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In the recent Irish elections, Sinn Féin won 37 seats and took 24.5% of the total vote. Despite this it has been (so far) unable to form a government.
The prospect of it doing so has produced expressions of horror from its rivals in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. The outgoing Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, described Sinn Féin plans to hold post-election rallies as part of a “campaign of intimidation”, while in an unprecedented intervention, the Garda commissioner Drew Harris (a former senior officer in the Police Service of Northern Ireland) stated that he agreed with a 2015 security assessment that claimed that the IRA army council still “oversees” the party. Mainstream commentators have echoed these points, stressing that Sinn Féin is unfit for government in Dublin.
This hysteria has several roots. Some evidently dislike the idea of a “northern” party holding power “down here”. Others, usually sotto voce, echo the view of the political correspondent John Drennan who once suggested that Sinn Féin supporters existed on a diet of “chips, Dutch Gold and batter burgers” – a nod to the party’s supporters being mainly working class.
Continue Reading @ The Guardian.
"Ironically the partitionist nature of Irish politics also benefits Sinn Féin. Most voters in the Republic pay little attention to day-to-day northern politics. But what people are aware of is that since 2017 Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have been demanding that Sinn Féin return to government with the Democratic Unionist party in Belfast. It seems strange then to assert that it is unfit for power in the Republic. Indeed if the IRA army council is really running Sinn Féin, then how does DUP leader Arlene Foster (a woman whose father was actually shot by the IRA), share power with them in Northern Ireland?"
ReplyDeleteThe World's gone fucking mad....