Adams’ arrest fall-out is the Litmus test for Sinn Fein

And you don’t need me to tell you that popular sentiment at the time was overwhelmingly behind de Valera and his colleagues.

Following his recent arrest, you wonder how well such an electoral strategy would work for Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein. For sure, in the strongholds of the North and the border and among working class areas it will do nothing but bolster the party’s support.

But the reaction elsewhere will be telling. If it boosts Sinn Féin’s support, or does not affect it one way or the other, it means that the party has crossed an important acceptability threshold… that people know all about its terrible past but don’t really care enough, or no longer see it as a factor.

The killing of Jean McConville was heinous. But the attitude may be that that was then (a long time ago) and this is now and Sinn Féin is now as shiny and bright as Gerry’s famous choppers.

It’s too early to gauge how it’s all going to play with the electorate. And besides, opinion polls (and we all use them as if they are political oxygen) are much more inaccurate when it comes to polling individual constituencies (as opposed to the entire country).

That’s because they use much smaller samples (500 people as opposed to 1,000) and that makes the margin of error larger.

And it explains, to some degree, the huge inconsistencies between the Millward Brown poll for the Independent and the Red C poll for the Sunday Business Post a week later.

One had Fianna Fáil’s Thomas Byrne at 16 per cent in Midlands North West and the other had him at seven or eight per cent.

Similarly Sinn Féin’s Lynn Boylan in Dublin was 20 per cent in the Millward Brown poll but only 14 per cent in the Red C one. Nessa Childers support in Dublin halved from 20 per cent to ten per cent in the space of a week.

There’s still a lot of jostling going on. European elections are second-tier elections and are considered by the electorate as mid-term, or not vital.

Thus voting and candidate choice can be impetuous – they can be reduced to beauty contests with big swings and fluctuations of support. As the actual results show in each election, some parties (Greens, Labour and Sinn Féin) have tended to have their support overstated in the election and some (Fianna Fáil last time) are understated. Labour is certainly not being overstated in the polls right now.

So if we were to rework that Dev slogan, it might read something unwieldy like this for Sinn Féin: Put him in to not them in.

And the ‘them’ in this case are Sinn Féin candidates.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.