Sinn Féin had a great Covid. But a bad Ukraine

Sinn Féin is on a charm offensive.

Eoin Ó Broin freely admitted on Prime Time that he was meeting developers. Emissaries are also being sent to other parts of the corporate world at the behest of the party leadership.

To its core of young working class followers, Sinn Féin fraternising with law firms and the like might smack of infidelity. But realpolitik calls the shots as Sinn Féin now sees itself as the government in waiting; its envoys as putative ministers in that government.

In short, Sinn Féin is marrying up in political terms. However unpalatable it might seem to its hard left devotees, moving on means moving up.

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But the big problem for Sinn Féin, as government in waiting, is they don’t know how long they will have to wait: this government, if it keeps up its surprisingly stable run, has between two and three years left.

It’s likely to be a long engagement. That is a problem.

Nobody put it more succinctly than Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest: “To speak frankly I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s characters before marriage, which is not advisable.”

If last week’s Irish Times/Ipsos poll is to be believed, those inadvisable character evaluations have begun. Sinn Féin dropped 2 per cent, while support for the Government grew by 5 per cent.

As always, when Sinn Féin has an awkward encounter with history, it is history which has to give way

Although the drop from 35 per cent to 33 per cent is not big and Sinn Féin polls significantly higher than any individual government party, it is nonetheless a drop and a reversal of their upward trajectory over the past two years.

So what’s changed?

For two years, we all lived in the shadows, adrift without life’s normal rituals to anchor us. With a population stuck at home in a housing crisis, discontent grew – particularly among young professionals. And Sinn Féin lucked out with a very vocal and capable spokesman, Eoin Ó Broin. Their support grew by half again.

Sinn Féin had a great Covid. But a bad Ukraine.

For proof of the paradigm shifts the war in Ukraine can effect, look no further than Britain. Boris Johnson will not be cast out over “partygate”. Lying to parliament fades in the face of his weapons donations and Kyiv walkabout with Zelenskiy.

As the Irish response to Russia’s invasion unfolded, Sinn Féin realised they could find themselves on the wrong side of history, with their website replete with denunciations of Nato and sympathy with Vladimir Putin. As always, when Sinn Féin has an awkward encounter with history, it is history which has to give way.

Just as the French Revolutionary Convention wiped the past and established a new calendar beginning with Vendemiaire (the year France was declared a Republic,) Sinn Féin wiped their inconvenient ideological history. Their website archive now begins at Pearse Doherty’s budget speech from October 2019. In other words, on the eve of Covid, their year Vendemiaire. The French calendar didn’t work.

But being slow off the Ukraine mark hardly accounts for this new embryonic unease. Sinn Féin, for all its pieties and opportunisms, has a surprising tendency to self-sabotage. Take the strange case of Eoin Ó Broin, for many the acceptable face of Sinn Féin and poster boy for their newly minted young professional following.

It has been noted by astute observers that Ó Broin has a different “voice” from most of Sinn Féin. As a general rule Sinn Féin deploys the passive voice, nowhere best exemplified than Mary Lou MacDonald on Times Radio describing the murder of Lord Mountbatten as something “that happened” rather than a murder the IRA actually did.

The irony for Sinn Féin capitalising on the housing crisis is that the refugee influx actually gives the Government the potential to take previously untapped measures on housing

Ó Broin, an ideologue who is turned on by social policy, doesn’t do the passive voice. Which is undoubtedly what led to his suggestion that Gerry Adams should apologise for the “Tiocfaidh ár lá” Christmas carol, with all its IRA connotations. The silence from the rest of the party was deafening. Sinn Féin’s brand of narcissistic nationalism requires conformity – Bobby Storey funeral, Gerry Adams’ Christmas carol, these are their icons. And Ó Broin transgressed.

It’s no secret he has been feeling the chill from the Sinn Féin press office. Where once he was ubiquitous, he now appears rarely and only to talk about housing.

The irony for Sinn Féin capitalising on the housing crisis is that the refugee influx actually gives the Government the potential to take previously untapped measures on housing. If they have the courage to transcend the cost of living shocks.

Sinn Féin knows it is on a knife edge. The difference between 30 per cent (about 54 seats) and 34 per cent (about 60) is the difference between government and opposition. And, right now, 48 per cent satisfaction with the government shows a definite desire for continuity.

In the last election Sinn Féin benefitted from The Great Flirtation – older, middle-class “sophisticated” voters who fancied they could engineer a radical chic opposition, with no terrible (taxed) consequences for themselves.

Middle-class people indulging in the whiff of cordite is almost Tolstoyan and something canny television writers have expertly exploited. Tony Soprano’s neighbour, Dr Cusamano, was keen to show him off in a round of golf at his country club. Soprano was up for it too. It didn’t work. Because although Soprano felt like “a dancing bear”, Dr Cusamano felt something else – fear of what he had opened up.

If this poll is to be believed the Sinn Féin Flirters are getting nervous about the party’s meteoric rise. The charm is wearing off. There may be a lot less skinny dipping at the deep end of the poll.