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There is, depressingly enough, nothing particularly out of the ordinary, at least in Irish terms, about the latest Sinn Fein scandal.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Man – in this case former press officer Michael McMonagle – is accused of committing sexual offences. People who know him rally around, provide references, and insist he’s a great lad altogether – before later realising that this doesn’t look great.
That story could have been about the case in Kerry a few years ago where a parade of local titans of the community lined up to shake hands in court with a convicted rapist. Or it could have been about any one of about 47 clerics. Or it could have been about Bill Keneally, the convicted serial sex abuser about whom a commission of enquiry was established, in order to figure out whether he might have been stopped sooner or whether “state agencies and political figures” dropped the ball on that one.
It is not even a new scandal in Sinn Fein, a party which has in recent years dealt (appallingly) with sexual abuse allegations from Maria Cahill, and been forced to come to terms with the fact that the brother of the man who remains the closest thing Shinners have to a Pope died in prison in 2019, three years into a sixteen-year sentence for rape and gross indecency against his own daughter.
Given that this is not a new scandal in Ireland, and that public reaction to such things is generally consistent, and not negative, you really begin to wonder what’s wrong with Sinn Fein in its current incarnation that is causing it to make such a mess out of relatively straightforward political questions so quickly. Let me give you a theory:
One of the interesting things about Sinn Fein, this writer has often thought, is the degree to which there are parallels between the party (and indeed the wider provisional movement) and the Catholic Church at its worst. Both are, ultimately, authoritarian and hierarchical movements. For all the talk of being a democratic party, Sinn Fein has never held a contested leadership election. Its leaders appear, fully formed, from a process that might actually become clearer with the addition of some white and black smoke.
Indeed the party remains – this is not something it talks about in public – committed to the Leninist principles of democratic centralism, a system by which policy is determined at the centre, by party committees, and is thus rendered binding on all members. For years journalists have strived to figure out who it is, precisely, who sets these policies – but it is like looking into a black box. The Roman Curia, again, could give the Shinners a lesson in transparency.
Sinn Fein also has the ideological structure of a religion: It has a promised land that will Tiocfaidh, just as sure as the second coming of Christ. It has the blood of the martyred and venerated saints of the movement’s own making. It has annual and public professions of faith and reverence. It has an original sin – partition – for which the unfaithful must account. And for years, like many religions, it ran its own internal disciplinary systems and offered penance to the offending, albeit with kneecappings a more severe form of penance than three hail marys.
The problem, I would venture, with this kind of structure is that it means that the Shinners lack the kind of internal accountability that other parties tend to have: When an organisation is centralised and top-down and “get in line” is the ethos of the day, it lacks a certain internal warning light.
In Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, for all those parties have many flaws, it is not unheard of for a parliamentary party meeting to be leaked and for those leaks to mention that the meeting was stormy. We might hear that John McGuinness or Willie O’Dea gave the leadership what the British would call a frightful dressing down, or we might hear from the generally more genteel blueshirts that Charlie Flanagan warned the Taoiseach that such and such a bill was a bad idea.
You never, ever, get such a leak from the Sinn Fein parliamentary party. Because Shinners do not step out of line. Even when their leadership is taking them off a cliff.
Thus, I would argue, the current mess, in which it has taken Sinn Fein the best part of two weeks to figure out that being on the side of a sex offender is perhaps incompatible with being on the side of the public.
To that mess you could add the party’s ongoing difficulty over immigration policy, where it has somehow managed to get outflanked by the Government on opposing Government policy. Simon Harris is now a bigger critic of the Government’s immigration record than Mary Lou McDonald is – largely because Simon Harris gets feedback from his canvassers, while Sinn Fein canvassers get orders from central office.
For years, Sinn Fein’s critics – perhaps most prominently Michael McDowell and, from this parish, Kevin Myers – have argued that Sinn Fein is simply not a normal party and that this is why it must be kept from Government at all costs. Most people, I think, hearing that argument, automatically assume that the “abnormality” in question relates to the provisional IRA. But this is only true in part.
Sinn Fein’s democratic centralist structure also renders it fundamentally abnormal, at least for any putative party of Government in the western world. Like most things that Lenin called “democratic”, his system of democratic centralism is not democratic at all. It is top down, authoritarian, and treats party members as cannon fodder – or canvassing fodder – rather than people with voices and views of their own.
That all works well, when the party leadership is in touch with the views of the electorate. The problems emerge when that is no longer the case – who is there amongst the regular membership to challenge Mary Lou? Who would dare?
Shinners will have to hope that their – ahem – central committee figures this out. Because there’s no internal rebellion coming to wake them up to the fact that their leader has lost her touch, lost her feel, and lost her ability to sense where the wind is blowing: Even on topics where the wind has been consistent, and strong, for several decades.
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