Sinn Féin, and their party line
I’ve seen critiques of Sinn Féin’s drift into nativitism that claim that these arise because the party is uniquely post-truth as a result of their decades of
I think that’s an important misdiagnosis because I’m my experience of Irish politics most political parties don’t care about the truth, so Sinn Féin’s particular attitude towards is largely irrelevant.
What is unique to Sinn Féin politicos though is that they’re loyal to their party in ways that other politicians aren’t. I know lots of politicians and lots of Sinn Féin politicians, but I don’t know what the Sinn Féiners personal views on things are because they’re disciplined in giving the party line and not their own view.
A tortured relationship with the truth is not unique to Sinn Féin among political parties. My sense of that period is that Gerry Adams was pushing the politics against the hardliners within the IRA and the constructive ambiguity of those days was diplomatic in nature.
This ambiguity allowed Gerry Adams to pretend to hardliners that the peace process was a gambit that could be stepped back from, should it not work out (and it probably wouldn’t have worked out if the tories had won in 1997). The ambiguity, or strained relationship with the truth (depending on how one wants to view it) created the political space to have the talks that led to the Good Friday Agreement.
Then the IRA retired into community work but all those who had been involved remained involved in the party (unless they became dissidents). If over the intervening period Sinn Féin were to have condemned the IRA they would have been condemning their own members. That would have undermined Sinn Féin as their central myth (to the party and for the peace process) is that they won, it worked, ergo there’s nothing to condemn.
With the following generation of Sinn Féin-ers, it’s very hard to know what their actual views are, because they’re so good at delivering the party line. Mary-Lou McDonald is a genius at this, she is exceptional amongst Irish politicians in being technically competent at delivering the line she wants to give, regardless of the question asked of her.
I’ve been lied to by enough politicians to view Sinn Féins lying as undistinguished. The big difference between them and other parties is that they have a party line and their representatives see their job as delivering that line, rather than offering their own views, or even holding their seat.
They’ve a loyalty to the party that is not present in other parties, and that is what makes their party structures more important than other parties. That’s why I push back on the ‘weasel words’ analysis of Sinn Féin chasing the votes of radical racists. I genuinely don’t believe that their politicos don’t know what the facts of the situation are, and are believers in some hyper-racist simulacrum. I think it’s that a top down decision has been made to go Tory on immigration (to the benefit of the SocDems, Greens, and Lefty Independens) for reasons that are completely obscure to outsiders. Though I think it likely that some boomer-era lead poisoning and social media brain worms are likely impact impacting the members of whatever councils are setting party policy.
So, my concern with Sinn Féin is that their lurch to the Reich on immigration is worse than simply lying for votes sake. It’s that they’ll completely u-turn on policy and they’ll act in lock-step to support the new policy, even if they take personal political pain for it, with no dissent. And we don’t know how their policies are formed. And we don’t know if they will act like that if in government too.
I don’t even think it’ll be useful to contact local TDs about it, they’re a policy black box that isn’t even pragmatic (as per the abortion referendum, when their members were active but the party wasn’t, so they weren’t even populist, they were doing something else). I had thought that they were had developed into a mature political party prior to 2020, but it’s very incongruous to see the likes of Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (whom I’d view as being one of the smartest of the TDs in the house) move from getting punched by Fascists outside Leinster House last September to flirting with them for votes today.
This speaks to issues within the party that are more profound than an ambivalence to the truth.
