Shinners Must Rock The Vote ... 2015 Is The Key For Power Play

By AM Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Share Tweet Share Share Email

John Coulter with this week's column from the Irish Daily Star.

The Shinners need to trigger both Dail and Stormont elections this year if they are to truly prove they are the party with power in Ireland.

Sinn Fein cannot afford to wait until next year’s Rising centenary before unleashing its all-island agenda.

By 2016, Robbo’s DUP will have outgunned the Shinners at the Assembly and all the cash gains Sinn Fein amassed for nationalism in the festive Stormont House Agreement might as well be chucked out the window of Deputy First Minister Marty McGuinness’ office.

The Stormont House deal means Sinn Fein won’t carry the can for stinging welfare reform and other austerity cuts which the Assembly has to implement in the coming months.

In the Republic, Shinner spin doctors can pump out the propaganda that Sinn Fein is the main voice of opposition to austerity.

If that line holds firm, it will take Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams through the magic 20-TD mark in the Dail, thereby guaranteeing the Shinners top seats in the next Leinster House cabinet. 

With Sinn Fein riding high in the Southern opinion polls, Gerry Adams must pile the pressure on Taoiseach King Kenny to call a Dail election. The real problem could be in the North trying to collapse the Assembly.

The Shinners’ ace card is the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, which resulted in Sinn Fein entering the power-sharing Stormont Executive with the late Ian Paisley’s DUP. 

Such was the DUP’s lust for power at that time, it successfully binned the 1998 Good Friday Agreement ruling that the largest political designation – Unionist or Nationalist – would take the coveted First Minister’s slot.

To outgun the election-battered Ulster Unionists, the DUP negotiated that it would be the largest party which would snatch the First Minister’s office. But that was always on the assumption the DUP would remain the largest Northern party.

The Unionist family is now at its weakest since the English Government axed the original Stormont Parliament in 1972.

Sinn Fein has only one electoral hurdle to clear this year – finishing off the Stoops. 

 

Dissident political groups have only managed to chalk up a handful of super councillors and pose no serious electoral threat to the Shinners.

 

Robbo’s DUP, on the other hands, has to contend with bitter factions within its own ranks, as well as a bucketload of rival unionist parties and independents. Sinn Fein is now in its best position ever to take the First Minister’s post. 

 

With welfare reform cash safely in its hip pocket, Sinn Fein must use the issues of parading and the past to crash Stormont and force a fresh Assembly poll to coincide with May’s Westminster General Election.

 

The sole card in the SDLP deck is that Stoop MPs take their Commons seats, while the Shinners are still stuck in their 20^th century bubble of meaningless abstentionism.

 

Robbo’s DUP can sell the spin to the Unionist family that it can become a major player in the next Westminster Government in a pact with Cameron’s Tories and Farage’s Ukip.

 

If the DUP can pull off a place in the next Commons coalition government, it will push the abstentionist Shinners into the fringes – and that will have a knock-on effect on Stormont.

 

If Sinn Fein can get the First Minister’s post, it can also rewrite the statute books so that the current equal status with Deputy First Minister can be scrapped.

 

The Shinners will run the Executive on their own. Ireland will be unified in all but name only.

The DUP will also be trying to outgun Rising centenary plans by commemorating the centenary this year of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in 1915 which cost the lives of thousands of Irish born troops.

 

Heavy metal king pins AC/DC’s new album, Rock Or Bust, could well apply to Sinn Fein’s Northern campaign in 2015!