Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on 26-October-2026.
What a 50/50 split on burning down the state reveals about who Sinn Féin, and the rest of Irish politics, are actually listening to
Fifty-Fifty
While listening to Tony Groves’ (tonygroves@bsky.social) podcast: The Political-Media Echo Chamber — Shop Mannequins and the Politics of the Out of Touch, Simon McGarr (tupped.bsky.social) pointed it out as he worked through a Hope and Courage Collective (H&CC) survey. The wording was straightforward: on a spectrum running from our institutions are worth preserving to I cannot help thinking just let them all burn, where do the supporters of each party actually land. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Greens were firmly on the side of preservation. Independent Ireland and Aontú tilted the opposite way. Sinn Féin’s voters were divided right down the center.
Every other group on that graph presented a clear account of itself. Among non-voters, the result was just over a majority for preservation, which is important because it undercuts the usual idea that not voting means wanting everything destroyed. The governing parties wanted their institutions maintained. The parties furthest to the right wanted them abolished. Only Sinn Féin’s voters were unable to agree among themselves on the most fundamental question any political movement can face: is the thing we belong to worth keeping.
McGarr described that division as an impossible coalition, and he argued that it explained more of the party’s conduct across the past three years than almost anything else he had observed. He is correct, and the basis for that judgment goes beyond a single chart. Over the last two years, Sinn Féin has been tugged toward whatever stance is loudest in the moment, not because it has abandoned its principles, but because it no longer has a settled internal baseline against which to measure a noisy signal.
While listening to Tony Groves’ (tonygroves@bsky.social) podcast: The Political-Media Echo Chamber — Shop Mannequins and the Politics of the Out of Touch, Simon McGarr (tupped.bsky.social) pointed it out as he worked through a Hope and Courage Collective (H&CC) survey. The wording was straightforward: on a spectrum running from our institutions are worth preserving to I cannot help thinking just let them all burn, where do the supporters of each party actually land. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Greens were firmly on the side of preservation. Independent Ireland and Aontú tilted the opposite way. Sinn Féin’s voters were divided right down the center.
Every other group on that graph presented a clear account of itself. Among non-voters, the result was just over a majority for preservation, which is important because it undercuts the usual idea that not voting means wanting everything destroyed. The governing parties wanted their institutions maintained. The parties furthest to the right wanted them abolished. Only Sinn Féin’s voters were unable to agree among themselves on the most fundamental question any political movement can face: is the thing we belong to worth keeping.
McGarr described that division as an impossible coalition, and he argued that it explained more of the party’s conduct across the past three years than almost anything else he had observed. He is correct, and the basis for that judgment goes beyond a single chart. Over the last two years, Sinn Féin has been tugged toward whatever stance is loudest in the moment, not because it has abandoned its principles, but because it no longer has a settled internal baseline against which to measure a noisy signal.
The Kettle
McGarr had already sketched the frame for this a month before, in a column (The Gist: What if?) that had no connection to Sinn Féin whatsoever. He pictured a political class trying to read the public via social media as a dog, ears pricked, staring at the automated, endless, wholly artificial rendition of His Master’s Voice. In his account, the old order had spent decades calibrated to detect real feeling through slower, tightly controlled media. By contrast, constant online clamour generates a transmission that resembles an emergency and never lets up, because responding to it does not silence it.
Both McGarr and Groves sharpened that point on the podcast. If you are using an X feed to work out what the public genuinely wants, you are not checking the public’s temperature. You are plunging a thermometer into a steaming, bubbling kettle and then acting surprised that the public is boiling mad.
The Synthetic Public
This is what actually fills the kettle. Hope and Courage Collective, an Irish civil society organisation that monitors far-right organisation, issued a detailed narrative analysis this year, Ireland In Focus 2025: Mind the Gap. It should be stated clearly that H&CC is an advocacy body with an explicit position, not an impartial academic institution, and some of its wording shows that. Its underlying data collection does not. It includes two complete rounds of a nationally representative survey, correctly weighted by a professional pollster, along with a systematic tracking effort covering hundreds of thousands of individual mentions. Even if the group’s own framing is openly partisan, the methodology stands up to ordinary scrutiny.
One figure does more heavy lifting than the rest of the report combined: 75% of the far-right narrative volume mentioning Ireland comes from outside the state. The UK and the US together account for more of it than Ireland itself does. Three in every four posts that shape what looks like a domestic migration dispute are not domestic at all, and the platform that carries the largest share of that volume by a wide margin is X.
That argument has also become harder edged. “Ireland is full,” a claim about capacity and resources, declined by 68% year on year. “Irish Lives Matter,” a claim about identity and threat, increased by 303% over the same period, even as the far right’s own electoral push fell apart and its street mobilisations diminished. Defeat at the ballot box did not reduce the noise. It only made it more furious.
Now compare that with what Irish people actually said when polled properly. H&CC’s own survey ran two full nationally representative waves, weighted identically in both years, and showed the public moving in one direction on every measure tested. Two thirds now say immigrants add positively to Irish life. Almost four fifths say working class people are being squeezed because the system is stacked against them, not because of who has moved in next door. Three quarters support trans people’s right to live their lives as they choose. Four fifths say Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people encounter greater barriers than white people. And specifically on wealth, 69%, up six points in a year, now say the rich prosper because of the advantages they were given, not because they earned everything on their own.
This is not a public drawing back. McGarr’s account of what politicians are reacting to instead, rather than to this, is nearly exact: a noisy display of refusal, staged exactly where the cameras happen to be aimed.
Matt Carthy, Twice
None of this is peculiar to Sinn Féin. Jim O’Callaghan has already had his week dissected in depth, both by McGarr directly, The Gist: The Petty Bourgeoisie, and by TheJournal.ie on its own, Jim O’Callaghan is proving to be a Teflon justice minister, which described him as a Teflon justice minister after he pushed a flimsy allegation about which court cases a solicitors’ strike had intentionally aimed at into the same week as a ministerial pressure drive against an independent rape crisis centre. That terrain is for other authors. This article’s focus is Sinn Féin, and Matt Carthy in particular, because the same instinct appears there too, and it really should not do.
Return to April and the fuel blockade, (The Blockade Is The Message), Carthy spoke to the crowd from the back of a truck on O’Connell Street, on the second day of a protest whose organising network had already been linked to far-right actors, alongside Aontú and Independent Ireland figures doing likewise. When The Journal asked plainly whether Sinn Féin regarded the blockade of fuel depots and the tactics used toward tanker drivers as legitimate, the party’s own justice spokesperson refused to answer yes or no: we can get bogged down in what’s legitimate or not. A justice spokesperson declining to take a stance on methods that involved threats against gardaí and the drivers carrying out their work. He later used the same platform that week to demand the carbon tax be abolished as an emergency measure, which is very different from judging whether the people making that demand were the right people to heed.
Then comes October, and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre controversy, which matters more because of who Carthy is. He chairs the Oireachtas Justice Committee, so he has the institutional role of examining precisely this sort of ministerial excess. A government funded consent campaign, intended to teach children they could refuse a hug, went viral and was withdrawn after ministerial pressure on an independent, state funded body. Carthy’s reported view was that the minister had been correct to shut it down, and that what was actually required was a review of how publicly funded campaigns are approved in the first place. No question about what the video itself said. No question about why an independent rape crisis centre had just been leaned on by a government department that depends on it for funding. The one TD in Leinster House whose actual job is to scrutinise ministerial overreach chose instead to call for tighter oversight of the side that had already lost.
It should be stated clearly that this was a choice, not something inevitable. Among the opposition TDs who spoke on the issue, Gary Gannon (garygannontd.bsky.social) of the Social Democrats issued a statement defending children’s right not to be touched against their will. A Green Party councillor put it even more simply, saying that asking a child whether they want a hug is just normal, regardless of the adult’s age. Neither of them had to wrestle with it for long. Carthy, despite holding an actual committee chair and an actual mandate to scrutinise exactly this kind of ministerial conduct, reached for the other answer first.
H&CC’s own narrative report, produced independently and with no connection to McGarr, to this piece, or specifically to either of those two incidents, describes Sinn Féin’s migration narrative as hybrid and, at times, incoherent: a party that mixes real and legitimate criticism of government failure with an increasing readiness to normalise the idea that the answer to a housing crisis is fewer people seeking shelter in the country at all. Three separate readings, reached independently, describing the same pattern.
Credit where it is due. Sinn Féin’s core critique of IPAS profiteering and government housing failure is genuine, and H&CC’s own report says so outright. The issue is not that the party lacks legitimate ground to stand on. It is that legitimate criticism and reflexive surrender have become genuinely difficult to distinguish from within the party’s own machinery, which is exactly what you would expect from a party whose own base cannot agree on whether that machinery is worth retaining.
Why This One Matters More
The real case is here, and it only comes into focus after everything else. When a party possesses a disciplined internal agreement, it can measure a noisy outside cue against what its own supporters truly believe, and disregard that cue if it does not hold up. Sinn Féin’s coalition lacks that capacity. Its supporters are divided precisely in half over whether the state is worth preserving at all, so there is no baseline beneath the party from which to judge anything. The stance that appears most publicly confirmed prevails by default, not because of principle, but because figuring out what the party’s own base actually wants risks reopening a split that already hurt it badly once.
That split has a clear record, and its fault line is exactly this one. In December 2023, the party found out, at genuine electoral cost, that putting a definite price tag on housing drove its own coalition apart: “Not A Proper Dubliner”, Siobhán Fenton And The €300,000. During 2024, the same constraint governed immigration: the issue was continually postponed instead of resolved, because any resolution meant deciding which half of the base to address and which half to alienate. In November, the party’s vote fractured along that same break. None of that is being reargued here; it has already been covered extensively elsewhere. For this discussion, the only point is that the rupture is real, time stamped, and still unresolved, and that a coalition that cannot really function, once created, does not remain silent. It merely shifts to a different arena to repeat the same evasion, again and again, with whatever loud external cue is most available that week standing in for a choice the party cannot actually afford to make.
That is why Carthy is more instructive than O’Callaghan, not less defensible than him. For a government minister, reaching for the loudest available signal is nearly part of the role. Sinn Féin is meant to be the alternative to that: a party whose identity was built on listening directly to communities rather than reflecting a feed back at itself. This year’s evidence suggests it can no longer do that any more dependably than the government it spent a decade trying to replace.
The Backstop
McGarr’s final remark on the podcast is the one that merits lingering over. He contended that journalism, along with the older media institutions, has largely forfeited its ability to determine the public’s real position, with RTÉ perhaps as an exception. What remains available to them is merely the power to establish the frame within which other commentators debate, a far smaller sort of influence than newspapers once enjoyed, back when purchasing one was itself a social signal. In his telling, the last meaningful correction is the one democracy has always possessed: an election, when the wider public has the final say no matter what the loudest feed repeated throughout the year.
His case in point was Fine Gael, a party that has long had an almost ingrained tendency to enter a campaign assuming its own message is getting through, only to be truly puzzled when the outcome arrives and proves otherwise. “Let’s keep the recovery going,” it campaigned amid austerity as if the recovery had already reached the people being asked to endorse it; that remains the clearest single example, though it is not the only one. The divide between what a party thinks it has been communicating and what voters actually took in is the space where elections do their genuine work. And, as McGarr and Groves’ points suggest, it may be the only place left that still does that work reliably at all.
Whether that final safeguard still operates for Sinn Féin is the unresolved issue, not a settled matter. If a party’s own supporters cannot even agree on whether the institutions deserve to be preserved, an election may not provide a clean verdict on whether this instinct is costing it anything whatsoever. It may simply continue mistaking the boiling, bubbling kettle for the room, and keep being as astonished and confused by the result as anyone who keeps reaching for the same thermometer.
⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.
