Poll shows SF survives bashing by media

On two facing pages of last Saturday's Irish Independent (the compact edition) there appeared a column by Bruce Arnold headed "Adams loses direction and pays heavily for it", and on the opposite page there is a chart showing the ratings of the parties in an opinion poll conducted for the newspaper last week.

The poll was conducted in the midst of the most hostile blizzard Sinn Féin has faced in well over a decade. The party was being blamed for the collapse on December 8th of the talks on a restoration of the Good Friday institutions.

Its sister organisation, the IRA, was being blamed for the Northern Bank robbery of December 20th and a massive money-laundering and racketeering operation. Members of the IRA were being blamed for the murder of Robert McCartney in east Belfast a few weeks previously and a consequent mass intimidation of witnesses. For once, the Sinn Féin leadership seemed unsure of themselves and their organisation(s).

If ever there was a time that the party might be expected to dip in the opinion polls, especially in the South, this was it. You could certainly expect Gerry Adams and his party to pay heavily for the public relations debacle of the previous weeks, as the headline suggested.

But looking over at the chart on the facing page, what do we find? Fianna Fáil doing very nicely thank you, recovering to its 2002 level of 42 per cent of support. That was, and is, regarded as a triumph for the party.

Not so good for the Progressive Democrats. Given the high profile of Mary Harney and Michael McDowell in the recent past, and particularly the running McDowell has made on the Sinn Féin issue, you might have expected the PDs to break out of the margin of error territory (given the margin of error in polls such as this is around 3 percentage points, on one reading of the PD rating they have no support at all, although on anther reading they might have 6 per cent). But, no, they are stuck in the margin of error terrain.

After all the hype about a Fine Gael revival they are showing worse than they did even in the 2002 election meltdown - down from 23 per cent to 20 per cent. Actually looking at how Fine Gael has fared in this poll (Millward Brown/IMS) since the last election, it has never rated higher than it did in 2002. Some revival! Labour has also fared very poorly, showing at just 12 per cent.

But Sinn Féin, the party of Gerry Adams who has paid heavily for losing direction, is showing at 9 per cent. And don't take my estimation of this rating, look at what the Irish Independent's own poll commentator, Michael Marsh of Trinity College, said about it: Sinn Féin "will be delighted to see its vote holding up well". And so it should be. The party got 7 per cent in the 2002 election and the poll now shows it at 9 per cent. At the very least what one can say about Sinn Féin and this poll is that the party shows no sign at all of paying any price, certainly not paying "heavily" as a result of the recent hostile publicity.

Bruce Arnold has an explanation for this. He writes: "The supporters of Sinn Féin-IRA in the areas targeted by the party members seeking votes are motivated by self-interest". He goes on to explain that voters in disadvantaged areas don't care about the great issues to do with the restoration of the Northern Ireland Executive.

Apparently they are so selfish that they care only about disadvantage. I promise you, I am not making this up. (His actual words are: "What Sinn Féin-IRA has done to frustrate the restoration of an executive in Northern Ireland is hardly going to concentrate the minds of people living in disadvantaged areas".)

There is a sense in which Bruce Arnold is dead right. The disadvantaged are so alienated from the political establishment down here that they see no option but to vote for the party they perceive as furthest outside the establishment, Sinn Féin, and they couldn't care less how many banks Sinn Féin and their friends rob or how much money they launder and the more Michael McDowell fulminates about Sinn Féin, the more they like Sinn Féin.

I have a fear, however, that the people who now support Sinn Féin are being duped. Again. Not because Sinn Féin is secretly planning to impose a fascist dictatorship here which will imprison us all. Nor because Sinn Féin is essentially a massive criminal enterprise, using politics for criminal purposes, nor because they are planning to return to war.

It is because the Sinn Féin long-term agenda is to respectabilise itself. To ingratiate itself with the respectable elements of society, North and South. To join government with one of the respectable parties and, when in government, show how respectable and responsible it is on every front: on fiscal rectitude, on the prudent management of public expenditure, and, wait for it, law and order.

The disadvantaged shouldn't be fooled by bank robberies.