Momentum ensures Sinn Féin aren’t going away, you know

World of Politics with Harry McGee

One of the big mistakes that political commentators make – myself included – is that they assume that a situation that has happened is permanent. If a Minister resigns in disgrace and the party plummets in the polls, that’s it, the leader is a goner and so too is the party for that matter. Forever.

If another party does well in an election, that’s it, they are going to dominate forever more. If yet another party plummets in an election, you begin writing its obituary.

But politics is cyclical in nature. Politicians and the parties they represent have an almost Biblical power of being able to bounce back like Lazarus. They all have to go eventually. And yet how many times was Charles Haughey or Enda Kenny or Bertie Ahern written (wrongly) during the course of their careers?

There are longer term trends, though, that can’t be ignored. That’s why British politics no longer has the Whigs or why parties like Clann na Talmhan and the Progressive Democrats have disappeared from the Irish scene.

There are long-term patterns in Irish politics that can’t be ignored. One is the gradual demise of the two Civil War parties, both struggling to be relevant in an Ireland that is unrecognisable from that of a century or half a century ago.

Many parties have arrived and tried to ‘break the mould’ in that time but none managed to do it until now. Sinn Fein was different. It wasn’t a fledgling party. It had already built up a formidable political machine in the North. It had a distinctive identity. It had a distinctive (and alternative) message. It was also a populist movement.

It took it over a quarter of a century to recalibrate all that for the south. And the party got lucky in last year’s election and pounced on every bouncing ball that came its way.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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