Reviewed by Michael O’Brien
The title promises significant insight into the inner workings of the Sinn Féin leadership, but the author, who served as a senior press advisor after the 2020 general election until the 2024 election, does not deliver it. That said, it serves as a useful historical reference for a party that saw itself, with some justification as the polls at the time attested, on a trajectory to government before a succession of setbacks from late 2023 onwards effectively halved its support from its opinion-poll heights.
Siobhán Fenton, a career journalist from the North, who did not traditionally support the party, was consciously hired by Sinn Féin as part of its strategy to solidify its appeal to what it saw as new white-collar and middle-class support which switched away from the traditional establishment parties to vote Sinn Féin in the 2020 elections. With its working-class voter base effectively banked, Sinn Féin’s strategy after the 2020 elections was to appear less like an insurgent protest party and more like a party preparing for government. Hence a focus on centrist, detailed, ‘costed’ policies and a further de-emphasis on campaigns and struggle. The strategy appeared to pay off as Sinn Féin surged from the 24% achieved in the 2020 general election to a consistent mid-30s in the opinion polls that, if replicated in the following general election, would have put them in the driving seat to lead a government.
A combination of wider political factors and missteps, eroding both working-class and middle-class support, is attributed to explaining the precipitous decline to 12% in the June 2024 local elections and 19% in the General election of the following November. The biggest factor was the rise in anti-migrant sentiment. Fenton accurately pinpoints the period of the lockdown as one where the far right successfully co-opted an audience which was in turn mobilised to harass migrants and protest against International Protection accommodation, but also saw Sinn Féin and the whole of the left as ‘traitors’ by dint of being anti racist. This phenomenon gained traction as the housing crisis worsened and especially after the Ukraine war.
While the radical left of Solidarity and People Before Profit, and to their credit the Social Democrats and Labour Party, did not bend to the rising tide of racism, Sinn Féin have proved to be extremely brittle and effectively moved to the right by supporting more restrictive migration policies.
However, this has only served to bolster the government then and since to lean further into anti-migrant policies and, rather than steadying Sinn Féin’s support among the working class, instead the beneficiaries have been, on the one hand, the Social Democrats and Labour, who have gained that layer of former Sinn Féín support alienated by their rightward move as well as the array of right-wing racist and transphobic forces, particularly Independent Ireland and Aontú and, to a lesser degree smaller far right groups, who had a minor breakthrough in the 2024 local elections.
Other factors in the timeline of Sinn Féin’s decline in support include Mary Lou McDonald’s reaction to the November 2023 riots (calling for the Garda Commissioner’s resignation) and her citing an objective for average house prices to be around €300,000, when in Dublin they averaged €450,000. Both are cited as having dented its support among middle-class Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael-leaning voters. On the later point, the problem here for Sinn Féin is that it did not have an answer to deal with the reality that if there is significant affordable public housing delivery that addresses the crisis, then, assuming we would still be operating in a capitalist context, prices of second-hand homes would inevitably fall, potentially leaving a cohort of working-class and middle-class home buyers in negative equity. This is mainly an issue if those homeowners get into difficulty and require protection from the banks. The mainstream media had a field day on this, and Sinn Féin, rather than providing a rounded-out anti-capitalist position on addressing the accommodation crisis in all its facets, instead backpedalled desperately.
In the March 2024 referendum on the constitutional references to women in the home and care in the family, Sinn Féin again showed itself to be rather flat-footed compared to Solidarity, for example, which took on board the arguments of the disabled community on the latter question and duly revised its position and called for a No vote on that proposition.
Surprisingly, the Gaza genocide gets no mention, and specifically Sinn Féin’s refusal at an early stage of the Palestine solidarity movement to back the call which arose organically among campaigners to expel the Israeli ambassador. In general, the book’s main emphasis is the loss of support from the working class and middle class to the right, and the author does not acknowledge the significant layer of left and progressive-minded people who have moved away from Sinn Féin, alienated by their move to the right not just on migration but also on other issues, including transgender rights, which also does not get a mention. Without taking these aspects into account, one could wrongly conclude that consistent left and anti-oppression politics cannot prevail.
