Andrew McQuillan

Could the rise of Sinn Fein lead to a united Ireland?

Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald (Getty)

The possibility of a political wing of a terrorist organisation becoming a party of government in an EU member state would normally be headline news. But that’s precisely what’s happening in Ireland. 

Sinn Fein is currently enjoying a consistent lead at the top of the polls in the Republic; a recent example from the Irish edition of the Sunday Times shows it had surged by six points to 37 per cent, some distance ahead of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, currently coalition partners. Public approval of the Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald — the middle-class Dubliner who described the IRA campaign as ‘justified’ and mused that there was ‘every chance’ she would have joined in if she had the chance — is at 50 per cent. The current Taoiseach, Michael Martin, is nine points behind her.

The nuances of the Republic’s electoral system and the strength of anti-Sinn Fein feeling among other parties could in all likelihood lead to another coalition designed to keep them out of government. The aftermath of the 2020 election is an instructive example. Yet the consistent and increasing popularity of a party of terrorist sympathisers holds up an unforgiving mirror to the state of society in the Republic which often goes unrecognised — deliberately or otherwise — by elements of the UK’s political class.

There is now a strong chance that it will become the largest party at Stormont following next year’s election

Events in the south are not taking place in isolation though. Such is Sinn Fein’s stranglehold on nationalist politics in Northern Ireland — and the atomisation of the unionist vote — that there is now a strong chance it will become the largest party at Stormont following next year’s election.

A strategic slip-up by the DUP — in 2006, they pushed through a change which meant that the leader of the largest party, rather than the party at the head of the largest designation in the Assembly would become first minister — means that Michelle O’Neill would take that role on, based on current projections.

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