Sinn Féin’s slide has a whiff of the Gilmore Gale
IT MIGHT well have been all joy and light in Stormont at the weekend but the worm in the Sinn Féin rose was another Sunday poll that revealed another slide.
Admittedly, the latest Ireland Thinks poll shows only a 1% fall but the trend continues to be downwards, and Sinn Féin, at 29%, is – for the second poll in a row – below the psychologically and politically critical 30% mark.
By contrast, the Independents’ tide, at 18%, is rising and the Civil War party-alternative of Fianna Fáil, at 17%, and Fine Gael at 19% (down 1%) is holding.
The latest result can only accentuate the concern in Sinn Féin that the old Marxist diktat about history repeating itself may be proved true yet again. But while you can ignore a drop of 11% in a year in public, privately there will have been some night-time shivers in a party which, since the Dublin riots, has not – until last week – enjoyed a good week in politics.
If there is a history-repeating precedent haunting Sinn Féin, it is the short, sad and ultimately hilarious drama of the ‘Gilmore Gale’.
The gale began back in 2010, when, for a brief period, FG’s dedication to internal feuding and coups d’état, and Fianna Fáil’s destruction of the economy, meant that Labour began to trend ahead of both big parties in the polls.
Sadly, no sooner had Labour taken pole position than weaknesses became evident.
Such was the excitement that Labour figures began to dream of a Labour taoiseach, as then leader Eamon Gilmore (remember? Thought not) was cast in the role of a Sir Lancelot poised to slay the dragon of austerity.
EVEN as Labour printed the ‘Gilmore For Taoiseach’ posters – the canny Joan Burton stored hers in the garden shed – the scrutiny front-runners must endure meant he started to seem more like a Sir Talks A Lot.
A vicious but entertaining cycle began where the more Mr Gilmore fell in the polls, the more he talked, and the more he talked, the more he fell. The nadir was perhaps during the 2011 general election campaign when he declared that the might of Labour would take on the IMF, the banks and the world and renegotiate the recent EU-IMF deal brought in under the Fianna Fáil-Green Party coalition.
The choice was ‘Frankfurt’s way or Labour’s way’, he said.
The voters chose Enda Kenny and Michael Noonan, and while Labour won a record 37 seats (in contrast, Fianna Fáil won 20) the ongoing trend was downwards.
In government, Mr Gilmore became the coalition’s invisible Tánaiste, and the World Bank and the IMF were left well alone. In an eerily similar manner to the more recent ditching of former
Labour leader Alan Kelly, the flailing Gilmore was despatched by a combination of eight backbench Labour TDs including Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, Ged Nash and the now Independent TD Michael McNamara, after just three years in government.
In fairness to the rebels, the putsch of the hipster wing occurred in 2014, after a set of elections when Labour failed to return any MEPs, lost 80 council seats, and was routed in two by-elections.
Nothing could save the party from falling to seven seats in 2016. And ironically, given the present circumstances, after the blownout Gilmore Gale, Sinn Féin feasted on the Labour carcass.
Sinn Féin’s dilemma does not precisely compare to Labour’s.
Even after the worst of elections, the party can expect to gain up to 100 local authority seats and three MEP seats in the summer elections. However, the replacement of the ‘Sinn Féin surge’ trope with a ‘Sinn Féin slide’ one puts the party at the top of a dangerously slippery political snake.
But Mary Lou McDonald is a far more ferocious politician than the grandiloquent Mr Gilmore and she has the respect of voters.
Voters know that Ms McDonald is a boss while the centrally controlled Sinn Féin New Model Political Army are a very different creature to Labour’s comic opera.
There are also similarities. One factor that helped to end the Gilmore Gale was that the party found itself fighting on too many fronts as it attempted to deal with a faintly resurgent Fianna Fáil and an avaricious Sinn Féin. It didn’t find Enda Kenny to be an accommodating partner either. Sinn Féin too is surrounded by enemies. The complex politics of immigration are biting the Sinn Féin rear both in the city and the country, courtesy especially of the Rural Independents.
The immigration debate has stiffened the genuinely leftish Labour and Social Democrats. Though they’re now at 9% for the present (Social Democrats 5%, Labour 4%), if the progressive leftwing vote should swing to those parties to edge the total beyond 10%, far from being picked off by Sinn Féin, Labour and the Social Democrats will be picking governments. And they might not pick Sinn Féin.
Come the election, the Government, and Fine Gael especially, is expected to turn the screw on Sinn Féin’s, let us say, ‘legacy’ issues.
BUT there is a growing sense that the voters have discounted all of this. Instead, Sinn Féin is experiencing a far more fundamental crisis of credibility.
There is a sense among the electorate that, like Mr Gilmore, Sinn Féin talks too much about the failings of others and too little about what it might do itself.
There is also a suspicion that when Sinn Féiners talk about their future plans, they talk too big. And there is a belief that promises about delivering a housing market in which homes cost under €300,000 are as credible as Mr Gilmore’s promise to take on Frankfurt.
The voters are equally sceptical about the sort of Sinn Féin economics in which proposed tax increases will apply to everyone else. The people view all taxes with great suspicion and they know that taxes that start with millionaires have a habit of trickling down to the working classes.
Sinn Féin is entitled to bask in the sunlight of Stormont – well, for a week at least – but the reality is that, for the Republic, the North is another country.
And here the party is struggling to articulate a credible stance on bread-and-butter issues such as law and order.
If, like Sinn Féin, you are trading on the fairy dust of change, the current crisis of credibility is lethal. Sinn Féin should look back in angst at the Gilmore Gale fable, and history, as we noted earlier, repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce. Labour’s experience veered towards the farcical, but it is hard to know in what category a Sinn Féin ‘slide’ would fall.
A party that was looking singleparty government in the eye a year ago would, even if it ends up slipping into government as a mere equal partner of Micheál Martin and Fianna Fáil, certainly view it as tragedy.