Sinn Féin found itself yesterday in the rather embarrassing situation in which they were outflanked on the Left in the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont, not only by the sole People Before Profit MLA Gerry Carroll but by the SDLP, the Ulster Unionist Party and Traditional Unionist Voice.
This somewhat bizarre fix came about as a consequence of the Health Minister, Robin Swann of the UUP, not only rejecting the agreed budgetary allocation for his Department but also voting against the Budget in its entirety. He has resigned and been replaced by party colleague Mike Nesbitt who also along with the other UUP members, the SDLP, TUV and Carroll made up the 21 of MLAs who rejected the budget.
The budget had been negotiated by Sinn Féin Finance Minister Caoimhe Archibald with the outgoing Tory government in London, and was backed by her own party, the DUP and Alliance.
Swann had notified his intention to oppose the budget prior to the Assembly debate. He said that he could not accept any cuts to health services that would be required.
That places Sinn Féin in the rather surreal position of what SDLP leader Mark Durkan described as failing to “undo the savage cuts” and effectively embedding the “Tory shark attacks on public services.”
Durkan also recalled Sinn Féin Deputy Speaker Carál Ní Chuilín’s “all-singing, all-dancing housing strategy” when she used to be Minister for Communities.
That strategy was “going to deliver 100,000 houses.” Such a vision was now replaced by a cut of 45% in the Department’s capital budget at a time when 6,000 more people had been added to the list of those in “housing stress,” and the number of households in temporary accommodation has increased by 50%.
There are now well over 40,000 on the north’s housing list and one MLA quoted the Chartered Institute of Housing’s claim that 400 fewer houses will be built in 2024 due to the cuts.
Jim Allister of Traditional Unionist Voice, about as right wing as you might find in the conventional context of northern politics, slammed the “Sinn Féin austerity budget” and described that party as the “New Tories.”
Allister also summarised the strange existential world of Sinn Féin in observing that “even though Sinn Féin has the authority and is in charge, it is still someone else’s fault. It is still the British Government’s fault.”
But of course, they seamlessly manage to reconcile all of this by continuing also to engage in relentless virtue signalling. The day’s session began with a solemn declaration by party ideologue, the Antonio Gramsci of South Antrim, Declan Kearney on Palestine.
This was followed by a good example of what Allister was referring to when West Tyrone SF MLA Maolíosa McHugh lamented the lack of funding for Gaelscoileanna just hours before voting for a budget that will further reduce such funding and require holds being placed on all school projects according to Gerry Carroll of PBP.
And yet the Shinners would have you believe that they will solve the housing problem in the 26 Counties not only for those currently seeking a home, but for tens of thousands of others who they believe ought to continue to arrive here and be accommodated mostly at public cost.
The schizophrenic nature of Sinn Féin was illustrated by the fact that on the same day that their Finance Minister was proposing an “austerity budget” in the British controlled part of Ireland in which they are area managers, their comrades in Leinster House were – with nary a blush gracing their earnest countenance – engaged in attacking the “Free Staters” for doing lots of all the same sort of stuff.
They had a Private Members Motion on local authority housing debated yesterday. A motion that refers to exactly the sort of shortage of funding for social housing that they were happily proposing and voting for in their very own budget a 100 miles up the road in the “occupied six.”
Cork North Central Sinn Féin TD Thomas Gould claimed that Sinn Féin has “solutions” for all of this. Has he not heard? Does he not follow what his comrades are up to in Stormont? Or perhaps he is too busily engaged in the sort of activities described here by Ben Scallan, tackling notional racism and what not and cavorting with fist waving George Floyd devotees.
Not surprisingly, the north of Ireland Budget has not been mentioned by the Ógra Shinn Féin which has gone full Palestine of late in an effort, after the manner of Violet Elizabeth of the Just William tales, to “thcream and thcream” in order to block out the dissonant noises of a real world in which the grown up party is about as revolutionary as any other bunch of snake oil peddling social democratic liberals. .
The revolutionary youth did find time to retweet a post by former Minister of the Crown in the north Michelle Gildernew who is running as a candidate in the Midlands North West constituency for the European Parliament. The Gildernew tweet begins with footage of images from the 1981 hunger strike and the election campaign for Bobby Sands in Fermanagh/South Tyrone.
I shall leave the tenuous historical claim jumping to themselves. It would be invidious to even attempt to imagine what they might have made of it all …