Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on 226-November-2026.
“Sinn Féin’s bottom line is that it has no bottom line.” – Tommy McKearney
The Position
Let’s start with the history, because it’s so often recounted in reverse. Sinn Féin is not a petitioner at a gate that two older parties have long barred to it. Rather, Sinn Féin is the house those parties departed. Arthur Griffith established the movement in 1905, absorbing into it the National Council he had headed since 1903, and in time both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil would break away from Sinn Féin, not the other way around. Fine Gael did not come into being until 1933, when it was created from the fusion of three bodies: Cumann na nGaedheal, the party pro-Treaty members organised in April 1923, as the civil war that the Treaty had opened in January 1922 was ending; the Centre Party; and the Blueshirts. Fianna Fáil was not founded until 1926, when Éamon de Valera, having been defeated at the Sinn Féin ard fheis on whether to enter the Dáil, stepped down as president of the movement and took most of its membership with him. If you put aside the century of civil war mythology so carefully maintained, until recent years, by both successor parties, what is left is not an old regime confronted by a new challenger. It is one movement, and two exits from it, exits that have shaped this nation of ours for over a hundred years even as each, in turn, claims to embody the tradition and casts the movement it abandoned as the deviation.
The family tree is not tidy. The remnant that retained the Sinn Féin name after 1926 divided again in 1970, and today’s party descends from that second division rather than from an unbroken line back to Griffith. Yet the actual movement of events runs opposite to the usual assumption. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil departed from Sinn Féin in order to construct an order, and since then they have ruled, one after the other and together, on the basis of having been the ones to leave. I make no apology for wanting this pattern to be over. I’m fucking sick of it. Sin é.
This piece is about how poorly Sinn Féin, in its present guise, is prepared to bring that order to an end. It is written by someone who still wants them to do exactly that.
What Meta Admitted
Begin with São Paulo, and with a detail that should shame a trillion dollar firm far more than it apparently does. On 16th October, Reuters said that Meta’s own employees, in internal messages examined by Folha de S.Paulo, admitted President Lula’s Instagram accounts were being blocked by campaign time restrictions even as the platform was surfacing his rival’s profile. Then, on 15th October, a Brazilian electoral court justice had to order Meta to cease the unjustified suppression of either candidate’s reach. A separate later ruling reinforces the point: after Lula’s campaign showed the company had “doctored algorithms to favor Bolsonaro in search results,” the same court issued an injunction against Meta. Meta rejected both accusations, though it conceded unspecified “technical issues.”
Nor did the problem end after Lula’s side pushed back. According to TikTok’s own published recommendation data, during the runoff it gave Flávio, Bolsonaro’s son and opponent, five recommendations to Lula’s two, by which time Lula’s digital operation was already at full speed. That skew was never fixed. He still prevailed with it in place.
Keep that in mind before reading any version of this as Lula “beat the algorithm,” remember this: he did not. No one has. He won despite it. Serbia offers the same lesson from the same week. Aleksandar Vučić stepped down as president specifically so he could run for prime minister, a workaround for the term limits that had finally caught up with him after more than ten years in power; even so, a student led list defeated his party for the parliament he needed. Within 48 hours, two entrenched political machines were beaten, not because the platforms favoured them, but for reasons entirely apart from that.
The Levee
The mobilisation did not begin with a deputy’s mobile phone. On the night Lula slipped behind in the opening round, students in Niterói were already out on the streets, drawing on their own tradition of marching against Bolsonaro’s university cuts in 2019. Only later did the machinery arrive. It amplified something that was already there.
Five days afterwards, Congressman André Janones opened a WhatsApp channel called Lula’s Army. By election day, it had 10.8 million followers and was delivering daily, unusually precise tasks: push a video hard, drive a hashtag into circulation, “no food before the mission.” Rather than distancing himself from the metaphor, Lula embraced it, naming Janones in his victory speech as the operation’s commander, a group that built its image on real soldiers, yet was outdone in the language of soldiering by a WhatsApp channel. The day before Flávio’s Avenida Paulista rally, that same effort had backers wearing the national jersey, taking back a shirt the far right had claimed as its own.
Bruno Dias, a commentator who observed from within São Paulo, captured the logic in a line worth retaining: “to be everywhere, to act redundantly, to be unbannable.” WhatsApp is, awkwardly enough, also a Meta product. No one appeared bothered by the contradiction. The aim was never to please Meta. It was to create something that would not require it.
Two scholars examining the outcome caution against treating it as simply a platform tale. Denilde Holzhacker does credit the shift, but says the key change was tying the digital effort to on-the-ground organisation. For Mayra Goulart, it was the material world, not the phone, that reduced abstention and persuaded the undecided. Lula’s vote climbed from sixty million in 2022 to sixty four million this year, first a turnout story, and only then a persuasion one. Both are also clear that no one can say how many votes, if any, the WhatsApp operation actually shifted. That is worth holding onto before turning this into a recipe instead of one specific three weeks that happened to succeed.
The Reframe
Here is the lesson, and here is what it is not.
It is not a matter of “out amplify the right online.” The second section above, “What Meta Admitted”, makes clear that the contest is fixed at the infrastructure level, not merely at the level of content, and no one can win a match when the referee is on the other team’s payroll. Lula constructed a second pitch alongside the first, then carried out the slower task of linking it to people.
The part that can be carried over is more limited: create distribution that does not need any platform’s approval to operate. Duplicate. Peer-to-peer. Built to be impossible to ban, because it was never asking for permission in the first place, functioning as a supplement to organising, not a replacement for it. That is an organisational issue rather than a matter of message discipline, and by itself it falls far short.
Nor is this confined to one place; it is being sought elsewhere by people who have even stronger grounds for confidence. In Spain, Pedro Sánchez has asked for Janones’ help directly in his own re-election campaign. In France, opponents of Marine Le Pen are copying what is already being referred to as “Janonisme.” No one spreading this is treating it as an oddity. They are treating it as a technique.
The Coalition Problem Comes First
Here I have to be precise about which Sinn Féin I mean, because the lesson doesn’t apply evenly.
26 county Sinn Féin runs as a coalition-management operation. It holds together voters who want opposite things on housing and migration by never quite specifying what it collectively believes, because any specific answer costs something with one half or the other. Simon McGarr named the condition precisely: an “impossible coalition,” split close to evenly on whether the state’s institutions are worth preserving or burning down.
This week supplied the clearest instance yet, and it isn’t new, it’s a pattern repeating. Justice spokesperson Matt Carthy TD from Cavan & Monaghan launched Valuing Irish Citizenship, raising the residency requirement from five to eight years and adding civics and language tests, substantially matching the government’s own reform and converging with the direction Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Aontú and Independent Ireland already hold, along with other right-wingers across Europe. Asked if fewer people would be granted citizenship, Carthy said it wasn’t about “crude numbers”, an evasion almost beside the point next to what he’d already said at the National Ploughing Championships: Sinn Féin “probably wasn’t vocal enough” about the asylum system, and the party’s position should sit “where the majority of Irish people are.” That is a party locating the loudest signal and moving to stand beside it, as strategy, in his own words, and it is the same admission, in substance, that other voices on the left have been making about the party for months, Paul Murphy TD of People Before Profit said in May that Sinn Féin had “drifted to the right,” and Social Democrats TDs said they’d been “taken aback” by the party’s abstention on a reproductive rights bill the same month. This is not a single bad week. It’s a pattern other people on the left have already named.
The same week, asked why he’d deleted an earlier post attacking the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Carthy confirmed he’d pulled it “fairly quickly” because of the “pile on” the centre was getting, while keeping his call for a funding review of organisations like it. The post goes. The position stays. The explanation offered is the backlash, not the argument.
6 county Sinn Féin is not running that problem. Three weeks before any of this, O’Neill and McDonald stood together at Garvaghy Road and held a line that cost them something real: both were later called in for PSNI interviews under caution, alongside other party figures including PBP’s Gerry Carroll MLA for west Belfast. That isn’t a movement incapable of a bottom line. The honest contrast isn’t that the north has principle and the south doesn’t, it’s that in the north, on an anti-sectarian question, the loudest signal and the party’s century old position point the same way, so holding the line costs something without forcing a choice between two things its own base wants. In the south, on migration, there is no settled position for the signal to answer to. Carthy isn’t failing to hold a line Sinn Féin has. He’s following a signal toward a line it never drew.
Even that contrast isn’t as clean as it looks. What bends, even at Garvaghy Road, isn’t whether O’Neill names something as wrong, it’s who she’s willing to name for it, the same naming capacity gradient that softens into agentless sentences the higher the cost of the name. The bottom line holds on position and loosens on attribution, north. South, it doesn’t hold on position at all.
Build a Janones style machine for 26 county Sinn Féin as it stands, and you aren’t amplifying a position. You’re amplifying whichever position tested best that week.
What’s Actually Being Asked
There are two questions here, and history answers only one of them unequivocally. The lineage is not pristine, I acknowledged that at the outset: because of the 1970 split, the current party comes from one faction within a faction, not from an unbroken chain reaching back to Griffith. Still, that is very different from what Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael did. Each of those parties departed and then created something else under a fresh label. In the end, the Officials, the wing of the 1970 split that did not become today’s Sinn Féin, did the same: they dropped the lineage entirely by changing their name and became the Workers’ Party. Today’s Sinn Féin never took that route. It retained the name and continued to stand as Sinn Féin through every split dating back to Griffith. That is the real point, and it is narrower than words like “unbroken” or “settled” may imply: not the sole successor, but the one that never walked away and never rebranded itself. Whatever the party does this week does not alter that.
The second issue is about conduct, and on that score the answer has just emerged in the least encouraging way. Choose a line. Not the one a pollster would call safest. Work out what the party believes a renter is entitled to in relation to a homeowner, what it thinks of a system that is failing people on all sides of the migration debate, and then accept that taking such a stance will cost something with someone. Carthy made that clear this week. He directed it at Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Aontú and Independent Ireland, and described it as the majority view rather than his own.
I should add the detail I am not going to omit, because it is the most important part. In a Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks poll of 1,181 voters carried out the day after the launch (30th October), Sinn Féin was up two points to 21, putting it ahead of the rest of the field. Aontú climbed to 9, which is its highest figure in this series. Independent Ireland moved up two to 7. Fianna Fáil alone took the hit, falling two to 16. Even allowing for the 2.9 margin of error, the trend is plain and real: that entire bloc shifting right on migration advanced in the same week Sinn Féin aligned itself with it.
I want to be explicit about what that means for me, because I am not prepared to let a poll decide the matter. Sinn Féin has once again been nudged rightward on immigration, this time by a cue it treated as if it were a mandate, and I cannot endorse that, whatever the numbers say this week or next. If a party rises in the polls by doing the wrong thing, that does not justify the thing itself. It explains why the thing continues. McKearney’s point was never simply that failure had been identified. It was that a strategy can work on its own terms, and precisely for that reason it endures; that is why it has to be named plainly, not excused because of the outcome.
Brazil did not show that making a position explicit is the key. What it showed is that being explicit in opposition to the noisiest signal, even when it carries a cost, and having something to organise around, does work, and that the approach is portable enough that Madrid and Paris are already requesting it by name. Garvaghy Road showed that Sinn Féin can do exactly that when the signal and the principle point in the same direction. This week, however, the signal was different, there was no principle beneath it, and the poll told the party that none of that mattered.
The embryo is real. It was there in 1905, and its claim on the tradition is the stronger one. But an embryo is not a guarantee. A movement can have the better claim on its own history, proof it can hold a line, a method already carrying its name abroad, and still spend a week discovering none of it costs the party anything, and take the easy road of least resistance regardless.
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| Photo by Lukas Souza on Unsplash |
The Position
Let’s start with the history, because it’s so often recounted in reverse. Sinn Féin is not a petitioner at a gate that two older parties have long barred to it. Rather, Sinn Féin is the house those parties departed. Arthur Griffith established the movement in 1905, absorbing into it the National Council he had headed since 1903, and in time both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil would break away from Sinn Féin, not the other way around. Fine Gael did not come into being until 1933, when it was created from the fusion of three bodies: Cumann na nGaedheal, the party pro-Treaty members organised in April 1923, as the civil war that the Treaty had opened in January 1922 was ending; the Centre Party; and the Blueshirts. Fianna Fáil was not founded until 1926, when Éamon de Valera, having been defeated at the Sinn Féin ard fheis on whether to enter the Dáil, stepped down as president of the movement and took most of its membership with him. If you put aside the century of civil war mythology so carefully maintained, until recent years, by both successor parties, what is left is not an old regime confronted by a new challenger. It is one movement, and two exits from it, exits that have shaped this nation of ours for over a hundred years even as each, in turn, claims to embody the tradition and casts the movement it abandoned as the deviation.
The family tree is not tidy. The remnant that retained the Sinn Féin name after 1926 divided again in 1970, and today’s party descends from that second division rather than from an unbroken line back to Griffith. Yet the actual movement of events runs opposite to the usual assumption. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil departed from Sinn Féin in order to construct an order, and since then they have ruled, one after the other and together, on the basis of having been the ones to leave. I make no apology for wanting this pattern to be over. I’m fucking sick of it. Sin é.
This piece is about how poorly Sinn Féin, in its present guise, is prepared to bring that order to an end. It is written by someone who still wants them to do exactly that.
What Meta Admitted
Begin with São Paulo, and with a detail that should shame a trillion dollar firm far more than it apparently does. On 16th October, Reuters said that Meta’s own employees, in internal messages examined by Folha de S.Paulo, admitted President Lula’s Instagram accounts were being blocked by campaign time restrictions even as the platform was surfacing his rival’s profile. Then, on 15th October, a Brazilian electoral court justice had to order Meta to cease the unjustified suppression of either candidate’s reach. A separate later ruling reinforces the point: after Lula’s campaign showed the company had “doctored algorithms to favor Bolsonaro in search results,” the same court issued an injunction against Meta. Meta rejected both accusations, though it conceded unspecified “technical issues.”
Nor did the problem end after Lula’s side pushed back. According to TikTok’s own published recommendation data, during the runoff it gave Flávio, Bolsonaro’s son and opponent, five recommendations to Lula’s two, by which time Lula’s digital operation was already at full speed. That skew was never fixed. He still prevailed with it in place.
Keep that in mind before reading any version of this as Lula “beat the algorithm,” remember this: he did not. No one has. He won despite it. Serbia offers the same lesson from the same week. Aleksandar Vučić stepped down as president specifically so he could run for prime minister, a workaround for the term limits that had finally caught up with him after more than ten years in power; even so, a student led list defeated his party for the parliament he needed. Within 48 hours, two entrenched political machines were beaten, not because the platforms favoured them, but for reasons entirely apart from that.
The Levee
The mobilisation did not begin with a deputy’s mobile phone. On the night Lula slipped behind in the opening round, students in Niterói were already out on the streets, drawing on their own tradition of marching against Bolsonaro’s university cuts in 2019. Only later did the machinery arrive. It amplified something that was already there.
Five days afterwards, Congressman André Janones opened a WhatsApp channel called Lula’s Army. By election day, it had 10.8 million followers and was delivering daily, unusually precise tasks: push a video hard, drive a hashtag into circulation, “no food before the mission.” Rather than distancing himself from the metaphor, Lula embraced it, naming Janones in his victory speech as the operation’s commander, a group that built its image on real soldiers, yet was outdone in the language of soldiering by a WhatsApp channel. The day before Flávio’s Avenida Paulista rally, that same effort had backers wearing the national jersey, taking back a shirt the far right had claimed as its own.
Bruno Dias, a commentator who observed from within São Paulo, captured the logic in a line worth retaining: “to be everywhere, to act redundantly, to be unbannable.” WhatsApp is, awkwardly enough, also a Meta product. No one appeared bothered by the contradiction. The aim was never to please Meta. It was to create something that would not require it.
Two scholars examining the outcome caution against treating it as simply a platform tale. Denilde Holzhacker does credit the shift, but says the key change was tying the digital effort to on-the-ground organisation. For Mayra Goulart, it was the material world, not the phone, that reduced abstention and persuaded the undecided. Lula’s vote climbed from sixty million in 2022 to sixty four million this year, first a turnout story, and only then a persuasion one. Both are also clear that no one can say how many votes, if any, the WhatsApp operation actually shifted. That is worth holding onto before turning this into a recipe instead of one specific three weeks that happened to succeed.
The Reframe
Here is the lesson, and here is what it is not.
It is not a matter of “out amplify the right online.” The second section above, “What Meta Admitted”, makes clear that the contest is fixed at the infrastructure level, not merely at the level of content, and no one can win a match when the referee is on the other team’s payroll. Lula constructed a second pitch alongside the first, then carried out the slower task of linking it to people.
The part that can be carried over is more limited: create distribution that does not need any platform’s approval to operate. Duplicate. Peer-to-peer. Built to be impossible to ban, because it was never asking for permission in the first place, functioning as a supplement to organising, not a replacement for it. That is an organisational issue rather than a matter of message discipline, and by itself it falls far short.
Nor is this confined to one place; it is being sought elsewhere by people who have even stronger grounds for confidence. In Spain, Pedro Sánchez has asked for Janones’ help directly in his own re-election campaign. In France, opponents of Marine Le Pen are copying what is already being referred to as “Janonisme.” No one spreading this is treating it as an oddity. They are treating it as a technique.
The Coalition Problem Comes First
Here I have to be precise about which Sinn Féin I mean, because the lesson doesn’t apply evenly.
26 county Sinn Féin runs as a coalition-management operation. It holds together voters who want opposite things on housing and migration by never quite specifying what it collectively believes, because any specific answer costs something with one half or the other. Simon McGarr named the condition precisely: an “impossible coalition,” split close to evenly on whether the state’s institutions are worth preserving or burning down.
This week supplied the clearest instance yet, and it isn’t new, it’s a pattern repeating. Justice spokesperson Matt Carthy TD from Cavan & Monaghan launched Valuing Irish Citizenship, raising the residency requirement from five to eight years and adding civics and language tests, substantially matching the government’s own reform and converging with the direction Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Aontú and Independent Ireland already hold, along with other right-wingers across Europe. Asked if fewer people would be granted citizenship, Carthy said it wasn’t about “crude numbers”, an evasion almost beside the point next to what he’d already said at the National Ploughing Championships: Sinn Féin “probably wasn’t vocal enough” about the asylum system, and the party’s position should sit “where the majority of Irish people are.” That is a party locating the loudest signal and moving to stand beside it, as strategy, in his own words, and it is the same admission, in substance, that other voices on the left have been making about the party for months, Paul Murphy TD of People Before Profit said in May that Sinn Féin had “drifted to the right,” and Social Democrats TDs said they’d been “taken aback” by the party’s abstention on a reproductive rights bill the same month. This is not a single bad week. It’s a pattern other people on the left have already named.
The same week, asked why he’d deleted an earlier post attacking the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Carthy confirmed he’d pulled it “fairly quickly” because of the “pile on” the centre was getting, while keeping his call for a funding review of organisations like it. The post goes. The position stays. The explanation offered is the backlash, not the argument.
6 county Sinn Féin is not running that problem. Three weeks before any of this, O’Neill and McDonald stood together at Garvaghy Road and held a line that cost them something real: both were later called in for PSNI interviews under caution, alongside other party figures including PBP’s Gerry Carroll MLA for west Belfast. That isn’t a movement incapable of a bottom line. The honest contrast isn’t that the north has principle and the south doesn’t, it’s that in the north, on an anti-sectarian question, the loudest signal and the party’s century old position point the same way, so holding the line costs something without forcing a choice between two things its own base wants. In the south, on migration, there is no settled position for the signal to answer to. Carthy isn’t failing to hold a line Sinn Féin has. He’s following a signal toward a line it never drew.
Even that contrast isn’t as clean as it looks. What bends, even at Garvaghy Road, isn’t whether O’Neill names something as wrong, it’s who she’s willing to name for it, the same naming capacity gradient that softens into agentless sentences the higher the cost of the name. The bottom line holds on position and loosens on attribution, north. South, it doesn’t hold on position at all.
Build a Janones style machine for 26 county Sinn Féin as it stands, and you aren’t amplifying a position. You’re amplifying whichever position tested best that week.
What’s Actually Being Asked
There are two questions here, and history answers only one of them unequivocally. The lineage is not pristine, I acknowledged that at the outset: because of the 1970 split, the current party comes from one faction within a faction, not from an unbroken chain reaching back to Griffith. Still, that is very different from what Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael did. Each of those parties departed and then created something else under a fresh label. In the end, the Officials, the wing of the 1970 split that did not become today’s Sinn Féin, did the same: they dropped the lineage entirely by changing their name and became the Workers’ Party. Today’s Sinn Féin never took that route. It retained the name and continued to stand as Sinn Féin through every split dating back to Griffith. That is the real point, and it is narrower than words like “unbroken” or “settled” may imply: not the sole successor, but the one that never walked away and never rebranded itself. Whatever the party does this week does not alter that.
The second issue is about conduct, and on that score the answer has just emerged in the least encouraging way. Choose a line. Not the one a pollster would call safest. Work out what the party believes a renter is entitled to in relation to a homeowner, what it thinks of a system that is failing people on all sides of the migration debate, and then accept that taking such a stance will cost something with someone. Carthy made that clear this week. He directed it at Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Aontú and Independent Ireland, and described it as the majority view rather than his own.
I should add the detail I am not going to omit, because it is the most important part. In a Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks poll of 1,181 voters carried out the day after the launch (30th October), Sinn Féin was up two points to 21, putting it ahead of the rest of the field. Aontú climbed to 9, which is its highest figure in this series. Independent Ireland moved up two to 7. Fianna Fáil alone took the hit, falling two to 16. Even allowing for the 2.9 margin of error, the trend is plain and real: that entire bloc shifting right on migration advanced in the same week Sinn Féin aligned itself with it.
I want to be explicit about what that means for me, because I am not prepared to let a poll decide the matter. Sinn Féin has once again been nudged rightward on immigration, this time by a cue it treated as if it were a mandate, and I cannot endorse that, whatever the numbers say this week or next. If a party rises in the polls by doing the wrong thing, that does not justify the thing itself. It explains why the thing continues. McKearney’s point was never simply that failure had been identified. It was that a strategy can work on its own terms, and precisely for that reason it endures; that is why it has to be named plainly, not excused because of the outcome.
Brazil did not show that making a position explicit is the key. What it showed is that being explicit in opposition to the noisiest signal, even when it carries a cost, and having something to organise around, does work, and that the approach is portable enough that Madrid and Paris are already requesting it by name. Garvaghy Road showed that Sinn Féin can do exactly that when the signal and the principle point in the same direction. This week, however, the signal was different, there was no principle beneath it, and the poll told the party that none of that mattered.
The embryo is real. It was there in 1905, and its claim on the tradition is the stronger one. But an embryo is not a guarantee. A movement can have the better claim on its own history, proof it can hold a line, a method already carrying its name abroad, and still spend a week discovering none of it costs the party anything, and take the easy road of least resistance regardless.
⏩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.
