Sinn Féin now faces a GOLDILOCKS DILEMMA
For a finicky electorate, some of the party’s views are too hot and others are too cold, and it’s finding it hard to get things just right
AS THE year of major polls begins, the Sinn Féin election dilemma is a lot like the children’s story about the adventures of Goldilocks.
For many, Sinn Féin would make an unlikely Goldilocks – and certainly our Government parties would see Sinn Féin as being more like the three bears.
But the bears have had a bad press, for it is actually Goldilocks whose actions are dodgy.
Apart from breaking and entering, she is the thief who steals Baby Bear’s porridge, but only after complaining that Daddy Bear’s was too hot and Mummy Bear’s was too cold (as well as excessively sweet).
After scoffing Baby Bear’s porridge, Goldilocks has a similar experience with the chairs, and the beds, before the bears return.
Sinn Féin now finds itself in a similar space to Goldilocks, as it tries to find which position – on issues as varied as the economy, climate change and immigration – will be most palatable to the ever-finicky voters.
When it comes to our centrist electorate, who like their politics bland, Sinn Féin is finding that getting the balance between too hot and too cold is none too easy.
The party, much to its unease, is also coming under far more scrutiny over its struggles to find the most voter-friendly political brand. But this scrutiny should not come as such a shock.
A certain airiness about what you stand for is all well and good for the first four years of a Dáil term, or when you are a small, Labour-sized party of 22 aiming for mere survival.
BUT policy tends to come under much closer scrutiny, especially by the electorate, when the pedal hits the metal in year five and you are the largest party, aiming to lead the next government.
In fairness, Sinn Féin is not unique in its embrace of the James Hacker – ‘these are my people, I am their leader, I must follow them’ – theory of leadership.
Fianna Fáilers especially were past masters of hiding in full view as they raced with the hare and hunted with the hounds.
Fine Gael, by contrast, was generally a little (but not a lot) too honest for its own good.
The problem for Shinners as they dally, legs akimbo, on top of the barbed wire fence of public opinion, moving neither to the left nor right but sometimes in both directions, is that if you keep on standing for everything, our suspicious voters will start to think you believe in nothing.
This is not the worst of outcomes for a government, given that the fewer changes you make, the happier the voters tend to be. But if you are seeking power with a ‘change’ agenda, and building ‘trust’ with a disillusioned electorate, it is a politically toxic stance.
The problem for Sinn Féin is that the party’s U-turns are many – and growing.
The issues on which Sinn Féin has blown hot and cold include the sacking of top civil servants, where the party blew quite hot on a policy that, curiously enough, was popular among middleranking civil servants, before turning cold after the first breath of criticism.
The party has also dithered between extremes on the delicate subject of law and order.
For years it blew hot on the abolition of the Special Criminal Court, before turning cold to the extent that it now supports the court as long as Ordinary Decent Terrorists are not charged.
The party has also taken very different stances when it comes to the State finances. It may have been hot for revolution once, but the Che Guevara posters have been in the bin for some time. Instead, our former Marxists are beating a path up to the golden gates of IBEC and ‘wooing’ US multinationals with pledges that ‘no boats will be rocked’, even before the election results are in.
Sinn Féin used to be singled out as rare in the Irish political landscape in having one core value, that being Irish unity of course.
However, with its increasingly equivocal position on a border poll, this core value has been replaced by a new one, that of power in the South as well as the North… of course as a stepping stone to unity. Now, where did we hear that phrase before?
Much to the distaste of the Greens, Sinn Féin has also blown hot and cold on climate change. In a stance that would embarrass even Charlie Haughey, it is both in favour of lower carbon taxes and against carbon emissions.
But the biggest difficulty for the party is what to do on immigration and this is where the party is looking increasingly surrounded on the political battlefield.
The sense is growing that the ‘Ireland is full’ vote, which would usually be a definite Sinn Féin prospect, is turning elsewhere.
Rural Independents especially are believed to be gobbling up the Sinn Féin vote, and while that will not cost Sinn Féin seats, it will stymie political gains. Sinn Féin knows that, rather like its increasingly calibrated position on the Special Criminal Court, it will have to abandon that vote.
Ironically, as the ‘great strategists’ of Sinn Féin struggle amid strategic uncertainty, its Coalition rivals are in the opposite state.
Voters know the sort of political porridge that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will serve up (bland and sugar-free) and if the Greens become too gritty for their taste, the Social Democrats can always replace them.
Fine Gael has consolidated its status as the ‘bland’ party to the extent that Leo Varadkar has even lost his 30% tax package, while Fianna Fáil has traded for decades on being the party of the centre.
The Sinn Féin hunter has suddenly has become the hunted. It will certainly gain seats in the next election but there is a world of difference between winning 55 seats, which means opposition, and 65 seats, which will secure the prize of government.
THE problem for Sinn Féin is two-headed. If it adopts too many positions where it is hot one week and cold another, it is vulnerable to comparisons with Groucho Marx who, while playing a politician, once said: ‘These are my principles and if you don’t like them, well, I have others.’
That will not build the trust with voters that is needed to win elections, and Sinn Féin has a deficit on the trust front, to put it mildly.
Finding out what the voters want and serving it up to them will not be easy though, for the voters are in a capricious mood even by SF standards.
Last year, they lulled Sinn Féin into the belief that it was on the threshold of an overall majority, and then despatched it back towards the low 50s in seat numbers by late autumn. A mere 20 extra seats would be scant consolation for a party that has been in opposition for 27 long years.
In that regard, Sinn Féin would be wise to remember that people who follow herds often end up falling off cliffs.
And as it tries to avoid the extremes of being too hot or too cold, the party – much to the delight of its increasingly complacent opponents – is running out of time.
If it’s not careful, it could suffer the biblical-style fate of being spat out because it is neither hot nor cold but merely lukewarm.
The Goldilocks fairytale ends with the central character, after she is rumbled, waking up, leaping out of the bed and taking off through an open window, never to be seen again.
Undoubtedly the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil Daddy Bear and Mummy Bear – and the Green Baby Bear – would like to see a similar denouement in election 2024. One suspects though that the Sinn Féin Goldilocks will show more durability than that.
And before FF and FG become too complacent, they would do well to remember that a Sinn Féin party that appeared to be in even worse trouble in 2020, after being too cold and too hot for the voters in 2019, got its strategy ‘just right’ in election 2020.