Inside Sinn Féin: Who really makes the big decisions in Ireland’s most popular party?

First and foremost, they call themselves activists. It is a conscious leveller – everyone is an activist, doing their bit, in their different roles. Even Gerry Adams describes himself as such in his Twitter biography, just doing his bit for the republican cause.

But Sinn Féin – a party on course to take leading roles in government, North and South – is a tightly organised and highly effective political machine with a culture of party discipline and obedience to a leadership that is an echo of the time when much of the republican movement lived outside the law. Back then, the primary function of Sinn Féin was to support the IRA’s armed campaign. While that time is definitively in the past for the “movement”, its importance for the party’s identity remains.

Sinn Féin is unlike all the other parties in several respects, but two stand out: it is a North-South organisation, and unelected people are prominent and important in the leadership and decision-making processes.

On occasion, it is unmissable – such as when Mary Lou McDonald said that the immediate aftermath of a potential no-deal Brexit was not the time to have a vote on a united Ireland, but then reversed her position 48 hours later. People asked if the party leader had been told to do a U-turn? Another was when the Stormont finance minister Máirtín Ó Muilleoir asked a senior backroom figure (in an email discovered by the Renewable Heat Incentive/”cash-for-ash” inquiry) if it was okay to proceed with a policy decision.

Of the latter example, the journalist Sam McBride wrote in his account of the scandal, Burned: “In an insight into where real power lay within Sinn Féin, the minister did not seem able to take the decision based on the advice of his civil servants and his own party-appointed spad [special adviser] . . . Here was the finance minister – one of Stormont’s most powerful democratically accountable figures – asking an unelected and entirely unseen republican with long links to the IRA whether he was ‘content’ for the minister to take a complex decision worth hundreds of millions of pounds, even after the legislation had been agreed by the legislature.”

[ Even Sinn Féin is frustratingly sketchy on the details of what a United Ireland might look like ]

Some ask legitimately if Sinn Féin were in government in Dublin, would its ministers be answerable to the party, or the Dáil? In a way, though, the party is upfront about its structure.

“We don’t want a parliamentary party running the organisation,” the party’s finance chief Des Mackin told The Irish Times in 2020. “We want to stay a party of activists. It’s a totally different model. There’s nothing mysterious about it.”

“Gerry [Adams] tried to inculcate the sense that important people, not necessarily elected people, [run the party],” says one party insider. “He wanted the smartest people in the room. We don’t have the same sense of elected or non-elected people – we’re all activists with our role to play. Elected people don’t necessarily have the sort of primacy they do elsewhere.”

Another source says that former IRA volunteers who moved into the party “developed a whole series of skills in prison and during the peace process – political leadership, organisational abilities, comms [communications]”. Describing one such man still involved in the party’s day-to-day business, the source said: “He has standing not just because of IRA volunteer status. He’s super smart. He is respected more for his abilities than his history.”

“It’s not a case of IRA figures in a smoky room in Belfast,” one Sinn Féin TD previously told The Irish Times. “They are on the ard chomhairle.”

Outside the ardfheis, the ultimate ruling body is the ard chomhairle – an unwieldy body with more than 50 members which meets about 10 times a year. The coiste seasta is a subcommittee of the ard comhairle and handles day-to-day administrative decisions. Its membership, the party says, is composed of the general secretary, the party chairperson, three deputy general secretaries and the director of finance. “It has no policy role,” a spokesman says.

But insiders say the central locus of power is on the national officer board.

“It’s the real political leadership of the party,” says one source. Its members are Mary Lou McDonald (party president), Michelle O’Neill (vice president), Ken O’Connell (general secretary), Declan Kearney (party chairperson), Pearse Doherty (treasurer) and Conor Murphy (treasurer).

But the “leadership” – broadly defined – goes beyond this. The party talks of a “collective leadership”, in which activists get a say in decision-making. But clearly, some activists are more important than others.

Who they are and how they work matters beyond the party. Sinn Féin is the largest party in Northern Ireland, with O’Neill poised to become first minister of the power-sharing executive if and when Stormont starts operating again, perhaps later this year. In the South, Sinn Féin has been the most popular party since the last election, attracting a wave of new support from younger voters, many of them disaffected with existing “establishment” parties due to the housing crisis that affects their generation so sharply.

[ Sinn Féin has access in Washington that other parties can only dream about ]

In the last six months or so, there has been a plateauing in Sinn Féin’s support as measured by opinion polls, with its share of the vote coming down from the mid-30s to the early-30s. The most recent Irish Times/Ipsos poll in June put Sinn Féin support at 31 per cent, down from 35 per cent. Other polls have tracked a similar trajectory. But the party is still far ahead of its rivals and it seems certain that McDonald will be the leader of the largest party in the next Dáil.

Whether that will make her taoiseach depends on a few things: the scale of any victory, the subsequent parliamentary arithmetic, McDonald’s ability to put together a workable coalition government, and whether her putative partners are willing to come out to play. If her desired partner is Fianna Fáil – as many senior party figures expect – it may also depend on whether that party has other options, and whether it believes it can make a coalition with Sinn Féin work.

In any discussion about a future government, the question of how decisions are made and who makes them in Sinn Féin will be vital. Its potential partners will want to know: who are these people? And can we trust them?

Over recent weeks, The Irish Times has sought to identify those people that matter in Sinn Féin, and who will be important in making and implementing big decisions North and South in the years ahead. – Pat Leahy, Political Editor

How is Sinn Féin doing in the polls?

[ Full results of The Irish Times Ipsos/MRBI poll, June 2023 ]

The Stormont office

From Northern leader Michelle O’Neill to the party’s rising stars

Michelle O’Neill

Sinn Féin’s vice president and leader in Northern Ireland, O’Neill has delivered landmark election victories for the party. She should be the first minister, but has been blocked from taking up the role by the DUP’s ongoing boycott of the Stormont institutions.

From a south Tyrone republican family – her father, Brendan Doris, was an IRA prisoner and later a Sinn Féin councillor – O’Neill was well regarded for the work she did as minister for agriculture and later health. She is noted for having a warm personality and an ability to connect with people, something evident in her handshake with King Charles following the death of his mother Queen Elizabeth last year.

Her remark in a BBC interview earlier that year that there was “no alternative” to the IRA’s armed campaign sparked an angry backlash from unionist politicians and victims’ groups, but, by and large, she has avoided controversy that would tarnish her image or contradict her pledge to be a “first minister for all”.

John Finucane

One of the party’s most high-profile members, Finucane’s rise has been meteoric. The solicitor, a son of the murdered solicitor Pat Finucane, was elected to Belfast City Council in May 2019 and within weeks became lord mayor. Seven months later, he made history by becoming the first nationalist MP in north Belfast, toppling DUP veteran Nigel Dodds.

He was only eight in 1989 when his father was shot dead in front of him by loyalists in their north Belfast home. He has campaigned for decades over the killing, one of the most controversial of the Troubles.

A fierce critic of the UK government’s Legacy Bill, he was criticised by victims’ groups, unionist politicians and Tánaiste Micheál Martin for attending an IRA commemoration in south Armagh last month. Finucane defended his decision to give a keynote speech at the event, insisting that remembrance is a right for every section of society.

Gerry Kelly

At 70, Kelly is one of the few remaining Sinn Féin politicians in the North who has an IRA past. In 1973 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the IRA bombing of two locations in London, including the Old Bailey, and 10 years later was involved in a mass break-out from the Maze prison outside Belfast.

He is currently Sinn Féin’s spokesman on policing and its representative on the Policing Board – one of the bodies introduced after the Belfast Agreement, which holds the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to account. First elected in 1996, Kelly was re-elected as an MLA for Belfast North last year for what is expected to be his final term in political office.

Conor Murphy

Regarded as one of Sinn Féin’s most able politicians, Murphy is the party’s chief negotiator and has twice been a minister – most recently holding the finance brief in the Executive which collapsed following the resignation of the then first minister, DUP MLA Paul Givan, last year. He is tipped to be Stormont’s next economy minister.

From Camlough in south Armagh, he won his first election – to Newry and Mourne District Council – more than 30 years ago, and has represented Newry and Armagh as both an MP and an MLA since 1998. He was sentenced to five years in prison in 1982 for IRA membership and possession of explosives. In 2020, following a long-running controversy, he retracted and apologised for comments he made claiming Paul Quinn – a 21-year-old from Cullyhanna, Co Armagh, who was brutally beaten to death in 2007 – had been involved in criminality and smuggling.

Caoimhe Archibald

A rising star in the party, and viewed as a future finance or economy minister, Archibald has been an MLA in East Derry MLA since 2016. From Coleraine, she holds a PhD from Queen’s University Belfast in molecular microbiology, and is from a Sinn Féin family. She formerly worked alongside her father, Ciaran – a party councillor – in his constituency office, and in May her sister Niamh – a party press officer – was elected as Coleraine’s first Sinn Féin councillor. Close to O’Neill, Archibald was appointed chair of the Stormont economy committee in 2020 and has been party spokeswoman on the economy and climate change. She was appointed as the party’s Executive Office spokeswoman in a Sinn Féin reshuffle in preparation for a possible return to power-sharing.

Declan Kearney

The party’s national chairman, Kearney was appointed junior minister at the Executive office in 2020 and remained in post until the institutions collapsed. Son of the late civil rights activist Oliver Kearney, he has been actively involved in republican politics since the early 1980s and has been an MLA for South Antrim since 2016, topping the poll in last year’s Assembly elections.

A central figure in the party’s all-Ireland development, Kearney chaired a “People’s Assembly” in Belfast’s Waterfront Hall last autumn – an event that aimed to canvass a wide range of opinion about the shape of constitutional change. During an event in Derry in 2015, entitled Uncomfortable Conversations, he apologised for all the lives lost during the Troubles while sharing the stage with the then PSNI chief constable, George Hamilton.

Stephen McGlade

Chief adviser and confidante to O’Neill since she replaced Martin McGuinness six years ago, McGlade is the ablest of the new crop of influential political backroom activists and will play an important role in a restored Stormont. Highly regarded by party veterans, he is O’Neill’s right-hand man and is rarely absent from her side. A graduate of Queen’s University Belfast – he holds a BA in international relations – the west Belfast man joined the party staff in 2007 as special adviser to the then regional development minister, Conor Murphy.

McGlade was head of the party’s political operation in Leinster House under Gerry Adams from 2011 to 2017 and was part of the negotiating team for the New Decade, New Approach deal that led to the restoration of Stormont in 2020. As special adviser to O’Neill during her tenure as deputy first minister, he managed relationships with the DUP side of the joint office and also liaised North/South, working closely with Mary Lou McDonald’s chief of staff, Dawn Doyle.

Aidan McAteer

One of the party’s most influential staffers, McAteer has been active in republican politics for more than 40 years. A former republican prisoner and personal assistant to Adams, he was also a confidante of the former deputy first minister, the late McGuinness.

The son of Derry man Hugh McAteer – chief of staff of the IRA in the 1940s – and a nephew of Eddie McAteer, the Nationalist Party leader who was regarded as “the voice of nationalism” in pre-Troubles Stormont. He works closely with O’Neill and McGlade and co-ordinates Assembly operations under the party’s chief Assembly whip, South Down MLA Sinéad Ennis. He was part of the negotiating team in the talks that led to the Belfast Agreement – and has been involved in every negotiation since.

Martin ‘Duckster’ Lynch

Lynch was a driver – and presumed bodyguard – for Adams for many years. He is one of a number of former IRA prisoners who are influential in Sinn Féin, having served 10 years for possession of heavy weapons, including a Russian-manufactured rocket launcher.

In 2011, he was named in the House of Commons by then deputy leader of the DUP, Peter Robinson, as being the IRA’s “adjutant general” on its “headquarters” staff. Insiders say that Lynch’s counsel is valued because it is smart and strategic, not just because he is a former IRA man. He certainly brings the benefit of experience, having been part of Adams’s circle during the long and often painfully slow march towards the ceasefires, the peace process and power-sharing.

There are lots of former IRA prisoners involved in Sinn Fein, but only a small number are, like Lynch, in positions of influence and authority. He was one of a small number of people in Sinn Fein’s Belfast headquarters who were dragged into the cash-for-ash inquiry, when it emerged they were consulted by Sinn Féin finance minister Máirtín Ó Muilleoir about a decision on the scheme.

Seán ‘Spike’ Murray

Another former senior IRA figure and ex-prisoner turned influential member of Sinn Féin’s Northern “kitchen cabinet”, Murray – at least in the days when the Assembly and Executive were functioning – was regularly seen around Parliament Buildings.

He was reputed to be the last such individual to back the IRA ceasefire but, like Lynch, subsequently became an important advocate for the peace process. A longstanding political adviser to Sinn Féin, the Belfast man has played a key role in the party’s strategy around issues such as parades, legacy and policing.

In 2018, after a police investigation, the North’s Public Prosecution Service decided Murray would not be prosecuted over the alleged importation of guns from Florida following allegations, which he strenuously denied – made in a BBC Spotlight documentary.

Ted Howell

A key member of Adams’s “kitchen cabinet” of trusted advisers, Howell acted as a key link contact between the IRA leadership and prominent Irish Americans during the early years of the peace process.

Though the Adams generation has mostly retired, Howell and some others retain respect and influence throughout the republican movement – and are sometimes directly involved in political events. Howell’s name surfaced during the inquiry into the “cash for ash” scandal in Stormont in 2020, when it emerged that Sinn Féin finance minister Ó Muilleoir had emailed him to ask his agreement to contain the overspend on the scheme – prompting accusations that Sinn Féin ministers were accountable to figures in their own party outside the democratic process. It is an accusation that has never quite gone away.

Asked by the subsequent inquiry into the scandal who Howell was, Ó Muilleoir said that he was “the former chair and chair of every negotiation Sinn Féin’s been involved in around these institutions and political processes since 1997″.

The cabinet contenders

The next potential taoiseach Mary Lou McDonald and her ministers

Mary Lou McDonald

Like Bertie Ahern, the Sinn Féin leader has long since established herself on first-name terms with the Irish electorate. Will she go on to emulate him and become taoiseach?

If so, it would be the culmination of a plan that has long been in preparation. McDonald was picked by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness (and the people who ran the party with them) long before she became leader in 2018. She was the most important element in the difficult, necessary and meticulously planned transition away from the military generation who brought the republican movement from bloody armed campaign and political irrelevance to peace and to power.

Now, the party stands on the brink of government in both jurisdictions on the island. McDonald has been a big part of making that happen. She has fulfilled the hopes of those who selected her, and then some: extending the appeal of Sinn Féin into areas of the electorate previously far out of reach, but without turning her back on the boys of the old brigade. She will, when push comes to shove, resolutely defend the IRA’s armed campaign, though would rather talk about other things.

The assumption of power in the Republic is no foregone conclusion, though. McDonald will likely need a coalition partner, and while that might be a scatter of left-leaning parties, it probably means Fianna Fáil – and that party might have other options. She is the unbackable favourite to lead the largest party in the next Dáil – but that is only half the journey.

Over the coming period, Sinn Féin needs to close the deal with a bunch of voters who are inclined to support McDonald but are not yet nailed down. She walks a tightrope of standing for change, while reassuring people that the things they like about Ireland – economic growth, political stability – will not change. As the election approaches, this will become harder, not easier.

McDonald has occasionally faltered as leader. The 2019 local and European campaigns were a disaster and the 2018 presidential election was misjudged. Her habit – and that of her party – of using legal actions to shut down avenues of inquiry into uncomfortable areas could yet backfire. But she has also demonstrated an ability to connect with voters, allowing them to project hopes and expectations on to her. Right now, she looks like the coming thing in Irish politics. Hello, Mary Lou.

Pearse Doherty

The Donegal TD is part of a cohort, including Cavan-Monaghan’s Matt Carthy, who rose through Ógra Shinn Féin in the mid to late 1990s. He made his way into the Dáil after a High Court challenge forced the then government to hold a byelection in Donegal in 2010. He was immediately appointed as finance spokesman.

In the midst of the financial crisis, he established himself with trenchant criticisms of the faltering Fianna Fáil-Green coalition. During the austerity era that followed the bailout, Doherty became one of the Fine Gael-Labour coalition’s chief antagonists. His confrontational style in the Dáil combined a critique of the coalition’s fiscal policies with a sharply honed pursuit of vulture funds, bankers, big finance and a culture of insiderism.

This was a time when the intertwining sovereign debt and euro zone crises overlapped with the legacy of the financial collapse and major change in the Irish banking sector – embodied by the creation of the National Asset Management Agency and the Irish Banking Resolution Corporation. This ensured plenty of airtime for Doherty, who was also to the fore in controversies surrounding Denis O’Brien’s financial affairs being read into the Dáil record. He was supported in developing policy around this time by Eoin Ó Broin, who worked in his office until 2014. The two are now seen as being nailed-on cabinet members in their current briefs should Sinn Féin lead the next government.

Eoin Ó Broin

After a time as a gigging musician in Dublin in the 1980s, Ó Broin moved to London without his Leaving Cert, where he completed A levels and university while working in catering. He returned to Dublin in the mid 1990s and joined Sinn Féin before moving to Belfast for several years. Alongside elected positions on Belfast City Council and South Dublin County Council, he worked for the party in a range of roles, including as Belfast organiser, director of European affairs and writing for An Phoblacht. He has written several books.

After failing to secure a seat in Dublin Mid-West in the 2011 general election, he went on to top the poll in 2016 and 2020, bringing in running mate Mark Ward last time out. Party figures believe three seats are possible in the constituency next time out.

Housing, above all else, has been the thrust behind Sinn Féin’s rise in the polls – gathering pace through the 2020 general election campaign to become the main engine powering its potent critique of mainstream politics. Ó Broin is central to this, armed with a mastery of his policy area and a strong media profile. He is often sent out by the party to tackle difficult issues – including breaking a three-week absence by Sinn Féin from the Leinster House plinth last autumn as controversies around Jonathan Dowdall and the publication of Shane Ross’s book on McDonald swirled.

Behind the scenes, he is known to cultivate an extensive network of industry contacts, including property developers who would have little in common with his self-described politics of left-populism, and has been part of Sinn Féin’s efforts to sway business leaders away from the idea that the party represents a fundamental threat to the economy. Ó Broin has flown close to the sun on a few occasions – including being forced into an apology after rash criticism of the chief economist in the Department of Finance. He also courted controversy due to a tweet of a painting depicting gardaí at an eviction. Even so, he is seen as the party’s intellectual standard bearer and one of its most effective operators.

David Cullinane

The party’s health spokesman is another frontbench member who is pretty certain to be a cabinet minister should Sinn Féin be part of the next government in Dublin. Prominent in the media, Cullinane is one of a handful of TDs who are conspicuously preparing for government – swotting up on his brief and staying in close touch with unions and other stakeholders, while being careful not to make outlandish promises to them.

He won nearly two quotas in Waterford at the last general election – one of the places where the party threw away seats by not running extra candidates – and he will be expected to bring in a running mate next time out. He encountered controversy after roaring “Up the ‘Ra!” at a victory party after the last election, defending and later apologising to those offended by his choice of words, but that won’t have done him any harm in the organisation. He was previously married to the party’s Carlow-Kilkenny TD, Kathleen Funchion.

Louise O’Reilly

The party’s enterprise spokeswoman came from a republican and trade union background. She grew up in Ballyfermot, where she and her family were active in protests against bin and water charges, but also lived in Dundalk for a decade. O’Reilly went into the family business, so to speak, rising to a leading role in Siptu’s healthcare division. Unlike some of her front-bench contemporaries, she was not prominent in Sinn Féin’s youth wing, instead becoming active during the austerity era and unexpectedly taking a seat in Dublin Fingal at the 2016 general election. She was not living in the constituency at the time, but moved up from Crumlin after winning a seat.

She was appointed as the party’s health spokeswoman at a time when fundamental changes – the Eighth Amendment campaign and Sláintecare reforms – were under way. She was seen as an effective operator in health and strolled home in the 2020 election after polling 1½ quotas in another of the constituencies where Sinn Féin left a seat behind.

Her move out of the health portfolio was a surprise and seen in some quarters as a demotion. But it also helped to broaden her experience (an asset for a possible minister in a future government) and saw her shadowing then tánaiste Leo Varadkar, while concentrating on less prominent areas of the enterprise portfolio such as workers’ rights and small business. This is somewhere Sinn Féin believes a lot of its base is, among working and lower middle-class people who may be sole traders or small business owners, and whose interaction with the machinery of the State comes as an employer or dealing with regulations or Revenue.

Matt Carthy

The Monaghan native is still only in his mid-40s, but has been a prominent party activist since his teenage years. He and Doherty have been close friends since their Ógra Shinn Féin days. Carthy is energetic and ebullient in personality and is a confident communicator. He is very partisan, though, and can be acidic enough with his criticisms. His self-confidence can sometimes come across as a slight arrogance, but he has the ability to match it.

He was an effective MEP and was clever and strategic as a spokesman on agriculture, where he was farmer-friendly and tepid (putting it kindly) on climate change. In his current foreign affairs brief, he is already easing the path to government, retreating gingerly from established Sinn Féin negative positions on issues such the EU’s defence policy.

Pádraig Mac Lochlainn

The chief whip has referred to himself as the party’s “team captain” and is responsible for maintaining discipline around key Dáil votes and debates. The role is demanding but Mac Lochlainn is known to be affable and approachable by those within, and outside, Sinn Féin. Born in Leeds, he was the first TD from a Traveller background to be elected. He is the son of Mary Mac Lochlainn and his father, Réamonn, was an IRA member, sentenced to 12 years in prison when Pádraig was a toddler. The family moved to Buncrana, Co Donegal, when Pádraig was 10 in anticipation of Réamonn’s release.

Two years later, his father died in a drowning incident. It was around this time that Pádraig began selling copies of An Phoblacht and later became involved in Sinn Féin. From 1997, he acted as Donegal spokesperson for the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed. He served on Donegal County Council twice, and twice as mayor of Buncrana. He was first elected to the Dáil in February 2011, but lost his seat in 2016 when the party used a three-candidate strategy in Donegal. He won his seat back in 2020. He is married to Sinéad Ní Bhroin, a party adviser and sister of TD Eoin Ó Broin.

Lynn Boylan

During her time in the European Parliament, Boylan described herself as a “watchdog” for the Irish people, putting an emphasis on climate justice. Somewhat unusually, she emerged from political obscurity to become, in 2014, the bookie’s favourite in the European elections. She topped the poll in the Dublin constituency with more than 83,000 first-preference votes. The victory, just five years after she polled 323 votes in an unsuccessful local election run in Killarney, represented a stunning success for Sinn Féin and someone who was nowhere near being a household name. Behind the scenes, however, she had been active within the party for eight years, and was then a member of the ard chomhairle.

She failed to hold on to her seat in 2019, in what were hugely disappointing elections for Sinn Féin as it suffered at both local and European level. Boylan was elected as a Senator on the final count in 2020 and has since continued to raise issues around climate change. Her partner is the party’s housing spokesman, Ó Broin.

Rose Conway-Walsh

The Mayo TD is from Ballycroy, one of the most sparsely populated parts of the county, halfway between Achill and Belmullet. She was one of nine children born on to a small farm holding. She emigrated to London at 19 in around 1990, where she worked in the press office of bookmaker William Hill. Returning to Ireland in 1998, she did a degree and masters in public management at the University of Galway. Political in nature, she cast around for a party to join, choosing Sinn Féin partly because it was more encouraging to women and partly because of her family’s republican roots.

Elected as a councillor in 2004, she became a senator in 2016 and was elected to the Dáil in 2020. Studious (she’s doing another post-graduate degree in Trinity), and low-key, Conway-Walsh is regarded by colleagues as conscientious, diligent and on top of her brief. She’s not quite as quick on her feet in debates as some of her colleagues. That said, her current portfolio, public expenditure and reform, shows she has a high standing within the party.

Pa Daly

In a relatively recent conversation with a Kerry politician who detested Sinn Féin, the subject turned to their constituency rival, Daly. The disposition completely changed. “Ah, sure, Pa is a fine fellow, isn’t he one of our own?” This reverse ferret might have been a bit of a Kerry thing, but like his predecessor Martin Ferris, Sinn Féin picked a politician for the key justice portfolio who is widely liked, seen as “reasonable” and “sensible” by deputies from other parties, and is regarded as someone who other parties can do business with.

Such qualities will be crucial should Sinn Féin go into government, as justice will be a sensitive area. It’s not that the 50-year-old is a non-Sinn Féin Sinn Féiner. Anything but. He has impeccable republican credentials. He has been a councillor since 2004 and was one of the party’s legal advisers who went to Colombia to observe the trial of three republicans charged with terrorism for training Farc rebels. An established and successful solicitor in Tralee, he brings an expertise in the law as well as solid communication skills. He has performed well in the media since his appointment, especially around the touch-paper issue of the Special Criminal Court.

The backroom operators

From Gerry Adams to the party’s money man

Gerry Adams

Adams has definitively stepped back from political life in recent years since retiring as leader in 2018 and leaving the Dáil in 2020. And yet, modern Sinn Féin is his creation above all and his influence is evident everywhere – not least in the person of his carefully handpicked successor. As Mary Lou McDonald found her feet as leader – a process that had rocky periods before the election breakthrough of 2020 – Adams conspicuously absented himself from many meetings in order to give space for her to establish herself. But few in the party believed she was not in regular contact with her mentor and predecessor. Nowadays, though, they are more inclined to say that McDonald runs the show herself. Adams seems to be enjoying himself since his retirement, though he still spends lots of time on activities related to broad republican politics, and has continued to write and speak.

And podcast. “The orange is part of what we are,” he told the latest edition of his Léargas podcast, where his is the only voice (read into that what you will). Recently, he reflected on the July 12th celebrations in the North. “And when the union is ended there will continue to be orange events and the orange will continue to have the right to celebrate its traditions in the new Ireland. But the orange clearly has a lot to do to make its behaviour more acceptable. And it doesn’t have to wait until the new Ireland to do this. Measures, actions, initiatives should be taken now to take the sting, to take the hatred, to take the tension, out of the marching season.”

Irish unity is a favourite theme, and party sources say that this is largely his focus, to the extent that he has a political one nowadays. After he stepped down as leader, after all, the party made Adams its spokesman on a united Ireland. It would be hard to say his tenure in the role was an overwhelming success. He describes himself, with conspicuous modesty, as “an activist”, but he remains the giant of the republican movement, and his role in modern Irish history will probably be judged, in the fullness of time, to be comparable with anyone of the last half century. Unfortunately for the historians, he seems unlikely at this point to tell the full, unadorned, extraordinary story of how he first made war, and then made peace.

Brian Tumilty

From Newry, Tumilty is one of Sinn Féin’s most important backroom strategists and has been central to election campaigns North and South in the last two decades. Though maintaining a low profile outside the party, he is well known to its activists across the island and is considered a key operator of Sinn Féin’s campaigning machine. Internally, he has stressed the importance of using campaigns not just to get people elected, but to build the party organisation, especially in areas where it did not have a presence previously. Colleagues have described Tumilty as softly spoken and a good listener.

He was convicted in the early 1980s for possession of one of the weapons suspected of having been used in the Kingsmill massacre of 10 Protestant workmen in 1976, for which he was sentenced to seven years in jail. It was one of the most notorious sectarian atrocities of the Troubles, though the Historical Inquiries Team was careful to say it could not assume that the people who later had possession of the weapons were involved in the shooting.

Des Mackin

The party’s money man, Mackin has overseen the financing of Sinn Féin’s growth North and South for more than a quarter of a century. He is thought to be personally wealthy, with links to several businesses over the past 20 years including a snooker and gaming hall and a security guard service, both on Bridge Street in Dundalk. He has been linked to a number of pubs around Ireland, a pub venture in Portugal and has accumulated a property portfolio. He was a director of a number of companies associated with the Parnell Centre in Dublin 1, a substantial but commercially unsuccessful development that is home to a cinema complex, car park and commercial units.

In September 2006, Revenue reached a €40,973 tax settlement with a company called Century City, of which Mackin had been a director up to January of that year. The company ran an amusement arcade in the Parnell Centre. Century was part of a group ultimately owned by Belfast businessman Peter Curistan, by way of a company in the British Virgin Islands. Mackin was a director of some of the Curistan companies, but not a shareholder. In January 2006, Century and some other companies of which Mackin was a director were given the Probation Act after they pleaded guilty in the Dublin District Court to the failure to keep proper books of account.

As its support has grown – along with it State funding in both the Republic and in the North – Sinn Féin has become the richest party on the island, a status that has led to persistent mutterings about the source of its wealth. Those finances were turbocharged in 2019 by the donation of more than £3 million (€3.4 million) by a mysterious Englishman, William Hampton, who had lived in a camper van for much of his final years but was apparently wealthy through bequests from his father. Hampton left his assets to “the political party in the Republic of Ireland known at this time as Sinn Féin”. But when Mackin took control of the estate after Hampton’s death in 2018 – he had been named as an executor – he began passing the money on to Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland to avoid the State’s ban on foreign donations. Mackin has since delivered millions to the party’s coffers in Belfast, collecting money from Hampton bank accounts in a number of jurisdictions, and liquidating assets, and transferring the money to Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland. Only last week, it was reported that another £100,000 (€115,000) had been found and passed to the party.

It is truly an amazing story, and one which is considered unbelievable by some of Sinn Féin’s opponents. Several complaints have been made to the Standards in Public Office Commission, which is also investigating other aspects of the party’s finances following complaints by political opponents.

Originally from Belfast, Mackin joined the IRA at a young age and, in 1972, was sentenced to five years in Long Kesh for membership of a proscribed organisation. He returned to the IRA upon his release and in 1978 was arrested and charged with attempted murder after a confrontation with British soldiers. Granted bail, he absconded and ended up in the US. He defeated an attempt to extradite him, but was deported to the Republic and set up home in Dundalk.

State papers released in December disclosed that Mackin was involved in discussions with Dublin officials in 1995 when the republican movement was lobbying for a change in Garda policy in relation to the surveillance of Sinn Féin and the IRA, arguing that an easing off would make life easier for those within the movement who were in favour of a permanent cessation of the IRA violence.

Michael Doyle

A key part of the Leinster House machine, Doyle has worked as an adviser in the office of Sinn Féin’s chief whip Pádraig Mac Lochlainn and is said to be important in the co-ordination of the party’s large contingent of staff, many of whom are young and relatively new to politics. A former bank official, he has worked full-time for the party since 2016.

Doyle is close to fellow Waterford man David Cullinane TD, and though he failed to win a council seat in 2019, he was instrumental as director of elections in delivering a huge vote for Cullinane – almost 40 per cent of the vote, in the 2020 general election. Back then, Waterford was emblematic of the party’s turnaround after a poor showing in the previous year’s local elections – Sinn Féin nearly tripled its vote and would have won a second seat had it run a second candidate. It will next time.

It was Doyle who – at a post-election celebration – introduced Cullinane when he made his “Up the Ra!” remarks, for which he later apologised. Doyle introduced him by thundering: “There’s a seismic shift and the Shinners are at the f**king table . . . The ‘big two’, as they call themselves, say they’re not going to talk to us. Well, do you know what? We broke the bastards. We broke the Free State and this country will never be the same again – because the people are after taking their voice and it’s up to us now to deliver!”

Miriam Murphy

Murphy is the party’s national director of policy and a key member of its Leinster House backroom team. She is heavily involved in all aspects of policy development and will be influential in the shaping of any election manifesto and subsequent programme for government. The party policy on issues such as neutrality (where it has abandoned a plan to immediately withdrawn from EU and Nato defence co-operation projects) and criminal justice (where it has dropped plans to abolish the Special Criminal Court) is on a march to the centre, in anticipation of participating in a future government.

Jonathan O’Brien

The former Cork North-Central TD stood down from frontline politics in 2020, but is a key member of the backroom team seeking to maximise Sinn Féin’s returns in the upcoming local, European and general elections.

As the party’s 26-county political director, he is heavily involved in the selection convention process and identifying the scores of new candidates needed to avoid a repeat of the error made in 2020, when Sinn Féin lost out on seats by not having enough people on tickets in many constituencies.

He has had a low public profile since leaving the Dáil, but was in the news last year when a 42-year-old woman was jailed for subjecting him and a businesswoman to separate campaigns of harassment between 2018 and 2019.

A former city councillor, O’Brien was known as a campaigner on homelessness and drugs in Cork. The father of five was first elected to the Dáil in 2011 and retained the seat in 2016. A former Cork City FC chairman, he was a vocal critic of the Football Association of Ireland during the controversies that hit the organisation.

O’Brien announced he would not be contesting the 2020 general election as he was seeking “new personal challenges”. He spoke to the Echo newspaper at the time about the frustration he faced when trying to help constituents, saying: “There’s only so much an Opposition TD can do. I wish I was in government.”

Seán MacBrádaigh

MacBrádaigh works as a communications strategist with Sinn Féin and was also the editor of the republican An Phoblacht magazine between 2005 and 2010. He has held a number of key roles in the party since 2010 including national director of communications and publicity. He became better known to the wider public when he worked as a political adviser and spokesman for Adams. During that time, he operated as something of a liaison officer for the party leader and was a key figure throughout Adams’ tenure. During this time, MacBrádaigh was the main writer of most of Adams’s speeches, such as ard fheis addresses.

From Dublin, he previously said that the first issue he ever bought of An Phoblacht was during the hunger strikes in the summer of 1981. This was his first form of contact with republican politics. He has, in the past, been heavily critical of the media, with some of his tweets attracting criticism and attention.

Ciarán Quinn

From west Belfast, Quinn was one of the first full-time Sinn Féin employees. He was originally active in the community sector before working in Adams’s constituency office when he was an MP. He has also worked in Leinster House and in a variety of roles across the party, including on its reorganisation and push for greater electoral success south of the Border from 2005-2007, as an adviser to Martin McGuinness when he was deputy first minister, and as head of communications in the mid 2010s.

In his current role, he sits at an important juncture of an overseas infrastructure that is beyond the scope of anything else in the Irish political system, as the party’s representative for North America – reporting directly to McDonald. While the party has staff in Westminster and Brussels as well, North America looms large.

Quinn inherited a network among Irish America that was tended to for years by former senior IRA member Rita O’Hare, who also cultivated relationships on Capitol Hill, and in Ottawa, and among Irish support and heritage groups such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians. In some ways these networks are a throwback to the peak of the peace process, but they have an important role today ensuring that Sinn Féin gets facetime with figures in Irish America and North American politics, which has found a new relevance since the Brexit referendum in 2016.

Quinn’s role links the party in with the Friends of Sinn Féin USA and Canada groups. These are formally separate entities from Sinn Féin, but do donate to the party’s campaigns in Northern Ireland, as well as taking out advertisements in US newspapers and running social events for supporters – and receiving significant donations, often from high net-worth people. There are several such organisations, including Friends of Sinn Féin Australia. Quinn is also a long-standing ard chomhairle member.

Joe Lynch

The 34-year-old Ballincollig native has since 2019 headed up the Sinn Féin press office for the 26 counties, working with TDs and Senators. He studied accountancy and then political science and, while he doesn’t come from a party political background, his family had a historical lean towards Fianna Fáil republicanism. He joined Sinn Féin at 18 and came through Ógra Shinn Féin with future TDs Mairéad Farrell and Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire. A former ard chomhairle member, Lynch worked in head office for a time before moving to Adams’s Leinster House office and then that of his successor, McDonald.

Sinn Féin is seen as good at generating press coverage for itself – but not solely through the press office. Individual spokespeople are encouraged to identify and develop stories within their briefs, with the press office working to fine-tune strategies and alongside the party’s two-person social media team (there are Northern counterparts to the Leinster House press and social media teams). The press side is a tightly-run operation, with TDs and spokespeople reporting back to the press office following media queries and alerting them to outings, as well as staff dealing with inbound requests and deciding which rep should appear for the party. Discipline is important, with few surprises – or, as one TD says: “Our press people don’t see us out on the plinth and say ‘what the f***?’”

Dawn Doyle

Doyle was completing her studies in UCD when she was invited to do a secondment in Sinn Féin’s press office for a few weeks. That was in 1993. Those few weeks have become 30 years and the Co Wexford native has risen to become the most senior official in the party. Her mentor when she started in the party’s ramshackle headquarters on Parnell Square was O’Hare. Five years later, she succeeded O’Hare to become director of publicity and became general secretary in 2009. After the party’s electoral surge in 2020, there was a reconfiguration and Doyle became McDonald’s chef de cabinet. She essentially runs the leader’s office, directing and advising on policy positions, overseeing strategy, speeches (the Sinn Féin leader has a speechwriter) and engagements. Doyle is widely liked and respected within the party. She is said by colleagues to be smart, organised, pleasant, efficient and unruffled.

Ken O’Connell

Another Sinn Féin “lifer”, O’Connell became involved full-time with the party around the time of the Hunger Strikes in 1981 and has been an official since. Originally from Co Wicklow (he has never lost the accent), O’Connell has been living in west Cork for many years and worked as Munster organiser for Sinn Féin. When Adams was elected to the Dáil in 2011 on the back of big gains for the party, O’Connell became the political director for the 26 counties. He had a policy role but was also instrumental in candidate selection, electoral strategy and membership.

He was the fire-fighter who went in when there was a series of defections from the party in 2017 and 2018 amid claims of bullying. He succeeded Doyle as general secretary in 2020 and oversees the party, as well as being a key member of an coiste seasta, the eight-person committee which makes decisions on day-to-day operations. O’Connell is affable, with a relaxed demeanour, but is said to be steely enough when it comes to toeing the party line.O’Connell has been succeeded as political director by former Cork North Central TD, Jonathan O’Brien.

Mark Guilfoyle

Guilfoyle is the president of Sinn Féin’s US-based money-making machine, Friends of Sinn Féin, and has forged connections for the party across the American political spectrum and secured extensive access to senior politicians. The fundraising arm was established in 1994, with the original aim of getting Adams into America, but has since become a key body used to bolster connections with the US.

Guilfoyle, a Kentucky lawyer, said previously that he was the first in his family to go to college. He brought his children to an event in 1998 which Adams was speaking at, and which he described as a “seminal” occasion leading to his greater involvement in Friends of Sinn Féin. Guilfoyle succeeded Jim Cullen, a former US army general, as the organisation’s president in 2017.

The fallout from Brexit has presented Sinn Féin with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to push for a united Ireland, and Guilfoyle has beefed up Friends of Sinn Féin’s online presence to this end. The US organisation has generated more than $2 million (€1.7 million) through fundraising over the last five years. Some of that has been used to pay for advertisements in publications such as the New York Times and Washington Post around St Patrick’s Day, urging support for the Belfast Agreement and calling for a date for a referendum on Irish unity. The funding is also used to cover travel expenses for senior party figures visiting Washington and other parts of the US.

Ciaran Scally

A businessman originally from Co Antrim, Scally is the president of the non-profit Irish-American organisation Knights of the Red Branch Inc (KRB), which includes among its aims to “lawfully advance” Irish unification. A long-time supporter of Sinn Féin, he emigrated to Oakland, California in the mid-1980s, where he runs an electrical and property business.

A grant of $80,000 from KRB helped fund the purchase of adverts in American newspapers promoting Irish unification in 2021, which were taken out by Friends of Sinn Féin. In 2018, KRB commissioned an economic study about the cost of a hard Brexit on Ireland and the benefits of reunification, and in 2015 funded a similar study on the economic benefits of unification. In 1999, Scally proposed a stretch of roadway in Oakland be named Gerry Adams Way.

Enda Fanning

An architect who comes from a comfortable south Dublin background, Fanning is chairman of the party in Dublin and an influential voice for the party on social media, where supporters – labelled “shinnerbots” by opponents – often take their lead from him. He is a vocal critic of much of the media for its coverage of Sinn Féin, Northern Ireland, Palestine and other issues, and has made personal attacks on journalists with whom he disagrees or whom he suspects of being anti-Sinn Féin.

While Fanning is not important in the party’s decision-making, insiders say he would be seen as reflective of grassroots thinking in Dublin. The support of an ard fheis would be needed to join a coalition government, and while the members have tended to follow the party line on big questions in the past, figures like Fanning could be important as the leadership prepares them for the compromises inherent in involvement in government. He is a member of Sinn Féin’s ard chomhairle.

Mick Nugent

Like Fanning, Nugent’s importance is not so much as part of the party’s executive decision-making but rather as a voice reflecting the grassroots to be listened to. Sinn Féin’s leader on Cork City Council, where he represents the North West ward, is also a member of the ard chomhairle. He was co-opted to the council following the election of Thomas Gould as a TD in 2020.

Nugent has a previous conviction from 2002 for possession of firearms, after he and three others were intercepted by gardaí. One of the men – who were dressed in boiler suits when their car was stopped – later told detectives that they were on their way to administer a punishment beating. Their leader was known to be an anti-drugs activist and member of Sinn Féin, though Nugent had no previous convictions and received a lighter sentence.