UnHerd: Why is Sinn Féin rising?

Ever since Ireland gained independence in 1922, every Irish Government has been led by either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael (or one of its antecedents). The two parties emerged from a split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty that paved the way to independence. The side that became Fine Gael accepted the Treaty, and the side that became Fianna Fáil, led by Éamon de Valera, rejected it. The pro-Treaty side, under Michael Collins, won the subsequent civil war but Fianna Fáil soon emerged as the strongest and most popular party in the new Irish state. [...]

But as time has gone on, and the Civil War recedes ever more into the distance, the historical differences between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael seem less and less important and increasingly they are seen as two sides of the same coin. [...]

Irish politics is also unusual in that immigration has barely raised its head as an issue, despite the fact that Ireland actually has a higher proportion of non-nationals living here than almost any other EU country, including Britain. Both the media and the mainstream parties absolutely refuse to permit a debate on the matter, but most of the immigrants to date are from other EU countries and fit in well for the most part. [...]

But every scenario is bound to strengthen Sinn Féin further. A second confidence-and-supply deal makes Sinn Féin the de facto opposition party, and if there is an outright coalition between the two parties, Sinn Féin becomes the official opposition. One way or another, the party of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness will benefit and the next time an election is called it will be running far more candidates and could potentially become the biggest party in the state for the first time since independence almost a century ago. It’s also possible that, if either main parties dumps their leader after the election, they choose a successor willing to cross that line and enter a coalition government with Sinn Fein.

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Europe Elects: Sinn Féin | SF | UK, Parliament Election 2019

This is the YouTube service of Europe Elects. Poll aggregation and election analysis for countries in the European Union. Europe Elects introduces the main political parties ahead of the 12 December 2019 parliament election in the UK.

The Guardian: Arlene Foster signals DUP shift on Northern Ireland border issue

In a break with previous rhetoric where she has strongly opposed treating the region differently to the rest of the UK, Foster said the final deal would have to recognise Northern Ireland’s unique historical and geographical position and the fact it will be the UK’s only land border with the EU.

Asked by reporters if it was possible to see Northern Ireland-only solutions that would not affect the constitutional link with Great Britain, she replied: “Well I hope so.” [...]

She made clear that her idea of an acceptable Northern Ireland-only solution was different to mooted proposals for a Northern Ireland-only backstop, which she said “would bring about customs [checks] between Great Britain and Northern Ireland and that is unconstitutional and undemocratic”. [...]

Echoing words of the party’s chief whip Sir Jeffrey Donaldson earlier this week, she said the solution lay in a joint letter she co-authored with the late leader of Sinn Féin, Martin McGuinness, in August 2016, a document rarely referred to by the DUP in the past two years.

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Reuters: Northern Irish party surges in EU poll, seeks Brexit referendum

The vote also indicated increasing support for candidates not aligned to the traditional Catholic or Protestant voting blocs. It was the best national showing for the Alliance Party, which was founded almost 50 years ago, just as Northern Ireland’s violent period known as “The Troubles” deepened.[...]

The vote also indicated increasing support for candidates not aligned to the traditional Catholic or Protestant voting blocs. It was the best national showing for the Alliance Party, which was founded almost 50 years ago, just as Northern Ireland’s violent period known as “The Troubles” deepened.[...]

Northern Ireland still overwhelmingly votes along traditional lines two decades after a peace deal ended 30 years of sectarian violence, choosing mainly Catholic nationalists who favour a united Ireland or predominantly Protestant unionists who want to remain British.

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The Guardian view on Northern Ireland talks collapsing: the lost language of power-sharing

The darker truth here is that Sinn Féin has chosen to weaponise the language question for political ends, less to protect a minority than to antagonise unionists. Unionists have duly been antagonised. The Gaelic language is the main tongue of a mere 0.2% of the Northern Ireland population. Around 10% claim to understand it to some degree (perhaps just a few phrases). But Sinn Féin does not do things accidentally. Its proposals have become a weapon of tribalism in communities where identity politics always looms large and divisively. Fears that Irish may be made compulsory in schools, that a language qualification might become a job requirement and that street signs would be made bilingual are not all well grounded. But some are. Bilingual road signs, for instance, would take the issue into every street in Northern Ireland, with pointless provocative effect.

Another glum truth is that the terms of Northern Ireland politics have been unhelpfully reset by two actions for which responsibility lies squarely with the Conservative party in London. The first of these is Brexit, and the seeming willingness of many irresponsible Tories to countenance a hard border in Ireland. The second is the pact between the Tories and the DUP, which undermines the British government’s role as a co-guarantor with Ireland of the power-sharing agreements of 1998. The two communities may indeed be enduringly suspicious of one another, as the language issue once again shows. But the current London government has all but abdicated from its responsibility to bring them together. In fact it has made things worse.

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The Guardian: The DUP is a party that loves power but hates pesky responsibility

There are few pronouncements from the DUP that can be understood unless heard from the perspective of a DUP stalwart. And this is a party that knows its supporters. Nearly a third of its members are Free Presbyterians – a denomination (founded by the late Ian Paisley) which constitutes just about 0.6% of the population in Northern Ireland.

The DUP is revelling in its moment in the limelight because it has no long-term strategy for Northern Ireland – it has no motivation to have one. In the long-term – so a crude (and I believe misguided) reading of demographic trends would suggest – unionists are outnumbered and thus outvoted into a united Ireland. The DUP perpetuates the idea that unionism’s position is precarious in order to bolster the rationale for its uncompromising stance.

Why sit in Stormont making unpopular decisions about budgets and tedious policy decisions about those schools and hospitals when you can instead concentrate on Westminster? There, at least, you don’t have to share anything with Sinn Féin. And from there you can keep the whole of Europe waiting for you to give a limp thumbs up to Theresa May’s Brexit deal. And yet, the DUP’s decision to shrug off the pesky responsibility of devolved government has a material, crushing effect on Northern Ireland, most particularly on its young.

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Jacobin Magazine: The End of the Old Brigade

For his supporters, Adams is the man who guided Sinn Féin to unprecedented political success; for disillusioned one-time allies, he is a slippery opportunist who abandoned fundamental principles in the name of expediency. His most vociferous critics in the Irish media will be glad to see the back of Adams, but their relief at his departure will be mixed with awareness that he did more than anyone to bring the IRA to a permanent ceasefire. He leaves Sinn Féin at a moment of uncertainty on both sides of the Irish border, with fundamental questions to answer about its political strategy in the years ahead. [...]

After his release in 1976, Adams was ready to challenge the old guard in the republican movement. His faction promised that there would be no more ceasefires without a clear British commitment to leave Ireland for good, earning themselves a reputation as hard-line militarists. The vision of a federal Ireland with an Ulster parliament espoused by Sinn Féin president Ruairí Ó Brádaigh was dismissed as a sop to unionism. Ó Brádaigh and his allies were ruthlessly marginalized by the younger northern Provos who rallied to Adams. In a dramatic role-reversal which reveals much about Adams’ political journey, Ó Brádaigh would later became one of his leading critics when he led Sinn Féin into the peace process of the 1990s. [...]

In the 1983 Westminster election Sinn Féin won over 40 per cent of the nationalist vote. It was a remarkable success that demonstrated the potential of an electoral strategy to Adams and his comrades in leadership. But it also proved to be the high water mark for the dual strategy of “the Armalite and the ballot box.” As time went on, the contradictions between the IRA’s guerrilla warfare and Sinn Féin’s political growth became ever more apparent. Support for the IRA campaign was confined to a minority of nationalists in republican strongholds like Derry, West Belfast and South Armagh. Beyond those circles, there was a ceiling that Sinn Féin could never break while the war continued. Controversial IRA actions, such as the bomb attack that killed eleven civilians at Enniskillen in 1987, would have a direct impact on Sinn Féin’s electoral prospects. [...]

But this should not really be surprising. For Gerry Adams and the movement he has built, social questions are ultimately a means to an end: useful insofar as they advance the prospects of Irish unification, disposable insofar as they don’t. And under his leadership, Sinn Féin has come closer to its primary objective than ever before. When Adams promised, at this year’s Ard Fheis, that his party would secure a referendum on Irish unity within five years, it wasn’t for show. Amid the fallout from Brexit, with unionism historically weak in the North and the conflict fading from the memory of the southern electorate, a referendum is increasingly plausible. What kind of Ireland it would produce is another story.

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The Guardian: How does the Irish border affect the Brexit talks?

Passport checks are highly unlikely: the EU signalled in its negotiation guidelines that it would like to see a codified version of the 1920s common travel agreement – which means passport-free travel for Irish and British citizens between the two islands – included in a final deal. [...]

Trade and services between the two sides now flourishes. Between 23,000 and 30,000 people commute across the border – a figure that discounts “frontier workers” such as community nurses or farmers who go back and forth across the border several times a day. [...]

The former European commission customs lawyer, Michael Dux, drew gasps from MPs on the Northern Ireland select committee in February, as he told how every vehicle carrying goods worth more than €300 (£264) crossing from Ireland into Northern Ireland would, under EU law, be liable for checks. [...]

One solution mooted is to move the border checks to ports and airports under a new unilateral agreement along the lines of the treaty of Le Touquet, which allows French border police to carry out immigration entry checks in Dover and British police to operate in Calais.

Technically, it is also possible that the customs checks on goods can be conducted electronically, with trusted trader status for regular cross-border freight and spot checks for standards.

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Quartz: Criminalizing non-violent extremism won’t prevent terrorism

In 2015, the prime minister had written that where “non-violent extremism goes unchallenged, the values that bind our society together fragment”. Going one step further, in its 2017 manifesto, May’s Conservative party called for a new approach where: “We will consider what new criminal offences might need to be created… to defeat the extremists.”

What this push for new legislation targets is not the criminal behaviour of violence, but the ideology behind it. This is based on the problematic assumption that criminalising the motivations behind an action can prevent it from happening: but my research suggests that the opposite may well be the case. [...]

Because politicians like May link certain ideologies to acts of violence, these ideologies are regarded as being just as criminal. All corresponding non-violent expressions of these ideologies—such as certain extreme interpretations of Islam—are to be considered in like terms, as a “pernicious ideology”, as May’s predecessor David Cameron stated following the terror acts in Brussels in 2016.

For instance, during the conflict in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin was censored, as were many advocating their political ideology. This led to a silencing of the political debate. Those challenging the violence of the IRA, but advocating for their goals—a united Ireland—were frequently labelled as terrorist sympathisers. For instance the former leader of the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), John Hume, notably stated: “Listening to honourable members opposite one would think that it [the pursuit of Irish unity] was a crime.” [...]

When non-violent expressions of a political ideology are criminalized this links the very ideology with criminality, and with terrorism. Holding a belief, no matter how disagreeable you may find it, does not make a person a perpetrator. Media headlines after the recent terror attacks in the UK provide disturbing examples of just how demonizing such language can be. One headline in The Daily Mail read: “Another fanatic slips through the net”, while another in The Sun called one of the attackers “The Jihadi next door”.

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The Guardian: How can Britain exit the EU? As a nation state it doesn’t really exist

Once upon a time there was a Roman province called Britannia, but it did not include Ireland, or Scotland north of Hadrian’s Wall. What does exist today is a state called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is not a nation state like France or Denmark. It is a multinational state, like the former Yugoslavia or the Austro-Hungarian empire.

It is also a distinctly odd state. It contains four nations, one far richer, more populous and more powerful than the other three. England contains almost 84% of the UK population, Scotland has just under 8.5%, Wales just under 5%, and Northern Ireland just under 3%. The state populations of Germany and the United States vary widely, but none towers over the rest to remotely this extent. To judge by what they say and do, the London-centred political and media elites are blind to the tangled history this oddity reflects. As a result the union state is now heading for break-up. [...]

Like a mortar bomb crashing into a building infested with dry rot, the EU referendum has torn great holes in the structure, the operational codes and the underlying assumptions of the increasingly rickety union state. Two of the union’s four nations voted to leave the European Union; two voted to remain. There were dramatic differences within three of the four. The Scottish vote to remain was pretty uniform across the nation. But in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin areas voted to remain while DUP areas voted to leave. England voted to leave but London, Liverpool and Manchester voted to stay. Wales also voted to leave but Cardiff, the Vale of Glamorgan and Monmouth in the south, and Ceredigion and Gwynedd in the north, voted to remain.

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The Guardian: We have woken up in a different country

For one thing, there is now a genuine question over the shape of this kingdom. Scotland (like London) voted to remain inside the European Union. Every one of its political parties (bar Ukip) urged a remain vote. Yet now Scotland is set to be dragged out of the EU, against its collective will.

The demand will be loud and instant for Scotland to assure its own destiny by breaking free of the UK. This is precisely the kind of “material change” that the Scottish National party always said would be enough to warrant a second referendum to follow the one held in 2014. And this time, surely, there will be a majority for independence. So a first legacy of 23 June could well be the imminent break-up of the UK.

The implications will be profound for Northern Ireland too. The return of a “hard border” between north and south imperils a peace that was hard-won and too often taken for granted. Note this morning’s warning from Sinn Féin that the British government has “forfeited any mandate to represent the economic and political interests of people in Northern Ireland”.

Of course, the divisions don’t end there. England is exposed as a land divided: London, along with the cities of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Bristol stood apart from the rest of England and Wales in wanting to stay in. There is a yawning class divide, pitting city against town and, more profoundly, those who feel they have something to lose against those who feel they do not.

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