Martin’s tone on SF is softening just like it did after Election 2020 results

Irreverent. Irrepressible. In the corridors of power

TAOISEACH Micheál Martin, only five years ago, called Sinn Féin a ‘cult’. In September 2017, on Newstalk radio, he said, ‘Sinn Féin is autocratic. It is very one voice, one party. It is very cult-like and individuals in Sinn Féin don’t have the freedom to articulate as much as people in my party do’.

Even then, he admitted there were differences of opinion in his party on working with Sinn Féin, but he added, ‘The majority [of Fianna Fáil members] are very clear: we will not being going into government with Sinn Féin’.

He said it was only two years before then that the PSNI had said the IRA still controlled Sinn Féin.

‘It is a very controlling organisation. They are still very strong apologists for the IRA and the most heinous crimes of the IRA,’ he insisted.

This was just months before Mary Lou McDonald replaced Gerry Adams as president of Sinn Féin.

And it was while Mr Martin was acclimatising Fianna Fáil members to coalition with Fine Gael with a period of ‘coalition lite’, which was officially called ‘Confidence and Supply’.

Confidence and Supply was the tentative manifestation of his personal Damascene admission that Fianna Fáil could not enter government without cooperating with other large parties.

Mr Martin appears to have spent his entire leadership of Fianna Fáil in a state of crisis, but his intellectual star has guided the party for this last decade.

If he thinks it, he eventually articulates it and thus far it has happened.

As Fianna Fáil leader, he has successfully prepared, psychologically, the intractable elements of the party before leading them in the inevitable direction.

THE same psychological softening up process is being performed with Sinn Féin, right now. There are subtle, but deeply significant, shifts in the language one leader in particular uses about the populist opposition party.

In an interview the day after Fianna Fáil’s recent Ard Fheis, Mr Martin was again asked about a potential coalition with Sinn Féin.

He said Fianna Fáil’s ‘door is always open’ to working with parties whose policies align with their own. It’s policy first. In relation to

Sinn Féin, as far as I can see in the past two-and-a-half years, their policies don’t align with ours at all, particularly on the enterprise front. They’re anti-enterprise, as far as I can see, deep down,’ Mr Martin said on RTÉ Radio’s This Week programme.

It’s a long way from labelling Sinn Féin a ‘cult’ to the mild ‘anti-enterprise’ jibe.

Communism, which Sinn Féin has a strong lineage of, is of course, a secular cult – and this column has provided ample evidence of communist leanings of key Sinn Féin politicians, including how they themselves view their movement.

The leader of Fine Gael, outgoing Tánaiste/incoming Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has decided to tackle the opposition party on the economics.

The MoS revealed last weekend his two-page plan to ramp up his party’s attacks on ‘dishonest, hypocritical, reckless and populist’ policies.

But this kind of language is rapidly disappearing from the Fianna Fáil leader’s lexicon.

He now seems to want Sinn Féin to recognise that the campaign in the North was wrong, a long distance from saying the party is still controlled by the Provisional IRA.

Another surprising element is how little wringing of hands has accompanied this apparent volteface.

Such calm was not apparent in February 2020, after Fianna Fáil’s confidence-shattering election.

Some of us are still around from that which, after a crisis-filled 32 months, feels like a century ago.

I wrote the front page story for our sister newspaper the Irish Daily Mail of February 10, as the final election results sunk in.

In Cork, Mr Martin had been asked if he was expecting a call from Ms McDonald.

He replied ‘For me the country comes first’. Mr Martin said he would ‘respect the decision of the people’.

HE ADDED: ‘I’m a Democrat. I listened to the people I respect the decision of the people. That said, for any government to sustain, there has to be compatibility in terms of the programme for government.’

Only the week before Mr Martin had ruled out coalition with Sinn Féin on ‘moral’ grounds.

He tutted at reporters excitedly wanting immediate answers, cautioning, ‘Well, you know, I have a fair degree of experience of these situations’.

So the change – given the historic circumstances of the election – was certainly newsworthy, or so myself and my editor thought.

Because make no mistake, no matter what a politician says before an election, they will all have the option – should they wish – to use the votes cast at the election to reset the terms of engagement.

‘The people have spoken’ has always covered up a multitude of political sins for those adept in the grey art of pragmatism.

I have been around long enough – though not as long as An Taoiseach – to know that lesson well.

So I was interested to know what the troops thought of the change, and I made some calls. And then I made some more. I even spoke to people who were standing beside Mr Martin in the Cork count centre. Initially, the message was clear: ‘Let’s do business with Sinn Féin’.

But, particularly in Dublin, another message emerged from TDs over the next 24 hours.

It was, as is often the case, as the first message is absorbed, the polar opposite: ‘Let’s not do business with Sinn Féin’.

Members near the border and those with links to the Army and gardaí were vehemently opposed to the idea - which, in fairness to them, they had been told was amoral a mere week before.

It was then that I took an angry, and confrontational phone call from a normally mild-mannered adviser of Mr Martin – then still just Fianna Fáil leader. They were panicking at the party backlash – and blaming journalists.

Deep down, Mr Martin had a singular mission: to become Taoiseach. To avoid being the only FF leader not to reach the top gig. (We are only just over two years after that prospect was a very live one in Irish politics.)

So Mr Martin reverted to plan A, coalition with Fine Gael, with the familiar patsies, the Greens, tacked on.

Now as the coalition prepares an unprecedented pivot on its axis, the time for softening ground has returned.

When I began covering politics, Micheál Martin was the cool, clean hero in contrast to the roguish Bertie Ahern.

Charles Haughey famously said of Bertie, ‘He’s the man. He’s the best, the most skilful, the most devious, and the most cunning of them all’. (These were words of praise!)

It appears Mr Martin wants the electorate to put his party in coalition with either left-wing populist (borderline communist) Sinn Féin or right-wing (borderline Tory) Fine Gael.

If he pulls that off, well then the Haughey accolade will have to be reassigned.