SF must get rid of its old ways before coalition

FOR all the fact Sinn Féin has made a decent fist, optically at least, of positioning itself as a mature player in Oireachtas democracy, there is at its heart still an essential immaturity when it comes to the sort of compromises necessary to achieve any real power in a coalition government.

Indeed, there are those within the party who say it is running a two-tier system, flirting with both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to boost its profile, while at the same time pursuing a longer-term strategy of becoming the majority party in the country and governing in its own right.

In the meantime, it continues with the politics of obstruction and dissent, disagreeing with every policy put forward by the Government while seldom tying down any specifics on how it would do things differently. When it offers vague economic plans to save the country, the consensus among economists is that these policies instead would cripple us, and pander to the cohort that believes absolutely everything should be free.

As one of the leading lights in the successful campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment, party leader Mary Lou McDonald firmly established herself as a metropolitan social liberal, but that image is at odds with the beliefs of much of the grassroots. Sinn Féin’s problem is that Irish unity is its single most inviolable policy, and those who are attracted to that ideal nonetheless have very different views on other topics. There is a fundamental gap between the doctrinaire, old-school Sinn Féiners cut from Marxist Republican cloth, and younger recent members who see it as a more European, socially liberal party that, nonetheless, accepts it must work within a capitalist framework.

The dichotomy between the old and the new is the biggest challenge facing Ms McDonald as the party holds its árd-fheis in Belfast this weekend, and the dilution by the árd-comhairle of a motion committing the party to the establishment of a left-wing coalition felt like an appeasement of some of its newer, more middle class supporters. Part of the old culture, maintained with an iron fist by Gerry Adams, was a cultish intolerance of dissent, and that led to multiple bullying cases in cumainn across the country. That is the ugly face of the party, not the one Mary Lou McDonald wants to present to the country, and it too must be eradicated for once and for all.

Unless she manages that, there are many who still will see the party, no matter how softened its image, as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and it is a stretch to see how these voters could countenance the idea of any coalition formed with Sinn Féin in its current state.