The recent elections in Great Britain saw not just a severe battering for the Labour Party, but also significant gains for the Hard Right Reform UK party as well as wins for the Hard Left Green Party.
But here in Northern Ireland, where there were no elections, the Provisional IRA’s political wing has been burning the midnight oil spinning the spoof about the significance of Scotland and Wales joining Ulster in having a First Minister.
The Scottish National Party (SNP), in spite of losing seats, remains the largest party in the Scottish parliament holding onto the First Minister’s post. In Wales, the main Welsh nationalist movement, Plaid Cymru (PC), overturned decades of Labour rule to become the top party in the Welsh Assembly, thereby getting its hands on its First Minister position.
If folk swallowed the Sinn Fein spin like a bad tasting dose of cod liver oil, you would be forgiven for thinking the United Kingdom is being politically shattered. Nothing could be further from reality as there are radical differences between the directions of Sinn Fein, the SNP and PC.
What’s the point of the SNP mouthing off that it wants to work with Sinn Fein and PC when the exercise is constitutionally pointless because the IRA’s political wing does not take its seats in the House of Commons.
Indeed, the blunt reality which this supposedly new look pan nationalist front must face is that while Sinn Fein has a terrorist military wing, the SNP and PC are both purely democratic parties with no terrorist factions to their movements.
Put bluntly, neither the SNP or PC - unlike Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland - gained their respective positions in Scottish and Welsh politics on the backs of thousands of people murdered and maimed in Scotland and Wales.
While Sinn Fein’s military wing failed to bomb Northern Ireland out of the UK, the perception is that both the SNP and PC would be quite happy with increased devolved powers for their respective parliaments.
The real issue facing the 2026 pan nationalist front is - who calls the shots politically? Is it Sinn Fein, the SNP, or PC?
Given that both SNP MPs and PC MPs take their Westminster seats, is there the possibility that Scottish and Welsh nationalist MPs could ‘suck the Shinners’ into the British constitutional democratic process by persuading Sinn Fein MPs to ditch their outdated abstentionist policy and actually take their seats on the famous green benches, especially if the next Westminster General Election produces a hung Parliament?
Since its formation in 1905, Sinn Fein’s abstentionist policy of various parliaments has been gradually diluted. Perhaps Sinn Fein is still living in 1918 when it won the vast majority of Commons seats in Ireland when the island was still part of the British Empire? No seats were taken.
When the republican hardliners did not get their way over the Anglo-Irish Treaty in the early 1920s, they walked out of the Dublin Dail and sparked the bloody Irish Civil War which saw more IRA terrorists killed by the pro-Treaty Free State forces than were killed by the British during the earlier War of Independence.
Sinn Fein refused to take its seats in the 1982-86 Stormont Assembly, but 1986 also saw the movement vote to drop its traditional abstentionist policy in Dublin’s parliament in Leinster House. That sparked a walkout by hardline traditionalists to form the fringe Republican Sinn Fein party.
And in 1998, the abstentionist policy was further diluted when Sinn Fein took its seats at Stormont in the Assembly formed as a result of the Good Friday Agreement. Sinn Fein even sits in power-sharing Executive where its ministers spend cash given to their departments by the Westminster Government.
Whilst they may crow about independence, the SNP and PC both know Scotland and Wales cannot survive financially without Westminster. Put bluntly, the Scottish and Welsh nationalist interpretation of ‘independence’ is radically different from the republican myth of Irish unity.
In a united Ireland, Sinn Fein would become a political irrelevance as traditional nationalist parties, such as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, would soon swallow up the Sinn Fein vote.
The best the new pan nationalist front can hope for is even more devolved powers for the three regions from London, along with a bigger budget and perhaps even tax raising powers - a move that may not make the nationalist and republican parties as popular as last week’s election results in Britain.
The really big worry for the pan nationalist front is the ‘stay at home’ brigade. Both the SNP and PC either retained their power or got into power because only around half the eligible electorate bothered to vote.
Unionism in Northern Ireland has suffered electorally in the past because of the ‘stay at home’ brigade in traditionally Unionist constituencies. Now that Sinn Fein is part of a power-sharing government at Stormont, could Sinn Fein suffer the same political malaise in next year’s Assembly elections in traditionally nationalist constituencies?
Just as opinion polls are seeing gradual support creeping up for the once election battered UUP and SDLP which dominated the original Northern Ireland Assembly in 1998, could 2027 see the current Sinn Fein/DUP grip on the Stormont Executive radically slackened?
In terms of sound bites, the concept of the First Minister hat trick sounds politically delicious. But I wonder how Sinn Fein would sell it to its traditional hardline republican heartlands if the SNP and PC persuaded the republican movement to take its Westminster seats?
When that bitter political medicine is administered to Sinn Fein, all of a sudden the pan nationalist front’s crowing about three First Ministers can be dismissed for what it really is - republican spoofing!
 |
| Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. |
As opposed to the negative Unionists who just decry everything and say no continually to try to grasp on to their precious union, a grasp that is slowly but surely going to slip in future years. There is much that we can criticise Sinn Fein over, not everything is rosey in the garden but please, the negativity of unionism is there for all to see. It’s virtually the only hand they have and this article is basically just an extension of it
ReplyDelete