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“No one likes us, No one likes us, No one likes us, we don’t care” is one of British football’s most iconic chants, sung by the fans of Millwall FC in the 1970s and 1980s when that club was synonymous with the kind of British football hooliganism that reached its apogee in Lansdowne Road in February 1995.
Millwall fans, of course, are generally very far removed from the supporters of Sinn Fein in almost every respect in terms of their views, except perhaps in the expression of that kind of defiance in the face of disdain from their enemies. The chant could have been used by supporters of Sinn Fein at just about any time between about 1969 and 2009.
As a consequence, we might imagine that recent years as a “Shinner” must have been, on some level, a very disconcerting experience. The “Republican Movement”, as it calls itself, has gone in Ireland from being a widely loathed fraction of the electorate in the 1980s to achieving, in opinion polls just a year or so ago, support approaching 40% of the electorate. Yet the leaders and die-hards of that movement are by and large the same people who were its leaders and die-hards in the years when to be a Shinner was to be disdained, and not care a jot. This matters, I think.
We are all familiar, or should be, with the trope of the unpopular schoolgirl in an American coming-of-age movie who suddenly gets a dash of makeup, loses the glasses, shakes out her hair, and becomes the apple of the Quarterback’s eye. Or of her male counterpart, the widely ignored and mocked nerdy kid whose strange obsession with some computer game or other gives him a sudden inspiration that leads him to save the day, and set the cheerleaders a-swoonin’. This might give us some idea of what it might have been like to have been a prominent Shinner in recent decades – going from it being illegal to broadcast your voice on the national airwaves, to suddenly being invited to bashes with Facebook and Google to discuss your economic policies.
Managing that transition is hard – as hard in life as it is in politics. Do you stay true to yourself, or do you fall into the temptation to become what you once stood against? People who’ve watched Mean Girls will note that this is basically the whole plot of that movie: Linday Lohan’s “Cady” character starts out her high school life in a hated minority of nerdy misfits hated and derided by the powerful establishment social group (“the plastics”) in her school. Like the Shinners, she plots to take it down from the inside. Like the Shinners, she ends up, most of the way through the film, a full-blown establishmentarian herself, and her old friends turn on her.
Many pages of ink have been spilled on the basic point that Sinn Fein’s collapse in support in recent months has been driven by discontent with the party over a series of perceived betrayals: Supporting the Government wholeheartedly on lockdowns was probably the first error, followed up by the bizarre decision to support two ridiculous referendums, and compounded by a firm decision to stand by FF and FG over immigration. A party whose whole raison d’etre was taking down the plastics now stands before the nation, more plastic than the plastics themselves. This is such a feature of the human condition that the same basic story is littered through classical and popular literature: Orwell’s farm animals, unable to tell the pigs from the men. Tolkein’s Saruman the White, serving Sauron instead of destroying him. Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, shouting at Darth Vader: You were supposed to destroy the sith – not join them. This basic idea comes up so often in literature that one might begin to think it is inate to the human condition, and that Sinn Fein are a real-world example of the phenomenon.
In Mean Girls, Cady eventually gets her redemption arc, but to get there she needs to engage in a very public act of atonement, apologising to those she had wronged and begging their forgiveness, which is granted.
Sinn Fein, you will note, has not sought forgiveness or performed any atonement. Instead, it is compounding the error – it is still trying to pose as the misfit outsider who stands against the oppressive system, when the world can see that it is no longer any such thing. Its populist credentials have been burned, almost sacrificially, in the eagerness to become a plastic in good standing.
The latest stuff – sex scandals, resignations, TDs claiming that they are being pushed out of the party by a group of shadowy insiders – does nothing to detract from Sinn Fein’s now fundamental image problem. People like Patricia Ryan and Brian Stanley, whatever else one might say about them, were there in Sinn Fein’s Millwall days, taking the incoming fire with the rest of them. It is people like that, it might appear to some, who are no longer fashionable or cool enough for the new, post glow-up Sinn Fein.
This is, really, the fundamental problem. It won’t be solved with anything less than a redemption arc, and that redemption arc – as in the movies – should really begin with a full-throated and genuine apology. Sinn Fein were supposed to represent people, and they failed to do so. Until they recognise that, they’re going to continue to suffer.
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