Sinn Féin struggles to keep everyone on same message

World of Politics with Harry McGee

Democratic Centralism; it’s a phrase most association with a time when the Workers’ Party were at their strongest over 30 years ago.

Derived directly from Leninism, it’s the notion was that every member of the organisation was bound by the decision taken by the party’s ruling body.

And it cropped up last week during the fall-out from the clamour surrounding Brian Stanley’s silly and clumsy activity on Twitter.

The first was that he commemorated the Narrow Water bombing in 1979 where 18 British soldiers were killed, as well as the Kilmichael ambush a century earlier, where a similar number of Auxiliaries were killed.

Both were trite. I spend a fair amount of time in 2010 down in Kilmichael doing a documentary on that ambush and – make no bones about it – it was bloody and cruel and Tom Barry showed no mercy.

Anyway, once Stanley was in the spotlight people began to look through his Twitter feed and came across a 2017 tweet with a possible homophobic reference to then newly-elected Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.

I’d say a quarter of a century ago, Sinn Féin was run on a military basis, a political arm for the Provos. That party has developed since them – but the military set-up and mind-set have never fully loosened.

A little bit like the Workers Party in the 1980s, when Sinn Féin people started getting elected they kept to themselves, sat at a corner of the canteen and did not mix as much as other parties.

Sinn Féin expects much more of its representatives than other parties and that includes making generous contributions to the party, and toeing the line on all occasions. In other words, everybody in the party is expected to be on message at all times.

But as a party expands, it becomes harder and harder to keep everything tight and to rein everybody in.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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