Campaign Gist: SF's Duality, Galway's volatility

Two thoughts arise from today's events and occurrences and both are on the situation Sinn Féin find themselves in. Let's take a look.

Black Boxes passing in the night

It is very difficult for me to write about Sinn Féin as an institution or a party. Unlike every other party, I have almost no insight into how it works or why it does what it does at a leadership and elected member level.

But one thing that has become clear over the last year is that SF's leadership is similarly mystified by what motivates its supporters. Voters and party have simply stared at each other for the last 12 months, in mutual incomprehension.

The key event in this simultaneous bafflement was the riot in Dublin. It was one of the most effective political violence events staged in the city since the 1916 rising, triggering a sudden and wrenching lurch by mainstream parties to mollify anti-immigrant sentiment by becoming instantly more anti-immigrant.

This wasn't solely the response from Sinn Féin. Fine Gael immediately reacted by swinging their political rhetoric so far right, so fast, it ended up in a ditch, wheels spinning. The State's policing response was so flabby as to be an invitation for further, conveniently local neighbourhood riots such as happened in Coolock.

The scale of its impact didn't go unnoticed in the UK where the far-right instigators of the riots in August clearly modelled them on the Irish one, down to adopting disinformation on children being stabbed by an immigrant. The effect fell flat when the UK police, courts and newly-elected-by-a-landside government just came down on the rioters like an anvil chorus. The UK police, more used to dealing with hooliganism and riots, were positively eager to hit people with sticks while the newly elected government felt no need to pander.

But, relevant to today's campaign launch of their immigration policy, the riot -and their subsequent reaction to it- marked the moment that Sinn Féin's polling went from slow drift down to sudden and sustained plummet from the top. On the 21st November 2023, SF were topping the opinion polls with an average of 30.6% support. By the 13th November 2024 (yesterday) that sat at 18.9%. In between those two dates, the ostensibly left-wing party has frantically been signalling they could be hostile to foreigners too.

Today, they even suggested they might look at making EU/EEA and Swiss citizens put their name in a register in order to keep a file on their movements.

"I think it makes sense if you’re establishing an immigration management agency, data drives policy, it’s important from that, that the information is there that you understand the flows of people in and out of the country.

“But it is relatively common across Europe and it is worth exploring, particularly in the context particularly of, we have adequate data to properly manage migration."
- Sinn Féin vows to ‘explore’ new registration requirements for EU citizens

This ignores that the countries across Europe who require registration do this because they require their own citizens to also register their addresses. In addition, it is specifically forbidden to require registration of 'flows of people in and out of the country' if those people are EU citizens who are in the country for up to three months. (You can stay in another EU country for up to 3 months without registering)

Any attempt to bring in automatic registration of 'flows of people in and out of the country', but only for non-Irish EU citizens, would instantly breach EU law, and for reasons so incomprehensible even the spokesman couldn't do more than suggest it might be nice to have some files and we could see what we'd do with it afterwards.

All of which is to say that Sinn Féin have spent a year studiously broadcasting to their community and left-wing voters that they are simply not trustworthy when it comes to sticking to their principles.

Misunderstanding your Voters

For decades, Sinn Féin's voters in the Republic of Ireland were made of two factions. One was attracted to the party by its association with physical violence and death. It was exciting to be able to break taboos and have a justification to advocate for atrocity. This was a minority, but held disproportionate power and voice before the Good Friday Agreement.

Their other, larger, bloc and the source of the party's slow rise to lead the opposition was built on their diligent support work in communities that felt, frequently correctly, ignored or abandoned by the other main parties.

We could term these the 'Up the Ra' and the 'How's yer Ma?' factions.

With the days of physical force left behind by the SF leadership, the impulses that created the Up the Ra support have moved on to radical right groups, who offer the same thrills of violence and taboo breaking without all the annoying helping the needy.

But instead of letting that minority go, SF's leadership has panicked and, in trying to win them back, has cost themselves the trust loaned by voters who really did care How their Ma was and wanted a left-wing party who would look after her.

In the end, barring a major upset, the party's year misunderstanding voters will likely cost them their chance of entering government.

That's Numberwang!

TG4 released a poll on the Galway West constituency. It revealed that running two FF candidates against a recently quit FF candidate (now Independent Ireland) was not the best method of converting any of those candidates into a FF TD. But behind that headline, it showed that the only sitting candidate to lose more support than the margin of error was SF's.