One theory about the political logic behind the citizenship referendum is that it was an attempt to spancel Sinn Féin, writes John Waters
The logic is that Sinn Féin, having a liberal agenda but an allegedly reactionary support base, would become discomfited by having to either dilute its multicultural principles or risk antagonising its traditional supporters.
The ploy seems to have backfired. Sinn Féin did not shrink from opposing the amendment, at least in the early stages of the campaign, and still prospered at the polls. As far as can be inferred from the results, it appears that the party's support base came out to vote Yes to both Sinn Féin and the amendment. What may have been overlooked is that traditional Sinn Féin supporters are accustomed to the party leadership speaking with forked tongues, and may have taken the party line on the amendment with a pinch of salt.
This ability among its supporters to comprehend the doublespeak of realpolitik may yet become the Shinners' most powerful weapon. There has been much talk all week about whether the party is poised to enter coalition with Fianna Fáil or move into the space once occupied by Labour as the party of alternative sentiment. But its potential may be of a more mainstream complexion.
Sinn Féin may be within reach of achieving something neither Labour nor the Progressive Democrats have done: emulating Mary Robinson's achievement in the 1990 presidential election.
After that extraordinary victory, one of Robinson's key strategists described the campaign strategy as being like a train comprising many different carriages, each containing a different sector of the electorate. The trick was to avoid letting the occupants of any particular carriage become over-conscious of who was in the others. Robinson reached out to traditional Ireland, feminist Ireland, Dublin 4, the young, the old, the reactionary, the gay, the left and the left-behind. Each group felt a special bond with her, not because of what she said, but what she suggested.
Sinn Féin has mastered the same trick. To begin with, the Shinners had on board the hardcore of nationalist sentiment and the disenfranchised of the inner cities. In these elections they expanded that base, reaching out to the young across a broad spectrum and to those who have become disillusioned with other brands of leftism or other shades of green.
Far from being the dogmatic entity of conventional belief, Sinn Féin has long been a blank page awaiting a manifesto. There is a discussion to be had about the fact that the party now known as "Sinn Féin" has only a tenuous connection with the tradition of Irish republicanism running back through 1916 and beyond. The case could be made that the roots of the present party are in what was essentially a local turf war, based largely in Belfast, for which the rhetoric and emblems of Irish nationalism were appropriated as an iconography of convenience.
Whatever about that, Provisional Sinn Féin was until relatively recently an army in search of any idea bigger than "Brits Out". Until the hunger strikes in the early 1980s, it was a deeply conservative party, having - partly in reaction to the socialism of the "Stickies" - co-opted a version of Catholic conservatism then wedded to Irish nationalism as though by a force of nature. Then, in the 1980s, when republican men were in the H-Blocks studying Frantz Fanon, the women were on the outside reading Germaine Greer. By the time the foot soldiers emerged into the light, their movement had metamorphosed into something, guns aside, pretty indistinguishable from liberal-left-wing parties everywhere. And yet, somehow, as Irish nationalism's franchise-holder, the party retained its more traditional support-base on what seemed an unconditional basis.
This gives the party an enormous advantage in the short term at least. One of the lessons of Robinson's election, which no political party has properly exploited, is that, when you have no record of responsibility in power, you can unite a range of isms and disgruntlements, be they ever so mutually contradictory, under a common banner.
No party followed through on Robinson's success, because each was in some way compromised by a history in power. Sinn Féin has no such compromising aspect. It has, of course, other compromising elements in its history, but these may operate to its advantage. I was interested to hear Gerry Adams, in his RDS speech following the election of Mary Lou McDonald, refer, unusually for recent times, to the urgency of removing British forces of occupation from Irish soil.
One school of thought holds that this was aimed at the "hard men", who would have been looking askance at Mary Lou. My hunch is that he was speaking to a new kind of voter, who, now that the shooting has stopped and there is no longer a moral stake necessitated in supporting Sinn Féin, will take little persuading in the matter of excavating from his soul the remnants of sneakin' regarderism so long buried by the terrible embarrassment of terror.