Agnès Maillot, Rebels in government, Is Sinn Féin ready for power?
Agnès Maillot, Rebels in Government, Is Sinn Féin Ready for Power?, Manchester, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.
Full text
1In her latest book, Rebels in Government: Is Sinn Féin ready for power?, Agnès Maillot, an expert in Irish republicanism, offers an analysis of a strange and complex political party called Sinn Féin. As Sinn Féin has recently demonstrated its electoral efficiency both North (2017 and 2022 MLA elections) and South (2020 Dáil elections) of the Irish Border, the question she raises is crucial and timely. To answer this question, she depicts Sinn Féin as a fairly flexible and pragmatic political party. She identifies three major inter-related issues which, according to her, define Sinn Féin today and can determine its electoral and political future: its ultimate goal of the reunification of Ireland, its past relationship with the IRA and the legacy of the Troubles and its radical proposals for societal and socio-economic reforms. The three chapters of the book are respectively devoted to these three central themes.
2In the first chapter, the author shows how Sinn Féin is now the main « Reunification Party » on both sides of the Border. This is the end-result of many splits and strategic u-turns. From abstentionism to taking seats in the Dáil and, later, to participation in post-Good Friday Agreement (GFA) institutions, Sinn Féin is still struggling to justify that such strategic flexibility does not equate to incoherence and contradiction. Since the 2016 Brexit referendum, and though they brought down the Northern Irish Executive for very different reasons in 2017, McDonald's party has imposed a debate on the reunification referendum in spite of the party's anti-European tradition and against the adamant rejection voiced by the entire Unionist community. Remaining the Reunification Party will therefore require majority support from Northern and Southern opinion and convincing both Dublin and London that a reunification process is the only democratic solution for Ireland as a whole including Northern Irish unionists.
3In the second chapter, Maillot delves into the question of Sinn Féin's past links with the IRA and the wider issue of the legacy of the Troubles, a period when, in close coordination with the Provisional IRA, Sinn Féin actively contributed to the violent destabilisation of Northern Ireland. Since the GFA and the IRA's decommissioning, war has been considered as over. Maillot shows how Sinn Féin has since developed a double discourse on violence: past Republican violence is now presented as a necessity and as instrumental in bringing about the peace process negotiations while the new democratic circumstances prevailing since 1998 have made physical force obsolete and illegitimate. Rejecting violence now while legitimizing and condoning past violence has taken several forms for Sinn Féin, including commemorations of past events and funerals. However, as Maillot demonstrates, this approach raises further questions. The Provisional IRA of the Troubles is seen by many as different from the old IRA of the Independence War and the so-called legitimacy of Provisional violence is not a consensual notion at all. Even after 1998, some of Sinn Féin's leading figures, like Gerry Adams and the late Martin McGuinness, were living symbols of the horrors committed by the IRA during the Troubles. Although a new generation of leaders have now emerged (McDonald and O'Neill), Sinn Féin's approach to its past, even when it implies public apologies or the "uncomfortable conversations'' published in An Phoblacht, tends to minimize or even negate republican responsibilities, not only for the deaths of innocent people but also for the long term suffering caused by countless injuries or sexual abuses. Sinn Féin also has to confront counter-narratives of its past, particularly from the Unionist/Loyalist side, with some going as far as accusing them of ethnic cleansing. The fact that the GFA has not established an agreed institutional process to deal with all aspects of Northern Ireland's painful and violent past is no mitigating circumstance. Crimes committed by the self-proclaimed soldiers of the Irish Republican ideal after 1969, are still crimes. In other words, Sinn Féin still has a long way to go before these questions are definitely solved.
4In the third chapter, Agnès Maillot analyses Sinn Féin's radical left-wing programme of societal and socio-economic reforms. Due to its anti-socialist origins, it took quite some time for Sinn Féin to assume such left-wing radicalism. Once they accepted to take part in elections, they realised their electoral strongholds happened to be found mostly in deprived areas which led them to introduce socialism into their republicanism. Other events, like the 2008 financial crisis and its devastating socio-economic effects, further convinced Sinn Féin that radicalism could bring massive electoral dividends. As Maillot shows, the party has been very skillful in linking its republican and radical programmes around themes like equality. Slogans like « Equality of Rights for Irish Speakers » or « Marriage equality » or « Equality, Diversity, Solidarity » now flourish, even if, on the question of abortion, Sinn Féin's progressivism is less clear (probably because of the large scale and profound historical influence of Catholicism on the party and its voters). On bread and butter issues, Sinn Féin has proved very pragmatic too. Before the 2020 election in the Republic, opinion surveys clearly showed that voters were interested in housing and health issues more than in unemployment. That is why Sinn Féin proposed large-scale state intervention and regulation in those sectors through, for example, a reshuffled tax system or a constitutional reform to guarantee the right to housing. Added to a very efficient communication strategy, with a particular gift for social media, this radical programme on societal and socio-economic issues bore fruit in 2020, notably among younger voters.
5Maillot's conclusion is fairly optimistic on Sinn Féin's future, which can be debatable: winning elections does not mean you can govern. To be ready for power, Sinn Féin rebels will most likely have to forge coalitions. With whom? In the Republic, Sinn Féin proved incapable of convincing other parties to form a governmental coalition in 2020. And in Northern Ireland, it demonstrated, in 2017, that even when they win elections, exercising power as part of an executive coalition for the good of Northern Irish citizens is not their cup of tea. Even if it finds coalition partners in the Republic, Sinn Féin will then have to make concessions. On what? On reunification, on its criminal past or on its socio-economic radicalism? How long can electoral tactics cover its ideological flexibility? If they do come to power, how long will it take for voters North and South to realise that The Long War was waged for absolutely nothing? How long will it take for voters North and South to realise that a referendum majority in the North and in the South is a necessary but insufficient condition to make reunification democratic and peaceful?
6In other words, the great merit of Agnès Maillot's book is that it clearly shows how, by pragmatism and realism, Sinn Féin has become the most efficient electoral machine on the island of Ireland today but this, in turn, raises another question: why has Sinn Féin not yet become a fully credible party of democratic government even 24 years after the GFA?
References
Electronic reference
Philippe Cauvet, “Agnès Maillot, Rebels in government, Is Sinn Féin ready for power?”, Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XXVII-3 | 2022, Online since 04 January 2023, connection on 16 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/10096; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.10096
Top of pageCopyright
The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.
Top of page


