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Featuring
in media discourse since Sinn Fein's electoral triumph
in the Northern Assembly elections has been an element
of apprehension, in some cases undisguised alarm,
that the nationalist party might now do to Fianna
Fail what it is in the process of doing to the SDLP
- electorally suffocating it. Out of four different
columnists in three separate Sunday newspapers alerting
their readerships to the 'ominous' signals portending
from the North, the Observer’s Henry McDonald
alone sees Pat Rabbitte’s Irish Labour Party
as being most at risk. Joseph O’Malley, Eoghan
Harris and Stephen Collins have all sounded the siren
although, in their view, it is not just Labour for
whom the bells toll.
Most
of what appeared in print has been distilled by Harris.
Sensitive to the danger of giving legs to any self-fulfilling
prophecy, he cautioned votaries of his column not
to be very afraid, just afraid. Confidence in Fianna
Fail’s grip on Southern political life is gnawed
at by memories of events from two decades ago. In
1982 when Sinn Fein announced its intention to mount
an electoral challenge in Jim Prior’s Assembly
elections towards the end of that year, the SDLP,
supremely confident that no pretender to its electoral
throne had yet been born, arrogantly trumpeted that
it would meet the challenge with 'gleeful anticipation.'
It never imagined that it was staring at the opening
seconds of what Dean Godson in the Spectator termed
its ‘Redmond Moment’. Twenty-one years on,
anticipation has been disrobed of its glee while the
party’s fortunes have curdled and gone sour.
Its 18 elected MLAs appear less a visionary group
ready to blaze a path to the future than a mournful
body of pallbearers whose main purpose is to lay to
rest with some dignity the worn shell within which
Northern constitutional nationalism thrived for thirty
years before jumping cuckoo-like into the nest built
by republicans.
In
many ways McDonald’s Observer piece was the most
logically anchored. The Labour Party, situated in
what passes for a socialist camp in Ireland, might
well anticipate a robust challenge from a party on
its left flank that is not by any means a sect and
has substantial popular support. Why Fianna Fail should
find itself the fly in the web of the socialist spider
is more difficult to discern. But is Sinn Fein really
a left wing party?
For
long enough speculation about the trajectory of Gerry
Adams' organisation in the Republic centred on the
Left constituency; the party’s brand of radicalism
would corral it into the ghetto. As a consequence,
some close to Fianna Fail are known to have aired
the view that bringing Sinn Fein into a coalition
would be the best way to finish the party off, by
allowing it to peak and then deflate in front of a
disaffected constituency which would by that point
have disappointment to number amongst its woes. The
Single Transferable Vote system is said to militate
against ideology and more towards compromise. Capital
rules and those who wish to govern quickly learn to
compromise on capital's terms.
In
this sketch Fianna Fail was considered to be under
no serious threat, at most a seat here or there. But
all of this is premised on the notion that Sinn Fein
is genetically locked into a left wing genre, the
electoral ceiling of which is not too high. It is
at this point that the alarmism of the Sunday Independent’s
twin lighthouses on this matter runs out of steam.
When Eoghan Harris throws a barb at Richard Haass,
claiming that he, a Jewish republican, was ‘assisting
Sinn Fein in its project of an Irish socialist republic
like Cuba’, and Joseph O’Malley sounds off
about Sinn Fein's Marxism- Leninism, neither explain
how Fianna Fail stands to cede its constituency to
Castro-emulating totalitarians.
Ultimately,
Sinn Fein might well eat into and usurp the hegemony
of Fianna Fail. But not for the reasons outlined in
the Sunday Independent. Sinn Fein will make its assault
from the right, not the left. Not because it is intrinsically
right wing. Its essence is neither conservative nor
radical - the leadership is committed to power and
power alone. There is no ideological compass, only
an ideological vacuum. Sinn Fein is an expansionist
party prepared to do what it takes in order to expand.
Its present left discourse is both the sheen and the
shield. Those who would style themselves radicals
in the Northern end of the party were found out when
the party in government vied to be as right wing as
the rest, and then gathered obediently for the Bush-Blair
war summit at Hillsborough in May. Its Southern radicals
too shall be found out when Adams takes them into
coalition.
Again,
the manner in which the party tackled the SDLP is
instructive. Adams once said in the first half of
the 1980s that it was perhaps better for Sinn Fein
that it did not bypass the SDLP as that would only
lead to a dilution in social radicalism. But such
social radicalism, like everything else the party
held dear, was diluted in order to overtake the SDLP.
We read of a ‘well known West Belfast businessman’
standing for Sinn Fein in Unionist Strangford, and
the election of Catriona Ruane, a party member only
a matter of weeks, in South Down. Sinn Fein is coming
to be sized up by those with an eye for opportunity
as either good for business or a career move. As business
and careerism colonise Sinn Fein, the party will dilute
its radicalism in the South to more effectively challenge
Fianna Fail. And if need be it will become the party
of law and order and tight immigration control. That
is where power lies. And Sinn Fein will comfortably
bed down with it.
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