Sam McBride: Sinn Féin thought Covid would hasten Irish unity, but increasingly it is exposing the party

It was clear that in the early weeks of the pandemic, Sinn Féin saw this crisis not just as a human disaster, but as a political opportunity.
Michelle O’Neill this week contradicted her party chairman – seemingly without even realising that she was doing soMichelle O’Neill this week contradicted her party chairman – seemingly without even realising that she was doing so
Michelle O’Neill this week contradicted her party chairman – seemingly without even realising that she was doing so

Party leader Mary Lou McDonald did not just think this privately; she was quite open about it, explicitly in late April linking coronavirus and her party’s campaign for Irish unity by arguing that constitutional change was now more likely as a result of the virus.

By revealing so openly that in the midst of the first wave of coronavirus Sinn Féin was thinking about how this might help its case for a united Ireland, Ms McDonald upset some of those who wanted to see party politics put aside temporarily in order to work solely on saving lives.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Both locally and around the world, Ms McDonald was not alone in seeing the pandemic as an opportunity to make the case for her political ideology.

DUP and UUP figures extolled the value of the Union as demonstrated by the NHS and the Treasury’s financial support, SNP politicians made the case for independence by railing against what they argued was a dangerous and incompetent Tory administration in London, and the Chinese Communist Party put out propaganda which lauded the one-party state’s ability to control the virus.

It is unreasonable to suggest that politicians can wholly set aside their ideological underpinning for more than a very short period; the nature of the decisions being taken in a crisis of this magnitude are so significant that a leader’s most keenly felt beliefs will always play some role in their approach.

It is also arguably unhealthy for politicians to go too far in simply acquiescing with any emerging consensus and there is a need for genuine challenge within government.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It is telling that now even some Conservative MPs are openly criticising Sir Keir Starmer for not acting as a leader of the Opposition would be expected to act in normal times by relentlessly scrutinising government actions for flaws, something they see as dangerous.

But one of the curious developments of recent weeks has been how casually Sinn Féin has cast aside months of work constructing an image as the party prepared to accept the most extreme measures to reduce spread of the virus.

As the pandemic has gone on, Sinn Féin’s position has become more muddled and less coherent – something exacerbated by being in government in Belfast where it faces the need for daily difficult decisions, and leading the opposition in Dublin where it is highlighting the flaws of the government there having to take daily difficult decisions.

The dramatic instant in which Sinn Féin abandoned its hardline stance on restrictions was at the funeral of Bobby Storey in late June. For reasons which even now are difficult to fully fathom, the party placed the need for public veneration of an IRA commander above what it must have known was not only severe damage to the public health message but also a mutilation of the party’s carefully-constructed position on the pandemic.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

However, Michelle O’Neill’s open disregard at the funeral for what she told the public to do was not the only point at which the party was self-contradictory.

In late April, party chairman Declan Kearney wrote a blistering column in which he starkly set out the party’s approach to the period ahead. Mr Kearney, who is the junior minister in Ms O’Neill’s department, savaged unnamed unionists and “right-wing elements in the British Cabinet” who were, he said, encouraging the “disturbing” idea that “the lockdown measures should be relaxed, and that economic activity and productivity should be resumed”.

That, he claimed, “is the typical capitalist reflex which puts the market economy first. Corporate greed over public welfare. The elevation of neo-liberal values and priorities above what’s actually needed at this time.”

Mr Kearney did not clumsily stumble into those comments when faced with a tricky question from a journalist; his words were set out in detail in Sinn Féin’s newspaper, An Phoblacht.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

But what Mr Kearney presented as a simplistic narrative of virtue versus vice is no longer Sinn Féin’s position.

On Good Morning Ulster on Tuesday Michelle O’Neill set out an utterly different philosophy in which she accepted that what the Executive is now doing – and what she supports – is weighing up the harm to human health against the harm to the economy.

Defending the rules she has told the public they must follow – under which one can meet someone in the pub, but not in their home – from the charge of absurdity, Ms O’Neill said that they were seeking “to get a balance here” between trying to curb the spread of the virus, “but at the same time we’re trying to make sure that we have an economy and that people have a job and that people have something to hold on to into the future...I accept that some people might feel that that is a contradiction”.

In another contradiction of the party’s stance early in the pandemic, last week Ms McDonald placed herself on the side of business and what Mr Kearney might have described as “the typical capitalist reflex which puts the market economy first”.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Ms McDonald opposed moves to shut restaurants and pubs which serve food in Dublin, despite the authorities saying that was necessary to contain soaring rates of the virus in the city.

Separately, the Sinn Féin leader last week decried the “confusion” of the Irish government’s pandemic response, saying that “the public is understandably fed up by incoherent mixed messaging”.

Yet this week Ms O’Neill belatedly said of Stormont’s rules that “I think it is actually a confusing message”.

Sinn Fein’s overarching position on the pandemic, insofar as one can be defined, appears to be that Northern Ireland should follow whatever Dublin does in order to ensure an all-island approach even though as the main opposition party in Dublin it is criticising many of those measures.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The episode is reminiscent of Sinn Féin’s ideologically instructive position on corporation tax where the party’s nationalism trumped the sort of left-wing rhetoric in Mr Kearney’s April column.

In fact, Mr Kearney was among those who called for taxes for big business to be slashed in Northern Ireland, advocating a policy which could have been written by any of the exponents of neoliberal economic theory.

Sinn Féin did so purely to attempt to harmonise tax rates across the island – even though the logical thing for a left-wing party seeking to achieve that goal would have been to argue for southern corporation tax rates to rise.

It is here where Sinn Féin is vulnerable to an economic critique from People Before Profit which argues consistently in opposition to the capitalist system.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

But while Sinn Féin is never going to be able to present a purer form of socialism than a party such as PBP, and the votes to be gained from such an attempt are limited, the party had been winning support with its hardline lockdown stance.

Even several individuals who dislike Sinn Féin spoke privately in that period about how they thought that the party was right to call for tough restrictions and they were unnerved by what seemed to be incompetence in Boris Johnson’s administration.

Lockdown was never going to last forever and a party calling for that to happen would quickly lose support.

But, having known that from the outset, it is puzzling that Sinn Féin failed to have any sort of coherent message and wandered into the wanton breaches of its own guidance at Mr Storey’s funeral before following that up with increasingly garbled messages on either side of the border.

The party was right that Covid, which has transformed so many aspects of life, has the potential to hasten a united Ireland. But for now it is exposing Sinn Féin’s inchoate ideology.