The Sinn Féin ardfheis last weekend was dominated by Palestinian flag waving and promises of housing for all, but a deep insight into how the party will act if it wins power was provided a few days earlier with the move to sue a respected journalist for simply doing his job.
Over the past few years Sinn Féin in opposition has made a concerted effort to use the legal system to muzzle the media as well as political opponents who have dared to criticise it. It takes no great leap of imagination to foresee how the party will act if it gets its hands on the levers of power.
Speaking in the Dáil last week following the disclosure that Sinn Féin TD Chris Andrews was taking legal action against Irish Times political correspondent Harry McGee and The Irish Times, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar remarked that suing a journalist personally was a frightening development.
“To see a member of this House not just suing a major newspaper, but also personally suing a journalist, that’s only designed to do one thing. It’s designed to make journalists afraid, it’s designed to make them think twice about what they write, and I think it’s wrong,” he said.
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This follows a string of legal actions conducted by leading members of the party in recent years. Among the most high-profile were the 2021 action taken by Sinn Féin Cork South Central TD Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire against RTÉ. He received more than €150,000 in settlement of a defamation claim over comments made about him on Joe Duffy’s Liveline radio phone-in show.
As well as suing the media, Sinn Féin has opened up an entirely new front in Irish politics by suing political opponents for allegedly defamatory statements. This has had a damaging impact on the nature of political debate
Back in 2015 Mary Lou McDonald, then Sinn Féin’s deputy leader, and the party’s finance spokesman Pearse Doherty received a reported €100,000 between them from the Irish Examiner after they sued the newspaper over an editorial and opinion column. More recently, McDonald has issued defamation proceedings against RTÉ over comments made by a presenter on Morning Ireland.
As well as suing the media, Sinn Féin has opened up an entirely new front in Irish politics by suing political opponents for allegedly defamatory statements. This has had a damaging impact on the nature of political debate as it undoubtedly inhibits the normal robust exchanges that are part and parcel of a healthy democracy.
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Speaking at a Sinn Féin ardfheis in 1981, Danny Morrison proclaimed that republican strategy involved “an armalite in one hand and a ballot box in the other”. This appears to have been refined in recent years to the philosophy of a ballot paper in one hand and a legal writ in the other.
Complacent voters lulled into accepting the notion that there would be no harm giving a Sinn Féin a term in government have been given plenty of notice that the party marches to a very different drum than all of the others who have held the reins of power.
Sinn Féin differs from other parties in the manner in which its policy in the Dáil is directed by the leadership in Belfast. It is not simply that the parliamentary party in Leinster House has no role in policymaking and takes its instructions from the top, it appears that the political leadership in Dublin does as well.
This was evident in recent days when McDonald suddenly shifted gears after a visit to Belfast and called for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, having previously declined to go down that road.
Sinn Féin makes no bones about its approach to policy decision-making. ‘We don’t want a parliamentary party running the organisation,’ the party’s finance chief Des Mackin told The Irish Times in 2020
In the event, the attempt by Sinn Féin and its left-wing allies to capitalise on the ongoing tragedy of in Gaza was rejected by the decisive margin of 85 votes to 55 in the Dáil. A significant number of Independent TDs joined the government parties in rejecting the counterproductive move.
It is not the first time that McDonald appeared to have been forced into a public U-turn after the intervention of Belfast. At the height of the Brexit talks she argued it was not the time to have a Border poll on a united Ireland but changed her position 48 hours later.
Sinn Féin makes no bones about its approach to policy decision-making. “We don’t want a parliamentary party running the organisation,” the party’s finance chief Des Mackin told The Irish Times in 2020. “We want to stay a party of activists. It’s a totally different model. There’s nothing mysterious about it.”
That model was evident in an email discovered in the cash-for-ash inquiry which showed the party’s then Finance Minister at Stormont Máirtín Ó Muilleoir asking a senior backroom figure if it was permissible to proceed with a policy decision.
As journalist Sam McBride wrote in his account of the scandal: “Here was the finance minister – one of Stormont’s most powerful democratically accountable figures – asking an unelected and entirely unseen republican with long links to the IRA whether he was ‘content’ for the minister to take a complex decision worth hundreds of millions of pounds.”
If Sinn Féin does make it into government after the next election, the public and the media will not be able to say they haven’t been warned.