Willie Kealy: Cult of Adams not going away, you know

SINN Féin has moved from being a party of protest to a party of government, according to Gerry Adams. But it isn’t true. It is just more of the myth-making the perpetual Sinn Féin leader has been employing for decades now to try to make us forget the murky past and believe his version of the present.

It was only briefly a party of protest after it found that Paul Murphy and other hard-left candidates North and south were eating into its electoral lunch. Now that the wave of discontent that allowed smaller parties and some individuals to prosper is waning, Sinn Féin feels safe casting aside the protest mantle and posing as a potential government partner. But for most of its existence, Sinn Féin was a fig leaf, a flag of convenience for a terrorist organisation. And behind the scenes, the anonymous godfathers of violence still demand respect from their political front men and women. But in the political arena, they want to see progress too for “the movement”.

To that end, Sinn Féin has now discarded the insistence that the party will only go into government as the senior partner in any arrangement.

Neither Fine Gael nor Fianna Fáil wants Sinn Féin, but Mr Adams and his colleagues are cynically confident that once the results of the next election are in, pragmatism will replace principle. For years now, Sinn Féin politicians have argued if they can bring themselves to share power with the DUP in the North, the main constitutional parties in the Republic should be at least as magnanimous towards Sinn Féin. But now they cannot even use that argument, having effectively boycotted the Northern Executive for the past eight months.

The excuse for holding up the Executive is the lack of an Irish Language Act, something Sinn Féin insists was guaranteed in the St Andrews Agreement. It wasn’t, but anyway, the DUP leader, Arlene Foster, has offered to get moving on this within the Executive with the proviso that if she is not as good as her word within an agreed time, the Executive will collapse. That was welcomed by Foreign Minister Simon Coveney but abruptly rejected by Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Féin’s leader in the North.

It’s all part of the 10-year plan, as is the decision of Mr Adams to contest the leadership of his party again in November at the Ard Fheis. He will be re-elected, almost certainly unopposed as he has been for the past 33 years. Then he intends to lead the party into the next general election, in the hope that Sinn Féin will end up in government for a term that could last anything up to five years.

Try squaring that with his promise to make clear in November what “his own future intentions” are (he promised something similar a year ago) and to set out “the process of generational change” within the party. Some party high-flyers seem to be comforting themselves with the idea that there might be another Ard Fheis in the spring and maybe Mr Adams (below) would go then. But he says he wants to lead the party into the next election. And for more than three decades now, what this cult leader wants, this cult leader gets. Very few voices have been raised against the autocratic nature of how Sinn Féin does its business. What dissent there has been has come from young, educated and articulate party councillors – just the kind to fit the myth of

the modern Sinn Féin.

Ten of them have made surprisingly similar claims that they have been bullied out of the party because they would not bow to a demand for blind obedience.

Inconveniently, just as Sinn Féin was having its think-in before the new Dáil term, Lisa Marie Sheehy, a 23-year-old Limerick councillor, resigned because of what she called harassment and “toxic” bullying within the party. She got some support from a fellow Limerick female councillor Ciara McMahon, who said: “The party has said there is no issue with bullying. But there is an issue.” Councillor Seamie Morris in Tipperary, who was expelled from the party for “uncomradely behaviour”, said this week he too was bullied.

They join the ranks of several others with the same story to tell, the most high profile of whom has been former Cork East TD Sandra McLellan. She refused to go forward at the last election after claiming she was bullied and received support from some of her local party councillors and other activists.

There was no such empathy with those who say they have been bullied from Gerry Adams or any of the other prominent party people. Mr Adams declared flatly: “There is no culture of bullying within Sinn Féin.”

But all political careers end in failure and if Mr Adams insists on clinging to power for the foreseeable future, it may become too much even for the most loyal of apparatchiks.