Guest post: What does a vote for Sinn Féin really mean?

The following is a thought-provoking guest post by itwassammymcnallywhatdoneit.  It's interesting because it rather flies in the face of the usual nationalist analysis: i.e. that a vote for Sinn Féin does not necessarily imply any degree of approval for the IRA's campaign of violence.  


By itwassammymcnallywhatdoneit


Berty Ahern,  famously opined that SF and the Provos “are two sides of the same coin”. 

Now, if we leave aside the boul Berty’s general tendency to get things wrong (especially when he was Taoiséach) and if we also leave aside the amusing protestations of President Adams that he has never heard of the IRA (or whatever it is Gerry likes to tell us from time to time) and assume that on this one at least, Bertram is on the money, then what does that tell us about the majority of the Northern Nationalist electorate who vote for SF?

Well, it surely tells us, that Northern Nationalists have, at the least, an ambivalent attitude to the Provo’s campaign of violence. It surely also tells us, that Northern Nationalists view the Provo campaign as having been more inspired by politics than criminality - and that however unpleasant and unfortunate some of it may have been,  those who organised it (and according to Berty that would be the current SF leadership), are now fully deserving of the rewards of political office.

It is not as if the Nationalist electorate have no choice. The decline of the SDLP began when John Hume (probably the most popular Nationalist politician since the 1930s in either part of the island) was still at the helm and that decline has continued with the SDLP’s two remaining redoubts, South Down and Derry coming under increasing electoral siege.   

No one in the SDLP has ever fired a shot, or set off a bomb, or organised any such activities, and yet, having stood their political ground and supplied in John Hume the political architect of the current settlement, not just between Orange and Green, but also between Ireland and Britain, they nevertheless find themselves losing out to SF - who are now claiming the SDLP’s political ground as their very own.

Nationalists, it would therefore seem, don’t not vote for the SDLP because, as it is sometimes claimed, they don’t cut the political mustard, but rather because most Nationalists prefer to vote for a party, who (according to Berty) did either fire guns and set off bombs or organised such activities.

Northern Nationalists now accept the legitimacy of the northern political arrangements but their current voting habits suggest they also accept the legitimacy of a Provo campaign of violence that helped destroy the previous political arrangements.

Such views on the legitimacy of the Provo campaign are not of course shared by Unionists, but Unionists do generally share Berty’s view of the relationship between SF  and violence, as reflected in the continued use of the term ‘SF-IRA’ and the occasionally less than diplomatic outbursts such as the ‘SF scum’ remarks by UUP Leader Tom Elliott.

Perhaps, it is with deference to Unionism’s sensitivities, or perhaps because of the proverbial ‘Catholic’ guilt, that when Nationalists are opinion-polled the level of SF support is generally under recorded.  But, when it comes to the polls that really matter, Nationalists clearly prefer to vote for those who (according to Berty), have a violent past.

…and however politically uncomfortable it may be to admit this in a society still scarred and divided by decades of violence and still striving to come to terms with that past - let’s not pretend otherwise.