Over the Christmas holidays I read The Long Game: Inside Sinn Fein, by the former Irish Examiner journalist Aoife Moore. I was looking forward to reading this book enormously, since good books on this “strange, secretive party that stands on the brink of taking power” are few and far between. I thought that somebody like Moore, from a working class nationalist background in Derry, whose family had been “touched by British state violence” (her uncle was killed on Bloody Sunday), and Irish Journalist of the Year in 2021, might be the writer to shine a light on its hidden workings and inner secrets.
I was a little disappointed. This is a book of occasional insights rather than major revelations. As a former journalist in Northern Ireland, I found I was familiar with much of the book’s earlier section, running up to Mary Lou McDonald’s emergence as the party’s vice-president, chosen on Gerry Adams’ orders, in 2009. Sinn Fein’s famous deep distrust of the media, and its press office dubbing her “the poisonous snake”, did not help.
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