Knives Out Between Sinn Féin And Soc Dems Since By Election Result

It’s daggers at dawn between Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats since Daniel Ennis of the Soc Dems beat Janice Boylan of Sinn Féin to a seat in the recent Dublin Central By-Election. Soc Dem leader Holly Cairns has been questioning Sinn Féin’s left credentials while simultaneously offering her party as a replacement for Labour in their traditional cosy-up to the establishment parties.

Poor People Before Profit are left sitting there begging the bigger left parties to come together and offer a left government. Their post-election analysis claimed that a left government was closer than ever. No sooner had the ink dried on their statement the Shinners and Soc Dems were at each other in the media and Holly Cairns was ruling out a left alliance for the general election.

When you look at the box by box tallies for the Dublin Central by-election it’s clear that the Shinners and Soc Dems have a different voter base. While the inner city and estate boxes saw large votes for Sinn Féin and the far right candidates, the Soc Dem vote was concentrated around Glasnevin, Drumcondra and Phibsboro.

The Independent reported that a Sinn Féin strategist called the Soc Dems “CALPOLs” - meaning they were Comfortable, Affluent, Liberal, Property Owning, Lefties! Meanwhile, the Soc Dems were all over the news calling on Sinn Féin to clarify their position on a list of social issues like abortion access. Both parties were playing to their voter base with Sinn Féin desperately trying to reclaim their working class credentials.

At one point over the last few years Sinn Féin were up to 36% in the polls. They could smell the leather of their future cabinet seats and played down the need for protests. This was self-defeating though.

The irony was that the more they avoided protests the more their actual chance of leading a government retreated. You see you can’t leave workers sitting at home waiting for the next election and not expect people to get demoralised. Sinn Féin dropped in poll after poll and after losing 100,000 voters sounded the alarm and started grassroots campaigning again.

While their voter base may be in the blue collar estates Sinn Féin’s leaders have the approval of Davy Stockbrokers who said the party was more Tony Blair’s New Labour than Jeremy Corbyn’s. It’s easy to see how the Social Democrats are a middle class party but it’s not so evident with Sinn Féin. But they ultimately represent the middle class too.

They’ve promised the Irish bosses that they won’t go after them. They’ve promised the EU they’ll operate with fiscal parameters set by an anti-worker system. They’ve promised the corporations that the tax haven scam will continue. What does that mean for their promises to workers on social housing or the cost of living?

So for the moment it’s daggers drawn for Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats. Both parties represent utopian illusions in a polite neoliberalism typical of the Irish middle class, despite one party having a voter base in the estates. They promise to partner up with the monsters of the Irish boss class and somehow deliver a mountain of reforms. It’s daydreaming.

This is why we need a real working class party in Ireland. That doesn’t just scoop up blue collar votes to then tie workers into the same old system. The knives are out on the left because they all want a seat at the masters’ table. We want to kick it over.