Sinn Féin’s performance in the recent southern election presents the establishment there with a serious problem: how to present the party which won the popular vote in a negative light.
But they’re trying, they’re trying. Fintan O’Toole recently had an Irish Times article entitled ‘The enignma of Mary Lou McDonald’, the enigma in question being whether Mary Lou was tethered to the past and “Up the RA!” or was a woman focused on the problems in the health service, in housing, in education. Most people have a memory and view of the past and manage to plan for the future as well, but it appears Fintan believes the Sinn Féin president is capable of only one.
And in this morning’s Irish Times, Pat Leahy has a column headed ‘Sinn Féin do not have an exclusive claim on government.” You might think that was stating the blindingly obvious, but Pat presents the party as seeing itself to have a God-given right to a place in government.
“Mary Lou McDonald’s public efforts to assemble a coalition of the left were largely performative, designed to bolster the idea that she won the election and any exclusion of her party from government is an establishment stitch-up. You’ll hear a lot more about that in the coming weeks, I promise you.”
Nice try, Pat. It might be on the other hand that Mary Lou concluded that trying to work in coalition with the many small and microscopic parties would be like mindng mice at the crossroads. It might also be – hell, Pat, you know it’s true – that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are sweatily straining to put Sinn Féin in a position which might weaken them and remove this existential threat to the way things have been in the south for near to one hundred years.
Pat again:
“There is no ‘right’ to be in government; get your 80 votes together and you’re in government. If you can’t, you’re not. Somebody else is.”
I don’t remember Mary Lou or Sinn Féin saying they had a right to be in government, Pat. When was that? I do remember them pointing out that they had won the popular vote by a comfortable margin over the two other big parties. That’s not a claim, that’s a fact. So expectation of a place in government might seem reasonable. Until, of course, you remember how terrified the establishment is of such an outcome. And hard though Pat may try, I doubt if he’ll be able to soothe that terror. Full marks for effort, Pat, but no cigar.
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