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Abstract

In this article we critically examine how Sinn Féin responded to Brexit, why, and with what consequences. By destabilising the UK’s territorial constitution and intensifying debate about Ireland’s constitutional future, Brexit has represented a moment of unprecedented opportunity for Irish republicanism. However, this has been offset by the very real political and economic risks it has posed for the island of Ireland. We argue that Sinn Féin’s pursuit of ‘Special Status’ for Northern Ireland represented an attempt to mitigate Brexit’s risks, rather than to leverage its opportunities. This approach came with political costs for the party, whose recent electoral surge has arguably been in spite of rather than because of it. We demonstrate how Brexit has served to reshape Sinn Féin’s politics, and how it has functioned to further moderate its ‘Eurocriticism’.

Keywords

Brexit British politics Irish politics Irish unity Northern Ireland politics special designated status Sinn Féin

Introduction

On the morning of 24 June 2016, in the wake of the United Kingdom’s surprise decision to leave the European Union, Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness addressed a press conference from the bottom of the Stormont Castle steps. The then Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland told the assembled reporters (Belfast Telegraph, 2016):

our focus is clearly on the democratically expressed wishes of the people here in the North. And achieving a 56 percent vote was brought about as a result of Unionists, Nationalists and Republicans voting together to remain in Europe . . . . We do believe that there is, against the backdrop of this decision – which has been so detrimental to everybody on this island – a democratic imperative for a border poll.

Thus, McGuinness outlined the narrative which has defined his party’s subsequent approach to Brexit, which is founded on the view that it is ‘detrimental to everybody on this island’.

Brexit has posed profound political and economic risks for Ireland, North and South (see Connelly, 2017; Murphy, 2018: 67–96, 2019). And it has represented an existential threat to the achievements of the Good Friday Agreement – not least among which is the open and largely invisible border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, which has facilitated increased North-South political, socio-cultural and economic integration and given expression to Nationalist political identity and aspirations. According to Sinn Féin, these risks posed by Brexit provide the logic and impetus for a referendum on Irish unity, which, under the terms of the Northern Ireland Act (1998), the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland is mandated to call, ‘if at any time it appears likely to him (sic) that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and part of a united Ireland’.

Support for Irish unity has indeed been growing since the 2016 Brexit referendum. Tonge (2020a) notes that although recent polling in Northern Ireland confirms majority support for the constitutional status quo the margins have narrowed considerably. Moreover, three of the five most recent polls (to February 2020) have recorded more respondents supportive of unity than against. While it is both possible and necessary to question the accuracy, validity and biases of this polling (Working Group on Unification Referendums on the Island of Ireland, 2020), there is mounting evidence that Brexit, in general, and the prospect of a hardening of the border, in particular, have increased demand for a border poll, catalysed debate about the constitutional future of the island of Ireland and made a united Ireland – though far from inevitable – a more immediate possibility (see Connolly and Doyle, 2019). This co-exists alongside increasing support for Scottish independence, growing Scottish National Party (SNP) agitation for an ‘Indyref2’ and burgeoning ‘indy-curiosity’ in Wales (Shipman and Allardyce, 2021). In sum, Brexit has represented a marked challenge to the integrity of the United Kingdom’s territorial constitution (Wincott et al., 2020). For Sinn Féin, these developments represent an unparalleled opportunity for the completion of the Republican project in the short term. This is at the root of what one former Sinn Féin MLA described as a ‘dilemma’ for his party: that ‘actually, the harder Brexit is, I suspect, the more support there will be for a united Ireland. But despite that, we are trying to mitigate or ameliorate the worst aspects of Brexit’. (Interview with author, 2018, original emphasis).

In what follows, we draw on interviews with senior party-members, members of opposing parties and EU officials, as well as party manifestos, policy documents and statements, to investigate this dilemma and interrogate the tensions between risk and opportunity that have defined Sinn Féin’s approach to Brexit. In so doing, we seek to draw and build on studies whose understanding and analysis of Sinn Féin go beyond a primary interest in (para)militarism and the party’s relationship with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) (see, for example, Finn, 2019; Taylor, 1997) and which seek to engage with it on its own terms as a(n increasingly ‘normal’) political party (see, for example, Bean, 2007; De Bréadún, 2015; Maillot, 2005; Ó Broin, 2009; Whiting, 2016): one aspiring to power on both sides of the Irish border and whose attempts to influence the course of Brexit’s critical constitutional juncture (Todd, 2017; cf. Cotton and Fontana, 2018) are wrought with political dilemmas, internal contradictions and (sometimes fraught) policy debates, not all of which are directly related to the party’s continuing (re)negotiation of its violent heritage.

Through semi-structured interviews with senior party figures, in particular, we have sought to gain insight into and bring a degree of analytical clarity to some of these debates and their consequences, which can often be obscured by Sinn Féin’s particularly strong message discipline (Spencer, 2006). Crucially, we take Sinn Féin’s policy approach to Brexit, and its European policy and messaging more widely, as worthy of examination as an important part of the platform of a party which now realistically and imminently aspires to government within and across the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland. Sinn Féin’s approach to European integration per se – and the pressures that have shaped it – is an aspect of the party’s policy that has previously received fairly limited scholarly attention and has not been examined in any depth since 2009 (see Frampton, 2005; Maillot, 2009). Below we therefore seek to bring nuance to analyses of this area of the party’s programme and how it has been reshaped in the wake of Brexit.

We argue that Sinn Féin’s opposition to Brexit during the 2016 referendum represented a turning point in the party’s long-term transition from a fringe and increasingly unpopular form of Euroscepticism towards an increased and more mainstream embracing of the European project, but that this (incomplete) mainstreaming of the party’s position on Europe has posed challenges for the party. We outline its proposals on ‘Special Status’ for the North of Ireland, suggesting that rather than representing an attempt to capitalise on the crisis for the British state represented by Brexit, they were instead a pragmatic response to its material and political risks for the island of Ireland. We reveal the pressures that shaped the party’s attempts to define a response to Brexit that could be translated across two jurisdictions, and the electoral and political difficulties this engendered. Above all, we argue that Brexit has represented a moment of both unparalleled opportunity and profound threat for Irish Republicanism. And we examine where the navigation of this tension leaves the party as it appears to stand on the brink of being in government in both jurisdictions on the island of Ireland in the short to medium term.

‘Eurocriticism’

As Frampton (2005: 236–237) notes:

In the aftermath of its inception in 1971, Sinn Féin existed purely as an IRA-support organisation, with few practical policies rooted in everyday realities . . . At a time when Sinn Féin seemed to take little notice of other ‘real’, contemporary political matters, it is undoubtedly noteworthy that the subject of Europe was one area in which the party did adopt a clearly defined and detailed policy.

This policy was one of outright resistance to any Irish involvement in European integration. In 1972, Irish accession to the European Community (EC) became the first issue on which the new ‘Provisional’ Sinn Féin sought to project itself as more than merely an Irish Republican Army (IRA) front and a political entity with a distinctive policy platform (although it shared opposition to European Economic Community (EEC) membership with the broader Irish left, including the Labour Party and the trade union movement).

The party campaigned for a ‘No’ vote in the 1972 referendum on Irish EC membership. Its ‘EEC-No!’ document outlined the four key arguments, which would underpin its policy on Europe for the rest of the decade and into the next. Irish membership of the EC, it was reckoned, would be ‘destructive of Irish sovereignty; anti-democratic; a violation of Irish neutrality; and economically harmful in light of the EEC’s capitalist nature’ (Frampton, 2005: 238–239). In 1975, this saw Sinn Féin advocate for a ‘No’ vote in the referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued membership of the EC. Sinn Féin also did not contest the first European elections in 1979. As Frampton (2005: 238) indicates, this was partly a reflection of the party’s wider policy of abstentionism and disdain for ‘normal’ politics.

In line with the wider political transformations taking place within Republican politics during the 1980s, Sinn Féin’s approach to Europe began to shift in the wake of the 1981 Hunger Strike by IRA prisoners in the Maze/Long Kesh Prison, and the election of hunger striker, Bobby Sands, as MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. The ‘armalite and ballot box’ strategy adopted at the 1981 Sinn Féin ard fheis (national party conference) (see Taylor, 1997: 281–290) saw the Republican movement begin to make important electoral in-roads winning a Westminster seat in the 1983 UK general election (on an abstentionist ticket) and then abandoning abstentionism for some domestic institutions: local government in Northern Ireland and Dáil Éireann (Irish parliament) in the South.¹ Crucially, this move was foreshadowed in 1983 by the decision to stand candidates in the 1984 European election, on the basis that successful candidates would take their seats in the European Parliament² (Frampton, 2005: 240). Active participation in European elections allowed Sinn Féin to assert its credentials as a credible and, significantly, all-island party. The first Sinn Féin MEPs, Bairbre de Brún (in Northern Ireland) and Mary Lou McDonald (in the Republic of Ireland), were elected in 2004. As part of the GUE–NGL group in the European Parliament, MEPs from McDonald and de Brún onwards have been proactive, if critical, participants in European politics (Jacobs, 2019) and the party itself has increasingly exhibited at least some of the characteristics of what has been termed ‘Europeanisation’ (De Winter and Gomez-Reino, 2002).

As Maillot (2009: 566) suggests, that its current and former MEPs are among Sinn Féin’s most prominent figures³ provides ‘an indication of how important EU politics have become for the party and how seriously they are taken at élite levels’. Changes in Sinn Féin’s position on Europe have been indicative not only of tactical adjustments but also of deeper structural and ideological changes. The EU has come to be viewed increasingly not as inimical to a Sinn Féin policy programme based on the pursuit of North-South integration, the promotion of rights and equality, and grounded in community activism, but as an (albeit flawed) ally (Maillot, 2009). This has been underpinned by the billions of Euro available through subsequent PEACE programmes, which, as argued by Bean (2007), have played a role in re-orienting the Republican movement’s political strategies, and its relationship with the (British) state and its agencies. Throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, Sinn Féin’s burgeoning reconciliation with the European project nonetheless remained incomplete and existed in a degree of tension with a ‘Eurocritical’ policy position, which saw it campaign for ‘No’ votes in Irish referendums on the Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon Treaties.

By the time of the Brexit referendum, the evolution of Sinn Féin’s thinking around the EU had been in gestation for over two decades. A former senior party strategist summarised the position thus:

It’s . . . been evolving from the early 1990s, until you get to a position where, for peaceful reasons – that is, that we don’t want to slide back into conflict – we have to stay in the European Union, like it or not. (Interview with author, 2019)

Sinn Féin’s coming out for ‘Remain’ in the 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s future membership of the EU thus marked a significant turning point in the evolution of the party’s European policy and a critical juncture in its political journey more broadly.

‘Put Ireland First’

Conservative Party leader David Cameron’s commitment to hold an ‘in/out’ referendum on UK membership of the EU prompted an unambiguous response from Sinn Féin. In April 2015, the party’s Westminster election manifesto explicitly articulated its opposition to a referendum and noted that the Tories’ planned vote on future UK membership of Europe demonstrated ‘no consideration of the needs of the people of the Six Counties and of the consequences of leaving the EU on this part of Ireland’ (Sinn Féin, 2015: 9). In 2015, following the election of a majority Conservative Party government, Sinn Féin quickly, formally and unanimously committed to campaigning for the United Kingdom to remain in the EU.

That the decision to campaign for Remain was unopposed (Kearney, quoted in Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, 2016) represented how fully Sinn Féin’s position had shifted since the 1975 referendum (McCann and Hainsworth, 2017: 328). The party’s approach to the EU referendum reflected and was framed by its emphasis on the importance of all-island institutions, relationships and economic integration – all of which were threatened by the prospect of an UK exit from the EU – and by a perception that Brexit (thereby) posed a threat to Sinn Féin’s ultimate constitutional aspiration for Irish unity. According to one Sinn Féin TD:

When you look at Brexit from that stand point, it doesn’t make any sense to have one part of the island in the European Union and one part outside . . . so when you ask, ‘why were we against Brexit?’, it’s because it was illogical for any party on the island of Ireland to support what is really a deepening of partition and an EU frontier running along the island of Ireland. (Interview with authors, 2018)

Since the 1980s, and the party’s shift towards electoral politics, Sinn Féin has capitalised on its tradition of grass-roots activism in the development of a more professionalised electoral strategy (McGough, 2005; Maillot, 2005). However, the extent to which Sinn Féin invested in developing a sophisticated and proactive strategy for the 2016 referendum is unclear. Indeed, the intensity of Sinn Féin’s engagement with the EU referendum campaign was decidedly mixed. The party did not fundraise to support the referendum effort and nor did it officially register with the Electoral Commission as a campaigner (Fealty, 2017). There are also questions about the extent to which the party really mobilised its voters to go out and vote for Remain (see Garry, 2016). The Sinn Féin stronghold of Belfast West, for example, recorded a turnout of only 48.9% in the EU referendum, the lowest turnout of any UK constituency (although with a 74.1% vote in support of Remain).

A confluence of factors appears to have undermined Sinn Féin’s capacity and appetite for rolling out a comprehensive referendum strategy. A stated reluctance to draw on diminished resources in the aftermath of two recent elections (a general election in the Republic of Ireland and Assembly elections in Northern Ireland in 2016), a likely element of election fatigue and some (legitimate) expectation that the referendum would produce a Remain result may all have played a role in undermining the strength and voracity of the Sinn Féin pro-Remain electoral machine. Among sections of Sinn Féin’s core constituency, there may also have been a perception that the referendum was a largely British (and more particularly English) issue, in which Irish voters had little stake (News Letter, 2016). This view was reflected by one Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) MLA (Interview with author, 2018), who also argued that Sinn Féin’s long history of Eurocriticism had had residual consequences for their constituents’ views on Europe. Furthermore, a section of the Nationalist electorate felt that a Leave vote might play to Irish Republicanism’s advantage, by acting to destabilise the British state. This ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’ mode of analysis has long been a feature of Republican political rhetoric and strategy, and was in evidence in a strain of argument initially pursued by the Sinn Féin leadership in the immediate aftermath of the referendum. Ultimately, however, we argue that this was over-taken by more practical and material political considerations.

‘Wearing the green jersey’

In July 2016, VICE News’ Katie Engelhart (2016) proposed that:

There’s losing, and there’s losing while still sort of winning. Gerry Adams, [then] president of Ireland’s Sinn Féin party . . . campaigned firmly against last month’s Brexit vote. But today, Adams appears delighted with the losing result: a less-than-United Kingdom leaving the European Union. ‘Never waste a crisis, never waste a difficulty’, Adams said while speaking to VICE News.

As outlined above, Sinn Féin’s immediate response to the result of the Brexit referendum was to call for a border poll. Northern Ireland’s majority for Remain, Brexit’s destabilisation of the constitutional status quo ante and the febrile political atmosphere it had engendered all appeared to provide new impetus for the rapid completion of Sinn Féin’s historic project of Irish (re)unification. The UK government’s subsequent (mis)handling of the Brexit process paid little regard not only to Nationalist sentiment and concerns in Northern Ireland (and, ultimately, also turned its back on Ulster Unionism (Kenny and Sheldon, 2020)) but also to those of devolved government in Wales and Scotland, with constitutionally destabilising consequences (McEwen, 2020; Wellings, 2020; Wincott et al., 2020) and the creation of new political openings for separatists to pursue their political objectives. Since the referendum, Sinn Féin has been represented by both its Unionist (see BBC News, 2021; Murphy and Evershed, 2019) and Nationalist (see, for example, Hanna, 2019; Leahy and Halloran, 2020) political opponents and its media detractors on both sides of the Irish Sea (see, for example, Harris, 2019) precisely as seeking to use or leverage Brexit in pursuit of its primary political objective: that of Irish reunification. Party President, Mary Lou McDonald has herself described Brexit as ‘the opportunity of a lifetime’ in this regard (Libreri, 2020).

However, this unanticipated opportunity that Brexit appeared to represent for Sinn Féin was radically offset by the political and economic risks that it posed (Connelly, 2017; Murphy, 2018, 2019) and which the party quickly found itself having to negotiate. As suggested by one Sinn Féin researcher, there were early debates within the party about whether it should be looking to use Brexit as a wedge issue – to be leveraged to accelerate the unity project – or whether and in what ways it should instead be seeking to mitigate the fallout from it (Interview with author, 2019). Ultimately, however, it became clear that sections of Sinn Féin’s constituency, including along the border and in multiply deprived areas of Nationalist majority in Belfast and Derry, stood to suffer most from Brexit’s adverse political-economic consequences, and it was felt that the need to address the very material fears and concerns of voters in these areas took precedence over and substantially outweighed opportunities to use or manipulate Brexit to the party’s advantage.

The upshot of this was, from November 2016, Sinn Féin’s adoption and articulation of a policy of Special Designated Status for the North of Ireland (see Sinn Féin, 2016). Special Status was to include: access to the single market; maintenance of EU funding streams; maintenance of the Common Travel Area (CTA); protection of access to employment and workers’ rights; representation for Northern Ireland in the European Parliament and on other EU bodies; human rights guarantees; maintenance of EU environmental protections and energy laws and, critically, full protection of the Good Friday Agreement (Murphy, 2018: 129). As Brexit became increasingly politicised in Northern Ireland (see Murphy, 2018: 63–65), Special Status was an important point of distinction between Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP)⁴ and was central to Sinn Féin’s attempts to shape a distinctive Brexit narrative for the party.

However, Sinn Féin’s version of Special Status was only minimally distinct from that adopted by its biggest electoral rival in the North: the SDLP (albeit that Sinn Féin was first to substantially flesh it out) (Murphy, 2018: 129). It was also basically indistinguishable from the policy adopted by the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (2017) and largely mirrored the position of both the Fine Gael government (Connelly, 2017: 68–85, 314–317, 320) and the Fianna Fáil opposition (Martin, 2016). Such conflict as existed between Sinn Féin and other Nationalist and non-aligned parties on how to approach Brexit was intermittent, tokenistic and largely semantic. In practical terms, there was remarkable unanimity in the policy approaches adopted across these parties. As it was put by one Sinn Féin TD:

We took a very pragmatic decision – and it was the right decision – that what was needed was to have not an Irish government position, but an Irish position on Brexit . . . And that position was that you would have a number of red lines. Those red lines are no hardening of the border[,] citizens’ rights [and] protection of the Good Friday Agreement. (Interview with authors, 2018, original emphasis)

Crucially – and despite claims to the contrary by political opponents – the policy of Special Status as it was ultimately adopted by Sinn Féin sought, as far as was possible, not to accelerate the process of constitutional change, but to protect the political-legal status quo. By November 2016, the very material risks represented by Brexit had thus seen Sinn Féin increasingly distancing itself from notions of ‘crisis as opportunity’. Special Status was ultimately more about mitigating, rather than leveraging, the difficulties represented by Brexit. As it was put by one Sinn Féin Senator:

There is no doubt, in terms of our objective of moving towards a united Ireland, that a hard Brexit and that chaos, would help that case. But that’s not the approach that we have taken . . . The reason that we have put Special Status on the table was to ameliorate the worst impacts of Brexit (Interview with author, 2019, original emphasis)

Representing a pragmatic response to the risks posed by Brexit, Special Designated Status became the crux of Sinn Féin’s approach to the Brexit negotiations. And it was decided at an early stage that the party’s strategy for delivering Special Status would involve an intensification of its engagement with the EU. Energy and resources were dedicated to ‘working’ the European Parliament. Sinn Féin organised a number of briefings on its proposals for Special Status for all of the political groupings within the Parliament and undertook an intensive series of engagements with individual MEPs and officials. It also met regularly with the European Commission’s Taskforce 50, which was identified by Sinn Féin as a (if not the) party’s key ally in the Brexit process. This ‘diplomatic offensive’ was spearheaded by Sinn Féin’s MEP for Northern Ireland, Martina Anderson (Jacobs, 2019; Sinn Féin MEP, interview with author, 2018; European Commission official, interview with author, 2020).

Broadly speaking, the party’s key Brexit priorities were upheld in Europe, including in European Parliament resolutions (see, for example, European Parliament, 2017), and in the guiding principles for the discussion on Ireland/Northern Ireland adopted by Michel Barnier’s Brexit Taskforce (European Commission, 2017). However, as suggested by one Commission official close to the Brexit talks, there is no real sense in which Sinn Féin ultimately had any greater influence over defining the EU’s position in this regard than did any other Irish political party or interest group (Interview with author, 2020).⁵ On issues pertaining to Ireland/Northern Ireland, the EU’s primary interlocutor throughout the Article 50 negotiations remained the Irish government. Furthermore, and as suggested by one Sinn Féin MLA, none of the multiple iterations of the Ireland/Northern Ireland protocol included in subsequent drafts of the Withdrawal Agreement were fully commensurate with Special Status:⁶

[the protocol] is, I think, what we are left having to defend. And, in that respect, it really requires the Irish government to be resolute. I personally am pleased with the Irish government’s response to date. And if the Irish government deliver on this, it will be the first time in my lifetime that they haven’t left the Nationalists in the North behind. So, we travel in hope. (Interview with author, 2018)

This deferral to the Irish government speaks to what amounted, ultimately, to Sinn Féin’s relative lack of institutionalised power to dictate the course of events during the Brexit negotiations, and its reliance on other parties and institutions in seeking to deliver on its core Brexit objectives. The collapse of Stormont institutions in January 2017 removed what governmental authority the party had had to make demands on other actors in the Brexit process. This would likely have been compromised at any rate, given the gulf between Sinn Féin and the DUP on the issue of Brexit, not to mention the UK government’s questionable commitment to meaningful inclusion of the devolved governments in shaping its approach to negotiations with the EU (McEwen, 2020). Abstaining from Westminster, Sinn Féin was left articulating its position from the opposition benches in the Dáil and its four seats in the European Parliament. While, according to Jacobs (2019), Sinn Féin did punch somewhat above its weight in Brussels, the party’s lobbying at the EU level was largely subsumed into a wider Irish diplomatic effort led by and identified with the Irish government.

At home, the uniqueness and potency of the party’s Brexit message were diluted by what one of its TDs described as the need to ‘wear the green jersey’ and present a united front:

We haven’t taken a confrontational approach with the Irish government. We hold them to account as best we can, where we see that they have been naïve or slow . . . but we’re conscious that what we need to do is keep that consistent position in place. Because I think if the British government see a crack in that, then it would be problematic. (Interview with authors, 2018)

As Costello (2020: 14) has identified, this presaged a shift in Sinn Féin’s rhetoric on the EU more generally, which became

supportive of the EU in its role as the defender of Ireland’s interests in relations with a third country. In this way, a previously Eurosceptic party adapted its rhetoric on EU affairs in a way consistent with the ‘rally around the flag’ effect.

Thus, Sinn Féin’s donning of the ‘green jersey’ and its ‘rallying to the (EU) flag’ on Brexit marked an important watershed for the party’s approach on Europe more generally. But this was ultimately of no real electoral benefit to Sinn Féin. This (incomplete) process of repositioning may even have cost the party electorally across what were a series of difficult elections in 2018 and 2019.

Fall and Rise

As phase one of the Brexit process reached its dramatic climax, any potential for a Brexit electoral bounce for Sinn Féin was roundly disavowed by the party’s performance in the 2018 Irish presidential election⁷ and 2019 Irish local elections.⁸ Brexit did not feature as an issue in either of those elections, and Sinn Féin was unable to leverage its Brexit positioning to win electoral support. The electoral slide continued with the 2019 European elections, which saw the party lose two of its four seats in the Republic of Ireland, although it retained its seat in Northern Ireland (albeit on a reduced vote share). For the European election, Brexit was a central and salient issue. In Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin candidate Martina Anderson’s campaign made much of her party’s record fighting for Special Status. In her EU election broadcast, she claimed that the inclusion of the backstop in the first iteration of the Withdrawal Agreement was down to Sinn Féin lobbying efforts, which had successfully influenced the position of the Irish Government and the EU27 (see Haughey and Pow, 2020: 35). Although Anderson went on to regain her seat, the main story of the European elections in Northern Ireland was the success of the Alliance Party’s Naomi Long, who took a European Parliament seat on the back of a similarly anti-Brexit message (Tonge, 2020b). In Northern Ireland, it was clear that the pro-Remain argument was not wholly owned by or identified with Sinn Féin.

In the Republic of Ireland, while Brexit was a defining issue in the European election, it was also a largely uncontested ‘valence issue’ which garnered ‘broad consensus across the public and the parties’ (Johnston, 2020: 20). Sinn Féin was unable to derive political capital from its policy of Special Status, given its similarity to the Brexit policy approach being pursued by the Irish government.⁹ Furthermore, the pursuit of Special Status jarred with a wider Sinn Féin campaign in the Republic of Ireland, which played heavily on more traditionally Eurocritical tropes, foregrounding the party’s opposition to militarisation of the EU and its support for Irish neutrality. This more critical message was awkwardly juxtaposed to the party’s strong support for Northern Ireland’s continued EU membership. As McBride (2019) suggests:

Since Brexit the party has increasingly shackled the case for Irish unity to the Republic’s continued membership of the EU . . . In any border poll, Sinn Féin will have an already difficult task of convincing non-nationalists to support Irish unity. If a key element of the party’s appeal to those people is a pro-EU message, even that element of the task will be undermined if the party is perceived to be cynically contradicting its own beliefs.

In the event, this contradiction also played badly with an Irish electorate among whom Brexit had bolstered pro-EU sentiment (Simpson, 2019). In sum, as one senior Republican admitted, the juxtaposition of ‘wearing the green jersey’ on Brexit with more Eurocritical forms of election messaging ‘didn’t do Sinn Féin any good’ electorally (Interview with author, 2019).

The December 2019 UK general election – which was called by Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, in an attempt to break the Brexit logjam and get the Withdrawal Agreement through Westminster – saw some important electoral gains for Nationalists. In a historic development, Northern Ireland returned more Nationalist than Unionist MPs to Westminster for the first time. A series of electoral pacts between pro-Remain parties paved the way for increased Nationalist representation. Brexit was the single most important issue for voters in Northern Ireland during the 2019 UK general election (see University of Liverpool, 2020). Although Sinn Féin’s election strategy placed renewed emphasis on ‘Irish unity as a solution to an English Brexit’ (Sinn Féin, 2019: 9), the party’s decision to agree electoral pacts with other pro-Remain parties acted to moderate that message. This played to the advantage of the SDLP and Alliance Party. The SDLP went from zero to two seats, and the Alliance Party returned its first MP since 2010. Sinn Féin’s loss of the Foyle seat it had wrested from the SDLP in 2017 was offset by a historic win for the party in Belfast North – where John Finucane, then serving as Lord Mayor of Belfast, unseated the DUP’s Deputy Leader, Nigel Dodds. Overall, Sinn Féin managed to hold onto seven Westminster seats, although its vote share decreased by 6.7%.

Sinn Féin’s mixed post-Brexit electoral fortunes were substantially reversed with an astonishing electoral success in early 2020. For the first time in its history, the party won the largest share of first preference votes in an Irish general election. Unlike during the Westminster election, Brexit was not a key issue for Irish voters. According to the Ipsos MRBI exit poll (Collins, 2020), it was of negligible significance and influenced just 1% of voters. To a substantial extent, the Irish general election was a Brexit free zone (see Murphy, 2021; The Business Post/RedC, 2020). Instead, the election focussed predominantly on issues around the housing and health crises in Ireland. Sinn Féin concentrated its electioneering on these highly politicised issues and limited its focus on Brexit. The issue of Irish unity was not forcefully pushed by the party during the Irish election campaign. For the most part, calls for a border poll were peripheral aspects of Sinn Féin’s electoral strategy, and non-Brexit-related ‘bread-and-butter’ issues were front and centre. The party’s 24.5% share of the first preference vote translated into 37 seats, just one less than the largest party, Fianna Fáil.

Sinn Féin’s electoral triumph in February 2020 coincided with the restoration of power-sharing government at Stormont, the start of negotiations on the UK–EU future relationship and the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic. In Northern Ireland, the UK and EU’s arrival at a limited Trade and Cooperation Agreement in December 2020 was followed by early difficulties in the implementation of the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland (Connelly, 2021). This confluence of events opened up new opportunities for Sinn Féin to more openly pursue intensified debate on the constitutional question and to reorient from the policy contestation it had pursued during the Brexit negotiations to renewed polity contestation, which Wellings (2020: 4) defines as ‘secessionism in the guise of Brexit’. The party has increasingly touted Irish unity as an antidote to difficulties experienced on both sides of the border in tackling the pandemic and to the complex, cumbersome and costly post-Brexit arrangements applicable to Northern Ireland.

Renewed emphasis on constitutional debate exists alongside growing SNP agitation for a second independence referendum and heightened discussion in both public and academic debate about the potential disintegration of the United Kingdom (see, for example, Shipman and Allardyce, 2021). It also takes place against the backdrop of the Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Green coalition government’s opening up of a new debate on a ‘Shared Island’: itself an attempt to respond to Sinn Féin’s electoral surge and an acknowledgement of the growing tempo and urgency of the constitutional conversation (McGrath, 2020). This confluence of these post-Brexit electoral and political developments comes with new opportunities for Sinn Féin as it seeks to firmly position itself as a government in waiting in the Republic of Ireland. But it also poses challenges, including in terms of how the party continues to reorient its policy approach on ‘Europe’ and how aspiration to govern in the South coincides with the realities of being in government in the North.

Conclusion

Opponents and critics of Sinn Féin have been keen to represent the party as having used (and, therefore, wanted) Brexit, in general, and a hard or no-deal Brexit, in particular, to help force the agenda on Irish unity. However, insofar as Brexit has acted to accelerate the debate about Irish reunification, this has largely been a product of the British government’s posturing on and (mis)management of the negotiations on its withdrawal from and future relationship with the EU. Westminster’s failure to meaningfully involve devolved governments in shaping its approach to Brexit negotiations has given renewed impetus to separatist projects in Scotland and Wales, as well as to that of Irish reunification. While it may therefore have provided a boost in support for the project of Irish unity, we have argued that it is far from clear that Sinn Féin was therefore well-positioned to benefit politically from Brexit per se.

As a matter of both strategy and principle, Sinn Féin ultimately sought to minimise rather than to leverage the impact of Brexit on the island of Ireland. In so doing, the party appeared to take further critical steps on its journey from the Eurosceptic fringe which it had begun in the 1980s and to become more definitively part of the pro-EU Irish political mainstream (Holmes, forthcoming). However, in subsequent elections in 2018 and 2019, Sinn Féin struggled to square this with its more traditionally Eurocritical message or to substantially differentiate itself and its Brexit policy from that of its opponents on both sides of the border. The resurgence of Sinn Féin during the Irish general election in 2020 owed little to the party’s careful walking of the Brexit tight-rope, as we have examined it above, but was a product of other, domestic political concerns; an appetite for change after years of austerity politics; and a creative reorientation and re-articulation of the party’s messaging around issues like housing and healthcare.

The Sinn Féin surge both resulted from and contributed to a reframing of the party’s policy position on the EU, in which its Eurocriticism – a perspective with decreasing resonance among Nationalists after Brexit, in general, and among voters in the Republic of Ireland, in particular (Simpson, 2019; Holmes, forthcoming) – became less pronounced. The Sinn Féin 2020 general election manifesto did contain familiarly Eurocritical language about the EU’s undermining of Irish neutrality, its militarism and neoliberalism (Sinn Féin, 2020a: 41–45). However, and as outlined above, in an election centred primarily on the domestic issues of health and housing, it did not receive much of an airing, and nor did the party seek to promote it. Brexit did not win Sinn Féin any votes in 2020, but, unlike in 2018 and 2019, nor did its (more muted) position on Europe lose it any. Furthermore, a 2020 policy document, The Economic Benefits of a United Ireland, adopts a more unequivocally pro-EU position. It deliberately advances ‘full EU membership for the whole island’ as a benefit of a united Ireland and argues for Irish unity as a means to reverse the negative effects of Brexit for Northern Ireland (Sinn Féin, 2020b: 17).

Sinn Féin’s Eurocriticism is thus an increasingly ambiguous policy position, and the extent to which it can be retained as a hallmark of Sinn Féin’s post-Brexit platform has not yet been fully tested: that awaits their participation in government in the Republic of Ireland (which, at the time of writing, seems likely to follow the next Irish general election). It is only really in this context that the party will have the opportunity to fully activate and pursue their Eurocritical credentials. However, here the party’s ability to adjust and redefine Ireland’s relationship with the EU will be circumscribed by existing political and institutional factors. Domestic pressure from prospective coalition partners to (further) moderate Eurocritical rhetoric and positions will be difficult to resist, particularly when set against the backdrop of a strongly pro-EU electorate. Additional pressures to temper the party’s position on Europe will emanate directly from the EU. Insistent Eurocriticism may jeopardise existing and future EU goodwill towards Ireland. This goodwill is needed in the short-term to secure full implementation of the Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol (on the need for which the party is emphatic) and, in the event of future Irish unity, to support the transition process. The party’s united Ireland ambition, therefore, cannot be neatly compartmentalised as a solely national project. It will, at least to some extent, require and benefit from the practical support and the political legitimacy which the EU can offer. Maintaining and managing the party’s traditional Eurocritical position, while simultaneously not allowing negative EU messaging to damage or undermine the party’s capacity to deliver Irish unity, poses a very real dilemma for Sinn Féin.

The party’s ambiguous, and at times contradictory, position on the EU mirrors tensions in its role in power-sharing in Northern Ireland, which does not always fit neatly with a resurgent narrative around Irish unity. The day-to-day work of devolved government requires a delicate triangulation of the demand for a border poll with the need to maintain good working relationships with coalition partners whose view on the constitutional question is diametrically opposed to Sinn Féin’s. In a context in which both Unionism’s electoral and parliamentary majorities have disappeared and in which Unionist opposition to the construction of a new regulatory and customs border in the Irish Sea has been all-but disregarded in Westminster, the ‘siege mentality’ that is a defining characteristic of Unionist political culture has been heightened (Murphy and Evershed, 2019; Tonge, 2019). And it is noteworthy that while it may have (albeit only marginally in some polls) increased support for and the urgency of the debate about a united Ireland – including for ‘moderate’ Nationalists and among voters in the ‘middle ground’ who view Irish unity as a pragmatic way to rejoin the EU (Ingoldsby, 2020) – Brexit has not radically diminished Unionist opposition to a border poll (McBride, 2020a). If a border poll called in the short- to medium-term was won by the pro-unity side, it would likely be done so on the narrowest of margins and in the face of (potentially violent) Unionist and Loyalist dissent and hostility (see Reinisch, 2020).

There can be little doubting that Sinn Féin now finds itself in a position of electoral and political strength – and possessing an opportunity to advance its ambition of Irish unity – which has thus far been unparalleled in the party’s history. However, Sinn Féin’s increased electoral popularity and political muscle create their own tensions, which the party will have to negotiate in the pursuit of its ultimate objective. As commentator Alex Kane (2020; see also McBride, 2020b) has suggested:

if [Sinn Féin] were in government on both sides of the border it would have to find a strategy for dealing with the possibility of pursuing separate Programme for Government policies in the Assembly and the Dáil; because, if it didn't have a solution to the problem, it [would risk] becoming a two-state party, with slightly different priorities and agendas on either side of the border. Which, in turn, [would raise] other problems when it came to elections and manifestoes.

The demands of governing require making (sometimes uncomfortable) compromises. Divergence between Northern and Southern political cultures, voter priorities and expectations (Todd, 2015) mean that these compromises are not necessarily of the same nature or order in the Republic of Ireland (where key priorities are ‘bread-and-butter’ issues such as healthcare and housing) as they are in the North (where the constitutional question per se is of more immediate salience).

Despite the apparent opportunity that Brexit appears to have presented for the Republican project, the road to its completion remains replete with obstacles. Economic and trade uncertainty engendered by Brexit, a Unionist politics shaped by hurt, anger and a sense of betrayal; and the difficulties inherent in triangulating its political messages – on both domestic and EU issues – for different audiences in two jurisdictions, all pose their own challenges for Sinn Féin as it pursues both power on both sides of the border and its ultimate goal of Irish reunification. Finally, contingency – the dramatic ability of both ‘known’ and ‘unknown’ unknowns to disrupt what appear stable or predictable political trajectories – is also an important factor. At the time of writing, the Coronavirus pandemic, perhaps the largest such destabilisation of the European social, political and economic order since the Second World War, poses as yet unanswerable questions for the Republican project of Irish reunification.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge and record their thanks for the support of the between Two Unions project team and the ESRC.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The research for this article was undertaken as part of the ESRC-funded project ‘Between Two Unions: The Constitutional Future of the Islands after Brexit’ (ES/P009441/1).

ORCID iD

Jonathan Evershed

Notes

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An bhfuil ár lá tagtha? Sinn Féin,special status and the politics of Brexit

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

‘Eurocriticism’

‘Put Ireland First’

‘Wearing the green jersey’

Fall and Rise

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References