Sinn Féin’s plunge in the polls is down to these five things. Are you reading this Mary Lou?

ALEFT TD came to my office in Leinster House for a coffee. The TD looked around the high-ceilinged room and became furtive, nervous even, asking: ‘Is this your world view on display here?’

We looked at a World War II propaganda poster of Winston Churchill, pointing down at us, saying ‘Deserve Victory’. Then our eyes turned to my vintage John Wayne movie posters. The TD’s visual scan finished, of course, on my framed photograph of Pope Francis, purchased in Knock. I answered, ‘yes’, though I hadn’t considered my bric-a-brac deeply before. When the TD left, it hit me: I had subconsciously created a latent critique of communism.

Churchill, a lifelong anti-communist, condemned the Bolshevist experiment as ‘foul baboonery’ and ‘barbarism’ as early as 1919.

He conceded that he had tried to ‘strangle Bolshevism in the cradle’, by sending troops to fight against the Reds in the Russian Civil War. It was he who first warned, in February 1946, that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’.

And The Duke? He criticized the classic 1960 Kirk Douglas movie Spartacus as ‘Marxist propaganda’. This was after The Duke had been informed by the FBI that Josef Stalin had issued assassination orders against him. Pope Francis has, himself been accused of being a socialist, but he is, like me, a good Jesuit boy, and that advocacy of equality is part of that deal. The Throne of St Peter is, however, eternal and hates true atheistic communism, to such a degree that Pope John Paul II was central to the drawing back of that Iron Curtain.

SINN Féin makes up the largest party of the left in Dáil Eireann and from its inception in 1969 the party has proudly proclaimed its socialist credentials. Yet they’re not socialist, they’re populist and these are very different concepts. Socialism, is in many ways an admirable creed, drawing substantially on the principles of Christianity. Yet when communism has been imposed in nation states from Russia, to China, to Venezuala, it has failed because it spurns human desires for competition and self-improvement. As such, it invariably has to be imposed by force. Populism on the other hand, is working everywhere. From a resurgent Donald Trump to Narendra Modi in India to Argentina’s Javier Milei, populists are winning elections and are set to win more in this great year of democratic contest.

As such populism seemed to be working for Sinn Féin. It won the largest vote the last General Election here, in 2020, (24.5%), ahead of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. And after they formed a coalition to keep Sinn Féin out, the party then attracted between 32% and 37% in opinion polls for three and a half years – an undeniable trend.

But more recently, it appears to be going spectacularly wrong. In the latest MRBI poll, Sinn Féin are down to 23%, neck and neck with ideological opponents Fine Gael and only 3% above an improving Fianna Fáil.

So where did it go wrong? There are as I see it, five key things that has seen support chipped away slowly, then all at once.

1. THE HEARTLAND:

Ronald Reagan, explaining why he continued to attend small conservative gettogethers long after he became President said, ‘you gotta, to dance with the one who brung ya’. You have to look after your heartland, your earliest and most loyal supporters. It is only eight years ago – in the 2016 election – Gerry Adams’ Sinn Féin took just 9.9% of the national vote. Many of this core weren’t deeply left wing at all. They were mostly republican, anti-Europe, anti-establishmentarians from lower socio economic groups. As the less well off in society they were more likely to be competing with our then still low numbers of immigrants for employment, housing and social assistance. Now, in the wake of the anti-immigrant crisis that exploded into the national consciousness with the Dublin riots last November, Sinn Féin are no longer radical enough for the ones who ‘brung’ them. Sinn Féin have become part of the establishment.

2. THE CONFLICT:

Many of Sinn Féin’s most powerful members were involved in the IRA’s armed conflict in the North and bombing campaigns in Britain. Just as Western leftists and liberals turned from the unsavoury brutality of Stalin’s regime, virtue signallers and middle class bar-room socialists were willing to forget about the IRA, while voting for a party they doubted could take power. The trial of Gerry Hutch – with its star witness, IRA man Jonathan Dowdall – reminded many middle class voters, who fear anarchy more than anything, of the party’s past. A Sinn Féin decision to table a motion of no confidence in Helen McEntee in the wake of Dublin Riots was calamitously misjudged. The debate became about Sinn Féin’s long established connections to criminality and terrorism. I recall a senior Cabinet minister telling me that it comes to a choice between rioting, racist thugs and the forces of law and order in Ireland there is no choice for the vast majority. The plunge in the polls truly set in at this point.

3. IRA VETERANS FOR EQUALITY:

The no confidence stunt backfired in another way. After the motion I spoke to a veteran IRA man who belatedly became involved in political activism. He told me: ‘I didn’t sacrifice most of my life to fighting – and going to prison – for the equality of people in Northern Ireland to be seen to be siding with a bunch of racists. It was, he said, a ‘foolish mistake that was regarded as a betrayal by the IRA’.

4. ATTRITION:

Sinn Féin has been at the top of the polls for four years now, promising to change Ireland and rectify the housing crisis. Like many senior members of the Coalition itself, Sinn Féin didn’t think the arrangement was going to last very long, and now, it has a chance of going the full term. It’s a long time to lead the race and the public are tiring of seeing and hearing Mary Lou McDonald without any tangible achievements. It usually takes a term in power for that fatigue to set in, but in this fast moving world, Sinn Féin have achieved that without ever being in government.

5. REDUCING HOUSE PRICES:

Mary Lou MacDonald told an Irish Times podcast in Christmas week that she thought the average Dublin house price should fall ‘to the €300,000 mark’ from its current €430,000. This statement will be the most politically damaging mistake Sinn Féin has made. Irish society – well the section a party needs to attract to be elected to power here – does not want to see their greatest asset, their descendants’ inheritance, plunge in value. There has been no indication how this would work or how the banks would react to ‘their’ mortgaged assets being forced into negative equity. How would you move house? It’s as crazy as their other major housing strategy, which assumes that they majority of aspiring working people would want to live in a local authority home. Communism isn’t actually popular.

These errors and fluctuations in support have come just in time for the first electoral outing since 2020, the local and European elections. Sinn Féin polled only 9.48% in the 2019 locals and a disastrous 11.7% in the Europeans. So they will have gains. But if they don’t make the gains they expect, questions will begin to be asked about candidate selection – and whether they are running too many candidates for the forthcoming General Election (certain within 10 months). In 2020, they ran too few. As such Mary Lou McDonald would do well to consider these reasons behind her party’s decline. Sinn Féin may have to temper their expectations, but they can still enter an historic coalition. But the path ahead seems much less certain than this time last year.