“Talk to the people in Northern Ireland who were kneecapped for decades,” Micheál Martin shot across the floor of the Dáil last month, taking aim at Mary Lou McDonald. The Sinn Féin president was pursuing him over what form a Covid inquiry would take – accusing him of trivialising the question and avoiding giving an answer.
“I could name seven inquiries that there should be in Northern Ireland about the activities of your movement over the years, but we have never had them,” the Taoiseach said, followed by the kneecapping remark. “There was never any closure.” The record of the Dáil shows this was followed by “interruptions”.
In many ways, it was normal service: Sinn Féin pursuing the Government, which hit back with a reference to the North. But the vivid image of kneecappings summoned in the Dáil by Martin (he has done this before, but not as Taoiseach) was in keeping with increasingly bitter exchanges between the Government and Sinn Féin in recent weeks.
This was most visible during Martin and McDonald’s sharp exchange on the plight of renters when he told her: “Don’t you dare lecture me.”
The Covid emergency put parliamentary politics into a state of suspended animation. With the pandemic hogging the news agenda, there was only occasional room for issues like housing and the cost of living.
On Covid, Sinn Féin largely stuck pretty closely to public health advice. This was a conscious choice, the party’s health spokesman David Cullinane says. “It wasn’t about supporting or opposing the Government on Covid, it was about supporting good public health advice.”
Ready for government
The approach was in line with one of Sinn Féin’s main strategies in Opposition: to impress on voters that it is not simply a party of Opposition for opposition’s sake, angrily attacking every Government policy on every issue just to score points. The wider theme here is that the party is sober-minded, considered and understands policy – in short, that it is ready for government.
Cullinane is a good example of this. Even some Government figures privately concede he has been constructive, and in private briefings with health service officials, conscientious and engaged. It contrasts sharply with the figure who, after being elected in 2020, was recorded addressing a crowd with: “Up the ‘Ra”.
The party attacks were on matters that were mostly peripheral to the main thrust of public health advice: Hepa filters, antigen testing, poor communication and indecision.
Some Sinn Féin actions challenged public health advice: it voted against extending emergency powers and criticised the use of vaccine certs for indoor dining as segregationist. McDonald’s view that pubs should be kept open as the situation deteriorated in the early autumn of 2020 stands out. But by and large, Covid policy was not a battleground issue between the Government and Opposition, and Sinn Féin didn’t treat it as one.
For many in Sinn Féin, the end of the emergency is an opportunity to ram home their advantage by concentrating on bread and butter political issues. In this, there is a view in the party that it is lucky in its enemies as it doesn’t take much to make the failures of the Coalition tangible for voters. One party source admits Sinn Féin’s job is “easy” at present, given the high rents, rising fuel costs and lengthening waiting lists.
Nonetheless, little is left to chance. Behind the scenes, there is an extensive architecture within the party that fine-tunes policy, bolstering the party’s positions in preparation for battle with the Government. Much of the work is done within the offices of spokespersons, but that in turn is reviewed by a central policy unit.
Party policy advisers Miriam Murphy and Shane O’Brien have a key function here, while Pearse Doherty’s office is very powerful. The finance spokesman and deputy leader is adamant that every policy be costed and defensible when it comes to budget time. Doherty is “meticulous”, says a source, convinced that credibility on budgetary matters is key.
Sometimes this can frustrate his colleagues. Speaking privately, one said the political dividend from this is minimal: “We put way too much time on it, they’re obsessed with not making a mistake, but the publicity out of it is zero.”
The extent of dialogue with party officials in the North is, obviously, a topic of much public commentary. Party figures do not deny that policies are cross-checked with Belfast, but say this is for the purposes of cohesion and coherence – that as an all-island party, policies can’t be contradictory. “If we’re going to be saying we want to ban canoes, you liaise with the North and see if they want to ban canoes,” one source explains.
Sinn Féin doesn’t have to grapple with some of the challenges Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael do – in particular, restive and leaky parliamentary party (PP) meetings. While the larger Government parties’ meetings are effectively semi-public, and are used to seed news stories and topical issues, the proceedings of Sinn Féin’s are closely guarded.
Fiercely protective
“I think what’s happened in Fianna Fáil has been very toxic for them with an almost live-streaming of the PP meetings,” says Cullinane.
Sinn Féin TDs say their own meetings can be robust but are free-flowing enough, with a loose agenda before it is thrown open to the floor. McDonald chairs. (“A lot better than Gerry [Adams]”, one source observed; “Gerry could go rambling around.”)
The meetings can be more charged at moments of political danger for the party. One TD acknowledges that they became heated after the party’s disappointing 2019 local elections, when McDonald’s nascent leadership took a blow, adding: “It wouldn’t be a shock to have a row at meetings.”
However, none of this seeps out. Members are fiercely protective of the privacy of the meetings, saying it’s important that the party has a space where it can debate privately and frankly. Critics point to this iron discipline as evidence that Sinn Féin can be secretive, cloistered and opaque. This is further bolstered by reports from those disaffected from the party, like former TD Peadar Tóibín, that TDs’ assistants are chosen for them. For his part, Cullinane says he had “a say” in choosing his assistant, who was also interviewed by a panel appointed by the party after the position was advertised as part of a “proper, fair process”.
The wider theme, of course, is the charge that Sinn Féin is not a normal party, and that its decision making is trammelled by forces within the wider republican movement. The view of the PSNI and the Garda is that the army council of the Provisional IRA still oversees the party.
The existence of pre-election pledges, signed by candidates, to “be guided and hold myself amenable to all directions and instructions issued to me by An Ard Comhairle of Sinn Féin”, raises further questions of accountability.
Sinn Féin rejects the suggestion that there is anything unusual in its governance structures. A party source who has served on its national officer board and its ard comhairle is adamant: “Nobody ever told me what to do.”
However it does its business, it is clear that Sinn Féin is preparing for the return of full-throated, post-Covid opposition – and, it expects, for government after that.
