A recent edition of Irish Central, Niall O'Dowd's online magazine cum lifeboat for his ailing Irish Voice newspaper, carried a series of reports about Gerry Adams' American crusade for a united Ireland which debuted on June 13th at the Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan. Tucked away at the bottom of the main piece on the meeting of Sinn Féin-friendly Irish-Americans was a painfully honest but insightful admission which somehow escaped Mr O'Dowd's normally vigilant red pen. "At the end of the conference", the report said, "the precise plans for creating a united Ireland remain unclear....."
While some might complain that there was nothing new in this statement, it nonetheless left unanswered, and unasked, the obvious question: What on earth is Gerry Adams doing in New York at this stage of the peace process on such a cockeyed mission? It would seem, according to Mr O'Dowd's fearless scribe, that not even the Sinn Féin leader really knew: '"This generation can make it real," Adams said. "But I can't tell you how to do it. You know how to do it, and if you don't, you'll find out."'
The notion of reaching out to Irish-America was first raised at the end of January in a speech given by Adams at a Sinn Féin conference commemorating the 90th anniversary of the First Dáil. The promise of equality offered by that memorable moment had not been realised, Mr Adams told those in the audience, so he and his colleagues would start looking further afield to realise its ambition: "Sinn Féin will be inviting Irish-America to discuss with us how we can advance a united Ireland campaign . . . Our intention is to engage with the diaspora and seek to marshal its political strength."
Now when Adams made that pitch the diaspora had lots of other things on its mind. The worst economic slump in living memory was into at least its fifth month, house prices and stock markets were nose-diving throughout Europe and North America and the Irish, British and U.S. economies were heading down the toilet. If there was ever an inopportune moment to revive an issue that most had thought sidelined ten years ago and for whose realisation the necessary capital, emotional or financial, was just not available anymore, then this was it.
Being the astute character that he has always been, it would have been extraordinary if the Sinn Féin president had not been completely aware of all that. So why suggest it? One clue to the answer lies in the fact that the venue chosen for that January conference was the Mansion House, an appropriate spot to commemorate the First Dáil, be sure, but one which Sinn Féin has avoided like the plague since the early 1990's because it so strongly evokes memories of the years when the Provos meant only one thing, the IRA. The party's annual ard-fheis and other gatherings have all, since then, been held in the RDS where only respectable, non-violent Irish political parties can be found.
So returning to the Mansion House to wave the green flag, albeit for just one evening, was for Sinn Féin a symbolic revisiting of the republican roots that the party had previously been trying assiduously to push well out of public sight. And for those who have made something of a career out of Sinn Féin-watching, it was another sign that the party has lost its way.
The recent European election results not only confirm that the strategy which underpinned and propelled the move into constitutional politics during the years of the peace process has failed but that Sinn Féin is a party which is now in decline. It is in a place where it's possible to say that its best years are behind it. Seen in this light Gerry Adams' mission to America has more the look of a flimflam about it than anything else, a trick pulled out of the bag to mollify an increasingly disenchanted grassroots. After all if the peace process strategy was working in the way it was supposed to, and Ireland was on target for re-unification by 2016, why mobilise Irish-America to do the job instead?
The reason why this is so lies in the priority accorded by Sinn Féin to the Southern dimension of their political strategy, something that has been evident ever since it ditched Southern abstentionism in 1986. Achieving political success in the twenty-six counties has been central to Sinn Féin ever since the Workers Party showed it was possible and it was no accident that the first move towards constitutionalism was made with that very strongly in mind. Those of us who covered Sinn Féin back in the 1980's could not but have been aware of the covetous glances those around Gerry Adams would cast at the WP because of its success in winning Dáil seats, even in sufficient number at one point to hold Charlie Haughey's government hostage. "Those are our seats the Sticks have taken", one of their number once complained.
Little did we know that when this was being said a strategy was being slowly constructed out of sight that in the not too distant future would make the prospect of imitating, even surpassing the Workers Party south of the Border one of the motors that would drive the Provo leadership into the peace process.
The argument that Sinn Féin might get into power in both jurisdictions, that the party could have bums on seats around cabinet tables in Dublin as well as Belfast, shaping policies that could eventually erode the Border, swayed many of the Northern foot soldiers and won them over to Adams' side. They were being asked to let the IRA go, to forsake the leverage of armed struggle and here was a strategy that offered just as much chance of success as the IRA had, and maybe even more.
But it was all dependent upon getting into government in the South. Having a place in the executive in Belfast was assured by dint of the power-sharing settlement of Good Friday 1998 but not so in the twenty-six counties. But the peace process had given Sinn Féin and its leader, Gerry Adams a wonderful makeover and for seven or eight years it was looking good for the party. A single Dáil seat won in 1997 became five in 2002 and then in 2004 Mary Lou McDonald won a seat in the European parliament. Up in the North, Sinn Féin were doing equally well and by 2001 had relegated the SDLP to second place amongst a majority of Nationalist voters.
By 2007 many were predicting that Sinn Féin's moment had come, that after the general election that year they would surely hold enough seats to qualify as a government partner with Fianna Fail. As we all know well, that was never going to happen. The loss instead of one Dáil seat was a huge psychological blow to a party that had known nothing but electoral success for over a decade but it was worse than that. Sinn Féin was like a shark that forever needs to move forward; if it stops or worse, moves into reverse then it is doomed.
The result of the June 4th European and council elections, the loss of Mary Lou McDonald's seat, the council seats lost in Dublin are all a huge lurch backwards. While a few years ago Sinn Féin's leaders could imagine that one day they would be strolling down the corridors of Government Buildings to their offices, now it is a question of how many of them will still be in Leinster House after 2011 or 2012.
There are some persuasive reasons given for Sinn Féin's decline. One says that once the St Andrews deal was done and the IRA's guns embedded in cement, a major inducement to vote for Sinn Féin south of the Border – to keep peace alive – had evaporated. Another that it has to do with Sinn Féin's ideological flip-flopping and lack of fixed beliefs. The move to the right after the disaster of 2007 in the search for a more moderate, less radical image was such a transparent ploy that it made it impossible for Sinn Féin to tack back in the wake of the economic collapse. Such antics invariably fail to impress the voter while disillusioning the grass roots activists.
There is no doubt these were both important factors in Sinn Féin's southern demise but history may judge that the real cause of the party's woes was the leadership's addiction to playing the IRA card for so long in the Northern peace process. Seen from this angle, Sinn Féin's decline began in December 2004 with the Northern Bank robbery and was accelerated a month or so later with the savage murder of Robert McCartney and its subsequent cover-up by the party's leaders. The evidence from opinion polls convincingly supports the view that Southern distaste for the Provos deepened immediately thereafter.
Neither event could or would have happened had Gerry Adams and his colleagues done the deal they finally cut with Ian Paisley with David Trimble instead, back in 2000 or 2001, when the Ulster Unionist leader enjoyed the confidence of his party and electorate. Had that happened Sinn Féin's breakthrough in the South could have come earlier, might well have been more substantial and almost certainly would have been more enduring. And their grassroots would not have had to endure the sight, and shock, of a former Chief of Staff canoodling up to Ian Paisley as he lorded it in the First Minister's office. Dismay over of those photos of the Chuckle Brothers was felt in West Belfast as much as Ballymena.
But instead the Sinn Féin leadership chose to drag the process out, to delay and obfuscate over IRA decommissioning and to subject Trimble to death by a thousand cuts. It is difficult not to conclude that it wasn't internal opposition that held up decommissioning – because there just wasn't any – but two other factors. One was Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern's incurable habit of throwing concessions Sinn Féin's way whenever a problem in the process arose, thereby making such problems more frequent, and the other was the desire to destroy the SDLP, to mobilise Northern Nationalist anger against the stubborn, bigoted Trimble to the electoral advantage of Sinn Féin. Not only was this latter ambition excessive greed on the Provos' part, it was unnecessary. Once John Hume and Seamus Mallon retired, the disintegration of the SDLP to its present state was virtually a given. The Provos could have had a deal with Trimble, replaced the SDLP and at the same time enjoyed a more propitious electoral lift off in the South.
To all of this, Sinn Féin loyalists will undoubtedly cry: 'Well, what about the vote in the North?' Bairbre de Brun's performance looks impressive on the surface but her topping the poll was the result of DUP in-fighting – and this in an election where a protest vote usually costs nothing – and not because of anything Sinn Féin did. Furthermore her victory reinforces the impression created by the Southern results, that Sinn Féin is becoming what it really always was, a Northern party, not an all-Ireland party. The truth is, as one former member commented, very simple: 'They'd gladly have Bairbre finish third if it meant Mary Lou would hold on to her seat.
Sinn Féin's difficulties help to explain why dissident republicans have recently made something of a comeback. The killings in Massarene happened because disillusioned former Provisional IRA activists had moved over to their ranks, adding military skill and ruthlessness to groups that since Omagh had been justifiably regarded as incompetent and infiltrated.
It is part of a story that has largely gone undetected and unreported in the Irish media, the sudden erosion of support in some key Provisional areas, not necessarily to the benefit of the dissident groups but to a stage just before that, to an attitude of cynicism about the Sinn Féin leadership, its motives and lifestyles, the widespread corruption at middle ranking levels, the sudden, hard to explain wealth. Most of what was Provo North Belfast, for instance, has turned against Adams.
Going meekly into government with Ian Paisley, accepting the PSNI and the collapse of the southern part of Sinn Féin's strategy form part of the explanation for all this. But so too does the drip-drip damage caused by Richard O'Rawe's allegations of dirty dealing during the 1981 hunger strikes. His story is not just about whether the republican leadership rejected a British deal to end the protest that the prisoners' leaders had endorsed, but whether the peace process strategy has its origins in the willful deaths of six hunger strikers, supposedly comrades and friends. It matters probably not at all to Nationalist voters but to the Provos' IRA base, it is everything.
Which brings the story back to Gerry Adams, the architect of that strategy and the man at the centre of O'Rawe's narrative. Three years ago he still had hopes that come 2016 and the 100th anniversary of the Rising, he could be living in Phenix Park. That prospect vanished after 2007 to be replaced by rumours that he would soon quit politics and hand over to Mary Lou, suggestions given credibility by Adams' heightened profile as an international peace person and a barely disguised yen for the American lifestyle. But walking away now after Mary Lou's demise will look like he's the captain abandoning a sinking ship. Gerry Adams has little choice but to stay on duty in the bridge even if the ship is eventually scuppered, trapped by circumstances that are arguably of his own making. It wasn't supposed to be like this.
