Whether they are related or not, and they are, Sinn Féin’s posture with regard to immigration and asylum seeking, has shifted in line with both public opinion and its own recent apparent slide in the opinion polls.
If we compare two Ireland Thinks/Sunday Independent polls published just over one year apart, on October 1, 2022, and December 2, 2023, the extent of the fall in Sinn Féin support can be seen.
In the most recent poll, Sinn Féin were at 28%, which confirmed a Red C showing of 29% two weeks earlier and a definite fall off over the previous two months. That contrasts with the 34% recorded at the end of 2022. Indeed, several other polls had Sinn Féin as high as 35% and 37% over the same period.
Opinion polls are liable not only to error and to temporary blips but they have been taken seriously by the Party number crunchers, especially given that there was no usual “bounce” from their Ard Fheis held in Athlone at the beginning of November.
Of more concern, but reflective of the apparent polling slump, is the almost hostile reaction of people towards some Sinn Féin elected representatives at various public forums. On the other hand, a number of Sinn Féin Councillors have been quite open about their support for their own constituents and voters on issues such as the placement of accommodation centres.
One prominent Dublin member told me that the party leadership had been made aware of the concerns of members’ and supporters regarding immigration, particularly in the wake of the trial of Josef Puska and the establishment reaction and effective censorship of the statement made by Ashling Murphy’s boyfriend, Ryan Casey.
He also told me that those concerns had been taken on board and that there would be a notable shift in public positioning.
So it has come to pass. I previously noted how the Sinn Féin speakers during the Rural Independent group’s private members debate on immigration signalled that they did not support “open borders” immigration, and that they understood the concerns being expressed by communities throughout the state.
Last weekend, party leader Mary Lou McDonald gave an arranged one to one interview with The Journal in which she criticised the state for failing to “communicate” with communities on the issue and calling for “space for people to ask questions.” Neither position is one that most people will have associated with Sinn Féin’s almost belligerent and hostile reaction to anyone in their bailiwicks who were questioning something that had the support of the party as much as anyone in Government.
Hubris, perhaps, because their arrogant dismissal, and more, of people in Mary Lou’s own constituency and in areas such as Finglas, Ballymun and Clondalkin, has clearly come back to bite them.
In one photo I saw of a confrontation between a Sinn Féin TD and protestors, I knew two of the prominent “hecklers” as people who were active Sinn Féin supporters 30 years ago and until recently. I did not recognise any of the clutter of Party activists accompanying the TD, and they were no spring chickens I might add.
That is merely a subjective observation on my part, but it does reflect that Sinn Féin support, as proven by their election success of 2020, and in the subsequent steady rise in the polls, is based on a fragile base. That such a base is prone, as are the other two main parties, to sudden shocks and starts, was illustrated in the 2019 local and European elections.
A Red C opinion poll in April 2019 put Sinn Féin support at 15%. On polling day, May 24, that materialised in actual votes as 9.5%. A fall of over 5.6% since 2014 and it meant the loss of 78 of their 159 sitting Councillors. Sinn Féin also lost two of its three European Parliament seats in the state.
Much of the loss was down to the fact that many of the councillors elected in 2014 were just not up to the task, and when entrusted with real power, as over the one million people living in the Dublin City Council area, they made a total mess of it. They pride themselves on their stance on housing, but Dubs can see evidence of their incompetence (and that of their other left fellow travellers) every time they look out their window or try to travel anywhere.
The gap between their poor showing and lowly seat tally – and the fact that they haven’t been able to do much more harm at local level in the interim – and more recent polling figures will mean that they cannot but increase both their vote and seat share when the next elections are held in June 2024. They are also likely to win at least one more seat in the European Parliament.
What seems unlikely, however, is that they will poll a percentage vote close to the dizzying heights of the mid 30s% recorded over the past two years. The nature of the local and Europeans makes that almost an impossible task in these multi-party/“others” days. Which is a sort of a statistical phenomenon – lots of votes spread among lots of competitors.
However, if Sinn Féin fails to recover in the polls, and worse for them if they continue to slide downwards, and that is reflected next June in their getting somewhere in the low 20s%, that might add to a perception that their chances of becoming the largest party after a likely general election in 2025 are greatly reduced. Any prospect of a “left coalition” would then become increasingly unlikely. Interesting times ahead.
Should Sinn Féin attempt to strike a “far right” position on immigration, then the party will risk not only failing to entice people back who have lost patience with them over the issue, but also risk alienating the more liberal open borders element in the party.
Many of the more recent intake, including a significant number of elected representatives and staffers, are not traditional republicans or nationalists. Not a few of them were in anti-republican and anti-nationalist parties before joining Sinn Féin and before becoming employed by the party in various capacities.
As such, they owe no allegiance to the “movement” as it was once conceived and the illusions of whatever vestigial “authority” held by greying oul fellas who nobody even gets to vote for at the Ard Fheis must seem as quaint and as absurd as did those of “Group B” did to the petit bourgeois liberals who took over the Workers Party and transformed it into another anti-nationalist social democratic liberal party.
To what extent will the “left” of the new Sinn Féin stay if the Party goes all For Roysh on their ass? Which is possibly the calculation also being made by the minor parties to Sinn Féin’s left liberal flank in Labour, the SDs and PBP if the Shinners “drift to the right” as I noted one chap, who I had actually thought was a Sinn Féin member, recently put it.
It is notable that those minor parties of the left; Labour, Social Democrats and People Before Profit have clearly doubled down on their support for the most liberal application of what procedures govern asylum seeking in particular.
So while the rantings of Aodhán and the student union speeches of Holly Cairns and the call to unite the racial and class struggles from the communists might appear absurd, they are not considered so by over 10% of the electorate. Nor to quite a considerable section of the Sinn Féin membership and apparat.