Over the past ten days or so, Ireland’s main opposition party has been convulsed by an existential question: Is it okay for top Sinn Fein leaders to voyage to the United States on Saint Patrick’s Day, and talk to the likes of Joe Biden, while the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza continues to rage on?
This weekend featured a sombre and stern intervention on the topic from the closest thing the Shinners have to an infallible Pope: Yes, we may journey across the Atlantic, intoned Gerry Adams, for our Palestinian brethren will understand. He’s probably right: Hamas surely know the importance of fundraising themselves.
On Friday, the Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy, normally an eagle-eyed observer of politics who rarely gets it wrong, declared to the great and the good who consume his weekly missive that “Gaza is now a major issue in Irish politics”. Sinn Fein’s soul-searching over whether to book their transatlantic flights in advance tends to back that theory up, but only if you define “politics” as what happens in the increasingly demented fever-swamps of Leinster House.
Yesterday, evidence emerged that perhaps Irish politics extends beyond the reaches of the opposition benches and the weekly protests in central Dublin. Despite having spent most of the last month leading the charge on Leahy’s “major issue in Irish politics”, the Shinners have a bona fide political crisis on their hands: Their support has collapsed back to 25%, per that gold-standard of Irish political polls, Red C for the Sunday Business Post.
At this point we might take a step back and recognise that even that very poor by recent standards result for Sinn Fein still represents an enormous transformation in the party’s standing with the public. As recently as the 2016 general election, the party won just 13.8% of the vote. At the election before, in 2011, it did not break 10%. These figures should tell us two things: First that the party has been very successful over the last decade at growing its appeal beyond its natural, core support base. But second, that it now has the support of lots of voters who were never in that natural core support base to begin with. The last 12 or so years have seen an enormous growth in what we might call casual shinners.
At the same time, a disproportionate chunk of Sinn Fein’s membership, TDs, and activists are not drawn from the ranks of the casual shinners, but from the hard core old guard. The people who were shinners back in the day when being a shinner meant you were properly excluded from polite society. The kind of people, in other words, who think of a Palestinian Keffiyeh scarf the way you and I might think about wearing a tie or cufflinks: It’s what you put on when you want to look like your best self.
Politics, ultimately, is a representative game: The people who win, usually, are those who are the most in touch with a broad swathe of casual public opinion. One of the most regularly asked questions in private polling, when political parties are trying to fine tune their messages, is to ask voters whether a certain party or politicians “shares the concerns of people like me”. This is why politicians go to such absurd lengths to be photographed at GAA games, or why they tweet out their love of particular television programs, or why they pretend to be all-in on supporting Ireland’s latest dreadful Eurovision act and pretend to be shocked and heartbroken when it inevitably crashes out in the semi-final. Looking like a normal Irish person is sort of fundamental to the whole act.
Of course, the normal Irish person does not wear a Palestinian Keffiyeh scarf, or agonise about whether good relations with the Americans might insult our friends in Hamas.
It is reasonable to believe that at least some of Sinn Fein’s recent slump has come from casual shinners suddenly realising that the hardcore shinners are still in charge, and that, frankly, they’re a bit weird.
Of course, that weirdness does not simply extend to the borderline obsessiveness about a minor war on the far side of the Mediterranean. The party is also in a bind on immigration, amongst other issues, as Eoin O’Malley pointed out in yesterday’s Sunday Independent:
“In the Irish National Election Study in 2020 we could see Fine Gael voters were fairly unconcerned about immigration (13pc mentioned it as one of the most important issues) but twice as many supporting Sinn Féin mentioned it (27pc). Tellingly, the rate for left-wing parties was zero.”
Fully a quarter of Sinn Fein voters were exercised about immigration as far back as 2020, when the present immigration crisis was a mere twinkle in Leo Varadkar’s eye. There’s a fair chance that number has grown, and there’s more than a fair chance that a good number of those voters were “casual shinners”, voting Sinn Fein on the understanding that hardline Irish nationalism would probably express itself in relative hostility to high immigration.
Here again, though, there’s a gulf between the casuals and the hardcore: The true red-and-green life-long Sinn Fein activist is much more steeped than the casual voter is in the dreams of socialist internationalism, and much more suspicious of anything “right wing”, than the casual anti-establishment Mary-Lou voter is. If Sinn Fein isn’t going to do a job on immigration, and sounds just like Labour and the Social Democrats on the issue, then the casual voter will walk.
This is the party’s big problem in a nutshell: It has the voter base of a broad mainstream party, thanks to rapid growth. But it retains the membership and activist base of a crank party of the hard left, because that’s what it was to be a shinner just a decade ago. Most of the time, for the last three years, Sinn Fein has been able to keep the keffiyeh wearing militants under wraps. But now Benjamin Netanyahu has unleashed them, at roughly the same time as the party is in a bind on immigration.
Gaza might be dominating politics, as Pat Leahy wrote on Friday. But immigration is dominating the minds of voters. At a time when Sinn Fein need to be standing with Irish voters, they’re wrestling instead about how a trip to the US might go down with voters in Gaza.
That’s what you might call a “weirdo” problem. And it explains, I think, their sudden slump.