Time for real change? Sinn Féin and the recent Stormont election

Time for real change. So read the election posters of Sinn Féin that were plastered all over the occupied six counties in the north of Ireland in the lead up to May 5th’s Stormont Assembly election. Outside observers would be forgiven for thinking that Sinn Féin’s return as the largest party within the Assembly marks an opportunity for such change. The reality to those of us familiar with how power functions under the aegis of the Good Friday Agreement and how Sinn Féin functions as a party is much, much different.

The results do, nonetheless, make for interesting reading. For the first time in the 101-year history of the illegitimate statelet that Britain carved into Ireland’s north, a so-called nationalist party is the largest of all the political parties. Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, parties entering the political system are given one of three classifications: nationalist, a broad tent meaning any political party of any class composition who places the reunification of Ireland amongst its main goals; unionist, a less broad tent of parties ranging from right wing social liberals to extreme right wingers whose main goal is the maintenance Britain’s colonial presence in Ireland; and the others, a mishmash of ‘neutral’ liberals such as the Alliance Party, socialists of the Trotskyite legacy in People Before Profit and the Green Party. Parties belonging to this third, other grouping are not entitled to lead any executive in Stormont; the First Minister and deputy First Minister must be a nationalist and a unionist, or a unionist and a nationalist as it has been from 1998 and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement until now. Functionally, there is no difference in powers between the First Minister and the deputy; it is a joint office, but unionism’s strong position in 1998 and its utter disdain for ever even appearing to be on equal footing with republicans/nationalists meant that they insisted that the leader of the largest party be designated the First Minister alone rather than being given a joint- or co- prefix. This mandatory coalition of two competing ideologies whose ultimate success depends on the defeat of the other is enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement and known here as power sharing.

The numbers from the election are notable, there is no point in denying that. They have made the commentariat and the politicians of both Britain and the south of Ireland scramble in panic at the thought of Irish reunification. Lewis Goodall of the BBC, in a lucid moment of saying the quiet part out loud, reflected that the northern state was ‘literally designed’ so that a nationalist party would never lead its government. The history of governance in the north since the partition of Ireland became operational in 1921 is best understood in three stages: the rule of the one-party, proto-fascist Orange State (1921-1972) wherein the civil service, government, corporations, secret societies such as the Orange Order and the Royal Black Institute, and the armed wing of the state (the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the B-Specials and later, the Ulster Defence Regiment) combined in order to crush the designated other of the northern state, the Catholic people largely of a republican outlook, via unemployment, low-wage work, oppression of cultural expression, and sporadic pogroms; direct rule from London during the period euphemistically called ‘the Troubles’ in order to downplay that a revolutionary, anticolonial war was taking place (1972-1998); and the ‘peace process’ (1998-present), during which power has been shared under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Last week’s election marks the first instance in any of these iterations that a party claiming to be in favour of the reunification of Ireland has returned the largest vote share.

Sinn Féin received 29 per cent of the first preference vote, smashing its nearest rivals in the Democratic Unionist Party, who recorded a first preference rate of 21.3 per cent. This result reflected Sinn Féin’s near-total monopolisation of the parliamentarian sphere of republicanism/nationalism, with the SDLP – their nearest rivals in this case, as representatives of the middle class Catholic reactionary establishment and doyens of the peace process – recorded a vote share of just 9.1 per cent. In total votes too, Sinn Féin dominated – recording over 250,000 first preference votes when no other party even approached 200,000. Yet Sinn Féin only have two more seats than the DUP in the 90-seat Assembly and 10 more than the Alliance, the next biggest party. Despite their vote share increasing, they did not in fact increase their number of seats and the parliamentary story of the election is as much one of the DUP’s haemorrhaging of support amidst the crisis within unionism surrounding the Protocol agreed between Westminster, Dublin and Brussels around post-Brexit trade relations as it is one of nationalism’s ascent to the top of the northern statelet. Unionism still commands a plurality in the Stormont Assembly, holding 42.1 per cent of the vote and 37 seats versus nationalism’s 40.5 per cent and 35 seats. The republican vote has shown no great increase in the peace process era, rising from 38.7 per cent in 1998. What has happened is that support for hardline unionists has slowly ebbed away to the benefit of those in the ‘other’ classification, where there are now 18 seats held due to the Alliance increasing their total to 17 and People Before Profit retaining their one member of the legislative assembly (MLA). People Before Profit operate on an all-Ireland basis and while they emphasise their cross-community credentials, they largely draw their support from the republican/nationalist communities in the north, as is seen through their only MLA Gerry Carroll hailing from and representing west Belfast; in the majority nationalist Derry City, their representative and long-time activist Shaun Harkin almost reclaimed a seat for the party.

It is the Alliance Party, however, that give the lie to the idea of neutrality when it comes to the national question in Ireland. The research of Jon Tonge from the University of Liverpool showed that 58.8 per cent of Alliance’s voters favoured the continuation of British rule in Ireland in 2019, with just 25.6 per cent favouring the reunification of Ireland. From their roots in the unionist Ulster Liberal Party and New Ulster Movement, the Alliance have attempted to brand the northern variation of socially liberal centrism as somehow neutral by portraying themselves as above such trifling matters as self-determination and national sovereignty and focusing on real material matters such as healthcare and housing. Healthcare and housing are unmitigated disasters in the north, of that there can be no doubt, but what a focus on these matters as a means of eliding the national question misses is that these permanent crises are guaranteed by British rule in Ireland.

Government funding in the north is arrived at via a block grant from Westminster. Stormont retains no powers over taxation, and thus revenue raising, other than long haul air passenger duty, which it abolished in 2012, and corporation tax, although this has not been changed from Britain’s as yet. What this means is that reform of any kind in the north is entirely dependent upon the largesse of Westminster, a largesse that is always found wanting. Belfast’s archaic wastewater treatment system requires up to £2 billion worth of works in order to make it capable of taking on the capacity demands that would be created by the type of construction necessary to shorten the north’s catastrophic housing waiting lists, but the block grant will deliver additional spending of just £450 million in 2022-23, £670 million in 2023-24, and £866 million in 2024-25. The vast majority of this extra spending will be spent on ailing healthcare system that is itself creaking under the pressure of its own significant waiting lists.

With British control over the public purse, a lack of sovereignty and a complete absence of even the pretence of democratic accountability for the English politicians that decide the levels of public funding here, questions of how to make the lives of everyday citizens better can only be answered by breaking away from Britain and emerging from under the yolk of centuries of domination that has deprived the Irish people of determining their own material circumstances. While it is to be expected of soft-unionist parties like Alliance to campaign on such issues, it should come as a disappointment to anyone who held out any last morsel of hope that Sinn Féin could deliver a real republican agenda in their turn to purely parliamentary politics to see the party campaign on similar grounds, attempting to turn this election into a referendum on combating the cost of living, on making the northern state “work”.

The northern state does work, and that is the problem. It is a state that was designed to circumvent Irish democracy and self-determination, which it does by merely existing; the border it cleaved into Ireland was designed in order to give the British government a say in Irish matters north and south; the block grant was designed to make an economy in permanent decay and crisis utterly dependent on the life support afforded to it by Westminster; Stormont’s current power sharing arrangement was designed to create stasis and inertia in government as two competing ideologies inevitably clash, guaranteeing the status quo.

Yet where the northern state has been most successful in the peace process era is in achieving the British government’s long-term goal of defanging the revolutionary aspects of Irish republicanism and housetraining its largest elements, in this instance Sinn Féin. This is perhaps most easily understood through the lens of the bizarre situation in which we now find ourselves: as part of their opposition to the Protocol, unionists are refusing to return to the Assembly, and the DUP are refusing to nominate a deputy First Minister, meaning that Sinn Féin vice president Michelle O’Neill cannot take her seat as First Minister. Instead of celebrating the demise of the northern institutions as a welcome step on the road to reunification, Sinn Féin now find themselves beseeching their unionist partners in the administration of British rule in Ireland to return to Stormont, to focus on the cost-of-living crisis and other on-the-ground issues. That the largest republican party is showing such steadfast commitment to the smooth functioning of the northern state should be worrying to anyone invested in the reunification of Ireland. O’Neill’s prospective move from deputy First Minister to First Minister will afford her no new powers and her governance will require sign-off from the DUP; the idea of real change being possible when democracy is still beholden to the vanguard of the Britain’s most loyal Irish subjects is laughable.

It is understandable if this is confusing for international observers, who best know Sinn Féin through their statements of international solidarity with liberations movements in Cuba, Palestine, Euskadi, and elsewhere, and as the party of the revolutionary Provisional IRA, but since the beginning of the peace process, Sinn Féin has moved away from revolution and fully embraced parliamentarianism. This move has undoubtedly bolstered its electoral credentials north and south to the point where it is now the biggest party in Ireland, but has come with the sacrifice of every ideal that separated it from the other strands of republicanism. Republicanism of the Troubles era was defined by the split in the IRA that broke it into two camps: the reformist Official IRA and its political wing Official Sinn Féin (later Sinn Féin the Workers’ Party), then the Workers’ Party and the militant, traditionalist republican Provisional IRA and its political wing, Provisional Sinn Féin (later simply Sinn Féin). The Provisionals disagreed with the Officials’ analysis that a united Ireland could be achieved by entering and reforming the northern institutions, by assuaging loyalist fears by downplaying the militant side of republicanism, and by calling a halt to armed campaigns against the colonial forces of the British. Bloody feuds were fought between the two factions over these political differences but these are the viewpoints that Sinn Féin have now aligned themselves to in the peace process era. Chief among the ideas of the Officials was that of a border poll, whereby the people of the occupied six counties would be given the chance to vote on the constitutional future of the area in a referendum, a referendum which would then be mirrored in the 26-county state. Originally rejected by the Provisionals for legitimising the partition of Ireland and again circumventing all-Ireland democracy by holding two referenda, this is now the only accepted mechanism towards reaching a united Ireland under the Good Friday Agreement.

The historian Brian Hanley is fond of quoting Cathal Goulding, Chief of Staff of the Official IRA stating: ‘We were right too early, [Gerry] Adams was right too late, and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh will never be fuckin’ right.’ An admittedly funny quote that has only one problem: Ó Brádaigh, the traditionalist republican who split with Sinn Féin over their 1986 decision to enter the southern political institutions and thus recognise and legitimise partition, was right and still is nine years after his death. Ó Brádaigh told the 1986 Sinn Féin ard fheis: ‘Once you accept the institutions of the state… you will not be able to do it according to your rules, you have to do it according to their rules.’ Sinn Féín’s entrance into the northern institutions in 1998 only accelerated their willingness to do things by the parliamentary rules of so-called liberal democracies. The party has now taken on the social mores of any vaguely left-of-centre party in Europe: having previously been committed Eurosceptics from the inception of the European project, Brexit has seen them reverse their attitude and preach unity as a means of returning the six counties to the EU. They reassure big business that they will not target them in government, they no longer vote against the southern Irish state’s retention of the non-jury Special Criminal Court – created to imprison Provisional IRA members and decried as a human rights violation by Amnesty International and the UN – and they now apologise time and time again for revolutionary republican actions or for the legitimate expression of republican goals and opinions.

Playing by the rules imposed by the British under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement means that Sinn Féin are beholden to chasing the border poll to reunify Ireland and the calls for preparation to begin for the holding of a poll have only grown louder since last week’s result. The reality of the Good Friday Agreement is that the decision to hold a border poll rests with one person: the Secretary of State for our occupied counties. No binding criteria for the holding of one is included in the Agreement and Brandon Lewis, the current Secretary of State, refuses to publish said criteria. Again, there is no mechanism by which people in the six counties can hold this modern day Lord Lieutenant to account. It appears that the Sinn Féin strategy is to gather as much support for the party as possible until the British government is forced into calling a poll, an approach that might be reasonable if the British were not showing on multiple other fronts – their lagging on language rights legislation, their efforts to exonerate the war criminals in their army for crimes committed in Ireland – that they are as untrustworthy as ever.

Brendan Hughes, the former Officer Commanding of the Provisional IRA’s Belfast Brigade, who split with Sinn Féin over the peace process, said in 2001, just three years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement:

‘The sad thing about all this is that the British set this up. This is the British answer to the republican problem in Ireland. It's a British solution, it's not an Irish solution. It's not a solution that we have control of. There are people up there and the British ministers are handing money out, but the whole thing is built on sand. First of all the statelet still exists. Secondly, whenever Tony Blair, or whoever comes after him, decides – or the Unionists decide – to walk out, the Good Friday Agreement is finished. It's all finished.’

Therein lies the rub for Sinn Féin. Having abandoned the armalite and ballot box strategy for an exclusive focus on the ballot, they are now the biggest party in the statelet and, as Hughes predicted, the unionist parties are simply refusing to play ball by entering government and the British are refusing by not entertaining notions of a border poll. Real change is impossible within the British solution, impossible once you enter the institutions built by partition north and south and make them your sole focus. Sinn Féin will of course make out that this is the moment the republican/nationalist people began to shake themselves free and follow the path to self-determination, but self-determination only when given the express permission of the colonial occupier is oxymoronic. The election may mark the symbolic end of the nationalist people being denied a seat at the table, but Irish republicanism is about constructing Ireland’s own table – not eating at Britain’s.

There is no doubting that this was an exceptional election for Sinn Féin the party, they kept their heads and increased their votes while most others around them melted down, but whether or not it was a good election for republicanism is another matter. For republicanism, nothing has changed.