The challenge for Sinn Fein may not be so much in winning the race as in collecting the prize. This matters, as the government is abruptly shunted into the second half of its term of office. The rotation of the office of taoiseach from Fianna Fail to Fine Gael is still likely to happen in December, but the second half of this government’s term effectively began on February 24 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Meanwhile, a return any time soon to a semblance of budgetary normalcy seems to be off the cards.
Minsters will return from around the globe this week to face a changed world they haven’t planned for. Neither, however, has Sinn Fein. The largesse it demands is based on the premise that no splurge of borrowed money by government is enough. Sinn Fein offers the promise that, once in government itself, the party will exceed what is planned on housing, health and more. But the sums no longer add up for its plans. The cheap money it would have borrowed will be long gone before the next general election. Both the government and opposition are gambling on our future with funny money.
The dangers for Sinn Fein are multiple. Fiscal credibility, one would have thought, is essential for electoral success. But any reckoning with harsh reality by Sinn Fein before the next election would unsettle the voter coalition it has assembled. There is now an ingrained belief that government has the capacity to remedy all need, and is to blame for any want. Sinn Fein supporters, about a third of the electorate, are angry and want change. They are in no mood to be told that their expectations can’t be delivered on. This leaves their party in a bind. The facts have changed, but it dare not change its positions accordingly.
The world has changed in other ways, too. Sinn Fein has a bandwagon of fraternal revolutionary allies globally. Its affinity to Russia, now ditched, was based on sharing common enemies in the West and some of the same friends in the global south, including Cuba and Venezuela. These are now being quietly abandoned, along with the “armed struggle”, long since recognised as futile.
Sinn Fein in government, should it get there, must lead on Ireland’s place in the world. Our friends in Europe, especially eastern Europe, who supported us on Brexit will expect our solidarity against a deadly common enemy. A blanket “no” to any deepening of shared defence, even stopping well short of joining Nato, won’t work for Ireland politically, but any move on is perilous for Sinn Fein within its own base. On Northern Ireland its proposed border poll is unwinnable in the foreseeable future and increasingly looks like a variant of the ethno-nationalism playing out on the eastern frontiers of the Continent.
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The economy, climate and the future of the EU are now the main issues. Eamon Ryan, the Green Party leader, has refused to be distracted from what he wants, but the legally binding targets he has helped to put in place to combat climate change are ones we will struggle to meet, while we have not yet started to do what is required to deliver on them.
The issue now is not that Sinn Fein is controlled by the IRA, but that it wants to be a version of Fianna Fail, a party that had almost equal strands of support across all sections of society for three generations. But the cultural context for a nationalist party embodying the “spirit of the nation” is over. Sinn Fein’s coalition of supporters is impressive but shallow. They are signing up for a radicalism that is either illusionary or unlikely to be delivered on.
Should Sinn Fein ”win” the election by being the largest party in terms not just of votes but of seats, where will its allies come from? There is no viable coalition on its left. Slightly to its right, in the centre where it nests now, are Fianna Fail and the Greens. On climate generally and carbon tax specifically, it is at war with the Greens. Perhaps Fianna Fail will be malleable.
Potentially, though, a nightmare scenario looms even if Sinn Fein were to be successful at the next general election. The three current government parties got 50.25 per cent of the vote in the last election. The aggregate of the poll numbers for Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and the Greens now is still about 45 per cent, according to a calculation on the Ireland Elects website. That means that more seats for Sinn Fein, but the survival of the existing three-party government, are not mutually exclusive scenarios.
