For years now, the Holy Grail among some Dublin publishers has been “The Book” on Sinn Féin. “The Book” would reveal everything in the inside story of Ireland’s insurgent political force, laying bare its darkest secrets: the secret IRA leadership (supposedly) still controlling the party, the (supposedly) dodgy sources of funding, the personal rivalries, the secret relationships. Like the grail, it has been a fruitless quest. Like the grail, maybe that story no longer exists.
What there has been, though, is a series of books which have gradually shed light, bit by bit, on the inner workings of the party as it has transitioned from the political wing of the Provisional IRA to something resembling a conventional political party. For all the great distance that has been travelled, many observers would say that this process is continuing.
Adding to the canon that includes books by Aoife Moore, Shane Ross, Máiría Cahill, Deaglán de Breadún and others, Mary Lou McDonald’s former press adviser Siobhán Fenton has written Ourselves Alone: Sinn Féin Behind Closed Doors, an account of her time working for the party in Leinster House. It covers 2020 to 2024, which coincided with one of the most remarkable but underexamined political phenomena of recent Irish history: the dizzying rise and precipitous fall of Sinn Féin before the 2024 elections. That story is at the heart of this book.
Fenton was on the absolute inside of things in Leinster House, working closely with McDonald and sometimes other senior figures as the party surfed a wave of popularity until suddenly the wave crashed and drowned the party’s hopes – expectations, actually – of leading the next government.
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There are no shadowy northern godfathers, but there is much new information about how the party functioned, the mistakes it made and the dynamics behind the firmly closed doors of the party’s offices. Political correspondents frequently complain that Sinn Féin doesn’t leak, doesn’t lay bare its internal workings in the way that other parties do with commendable incontinence. Well, here you go, folks.
I was an observer of and sometimes a participant in some of the events described in this book. It is a reminder that however much journalists can report and analyse what they see and what they learn, there is always lots going on behind the scenes that they don’t know about. Often that is where the real story is.
Fenton was an outsider to the party, who grew up in a non-party political household and took degrees at Oxford and Cambridge before embarking on a career in journalism. She even worked for an SDLP MP for a brief period before university. It may have been this background that prompted the party to offer her a job – it wanted to build its ability to communicate with educated, middle-class voters outside the party’s traditional working-class base.
Fenton respected and admired her boss and set about marketing her to a broader audience. Like all politicians, McDonald has a public persona – Fenton noticed that McDonald had an “inside voice” for office talk and an “outside voice”, slower and higher-pitched, for the Dáil and the media. But she was warm and empathetic and the public was responding to her. The party and its cadre of young staffers, who dreamed of higher-paid jobs in government so they could afford to live in Dublin, came to believe – reasonably – that they were on their way to government.
The story of how that fell to pieces is well told here. It stemmed in part from mistakes by McDonald (such as her response to the Dublin riots in 2023) but also more broadly because the party found itself squeezed on two sides – by its working-class base, who were increasingly hostile to immigration, on one side and on the other by its new middle-class voters, who were alarmed by a harder line on migration but also by some of the party’s economic and housing policies.
Fenton recalls being pelted with coins while canvassing inner-city flats in Dublin; McDonald was screamed at for being a “traitor”. The story of McDonald’s assertion that she wanted house prices in Dublin to fall sharply – and the political impact of that – is told in detail.
Looking in from the outside, we did not fully appreciate the sense of aimlessness and despair in the party during the summer of 2024 after the twin disasters of the local and European elections, in which Sinn Féin won just 11-12 per cent of the vote. True, the party pulled things back somewhat in the general election campaign in November. But the unavoidable sense in this book is that Sinn Féin had a huge political opportunity – and they blew it.
“The party,” Fenton concludes, “had held in its hands a once-in-lifetime opportunity to enter government and had squandered it”.
Pat Leahy is Political Editor of The Irish Times
