Sinn Fein’s election success follows a path blazed by the SNP

Twenty years ago, the Scottish National Party had never been in power, and had never indeed got beyond the fringe. Now it has provided the devolved Government of Scotland since 2007 as either a minority or majority administration. It would be no surprise if Mary Lou McDonald, whose Sinn Féin Party has just registered its best electoral result ever and finished with the second highest number of seats in the Dáil, wasn’t looking at the SNP and saying: “that could be us – I could be Ireland’s Nicola Sturgeon”.

Of course, there are big differences between the two nationalist parties. The SNP doesn’t have Sinn Féin’s historical baggage. Alex Salmond, Sturgeon’s predecessor, used to say that Scotland would be the only nation to achieve Independence without bloodshed. Sinn Féin, on the other hand, cannot escape the history of IRA murder and terrorism. It was led for thirty years by Gerry Adams, the Provisional IRA’s Chief of Staff. Is it a coincidence that Sinn Fein polled best in this election in Donegal and other counties close to the Border?

Still, there is an Irish precedent for the transition from armed action to democratic persuasion. Fianna Fáil, for so long the dominant party in the Republic, was formed by men who had rejected the Treaty which established the Irish Free State in 1922 and fought the Civil War against the Free State compromisers. It became respectable, even though as late as 1969 its future leader, Charlie Haughey, was charged with running guns across the Border in the early years of the Troubles. Memories are long in countries with a history of violence and it is significant that on Saturday Sinn Fein polled worst among older age-groups, a majority of whom can’t, unlike the young, dissociate McDonald’s socially-conscious Sinn Fein from the bullets and the bombs.

The SNP has long consigned the Braveheart, kilts and claymores side of Scottish nationalism to the dressing-up box – all right for the occasional theatrical occasion, useful as a means of cheering up the faithful, but irrelevant to serious politics. While holding on to romantic and aggrieved nationalists – who in any case have nowhere else to go – the SNP has marketed itself as a douce, and indeed dull, soft left-of-centre party.

Sturgeon’s party still feed on resentment of supposed English indifference to what Scotland thinks, believes and wants, but essentially it has for more than a dozen years aspired to show itself as competent as an old-fashioned bank manager and as caring as a district nurse. It has set itself to take excitement out of daily politics and one has to say that it has succeeded in doing so. There is, happily for the SNP, very little public interest in the proceedings of the Scottish Parliament or even in the performance of the Scottish Government. It may, as Gerald Warner tells Reaction readers, have a record of sorry failure in health and education. But so what? It’s Scotland’s Government.

McDonald is a long way from being in a position to emulate the SNP’s splendid complacency. She may yet be denied office, and not only on account of the IRA connection. The old parties – Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – may combine against her. But she is on the way and she has persuaded young voters, left-behind voters, and only just assimilated immigrant voters that Sinn Fein speaks for them and recognises what they want.

Setting aside her Party’s historic role as the political wing of the “armed struggle” delicately, she leaves it to be understood that all this and the Peace Process too are ancient history. I am sure she would never say that today’s terrorists speak Arabic, not Irish or English with an Irish accent, but then there’s no need to spell things out. Implicitly, Sinn Fein engages in its own Act of Indemnity and Oblivion – with the emphasis strongly on Oblivion.

The SNP grew up in now distant days when there were two big competing parties in Scotland, just as there have been in Ireland. It took votes first from the Tories who could be presented as an English Party indifferent to Scotland. Indeed Willie Ross, Harold Wilson’s formidable Secretary of State for Scotland, used to dismiss the Nationalists as “Tartan Tories”. Then when the Scottish Tories self-destructed , with a bit of help from Mrs Thatcher, the SNP aimed its second barrel at Labour. Labour MPs were “the feeble Forty”, incapable of protecting Scotland from the vicious Tories.

Tony Blair’s Labour landslide in 1997 was a setback for the Nationalists, but a short-lived one. Labour introduced devolution and established a Parliament in Edinburgh in the fond belief that this would “bury” the SNP. Quite the contrary: the parliament proved fertile soil. The SNP flourished. The Tories, admittedly, have made a modest recovery since the Independence Referendum in 2014 because they have been able to present themselves as the last defenders of Unionism; but the once mighty Labour Party is now scarcely even a rump.

So the leaders of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael may look at  the two once-dominant Scottish parties and feel a  cold shiver run down the spine: might Sinn Fein do to them what the SNP has done to Labour and the Tories in Scotland? Certainly, Sinn Fein seems to have harnessed the same assortment of voters to supplant one of the old parties – perhaps Fianna Fáil, who may no more be saved by their deep roots in local government than Labour was by theirs in Scotland.

Yet what is comparable is not identical. Independence remains the big issue in Scotland, where the real division is between Nationalist and Unionists. It’s different in Ireland. Sinn Féin is nominally committed to the elimination of the Border and the creation of the 32-county Republic. But how many of its new voters sing that song? How many of them even know the words? The wearing of the Green may make for fine music, but not perhaps for practical politics.

In Scotland, Sturgeon calls week after week for a second Independence referendum. In Ireland McDonald speaks of a cross-border poll someday. Of course she longs for a United Ireland: how as a Sinn Féiner could she not? But perhaps, in the dead of night, she may wonder if she really – really – longs for the day when the progressive, bien-pensant, and ever more politically-correct Republic is disturbed by the admission of the Paisleyite Democratic Unionists and marching bands playing the brave music of the “The Sash”? Mightn’t it all be just a wee bit unpleasant?