For Siobhán Fenton, the dream of Sinn Féin winning power and leading a progressive leftwing government evaporated the day she was canvassing in Dublin and felt a cold, sharp sting on her neck. She was in the passageway of a block of flats in the inner city, knocking on doors, and looked around for the source. Fenton, a media adviser to the party leader, Mary Lou McDonald, felt another sting on her shoulder, then another on her forearm.
They were coins, thrown from a balcony above, where a man’s voice was shouting. Ireland is full!” It was May 2024, and instead of steaming towards victory in local and European elections – widely deemed a foregone conclusion, to be followed by a historic triumph in a general election – the party was experiencing a backlash fuelled by anti-immigrant sentiment in what was usually a bastion of working-class support. The coins left Fenton with gashes and bruises that augured an electoral hammering.
It lifts the lid on a debacle that ambushed the party on the path to power. Instead of winning a general election and turbo-charging the campaign for Irish unification by ratcheting up pressure for a referendum, the party stumbled and today remains in opposition. It is a cautionary tale for progressive movements across Europe and elsewhere that struggle to reconcile tolerance for immigrants and refugees with clamours for crackdowns on new arrivals.
A surge in xenophobia among grassroots supporters had blind-sided and, for a time, paralysed party leaders, Fenton said in an interview. We were struggling to adapt because it was a sense that things had started to spiral out of control.” The book, published this week, depicts a largely well-intentioned but hapless party, and is also an account from a member of an organisation that many perceive as secretive and still in thrall to former IRA leaders on both sides of the Irish border, a perception Fenton disputes. Fenton, 34, was an atypical “Shinner”, the informal name for party adherents.
She came from a middle-class Belfast family that abhorred the violence of the Troubles and favoured constitutional nationalism, not flinty republicanism. Fenton briefly worked for the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) before studying English literature at Oxford, researching gender-based violence at Cambridge and becoming a London-based journalist for the Independent before returning to Northern Ireland in 2016, where she freelanced for the BBC and other outlets, including the Guardian, and wrote a book on the Good Friday agreement. In early 2020, Sinn Féin offered Fenton a job in Dublin.
It had just won 24.5% of first preference votes in the Irish general election, overtaking Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, two centrist parties that had alternated in power for a century. As successor to Gerry Adams, McDonald, a Dubliner universally known as Mary Lou, offered a fresh alternative, especially to young voters who blamed the political establishment for a housing crisis. Sinn Féin had run too few candidates to capitalise on the breakthrough, so Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael mustered enough seats to form a coalition, leaving Sinn Féin in opposition.
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