Handling Sinn Fein will be hard for the UK — and not much easier for Ireland

Sinn Fein has triumphed in the Irish general election, and if the party plays its cards right it could end up with even more influence. This is nothing short of a nightmare for British prime minister Boris Johnson.

Winning 37 seats in Ireland’s parliament, Sinn Fein is a long way from the 80 necessary to form a government, even with its preferred left-wing coalition partners. But by coming second in the election, and winning the popular vote, Sinn Fein has finally shifted from being a large but ultimately fringe party, tainted by its history with the IRA, to a mainstream fixture in Irish political life.

Unedifying scenes of the party’s hardcore supporters singing rebel songs have annoyed many, but the party has undeniably split the Irish political scene wide open, and this cannot be ignored in London any more than it can in Dublin. The days of the cordon sanitaire are over, though in truth it was always rather more porous than it appeared.

Despite the repeated claims of never talking to terrorists, British governments have always negotiated with Irish republicans. Even in the darkest year of the Northern Ireland conflict, 1972, meetings were held between the likes of Gerry Adams and Whitehall officials.

The government of Margaret Thatcher, arguably the staunchest opponent Irish republicanism ever faced, kept channels open to the IRA during the terrifying times of the 1981 hunger strikes, the events that precipitated the rise of the hitherto irrelevant Sinn Fein as an electoral force. In the end, most of these discussions came to nothing, and amount to little more than the British being smart enough to keep their ears to the ground during horrendous times.

Most famously, of course, in the 1990s John Major and his successor Tony Blair brought Sinn Fein in from the cold, a bold and not universally popular move that has nonetheless led to the imperfect peace of today and eventual disarmament of the Provisional IRA. Recently, Sinn Fein was present at a recruitment drive for the Police Service of Northern Ireland, something that would have been unimaginable in the past.

What no British government has ever had to do, however, is to negotiate with republicans in terms of intergovernmental statecraft — deal with them as equals. But following the results of the Irish general election and in the febrile atmosphere of the final negotiations with the EU over Brexit, this is a very real possibility — if not yet a certainty.

Will the Sinn Fein, North and South, push for a poll on Irish reunification? Would a Sinn Fein-led government use its veto power to stop a UK-EU trade deal?

Probably not, at least in the case of the latter. Portrayed as stubborn and belligerent, and in truth they can be, Irish politicians have a pragmatic streak. Irish republicans, no less than the unionists of the DUP who squeezed Theresa May, know how to drive a hard bargain. In the run up to the Irish election Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou rowed back on demands for a border poll — though who knows what the party is thinking now, presumably feeling emboldened by having so thoroughly changed the face of Irish politics. Either way, holding power in a sovereign state, rather than as a mere regional player in a conflict most people would rather forget, Sinn Fein would have real leverage.

It is not clear that the British political class is at all ready for this. During the negotiations over Brexit, the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and his minister for foreign affairs Simon Coveney were lambasted as anti-British wreckers, bent either on crippling Brexit or using it to dismantle the United Kingdom.

In fact, Varadkar and Coveney are anglophile liberal-conservatives from a centre-right party, Fine Gael, that has always favoured close ties with Britain. They have no love of latter-day Irish republicanism. The idea that Varadkar’s Fine Gael was, not so secretly, pushing for a united Ireland was met with gales of laughter in Ireland.

All Varadkar and Coveney were doing was narrowly protecting Ireland’s immediate interests: ensuring the country continues to benefit from EU membership, protecting supply chains that cross Britain, and ensuring that the border did not again become a live political issue on the island.

For his part, Varadkar repeatedly refused to call for a referendum on uniting Ireland. One wonders what those who mistook him for a reincarnated Michael Collins or Eamon de Valera would do when faced with an unrepentant republican who really does see Irish reunification as an important and achievable medium term goal.

“The Irish really should know their place,” one unnamed Tory MP reportedly told the BBC in 2018. The thing is, they do: their place is running the sovereign state of Ireland.

And it’s true: Ireland is a small country, of much less importance on the global stage than Britain. This, in fact, is a key reason why the EU is so popular in Ireland: not only is the economy dependent on single market access, but EU membership increases Ireland’s clout. A seat at the top table is more than Ireland ever had under British rule. (Eurosceptic candidates averaged between zero and one per cent in the election on Saturday).

The actual geographic composition of that small country is not an immediate issue, either. Whatever British newspaper columnists tell you, most Irish people support reunification. Few are in any rush to achieve it, though. Brexit brought the issue back into people’s minds, with the glee of pro-British unionists deeply hurting Irish feelings. The latter thought everyone had agreed to make the border invisible and meaningless in everyday life if not in reality. The truth is, though, that if Brexit is a success, Northern Ireland does not sink into depression, and people are not inconvenienced crossing it, then the border question will settle back down again. It’s not the border that drove Sinn Fein’s vote.

Online hotheads have already said that Johnson should refuse to deal with any government that includes Sinn Fein, as it would no longer be an honest broker on Northern Ireland. Tell that to Theresa May, who negotiated a confidence and supply agreement with the DUP to prop-up her minority government in Britain.

For now, the prospect of a Sinn Fein Taoiseach remains up in the air. McDonald says she is trying to put together a coalition of left-wing parties, but the numbers just aren’t there. If she elects to go into government with the establishment party Fianna Fail, then Sinn Fein’s newfound support, predicated as it is on being a new broom, could blow away like dust in the wind.

The good news for the British government is that Sinn Fein will have more pressing things to deal with than spend its time attempting to agitate across the Irish sea, not least the housing and healthcare crises that propelled its surge.

If the party does enter government it will also have to prove itself competent, but it will not have a free hand. A left-wing minority government would be inherently unstable, while a deal with Fianna Fail could see clashes over public spending. With plenty of problems to deal with at home, bashing the Brits will not be high on Sinn Fein’s agenda.

Another option is that Sinn Fein could refuse to coalesce with Fianna Fail and, possibly, trigger another election — one it may well triumph in. After all, the party’s transfers under Ireland’s system of proportional representation indicate that, had it put up more candidates, it would now be the biggest party in the Irish parliament.

But it’s early days yet: the counts have only just ended and negotiations to form a coalition are underway, so things may yet change again. We do know Ireland has voted for change, but we are no closer to knowing what shape that change will take.