As Sinn Féin held its ardfheis in Belfast last week, there was reporting of rumblings of discontent with the leadership of Mary Lou McDonald. The uneasiness may be overblown given opinion polls suggest Sinn Féin is the most popular Irish political party, but it is no exaggeration to suggest the party is unsure where to place itself.
There is nothing new in that. One of the interesting characters to emerge during the original Sinn Féin ascendancy in 1918 was Fr Michael O’Flanagan from Roscommon. As a Catholic priest, he embraced republican politics with such vigour that his efforts earned him censure from his superiors in the church. But he remained dogged and was elected one of the vice-presidents of Sinn Féin and later chaplain of the First Dáil in 1919.
O’Flanagan was also frank about the danger of ideological wooliness. Sinn Féin triumphed in the December 1918 election, riding the wave of post-1916 sentiment and anger over the British plan to impose military conscription on Ireland. It proved attractive to an expanded and younger electorate and crushed the previously dominant Irish Parliamentary Party. Yet following its victory, O’Flangan reputedly said: “The people have voted Sinn Féin. Now we have to explain to them what Sinn Féin is.”
For all its poll topping in 1918, some Sinn Féin politicians were wary of being perceived as too radical or embracing class politics. The Democratic Programme unveiled by the new Dáil in 1919 included the assertions that “all right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare”, and “the first duty of the Government of the Republic is to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of the children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing”. Some of its content emanated from the Labour Party that had stood aside from the 1918 general election but was buoyed by the potential for postwar international socialism to develop.
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Serious labour unrest in Limerick in 1919, including a strike backed by the Limerick United Trades and Labour Council, prompted a response from The Irish Times, describing it as “a very bold and candid experiment in Irish syndicalism”, but that such “Bolshevism” would not succeed, as nationally, “the bulk of labour” was too cautious and “in our farming classes the sense of property is sacred and strong.”
The strike lost its momentum amid criticism from church figures and fears it would dilute nationalist unity. Towards its end, Sinn Féin’s Eoin MacNeill was getting increasingly concerned about reports in America of Sinn Féin being “under the red flag” and told a Chicago newspaper “We Irish are neither Russian nor international ... the wind behind the Irish red flag is not strong.”
Establishing the Irish republic, it became clear, was to be about a strong wind behind a Tricolour rather than a red flag. So how would Sinn Féin be ideologically defined while engaged in its quest for a unified republic? One of the party’s propagandists, Aodh de Blacam, sought to answer that with his 1921 book What Sinn Féin Stands For. De Blacam, born in London, but descended from a Protestant Newry family, concluded that “the strength of Ireland is the spirituality of her ideal.” His preferred option was “social Gaelicism”, amounting to “a native socialistic order” which would travel, as it had historically, only to the point that it “did not part with the law of God”.
Both capitalism and feudalism, de Blacam’s argument went, were “external” impositions on Ireland, but by resurrecting long-crushed Gaelic traditions, Ireland could become a co-operative rural utopia untarnished by industrialism: “Every Irish social thinker envisages the Gaelic polity as a rural polity. The great crowded industrial cities of Britain and America are regarded in Ireland generally as horrible perversions of the natural order.”
This was delusional, but in keeping with the cultural formation of that generation. Contemporary Sinn Féin has its own versions of the dilemmas of yesteryear. It seeks to reassure more affluent voters that it is not unthinkingly populist; it chases urban working-class voters but has shredded its socialist language while also shifting its language on immigration. It courts rural Ireland by making common cause with fuel protesters and insisting on reduction of fuel taxes while also declaring a united Ireland would be, in McDonald’s words last week, a “vehicle” for a “dynamic all-island economy, energy independence, climate justice”. But a united Ireland does not loom large as a priority for the electorate.
Last week’s Sunday Times quoted an unnamed “senior TD” from Sinn Féin asking: “Are we Sinn Féin or are we Independent Ireland? ... no one knows what we stand for.” McDonald insists Sinn Féin is at its strongest since 1921; in power in Belfast and heading opinion polls in the Republic. But there is still little clear indication of where it is going.
