Reports of Sinn Féin's demise may be exaggerated, but following a bruising election, it must face some hard truths and regroup, writes Mark Hennessy, Political Correspondent
With the Northern Ireland conflict hopefully receding into the mists of history, Sinn Féin must change significantly if it is to make gains in the Republic, or else face the danger of withering.
Six weeks after the general election, the party is not short of self-analysis: much of it blunt, with few totems sacred, including Gerry Adams.
During two much-criticised RTÉ television appearances, Adams seemed out of touch with opinion in the Republic, and poorly informed on the economy.
"We don't need to be overly defensive about Adams," says Louth TD Arthur Morgan, in his Williamson's Place constituency office in Dundalk. "Adams is big enough to take criticism, and he has been criticised, as I am sure you have seen, by party members. That is fine, too. We dust ourselves down. We learn the lessons and we improve."
However, the damage done by Adams was serious, even if he himself believes that the debate with Pat Rabbitte, Michael McDowell and Trevor Sargent was not as significant as others argue.
Instead, Adams believes that Bertie Ahern was the one to gain from the euphoria surrounding the Sinn Féin/Democratic Unionist Party deal, rather than Sinn Féin. "There was a bounce out of the peace process, but Bertie got it. It was quite clear: the Westminster address, the Battle of the Boyne ceremony, engaging with Ian Paisley, the Stormont opening," the party's president says by telephone from the US.
BUT THAT HAD not been the case early in the campaign. Labour became concerned when, in polling after the Stormont deal, Adams's ratings with voters soared. "It was incredible," says one senior Labour strategist. "In working-class areas, people were saying that Adams was different to everyone else. In middle-class areas, the voters had lost the language they had to criticise Sinn Féin." But, following the TV displays, the voters' mood changed: "For the first time, Sinn Féin went to doors only to find that voters were saying, 'janey, your man let you down'."
Though the programme had 560,000 viewers, its "viral damage" spread wider. "People went into pubs and heard that Adams had done badly. That creates its own reality," the Labour strategist concludes.
For some, Adams's performance in the four-way debate, and subsequently on RTÉ's Six One, crystallised for them the view that Sinn Féin is still a Northern-dominated party.
Adams accepts the argument, but only in part: "I don't think it is an issue in terms of [ the implication that] there is in some way a resistance to Northerners. After all, President McAleese is from Ardoyne. I don't think that there is that type of resistance, except in a very, very small section who would not be voting for SF anyway.
"I do think, in terms of us developing, that we do have a difficulty in that the party president wasn't standing in the elections," he continues. "That is a difficulty for us. We have a southern leadership, or we have a southern dimension to our national leadership. We have to build their public profile."
Indeed they do. Cavan/Monaghan TD Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin has led the party in the Dáil for the past five years, but, despite enormous effort, has failed to connect with the public.
Had Sinn Féin's election campaign gone according to plan, it would have provided a new crop of leaders one generation removed from The Troubles, such as Pádraig Mac Lochlainn and Pearse Doherty in Donegal.
In truth, key people in Sinn Féin are from the South, such as its director of publicity, Dawn Doyle. "We are an all-Ireland party, but we are not good at presenting that fact," says one party member.
So far, however, Sinn Féin has not yet come to a conclusion to explain its performance, in which no gains were made and Seán Crowe lost the seat he had held for five years in Dublin South West. The reasons are numerous: Fianna Fáil's late surge; the way in which the election became a Bertie Ahern/Enda Kenny contest; and Sinn Féin's lack of coalition options.
However, there is another possibility, less palatable in the eyes of Sinn Féin: perhaps voters have less interest in the party now that The Troubles are deemed to be over. Already, Sinn Féin's opponents are quietly spreading the message that the party's high water mark in the Republic has been reached, regardless of successes in Northern Ireland.
Adams does not agree: "We have work to do to get our message across, obviously, but we will set about finding ways to do that in a way which is better than we have been able to do. If I thought that we were not going to learn the lessons that will come out of our own deliberations, then I would be concerned, but we are a party that engages in a lot of self-criticism and self-analysis.
"We would not be where we are if we were not capable of doing that, so anyone who is trying to write off Sinn Féin in the South, or on the island, is making a very, very big mistake," he warns.
However, the declining significance of Northern Ireland on the Republic's politics is a factor. In future, Sinn Féin will not be able to piggy-back on northern events to gain traction south of the Border.
Fine Gael TD Brian Hayes, who lost five years ago when Crowe was elected, says: "People [ in 2002] thought they were doing the right thing in the peace process and wanted to support them. The fact that the northern deal was done so close to the election reinforced the message that the problem was dealt with. That hurt them, rather than helped them.
"They might encourage you to deliver something, but once it is delivered it is delivered. Once the peace was delivered, people said, 'Next business'."
On the policy front, Sinn Féin's message to the electorate was confused, with late changes to its corporation-tax policy dropping previous proposals that the tax should increase from 12.5 percent to 17.5 per cent.
Though Adams argues now that he had been pushing for a change for "20 months", he still called for the higher rate in his February 2006 ardfheis speech, while Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin was still pushing the message last November.
The plan to impose a 50 per cent tax rate on all income earned above €100,000 went the same way, though Sinn Féin, unlike Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour, told voters that they would not cut taxes. The changes, though the detail may have passed voters by, sent out a message that Sinn Féin was trimming its sails to get into government - an uncomfortable message for some southern rank-and-file members.
In any event, Sinn Féin's tax and economic message did not satisfy the political zeitgeist - one in which voters want better public services, but are not prepared to pay more for them.
Sinn Féin's failure to understand, or, perhaps, recognise the voters' priorities, has dominated the letters page of the party's newspaper, An Phoblacht, since the election.
"With Election 2007, the 'Me Generation' was born and they came out to vote in force on issues around their own personal economic welfare," wrote Louth-based Ógra Shinn Féin member Eugene Garvey. "We have to respect that vote and we have to accept that [ Sinn Féin] economic policy did not satisfy their wants or needs."
However, others take the view that the political pendulum will swing in time, including 30-year-old Louth county councillor Thomas Sharkey, who uses an alcohol metaphor to explain his point.
"People of my age will tell you on a Sunday afternoon that they shouldn't have had those five Bacardis. In the run-up to the election, we were trying to tell people about our arguments. The establishment parties were trying to tell young people to consume all that was going. Now it is Sunday morning. Now it is the hangover stage and the young voters are realising that they should have taken our advice and taken a pint of water after every second drink. Sometimes it takes until after the election for people to realise."
IN THE EYES of some, Seán Crowe lost out in Dublin South West because of a poor constituency performance and the presence of Labour leader Pat Rabbitte, the man then poised to be Tánaiste.
The first argument is incorrect, while the second only partially explains Sinn Féin's problem. In fact, a detailed examination of the result holds much that should worry the party's leadership.
Rabbitte's vote in the middle-class districts of the rapidly changing constituency actually fell, according to tally figures seen by The Irish Times, but his vote in working-class areas increased sharply. In the Knockmore National School polling station, Crowe took 27 per cent of the first preferences, down dramatically on the 50-plus per cent he received five years ago.
In the Fettercairn National School boxes, Crowe's tally dipped to 29 per cent, down from 40-plus per cent in 2002; while the situation in Jobstown was no better.
Hayes's argument that some voters had "loaned" their support to Sinn Féin in 2002 is illustrated by the results from the more affluent Kingswood district, where Crowe's tally fell from 12 percent to 5 per cent.
Though the analysis currently underway is searching, Sinn Féin is, perhaps, shying away from the harsh reality, concentrating on the fact that its national vote increased.
It did, by 20,000 first preferences on the 121,000 it received in 2002. But Sinn Féin ran 27 candidates in 2002, whereas this time it ran 42 candidates in 41 constituencies.
The greater national spread of candidates partially explains why opinion polls did not highlight in advance the difficulties Sinn Féin was to face on polling day.
Following the election, Fianna Fáil, which has been indulging itself by offering a revisionist version of recent history, has argued that it saw all along that Sinn Féin would run into trouble.
Regardless of what it might say now, Fianna Fáil did not. Neither did anybody else. Even Labour, which picked up signals in the days before the election that Crowe was in trouble, was slow to believe them.
"My hard-nosed view going into the elections was that we would hold our five seats, perhaps increase them to seven, and, at the outside, reach eight," says Adams. "I did not think that we would win with the two Donegal constituencies. I did think that we would win with Mary Lou [ McDonald in Dublin Central]."
McDonald's defeat was a bitter pill to swallow, though here, at least, there were signals in advance that all was not well, even if they were not fully recognised.
From the beginning, McDonald, a Dublin MEP, faced difficulties, with unhappiness in Dublin Central's key Cabra district about her arrival in succession to Sinn Féin's 2002 candidate, Nicky Kehoe. Many of Kehoe's supporters, centred around St Finbarr's GAA Club, are exactly that: Kehoe's supporters, not subject to the party. Many stayed at home.
Equally, there were signs in Dublin Central and, indeed, elsewhere, that IRA decommissioning and a deal with the DUP were steps too far for some Republicans. On the northside of Dublin, the situation was just as bleak, where both Dessie Ellis in Dublin North West and Larry O'Toole in Dublin North East struggled, and failed.
"The area of concern, and let's be very straight about it, is in Dublin. Everywhere else you would have to be relatively satisfied that it wasn't a meltdown for the party," Adams comments.
"All of the parties of the broad left suffered during the course of the election. There was a raised expectation that SF would do better than we did.
"I think that that is very relative. It doesn't form a proper judgment. But in Dublin, obviously, we need to, and we will because we have a range of younger, able, articulate, energetic activists," he says.
FOR NOW, SINN Féin intends to regroup in the Republic, and implement the reorganisation drawn up last year by the formidable Belfast-based chair of the party in Northern Ireland, Declan Kearney. Under the original plan, the reorganisation should have been enforced before the election, but was put off as the party struggled to cope with the workload caused by the Northern talks. "That's kicking in now. That is being rolled out now. It will seek, in a systematic, almost forensic way, to build the party strategically, ward by ward, parish by parish," says Adams.
Arthur Morgan expresses publicly the feeling shared more quietly by many others in the party: that Sinn Féin, on the back of a succession of victories, had become cocky. "I am wondering if there was an element of complacency in the organisation given that we have won a good election after a good election after a good election for literally decades now," he says. "I think we need to address that. We are not going to bounce back. We are going to claw our way back by our fingernails, inch by inch politically, right across this State."
Over the past five years, Sinn Féin was, in the words of one party member, "sucked into" Leinster House: "We spent a lot of time being good parliamentarians, but not a lot of people know about it." In truth, opinion divides about its TDs' effectiveness; opinion in Leinster House always does. But even the party's enemies would not accuse their elected representatives of being lazy.
The electoral usefulness of some of SF's Dáil work is also now in question within the ranks, where memories linger of the hours spent preparing 100 Criminal Justice Bill amendments that were never debated.
Left without the necessary numbers to secure full Dáil speaking rights, Sinn Féin's four TDs will find it more difficult to gain national profile from within the Dáil chamber. The restrictions, which Fianna Fáil is enjoying imposing, may, however, offer opportunities for Sinn Féin TDs to campaign more actively on local issues in their constituencies.
The local elections in 2009, along with the European Parliament elections, provide the next major challenge for a party that has, perhaps, been exhausted by elections. For a decade, it has fought one nearly every year. Sometimes, it has fought two. The workload has left its mark, particularly on those, such as Adams, who are at the political coalface.
"There are some times that people go out to play a game and every bounce of the ball is with them, every puck of the sliotar is with them," says Adams. "Then there are times when others go out that no matter what they do, they can't get it right. The people have given their verdict, but we are still very, very much in the contest and preparing for the next outing."
The party's future is far from bleak. In 2012, Sinn Féin will be a potential coalition player if it has five successful years in government in Stormont behind it, while the IRA's actions could by then be an issue for history.
If so, the party will be relevant in a way it was not this year.
Already, Gerry Adams is complimentary toward Fianna Fáil's next most likely leader, Brian Cowen, while he acknowledges Enda Kenny's "huge achievement" in winning 20 extra seats.
The road ahead for Sinn Féin has a steeper incline than before, perhaps, but there is a road. Reports of the party's demise are, for now, much exaggerated.