Will the Republic of Ireland vote Sinn Féin into power?

Sinn Féin now leads the Republic of Ireland’s general election race, according to the latest Irish Times’ opinion poll. The survey puts the party on 25 per cent of the vote, while Fianna Fail is down two points at 22 per cent and Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael is on 20 per cent.

During the campaign, the Republic’s prime minister has emphasised his apparent achievements in negotiating a Brexit deal with Boris Johnson and portrayed Ireland as a modern, progressive European nation.

It seems the Irish public is more focussed on domestic problems and the perceived unsustainability of the country’s economic recovery, while his vision of a dynamic, tolerant state could be exploded by Saturday’s poll result.

There’s long been a contradictory attitude to Sinn Féin from Dublin’s political establishment, one that verges on hypocrisy.

The party is considered uncivilised and embarrassing, thanks to its links with terrorism. Varadkar says it’s “not a normal political party”, while the Fianna Fail leader, Michael Martin, points to the continuing involvement of “shadowy figures” from the IRA. And they’ve both ruled out including Sinn Féin in any coalition government that they might head.

Yet, both men felt free to urge unionists in Northern Ireland to make sweeping concessions to restore power-sharing with the party. And they’re competing to lead a state that celebrates the involvement of separatist terrorists in its very creation. Indeed, their parties each have roots in the same violent republican movement from which Sinn Féin claims its heritage.

Until recently, there was a complacent assumption that the Republic’s electorate was too mature and sophisticated to vote in big numbers for “the Shinners”, due to their associations with organised crime and overt anti-British bigotry. The party grew substantially during the financial crash, winning nearly ten per cent of the vote in 2011 and almost fourteen per cent in 2016, but that was supposed to be about angry voters lashing out at the establishment.

In contrast, in the run-up to this election, the Republic’s economy has performed well, at least as far as statistics are concerned. Leo Varadkar argues that his minority Fine Gael administration is managing the country’s finances wisely and that a change of government could damage economic progress and create uncertainty in the next round of Brexit negotiations between the EU and the UK.

In a successful, moderate state, though, Sinn Féin would not be surging in the polls.

Mary Lou McDonald replaced Gerry Adams as the party’s president in 2018, providing it with a figure-head untainted by associations with the IRA. But, even setting aside its terrorist connections, Sinn Féin mixes an aggressive form of left-wing populism with virulent Irish nationalism.

The party’s spending plans for this election drew inspiration from Jeremy Corbyn’s pre-Christmas manifesto. And previously, it tried to emulate the street activism of radical continental parties like Syriza and Podemos, with which it shares alliances in the European Parliament.

It combines this progressive facade with vicious attacks on the British government, attempts to demonise unionists and demands for an immediate border poll aimed at creating an all-Ireland state. One of the party’s pre-election broadcasts featured the IRA ditty, ‘Come out you Black and Tans’.

If the Republic’s economy really were as formidable as it seemed, Sinn Féin’s left populism would have little purchase. However, last year an IMF report revealed that two-thirds of the country’s GDP was “phantom”, comprising income passing through Ireland to minimise tax revenue rather than meaningful economic activity.

This “Father Ted economy”, relying on monies resting in the Republic of Ireland’s account, can’t hide the daily reality of child poverty, a struggling health-service and a housing crisis that has caused highly visible homelessness, particularly on the streets of Dublin. Meanwhile, the Brexit withdrawal deal, for which Varadkar is keen to take credit, hasn’t solved the problem of potential trade barriers between Ireland and Britain, that could cause a 7 per cent contraction in the country’s economy.

For Mary Lou McDonald, the least comfortable moments in this election have still come courtesy of Sinn Féin’s links with the IRA. There is compelling evidence, both from police services and republicans themselves, that the organisation’s Army Council directs its political wing. The Shinners are unrepentant about IRA violence during the Troubles, but the southern Irish public is more perturbed by its connections with criminality after the cease-fires.

In a leaders’ debate on the Republic’s state broadcaster, RTE, McDonald struggled to field a question about the murder of Paul Quinn in County Monaghan in 2007. His parents and the Independent Monitoring Commission, a body set up by the British and Irish governments to monitor paramilitary activity, believed that IRA members were involved. Their hurt was compounded when Sinn Féin’s Conor Murphy, now Northern Ireland’s finance minister, implied that Quinn was killed because he was involved in criminal activity.

This is the type of barbarity that 25 per cent of southern Irish voters look set to ignore, as they go to the polls on Saturday. Even liberal commentators, like the Irish Times’ Fintan O’Toole, are now wheeling out arguments to justify Sinn Féin’s potential inclusion in any coalition government. Though the party is topping the polls, it is unlikely to win most seats and have one of its own as prime minister, because it is fielding only 41 candidates in a proportional election.

In the wake of Brexit, a lot of attention was devoted to apparent “soft” unionists in Northern Ireland, who were supposedly considering whether an all-Ireland state inside the EU was more attractive than nasty, “nationalist” Britain. That argument relied on the idea that the Republic was increasingly outward-looking, diverse and international, while the UK was cutting itself off from the rest of the world.

It was always a fanciful notion and it will be exploded for good if Sinn Féin, part of a movement that waged a murderous, sectarian campaign to force unionists to accept an Irish nationalist state, win the election or form part of the Republic’s next government.