New Sinn Féin

Irish Republicanism in the Twenty-First Century

Agnès Maillot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134355006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Partidos políticos

As a consequence of Sinn Féin's connection with the IRA, the military side of the republican movement has tended to overshadow the political, both in terms of its internal operation and strategic choices and in terms of the attention that it has attracted from scholars, writers and journalists. However, since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Sinn Féin has experienced substantial growth, in terms of electoral results and party support, both in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland.This book assesses the importance and relevance of Sinn Féin within the changing configurations of Irish politics, studying it as a political party on both sides of the Irish border. It investigates whether Sinn Féin can sustain the progress made over the last decade, retain its identity as the voice of radical republicanism, and ultimately, whether its vision of a united Ireland can prevail.

1
Historical overview

Sinn Féin today is but the latest incarnation of the party that was created in the early twentieth century and subsequently experienced many internal turmoils. From monarchist to republican, from abstentionist to fully electoralist, from the mainstream to the margins and back to the mainstream, Sinn Féin has undergone numerous transformations. It is credited with driving a substantial part of the island of Ireland to autonomy, but for the following decades it operated in the shadow of the IRA. Republican in outlook, socialist in policies, it was for years mainly associated with the issues of reunification and the Northern Ireland conflict. In the twenty-first century, the party calls itself the fastest growing political organisation in Ireland, a party on the move, and one of the main forces behind one of the most exciting developments on the island: the peace process. In order to assess how Sinn Féin became what it is today, how it has modelled itself on the struggle of its forefathers and yet has managed to emancipate itself to a considerable degree from its alter ego of many years, the IRA, as well as how the changes in tactics in the last decade of the twentieth century represent a watershed for republicanism, it is important to go back to the origins of the party and its principles.

Despite the many ups, downs and splits that Sinn Féin has gone through, the party has maintained its adherence to the cause of self-determination, which it views as the fight to obtain full independence from Britain, and ultimately, the reunification of Ireland. Republicans used two broad strategies to achieve these two objectives: abstentionism – the refusal of elected candidates to take their seats in parliament – and armed resistance. However, over time, these strategies mutated to become fundamental principles. As such, they were often confused with ideology, blurring the distinction between strategy and ideology. Neither abstentionism nor armed resistance, in themselves, had much to do with the social or economic vision of the party. Nevertheless, these strategies were what successive splits within the organisation were mainly about, and they were ultimately upheld as the fundamental philosophy of the party and of the movement as a whole. They were what distinguished Sinn Féin from the other political formations of the island, constituting the core identity of modern republicanism and guaranteeing its very survival in the face of what Sinn Féin perceived was an increasing denial of the nationalist agenda by the mainstream Irish political parties.

The abstentionist party

Although his name is rarely mentioned in recent republican literature, Arthur Griffith can be credited with developing the tactic of abstentionism and making it the signature of twentieth-century Sinn Féin. Griffith, a Dublin-based journalist, came to prominence within nationalist circles when he put forward a set of practical proposals under the name The Resurrection of Hungary, published in 1904. In this document, he described how the Hungarians ‘refused to permit their representatives to appear in the [Austrian] imperial parliament. Six years of persistence in this attitude reduced the imperial parliament to impotence’ (Griffith, 1904: 85). Griffith advocated a similar approach for his country, since in his view, as long as Ireland was governed from London, it was limited to the status of province, a situation that hindered it in its aspiration to become a nation.¹ Consequently, he proposed that all elected representatives form their own assembly in Ireland instead of taking their seats in Westminster. Griffith was not the first to suggest subverting the workings of Parliament to achieve concessions from London. The main nationalist party, the Parliamentary Party, also known as the Home Rule Party, had been using obstructionist tactics in Westminster, and at one stage even considered taking a more radical step by withdrawing all its deputies.² However, Griffith was the first to construct a policy around the idea of abstentionism that had practical and short-term implications.

At the heart of Griffith’s vision of independence was also the concept of self-sufficiency, and this was to become the hallmark of his economic orientation. Griffith was convinced that political autonomy would have little weight if it was not supported by economic independence. In practical terms, he proposed to mount campaigns urging people to buy Irish products in order to promote indigenous industries. In upholding such protectionist and isolationist policies, Griffith was overestimating the resources of the island (Lyons, 1983: 254). Nevertheless, in his eyes, this formed part of a whole set of proposals, the ‘Sinn Féin Programme’, which he put forward at a nationalist convention in 1905. However, Griffith was not a republican. He did not seek to sever all links between Ireland and Britain, and favoured the establishment of a double monarchy under the British Crown, so long as his country obtained economic and political autonomy. Moreover, his conviction that armed resistance was counterproductive and that the way forward was passive resistance put him at odds with the Irish Republican Brotherhood.³ Griffith’s Sinn Féin thus offered a third way, one between the tradition of physical force and the Home Rule type of autonomy advocated by the Irish Parliamentary Party, one between insurrection and parliamentarianism. His main legacy to the later incarnations of the parties that were to retain the name Sinn Féin throughout the century was therefore abstentionism and self-reliance.

Griffith’s Sinn Féin was rapidly overtaken by events. The Home Rule Bill, passed by the House of Commons in 1912,⁴ greatly preoccupied the unionist politicians in the northeast of the island, who reacted by creating an armed defence force in 1913, the Ulster Volunteers. As a result, the Irish Volunteers were formed, which attracted members of the main nationalist organisations such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Gaelic League⁵ and Sinn Féin, which pledged to defend any future Irish government. When the First World War broke out, the Irish Volunteers split between those who urged support for the British war effort, and those who saw Britain’s difficulties as an opportunity for advancing the cause of Irish independence. Among the latter were leaders of the IRB, who conspired to organise an armed insurrection which started on Easter Monday, 1916. The break with Griffith’s ideals was clear, as this rising not only revived the tradition of armed resistance that Griffith had staunchly opposed, but it also implied the rejection of any continued link with the British Crown with the proclamation of a Republic read by Pádraic Pearse.

In total, sixty-four insurgents and 103 troops were killed before Pearse surrendered to the British authorities. Fifteen men seen as the leaders were executed in the following days, and hundreds were imprisoned. Yet far from being a setback for the cause of independence, the Easter Rising left a lasting impact on Irish nationalism. It gave the tradition of physical force a mythical dimension. Not only was such an action deemed inevitable by those who supported the ideal of a Republic insofar as it seemed the only effective means of putting forward the demand for national independence, but it was now equated with martyrdom, seen as intrinsic to the cause of Ireland. It also combined different political traditions: that of the republican nationalism of the Irish Republican Brotherhood with that of socialism expressed by James Connolly. After the rising, although the Labour Party maintained an independent position, a coalition emerged, bringing together those intent on fulfilling the goals set in the Proclamation. While it had little in common with Griffith’s party, this coalition retained the name Sinn Féin. Led by Eamon de Valera, the organisation was heterogeneous and somewhat incoherent from a political point of view. It advocated independence but did not clearly spell out how an independent Ireland would be governed and managed. It fought the December 1918 Westminster general elections on an abstentionist ticket,⁶ stipulating that its elected candidates would form their own assembly, although it did not specify clearly what such an assembly would do. The lack of political orientation was made clear by the surprisingly naïve comment of Sinn Féin’s Vice-president Michael O’Flanagan in the aftermath of the election, when he stated: ‘the people have voted for us. We must now explain what Sinn Féin is’ (Kee, 1976: 627). Sinn Féin won seventy-three seats, the Nationalist Party six and the Ulster Unionist Party twenty-two (Lyons, 1983: 398). In keeping with the promise made during the electoral campaign, Sinn Féin’s newly elected representatives, or at least those who were not in prison at the time or otherwise unable to attend, gathered in the Mansion House in central Dublin, forming the first Parliament since the 1800 Act of Union: Dáil Éireann. Along with a ‘Declaration of Independence’, the deputies voted a ‘Message to the Free Nations of the World’ and a ‘Democratic Programme’ outlining the objectives of the newly constituted provisional government. Thus, with abstentionism, Sinn Féin had succeeded in establishing what previous risings and insurrections had failed to do: a set of parallel institutions in Ireland that would rival the official British institutions still in place in the months to come. In effect, and without resorting to arms, Sinn Féin had taken over essential aspects of the management of the country, and could claim to have achieved a degree of self-government. Thus was created another powerful myth: abstentionism was more than a tactic, it was an essential key to independence. Curiously, what survived of this principle had far more to do with the strategy of abstentionism than with the potential that politics, as opposed to military action, could represent. Politics alone, at the time and for the following decades, was not considered sufficient to guarantee the ultimate goal of nationalists: full independence and sovereignty.

Dáil Éireann was exclusively composed of members of Sinn Féin, as the unionist and nationalist candidates had not responded to the call to assemble in Dublin. This implied a degree of confusion between the party itself and the newly created institutions. As the party admitted at the time, ‘The work originally undertaken by Sinn Féin has become the province of Dáil Éireann. Sinn Féin having been released by An Dáil of the major portion of its various departments, is now practically confined in its sphere of activity to the work of organising elections and propaganda’ (Sinn Féin, 1919). This would have been quite an accurate description of the organisation’s work right up until the beginning of the 1990s. Yet it is possible that the merger between the institutions and the party reduced the vision of the role of a political machine and thus hindered development on the political front for the years to come.

In the aftermath of the 1916 Rising, the Irish Volunteers had been reorganised and trained under the leadership of Michael Collins, and they pledged allegiance to Dáil Éireann, thus becoming the Irish Republican Army (although as individual members they would still be referred to as ‘Volunteers’, or, in Irish, Óglaigh na hÉireann). On the day of the inauguration of Dáil Éireann, 19 January 1919, three Irish Volunteers killed two policemen in an ambush in Co. Tipperary, thus setting in motion a war of independence that was to last for two years. The IRA faced formidable opponents, not only the British army and Royal Irish Constabulary, but also the Auxiliary forces and former First World War soldiers who became known as the Black and Tans because of the uniform they wore, and whose ferocity soon acquired the status of legend in the country.⁷ The war was based on guerrilla tactics, and the pattern that soon developed was one of attacks, counter-attacks and retaliation on both sides, until a truce was agreed in June 1921.

As a consequence of the War of Independence, the position of Dáil Éireann had rapidly become untenable. The British government declared it an illegal and dangerous association in September 1919, but it continued to operate underground, as did the republican courts which came to supplant the British judicial system in parts of the country. Westminster passed the Government of Ireland Act in November 1920, which provided for two parliaments, one in the six counties of the northeast of the country and another for the remaining twenty-six counties, both of which were granted a limited level of autonomy while London kept control over key areas such as defence, taxation and foreign policy. Ireland was thus, de facto, partitioned. Sinn Féin refused to have anything to do with these new institutions, since they so obviously fell short of the aspiration to independence. Elections were held to the new parliaments in May 1921. In the north, the Ulster Unionists won forty out of the fifty-two seats. In the south, Sinn Féin once again used the electoral campaign to field candidates for its own assembly, Dáil Éireann, the only one that it regarded as legitimate, and winning an overwhelming majority of 128 out of 132 seats. When the newly elected Parliament provided for under the Government of Ireland Act was due to meet, only the four Dublin University candidates who were not affiliated to Sinn Féin were present. The other deputies assembled in what became the Second Dáil. In republican thinking, the First and Second Dáils are the only legitimate and truly representative parliaments that Ireland has ever had, as the first was elected by the electorate of the whole of the island in 1918 and the second was not established by the British but by Sinn Féin itself (although it is ironic that the Second Dáil could be considered a partitionist assembly since it only had jurisdiction over the territory of the twenty-six counties). Thus the policy of abstentionism took on another dimension: it became enshrined as an inviolable principle. To sit at a parliament that was either ‘foreign’ (Westminster) or illegitimate (both Irish parliaments provided for by the Government of Ireland Act, neither of which was sovereign) was nothing short of a betrayal of the fallen patriots of the 1916 Rising and of the War of Independence, as well as of the previous generations. Abstentionism came to acquire a hugely symbolic importance for republicans, epitomising the movement’s refusal to accept any compromise solution as well as its strong belief in the precedents set by history.

Negotiations took place between Lloyd George’s government in London and a delegation of Irish representatives, leading to the signing of the December 1921 Treaty which gave partial autonomy to the twenty-six counties, known as the Irish Free State, while firmly reasserting the bond between the Crown and the two local assemblies of the island. This deeply divided both Sinn Féin and Dáil Éireann, between those who followed Collins and Griffith’s lead and saw the Treaty as a stepping stone towards full independence, and those, under De Valera, who castigated it as a betrayal of republican aspirations. The Treaty was put to a vote in the Dáil in January 1922 and was passed by sixty-four votes to fifty-seven; subsequently, during a national convention in March of that year, the IRA also split between those who remained faithful to the newly established Free State and those who opposed the Treaty and joined the force which became known as the ‘Irregulars’. When a majority of the Irish people decided, in June 1922, to accept the Treaty, the split within the Sinn Féin and the IRA ranks, which had been more or less contained until that time, spread to the whole of the country. This resulted in a bloody and merciless civil war, setting former allies against each other, dividing the country and in some cases even splitting families. The Free State forces did not hesitate to execute their former brothers-in-arms turned enemies (seventy-seven men were executed between November 1922 and May 1923). The Irregulars, for their part, ambushed and killed Michael Collins on 22 August 1922, the very man to whom they had previously entrusted the destiny of their country and under whose leadership they had fought the War of Independence. A ceasefire was finally brokered in April 1923, when it was beyond doubt that the Free State forces had the upper hand from a military point of view. The Irregulars had been administered a further blow by the Catholic Church, which had threatened to excommunicate them. But the truce was by no means seen as a surrender on the part of the IRA, since it only involved a dumping of arms; armed struggle had merely been postponed.

After the Civil War, Sinn Féin’s decline was rapid, as was shown with the elections of August 1923, when the party secured only 27 per cent of the vote. It considered the newly elected assembly illegitimate because, as it saw it, it derived its authority not from the Irish people but from the Treaty and, thus, from Britain. Sinn Féin’s isolation was compounded by its refusal to sit in the new assembly. From then on, it progressively removed itself from the political process. Importantly, at that time, the main reason for doing so was not fundamentally due to the existence of a rival parliament in the northeast, Stormont (historians subsequently estimated that of the 338 pages dealing with the Dáil debate on the Treaty, only nine were dedicated to the issue of partition (Lyons, 1983: 445)). The main bone of contention rather seemed to be the fact that Ireland retained its attachment to the British Crown, epitomised by what Sinn Féin regarded as the odious oath of allegiance that the deputies had to swear to the British monarch. But this position soon became untenable, at least for those who were not content with a principled opposition to the new institutions. Sinn Féin’s ranks were divided between those who sought a compromise solution on the oath of allegiance, and those who saw any softening of their stance as the abandonment of their loyalty to the Republic. The wording of the two motions put forward at the 1925 annual conference of the party (Ard Fheis) typified the orientations that the republican camp would take in the years to come. On the one hand, De Valera proposed that ‘once the admission oaths of the 26-county and 6-county Assemblies are removed, it becomes a question not of principle but of policy whether or not republican representatives should attend these assemblies’, whereas in the opposing camp, Art O’Connor, who was to become President of Sinn Féin, replied that ‘it is incompatible with the fundamental principles of Sinn Féin as it is injurious to the honour of Ireland to send representatives to any usurping legislature set up by English law in Ireland’ (An Phoblacht (AP), 19 February 1926). This was but one of the many debates that were to take place on the issue of abstentionism, debates that always opposed pragmatism and principle.

Although Sinn Féin continued to operate in the 1920s, it had become a marginal political force by the end of the decade. Its difficulties stemmed from the loss of the prestigious leaders who had followed De Valera in his newly founded party Fianna Fáil, and the consequent loss of substantial support. But perhaps equally significant was the fact that the bond that had united the party with the IRA had been severed in 1925, on the eve of the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis. In November of that year, the ruling body of the IRA, the Army Council, voted in favour of withdrawing its allegiance to the Second Dáil in order to avoid the split that was looming within Sinn Féin spreading to its own ranks. From then on the IRA was, de facto, independent. The organisation inflicted a further blow to Sinn Féin during the 1932 electoral campaign, when it openly called for a vote in favour of Fianna Fáil.

The decision to remain independent from any political party also caused problems for the IRA. The military organisation was riddled with internal divisions. Some leaders like Peadar O’Donnell advocated an alternative political process. The socialist route that he wanted to follow was unacceptable to most IRA members and he left to create his own organisation, Republican Congress. Others, like Seán McBride, chief-of-staff from 1936 to 1938, were of the view that once the Free State had enacted its own Constitution in 1937, there was little reason left for the IRA to pursue its campaign. When McBride proposed the creation of a political organisation, he was opposed by the Army Council and eventually severed his links with the organisation, forming, eight years later, a political organisation, Clann na Poblachta (Republican Family), that would actively take part in the parliamentary process. Yet there was always a third way, that of military action, which was still held in high esteem by a sizeable faction of the organisation. One of the main defenders of such action, Seán Russell, had been pushing for some time for a military campaign on British soil. This strategy was not unanimously agreed upon within the organisation, as some, like Civil War veteran Tom Barry, contended that any military action had to be limited to the north of Ireland (Bowyer Bell, 1983: 145). In order to contain the opposition within his own ranks and to lend legitimacy to the campaign, Russell turned to the surviving members of the Second Dáil to secure their support. Although in 1938 this bo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Historical overview
• 2 The peace process
• 3 From political wing to political party
• 4 The equality agenda
• 5 The international dimension
• 6 The legacy of the conflict
• Conclusion: beyond the IRA?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index