As A Sinn Féin Government Slips Out Of View - Elect Fighters!

Things can change during an election campaign as people focus their minds and begin to think about the next government. But recent polls all show one thing - a fall in the Sinn Féin vote. The entire establishment, including their mouthpieces in the D4 media, have united to punish Sinn Féin for trying to join their club - and that’s the problem right there.

Sinn Féin never proposed challenging the system. They were offering themselves as viable partners in running the neoliberal tax haven economy. Yeah they offered a few tweaks here and there, a few extra homes, but they also promised business leaders there’d be no threat to their wealth.

They had reached 34% in the polls and now sit at 16%. We all know that the establishment was able to use protests organised by the far right to divert the debate about 40 years of neoliberal housing policies into a debate about immigration. That’s why a lot of defecting Sinn Féin voters were those who sympathised with the right.

But they should have stood up to that bullying instead of flip flopping and conceeding ground. Everytime Sinn Féin parroted some far right talking point it guaranteed more voters would defect for the real thing, feeling it was legitimised rather than challenged.

Some on the left have fallen into demoralisation at the prospect of the return of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to government - but what did you expect a Sinn Féin government was actually going to do? Are we so despairing of change we’d settled for a few extra homes in a tax haven economy? Any reforms won under neoliberalism are eroded.

And we have shown that we can beat Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil when we mobilise in large numbers as we did during the water charges. A Fine Gael government was beaten by mass protests and mass direct action combined with non-payment of water bills.

Sinn Féin’s argument has always been to claim that change was only possible if they got into government - downplaying the role of mass mobilisation for fear that big demos on housing would empower the socialist left.

The longer we went without serious attempts to mobilise people the more the mood out there began to fester and Sinn Féin paid the price at the polls. Usually attempts to reform capitalism while running it lead to a rightward shift and collapse in support for the party that tries it - just look at Syriza in Greece or the whole history of the Irish Labour Party.

But Sinn Féin have paid the price for begging the establishment for a seat at the table before they even got a whiff power in the 26 counties - of course in the North they’ve been implementing Tory austerity while posing as an opposition for years.

The establishment will use every means at their disposal to destroy any perceived threat to their privelge and power. If that bullying has pushed Sinn Féin back it’s not a sign of establishment strength but of the weakness of the Sinn Féin strategy.

Socialists expect the establishment to behave that way and will always appeal to popular mobilisation in response. Electing socialists means putting voices in the Dáil who will stand up to the establishment no matter what parties are acting on behalf of the rich.

As for those socialists who thought a Sinn Féin government (and insinuating we’d join it) was the recipe for change - you need to stop tailing events and start fighting from the front.

The Red Network never made that mistake.