SF build on momentum – but grand coalition still best guess

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

For a General Election with no surprises, there are more of them around than you’d have thought; Sinn Féin’s performance, for one thing, just when it seemed that the tide was going out for the party. Remember, the local elections saw them lose half their councillors – including all three councillors in Galway city. They did no better in the European elections, losing two of the three seats they had held.

And there was background; the party had been beset by a series of bullying claims, and internal strife, among its councillors. It lost dozens of councillors in Cavan, Dublin, Westmeath, Tipperary, Cork and Wicklow, who either resigned because they claimed they were being bullied, or were expelled for alleged breaches of discipline.

The November by-elections were a strange mix. Sinn Féin did poorly in two of them (Dublin Fingal and Wexford) but really well in the other two.

Mark Ward’s victory in Dublin Mid West was really unexpected, and Thomas Gould really got out a good vote in Cork North Central, finishing up in second place in the end.

Looking back now, that was a straw in the wind but I think I regarded it as an outlier. Eoin O Broin had mounted a huge ‘get-out-the-vote’ campaign in the party’s strongholds and had got the party’s leadership to campaign vigorously. Ward’s election gave the party a huge fillip.

And recent history shows that a single event turned Sinn Féin’s fortunes around in the past.

The party was really going nowhere in the 2007 Dáil; as the fortunes of Fianna Fáil and the Greens declined, it was Fine Gael and Labour that were making hay.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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