have enough gardaí.”
(It is worth observing that Harris was appointed to head Ireland’s police force after 34 years in his native Northern Ireland, with the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Police Service of Northern Ireland. His father, Superintendent Alwyn Harris of the RUC, was murdered by the PIRA in 1989. In July 2023, the Garda Representative Association had passed a motion of no confidence in him over roster disputes by 98.7 per cent to 1.3 per cent.)
A week later, Sinn Féin tabled a motion of confidence in the Dáil against McEntee (intending to vote against, that is, to indicated no confidence). McDonald charged that the justice minister “refuses to acknowledge the political failures that allowed our communities to become unsafe”. However, the motion passed by 83 votes to 63.
The party had long supported a liberal approach to immigration and asylum, and suddenly found itself facing a backlash. Anti-immigrant posters could be seen bearing McDonald’s face and the word “traitor”. Martin Kenny, a Sinn Féin TD for Sligo-Leitrim, blamed the public mood on manipulation by extremists.
They have generated this feeling of fear and hatred towards migrants and anyone who supports migrants. This is a tiny minority of people that fire up another minority. It has become a trend.
He may have been right, but to an extent that was beside the point. Rising immigration combined with an acute housing shortage and instances of violent crime to produce a combustible mix. As The Guardian’s Ireland correspondent Rory Carroll put it:
Far-right candidates may struggle to get elected… but they have set the agenda. The government has tightened rules, reduced welfare supports and expanded enforcement to deter fresh asylum seekers. The taoiseach has insisted Ireland will apply “common sense” while retaining compassion: “The reason we apply the rules is not because we wish to be nasty, is not because we wish to learn from other countries whom I wouldn’t frankly wish to learn from.”
The challenge for Sinn Féin is that where it previously relied on a base which was working-class and progressive, a fissure may now be opening between those two instincts. In January, it was reported in Politico that the party had banned members from posting social media content concerning immigration that was, in any significant way, at odds with what McDonald had said.
McDonald wants her party to stay focused on housing… she sees anti-immigrant sentiment as tied to the soul-crushing struggle to secure an affordable home in a country where property prices and rents are among the highest in Europe. This market dysfunction reflects a Europe-leading population boom amid tight supply.
However, the Sinn Féin leader was attempting to demonstrate that anti-immigration sentiment was simultaneously unfair and understandable. An interview with The Business Post laid out her thinking: Irish nationalism was open and inclusive, but the housing crisis was real, and it was inevitable that some people might ascribe their problems to higher levels of immigration. This must not be a taboo subject but open to mature, responsible dialogue. “All of that anger about housing, I share that anger, but that’s on the government, not on new people coming into the state.”
This is a perfectly defensible intellectual position, but in the rough and tumble of politics it is dangerously elaborate. It has been made more difficult for McDonald by data which suggest that Sinn Féin’s core supporters are among the most sceptical about immigration, exacerbating the tension between the poles of progressivism and anti-immigration.
In fact McDonald has tacked to the right in an attempt to retain some of Sinn Féin support. When the European Union published a Migration and Asylum Pact in March in an attempt to coordinate and rationalise the EU’s approach to the issue of migrants, the Irish government indicated it would opt in but Sinn Féin opposed it, stating that most of its provisions were not in Ireland’s interests, while insisting on social media that it did not support open borders. Gradually it seemed to be working, and the party’s standing in the polls, which had been 26 per cent in March, climbed to 29 per cent in May. Perhaps Mary Lou McDonald could ride two horses at once.
Last weekend’s election results suggest any recovery is not total. While counting is still going on in Ireland, at a local level Sinn Féin looks to have been rather battered, making limited headway from a poor result in 2019 and only managing around 12 per cent of the vote. Their share in the European Parliament elections looks a little healthier, near 20 per cent, though three MEPs (so far) is hardly an enormous return. Interestingly, Michelle Gildernew, who did not contest the Westminster seat she had held from 2001 to 2015 and 2017 to 2024, looks like she has failed to be elected as an MEP. Meanwhile, the most recent polling for elections to the Dáil does show Sinn Féin the most popular party, but only winning 23 per cent of the vote, while Fine Gael is on 22 per cent and Fianna Fáil on 17 per cent.
A tripartite return of 23 per cent, 19 per cent and 12 per cent does not obviously indicate a party on the verge of a serious impressive result when the Irish general election comes. More than that, it could possibly see Sinn Féin win fewer seats in the 34th Dáil than it held in the 33rd. Certainly it gives little reason to think that it will be a dominant factor, and it would be back to relying on one of the mainstream parties for any possibility of a coalition government. This is potentially disastrous.
Immigration is clearly a major challenge for Sinn Féin. The sudden irruption of the issue into Irish politics has unexpectedly divided the party’s traditional electoral base, and while Mary Lou McDonald has struggled to find an authentic, consistent and presentable policy, it seems that some former Sinn Féin voters are finding more attractive champions both in other, smaller parties and among independents. In addition to seeming uncertain and confused on immigration, Sinn Féin can no longer benefit from its unerring focus on the housing crisis, which has been a major part of its rise. Housing and immigration play into each other, of course, but the party no longer has a straightforward, highly popular issue.
Another setback has come in the form of the governing coalition parties holding a reasonable degree of support. Although the taoiseach, Simon Harris, has only been in office since April, his elevation has given the government a young, fresh face (he is only 37) and taken some of the sting out of Sinn Féin’s demand for “change”. Moreover, for a government approaching the end of its fourth year, the coalition retains a combined support of over 40 per cent in the polls. Fine Gael won 20.9 per cent in 2020 and is currently trending at 22 per cent, Fianna Fáil won 22.2 per cent but has fallen to 17 per cent and the Green Party secured 7.1 per cent in 2020 and now runs at four per cent. Of course that equates overall to a lower level of support, but there has been no incumbent collapse.
It is also necessary to address the leader herself. Mary Lou McDonald inspires extreme emotions in many people. When she took on the party leadership in 2018, she succeeded Gerry Adams who had been in post for 35 years, easily longer than any other president in Sinn Féin’s history. He bequeathed to her, among other things, a deep-seated tradition that the leadership of the party was virtually beyond question or challenge, and yet, as The Irish Times reported recently, there are now voices being raised about McDonald’s position. Jennifer Bray reported that there are currently two schools of thought: one that would be content to replace McDonald with someone like Pearse Doherty, its finance spokesman and deputy leader in the Dáil, or Matt Carthy,, the youthful-looking, Birmingham-born agriculture spokesman; and another which does not think that McDonald, personally, is the party’s problem.
According to the second group, the party has suffered reverses because it had become too centralised and disconnected from its grassroots. John Hearne, an outspoken Sinn Féin councillor in Waterford, spoke bluntly to The Irish Times.
Armchair generals don’t win elections; soldiers do, not some guy in a back room. We need to get out of these back rooms, with officers’ boards meeting behind closed doors. We need to get back to hard work. We were trying to be all things to all people. People thought we were spoofing.
Nevertheless, some feel McDonald is part of the problem. Some of her media performances in the run-up to last weekend’s elections were flat and clumsy, and there is a low-key but persistent narrative that in her eagerness to appeal to the liberal middle class of Dublin (she represents Dublin Central), she has lost touch with the priorities of many working-class voters on whom Sinn Féin relies. This is, of course, a common trope in contemporary politics.
To return to the three fundamental questions I posed, then, it is clear that, yes, Sinn Féin has a problem in the Republic of Ireland, and it is a significant one. The aggregation of conventional wisdom is that it comprises an unpopular stance on immigration, a sense of the leadership’s detachment from the party’s grassroots and the personality and style of the leader herself. The solution you prefer will depend on which of those three factors you regard as most important. If McDonald is the major problem, that is relatively easy to fix by replacing her with another fluent media performer who can establish a rapport with the voters. More likely, however, the review which Sinn Féin has already promised will need to look both at the party’s internal structures and its considered response to ongoing concerns over the levels of immigration and integration.
Parties across Europe are struggling to find a popular and effective platform on immigration. It is Sinn Féin’s misfortunate that the issue has seemingly carved a deep fissure in its traditional support, forcing apart two separate impulses. How that can be resolved will be a key part of the party’s prospects not just at the forthcoming general election in Ireland, but over the next 10 years and more. Sinn Féin has risen quickly, but no party is guaranteed its position in the political firmament.
Sinn Féin secured 11% of the votes in the recent European elections in the Republic of Ireland (not 19.2%) and won 2 out of 14 seats. Dublin Central (the constituency which Mary Lou McDonald represents) is largely working class though parts of it are becoming gentrified. An important point you fail to make about her leadership is that she was not elected to the leadership by the party members or her Dáil parliamentary party, as would be the case with a normal parliamentary party. She was appointed to that role by the group of shadowy backroom figures in Belfast who really run Sinn Féin. (Michelle O'Neill was appointed Sinn Féin leader in Northern Ireland in the same way.) It is they who will decide when Mary Lou's time is up, not the voters, party members, or her parliamentary colleagues.