The problem with Sinn Féin in the South - It's not just about our presentation, it's about our vision!

Below is a piece received from Ban Sidhe and it was meant to be a comment in response to a piece from 17th July entitled "Establishing A Political Narrative".

However, when I read this piece I felt that it was too good to be left as a comment and deserved to be posted as a separate piece. For me it is the best analysis I have read concerning the failure of Sinn Féin to have grown in power and influences in the South, in the manner we would have hoped. It also covers what we need to do to move Sinn Féin forward to achieve the goals we have for the party.

This is quite a long piece, but I feel it is really worth reading.

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Let me apologise in advance for the length of this post, but it is a complicated subject and I want to cover it all. I never get to talk about Irish politics due to my blog being about Palestine:)

The debate on Sinn Féin’s narrative and the counter-narrative is fascinating as we all try to deal with the fact that the only alternative to the current government parties that has any prospect of achieving electoral success was not embraced by an electorate facing a disastrous economic crisis.

That economic crisis is hitting us harder than many other countries because as we can see the money was salted away by corrupt bankers, property speculators and assorted scallywags who were the darling of a fawning media and establishment politicians who help them us as exemplars and denounced anyone who questions this as economic illiterates.

In these circumstances people did turn to alternatives but they did not turn to the only one that had any reasonable chance of exercising power so they elected Joe Higgins in Dublin, and an assortment of Trotskyites across Dublin. They did not turn to Sinn Féin and we are wondering why.

The answers tell us about honest Joe, about the lack of community work about the need to be relevant to the 26 etc etc etc but the first thing we need to recognise if we are to earn the votes of the electorate is to recognise that they had the chance to vote for us and they rejected us in favour of others.

The last thing we want to do is think of this as merely a presentational matter, or tinker with our message, retreat from serious political work or retreat into clientelism. That is not to say that we should not consider our presentation, that we should not tinker with our message, question the type of serious political work we are engaged in or work hard for our local communities and constituents. We need to do all of these things but doing these alone or more importantly doing all of these in the absence of a diagnosis of our recent electoral malaise will not help and could even make things worse.

Joe Higgins was not elected because he had an army of community based councillors behind him delivering constituency services. He was not seen as less economically illiterate as Mary Lou – he was much more vulnerable to that criticism than Sinn Fein. His rhetoric was not some sophisticated newspeak that hid the socialist message behind clever choices of words. Yet he won – he attracted the votes that Sinn Féin failed to and we need to wonder why – more than that we need to find out why!

The reason I am so hostile to seeking to deal with this at the level of message and image (and I repeat these things are important and do need to be worked on) but the reason I do not want to start from these points is that I think they avoid the major problem we have.

In the previous election when Sinn Féin failed to break through at Leinster House. This was pre economic crisis and pre the bail out of the bakers so we could understand that the electorate would find the status quo relatively attractive but we all heard the media pundits and some Republicans muttering about Sinn Féin’s irrelevance and our “economic illiteracy”.

Then we had a range of people telling us that we had to move with the times- the 6 counties is either sorted, or stable, or stagnant and Sinn Féin as a party of the North was irrelevant to the south and we needed to place ourselves in the centre in the south, with realistic policies and southern leaders.

The recession led a to a half-hearted fightback as we old fashioned Rebels with our Che t-shirts laughed at the cheek of the thieving bankers who got us into this mess turning to the governing parties to bail them out by cutting our social welfare budgets while foreclosing on small businesses and driving us out of work. The revolution was still on – we were right all along and could smugly puff on our best havanas.

But there was no analysis of what type of country we actually sought to build and how we intended to get into a position to do so. This election would be our election – the big parties had let everyone down and we had tidied ourselves up and would not throw any hostages to fortune and we were keeping everyone strictly on message.

After this election we scratch our heads and wonder what we have to do to win elections in the 26 counties – and we again look at our image and our message and we do not examine our basic and economic paradigm.

The basic problem for Sinn Féin is that we need to have a clear vision right now for this country. The war in the north is over and we are moving into a period of nation building – where we are seeking to reconcile with unionists and bring them into our nation. In the south we have a partitioned economy that has squandered one of the fastest periods of growth that any country has experienced in many decades and is now in the depths of recession. We are trying to become relevant and electable by being “leaderly”, by being “respectable”, by being a “safe pair of hands to mind the shop” at the same time as talking about workers rights and an Ireland of equals.

Why should people vote for Sinn Féin if we are just like the big parties only with a social conscience? They already have the Labour Party for that. And now they have the Greens. There are other parties that will crawl into coalition with the big parties for a seat at the big table and then abandon everything that made them distinct when they sat in opposition. What makes Sinn Féin any different – why should people believe that we would do any different?

Clearly whilst we do not want to appear to be looney lefties, and we do want to place ourselves in the political mainstream so that we can influence politics and government, that does not mean we have to abandon left wing positions. The electorate in the past elected Tony Gregory, and in this election elected his successor and then Joe Higgins, as well as an assortment of “People Before Profits” SWP’ers. They have voted for Sinn Féin in significant numbers at various times and in this election in other parts of the country, so they are willing to vote for change but they need to believe that they will get change or at least someone who will fight for change. I do not think they believe that Sinn Féin is sufficiently different from the other parties or that we will deliver change if we are elected.

We have had an MEP in Dublin and the socialist paradise did not arrive. Joe Higgins will not deliver it either, but if he plays the left maverick, the people’s champion he may well hold onto the seat. We can’t just set ourselves the goal of being the leftist mavericks, a party of Irish Dennis Skinners, Sinn Féin is more ambitious than the Joe Higgins’ of this world – and we need to be.

Sinn Féin is not seeking to be a good opposition – we are seeking to be in government and that is much harder and requires clear thinking and clear strategies.

This is where our debate needs to concentrate – what do we want to do with the electoral strength that we are seeking? If we are seeking electoral strength to be in government but have no clear vision of what we intend to do in government then we are worse than useless. We would be better being a solid opposition than a weak and dithering government – or junior partner in a coalition with a right wing party.

One difficulty we face (that our competitors on the left can evade) is that we are a party of government in part of this country already. We are the second largest party in the Northern Assembly and that means that we are in government there – along with the DUP.

So we can be tested on our achievements or lack of them in the north. Allegations that the north is stagnant damage us in the 26 counties. The fact that the northern assembly has only limited powers and is still within the UK economic system limits the choices that we can make and the fact that we are in coalition with a right wing party (the DUP) limits them even more. We are vulnerable to accusations that we are merely in government for the sake of being in government for the “mercs and percs” as its called in the south.

In the north it is vital that Sinn Féin continues to lead from the front in government. It is vital that we exercise power to benefit our communities and seek more power to benefit our communities even more. But in doing this we face serious challenges.

The British Government economic policies and the insistence on Public Private Partnerships create major problems for us. We have to deliver investment to our communities and have to work within certain realities. But we have to ensure that we don’t start to believe that when we do the best we can that that means we are doing the best there is. We need to be good in government whilst challenging the restrictions that bind us.

We could look at the devolved parliament in Scotland and see how the SNP under Salmond is succeeding in exercising power within the UK imposed restrictions whilst at the same time pointing out what could be achieved if the restrictions were not there. The SNP seem to manage the trick of taking credit for every positive action and at the same time blaming Westminster for every failing.

Sinn Féin is seeking to develop a clear view of where we want to take things in the North. MLA’s like Martina Anderson are challenging the old ways of doing things, stretching the Civil Service and forcing them to act in new ways. Whilst we have also been outflanked on occasions but we are getting better at it and this has translated into continued electoral growth.

Our problem in the south is that we need a clear vision. We are seeking to be in government but that will not happen in the same way as in the north. The coalition in the north is based on proportional representation. Despite its limitations our vote gave us access to limited power in the first Assembly election and greater power with our result in the last elections. It has its downsides and the dual vetoes that were necessary to prevent DUP sabotage can create problems for us too. It allows them to hold us back on occasions – most obviously in the case of the abolition of the 11+. But our access to power and the benefits we have been able to deliver have allowed us to continue to build our support.

In the south we are a small party and even if we grow to 15% or 20% we will at best be eligible to entry into a coalition government and up until now these coalitions have been with one or other of the two major parties. We will not have access to government as of right, like in the north, and so we will have to look at such coalitions very differently.

This means that we have to decide why we want to be elected, and how we intend to achieve that if elected, and then we need to set about selling that to the electorate.

So what we need to do is to develop a set of strategic objectives – for the whole country taking into account the different set ups north and south. We will be in government in the north and in partnership with the government in the south, whilst in opposition to that government within the 26 counties.

We are a left-wing Republican party and we are seeking to change the nature of this country’s relationship with Britain and the internal politics and economics of Ireland. That means people need to have a real say in how their communities are governed and how their economies are developed and that bankers and other vested interests are never again allowed to distort development to suit their short-term and self-centred aims.

That to me is socialism, but if that word is a problem then ditch it. Bring on the imaging consultants and the message manipulators to get our message across but first of all let’s decide on the message.