A Dublin academic has questioned Sinn Féin’s compliance with recent legislation obliging political parties to include details of subsidiary organisations and their property in annual accounts filed to the Standards in Public Office Commission (Sipo).
The non-inclusion by Sinn Féin in its accounts of the New York-based Friends of Sinn Féin organisation is “difficult to understand”, according to Iain McMenamin, professor of comparative politics in the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University.
However, the party has said it is fully compliant with the new disclosure rules, and the president of the US organisation has said no director or officer is a member of Sinn Féin.
Although UK law on political fundraising prohibits foreign donations, Friends of Sinn Féin in the US (FOSFUSA) can provide financial support to the party in Northern Ireland using a mechanism agreed more than two decades ago.
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Under the agreement, the party in Belfast can receive money from the US as long as it originated in individual donations below a £500 (€577) threshold set out in UK law.
The mechanism by which the US entity transfers money to Sinn Féin in Belfast was agreed with the UK Electoral Commission in 2010.
As well as supporting Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, FOSFUSA uses the money it raises to promote the Irish unity agenda in the US, including supporting trips to the US by Sinn Féin politicians and party workers – a practice that is permissible under Irish and UK political funding laws.
Friends of Sinn Féin organisations in Canada and Australia operate in a similar way to FOSFUSA.
As with the UK, Irish political funding law does not allow foreign donations.
The law in the Republic, however, limits domestic donations to €2,500 while the UK law has no upper limit.
The latest figures from FOSFUSA show it raised €99,646 in the six months to the end of April and donated €41,412 to Sinn Féin in Belfast.
It also contributed to the cost of trips to the US by, among others, party leader Mary Lou McDonald and TDs Louise O’Reilly, Pa Daly and Cathy Bennett.
In the 12 months to the end of October 2025, according to previous filings, the New York-based corporation raised €321,936 and donated €26,938 to Sinn Féin in Belfast.
During 2025 it paid £5,756 towards the cost of two US trips by Sinn Féin MP John Finucane, and £3,369 towards the costs of a trip by MP Pat Cullen, according to the UK Electoral Commission website. FOSF in Canada also supported a trip to Vancouver by Finucane.
FOSFUSA and Friends of Sinn Féin Canada have websites with donation portals that target modest donations from people living in those countries.
A third website, Friends of Sinn Féin International, seeks financial support from people outside the US and Canada by way of a £45-per-year subscription that goes toward “Sinn Féin in the north of Ireland”, according to the website.
The regular financial disclosures made by FOSFUSA to the US department of justice include the names of people who made online donations, most of which are between $25 and $500.
Correspondence between the UK Electoral Commission and Sinn Féin in Belfast, available on the commission’s website, shows the party’s declared income in the North in 2022 included £41,357 it received from FOSFUSA, and £12,191 from FOSF in Canada.
In 2010 the party in Belfast agreed a procedure with the commission to allow for the receipt of money from FOSFUSA in a way that complied with the UK’s Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, the correspondence shows.
Under the arrangement, FOSFUSA was to open a bank account in New York solely for the receipt of donations for Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland that were under the £500 threshold.
“All donations lodged to this account will be either sent to Sinn Féin (North of Ireland) or used to pay invoices incurred by Sinn Féin (North of Ireland) and submitted to Friends of Sinn Féin (USA) for payment,” the agreement said.
A new law on political fundraising in the Republic that came into effect last year was largely aimed at Sinn Féin and arose from a concern that it was engaging in “regulatory arbitrage”, McMenamin said.
Other parties in the Republic were concerned they were at a disadvantage vis-a-vis Sinn Féin because it operated under two different political funding laws, he said.
The concern was largely triggered by the party’s receipt of a large bequest from the late William Hampton, a UK citizen who left millions of pounds to “the political party in the Republic of Ireland known at this time as Sinn Féin”.
Revisions to the Electoral Reform Act of 2022 included a provision that parties would have to show details of all their “subsidiaries” – a term McMenamin said was given a very wide definition – in their filed financial accounts.
McMenamin, who examined the issue for a paper published last year in the Irish Political Studies journal, concluded that, measured on a per vote received basis, Sinn Féin was better off financially in the Republic than it was in Northern Ireland and it was more likely the party in Dublin would be giving money to its Belfast operation than vice versa.
This is because parties in the Republic receive much more public funding than do parties in UK, which are substantially more reliant on private fundraising.
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“If state support for parties is taken into account, it can be shown that the (southern) Irish branch of Sinn Féin, not its Northern Ireland wing, is the richer,” McMenamin said.
Sinn Féin in the Republic has been sending money to Belfast in recent years.
The UK Electoral Commission website shows that Sinn Féin in Belfast received £207,182 from Republican Merchandising Ltd, Parnell Square, Dublin, in the period July 2023 to December 2025. The company runs the party’s retail operation, which includes a website, and sells mainly republican T-shirts, badges, books and flags.
A second party company, Parnell Publications Ltd, which published An Phoblacht but has since ceased trading, donated £24,089 to the party in Belfast in July 2023.
In March 2024 the party in Belfast accepted £37,047 from Michael Dollard, from Kilkenny, who had listed the party in Dublin as a recipient of part of his estate.
The extent of public funding for the political parties in the Republic – in 2019 Sinn Féin in the Republic reported 90 per cent of its income as coming from the exchequer – means the bequests accepted by the party in Northern Ireland are unlikely to bleed their way into political expenditure south of the border, McMenamin said in his paper: “Rather than the bequests facilitating transfers southwards, they may reduce the incentive for transfers northwards.”
The new Irish law deliberately set out to force parties to include subsidiary organisations, including foreign subsidiaries, in their annual accounts in the Republic, McMenamin said.
However, the consolidated Sinn Féin accounts for 2024, filed with Sipo in Dublin last year, did not include FOSFUSA as a subsidiary – which McMenamin said he finds “difficult to understand”.
The US organisation was not included despite FOSFUSA describing Sinn Féin as its “foreign principal” in the filings it is obliged to make to the department of justice in Washington.
“The 2024 audited party accounts were prepared in accordance with the new Electoral Reform Act, which introduced updated requirements relating to subsidiaries and financial reporting overseen by Sipo,” the party told The Irish Times last December.
“Under these provisions, Friends of Sinn Féin (FOSFUSA) is not considered a subsidiary of the party for reporting purposes,” it said.
Asked about FOSFUSA non-inclusion in the Sinn Féin accounts, the organisation’s president, Kentucky attorney Mark Guilfoyle, said the New York corporation was managed by a three-member board all of whom resided in the US. It does not have any director or officer who is a member of Sinn Féin, he said.
