The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Another week, another article by Ed Moloney about Sinn Féin. I hate to take him to task – particularly after noting some curious ideas of his as regards the insincerity of G. Adams as contrasted with the blinding sincerity of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh. But needs must. Actually, I’m somewhat amused to be having to defend Adams yet again considering my own political outlook and heritage (and by the way, it’s not just Adams. I’m also defending Eric Hobsbawm over on Socialist Unity – it’s one of those weeks).

Under the heading: President Adams plan is parked we read,

Sinn Féin hoped to get Gerry Adams elected president of Ireland in succession to Mary McAleese. But the party’s poor May election showing has scuppered the ambitious plan…Instead of the 12 or even 15 seats that some in the party had privately predicted could be won, Sinn Féin ended up with four TDs, not even enough to qualify for full speaking rights at Taoiseach’s question time in the Dáil, never mind a junior coalition partner…

Well, I was talking to SF people the day of the election and their own predictions appeared to be averaging out at 10. Perhaps some, somewhere thought 15 was realistic but for my money the most realistic appraisal I saw pre-Election was that in Phoenix magazine which was very very close to the final outcome. Looking at that I thought they’d retain 5 TDs (although oddly enough I thought Ferris might be goner) and perhaps get two or three more. Grand total 8 or 9. The extras seemed to be coming from MLM – on a good day, the two candidates in Donegal and one or two of the Dublin candidates. But even there I was dubious. I know Dublin North East, and the idea that Larry O’Toole was going to take a seat there appeared highly unlikely. I find it difficult to believe that SF were so blinded that they didn’t accept some of that analysis and moderate their own ambitions accordingly. Of course it is also important to note that political parties lie, they talk up election prospects and so forth. Still, if one is taking it as an article of faith that SF is capable of any deceit being able to parse out the usual old politicking from their ‘project’ is probably difficult.

However, what was not known at the time of the election was that the result was actually much worse for the party. The poor performance dealt a body blow to an ambitious and highly secret plan to get Gerry Adams elected as president of Ireland in the 2011 presidential poll…

…Two parts of Sinn Féin’s election strategy were well known and never a secret. One was to overtake the SDLP to become the largest nationalist party in the North. Another was to become large enough in the South to qualify for partnership in government with Fianna Fáil. If both strategies had been successful then Sinn Féin could have been in office on both sides of the Border at the same time.

Most observers believed that if this state of affairs came about the high point in the Sinn Féin strategy would have been reached. Certainly a successful conclusion like this would mean that Adams, who is widely acknowledged to have been the real moving force behind the birth and development of the peace process, would have a secure place in the republican pantheon…

To which one can only suggest that he already is in that pantheon for better or worse… Of course the fly in that particular ointment was the clear statement by Fianna Fáil that they would not enter coalition with Sinn Féin. Now some might doubt the sincerity of that statement but I’ll address that later…

…the third part [of the SF strategy] was to seek Gerry Adams’s elevation to the presidency – and while it was kept secret outside Sinn Féin’s inner councils it was apparently known to both the Irish and British governments during their tortuous dealings with Sinn Féin leading to the new Stormont government.

The goal of running Adams for president was entirely dependent upon success in elections to the Dáil, and that is why May’s poor result has scuppered the plan. Had the result gone better for Sinn Féin then the party would have been in a position to exercise a clause in Bunreacht na hÉireann to allow them to nominate Adams for the presidency. Article 12 (4) of the Constitution says that if a person is nominated by 20 members of the Oireachtas then he or she is eligible to stand.

Had Sinn Féin won 12 or so seats last May then with one or two Senators elected as well they would have been within shouting distance of the required 20 nominators.

There would have been ample scope for Sinn Féin to secure the extra votes needed through deals with the smaller parties and/or with Independents…

Okay, let’s look at the reality of this as distinct from the tabloidesque delivery. What smaller parties is Moloney referring to. The Socialist Party? The Greens? The Progressive Democrats? Even if we accept that the GP and the SP were willing to operate (as distinct from work) with SF in the last Dáil in the Technical Group the idea that that would extend to active support of an SF nominee is simply absurd. Moloney seems to forget (or ignore, or perhaps simply not know) that in the last Dáil the GP floated the idea of putting forward their own candidate Eamon Ryan. Hard to impossible to see them accepting G. Adams as an ‘agreed’ nominee. And then take Joe Higgins. Ideologically it would have been near impossible for him to support an SF candidacy. Of the Independents, well Seamus Healy didn’t get elected and Finian McGrath went into supporting the government. The crop of previous Independents such as James Breen and Paudge Connolly were much more inclined to Fianna Fáil. Tony Gregory? Not really a friend of SF – or Gerry Adams – if one studies some of his public pronouncements. And that leaves? Well, no one.

And these mythical Senators? In May 2007 what were the names of likely SF Senatorial candidates? Moloney ignores the events which led to the election of one SF Senator. And while it is possible that Ahern might have nominated a couple of SF Senators that is to ignore a further political reality that shaped the current administration. Whatever SF wanted it is fairly clear that if push had come to shove and Ahern was unable to assemble our present coalition of all the talents he would have defaulted to Labour.

So one has to suspect that Moloney is suffering in his own way from something rather similar to that which afflicted SF in the run up to the last election – that being a certain lack of knowledge on the detail of politics in the 26 counties. And that is crucial to the credibility of this thesis.

I have no doubt SF has – in it’s less grounded moments – pondered the idea that Adams might be elected President. But there’s many a slip between cup and lip. To get to that point would need a lot more than 12 TDs. Would in fact need… why 20 TDs and Senators. A figure that quite frankly is unbelievable as a realistic number today and was equally unbelievable in May of this year. And for all the talk of long term plans, which having come from a party with fairly utopian visions of its future, I don’t find quite as unbelievable I suspect that they might not have been quite as precise. After all, whatever the efficacy of SF strategists in the North over the past two decades or so, we’re not yet talking about Hari Seldon.

Another reason to believe the strategy has been fatally wounded lies in the timing of elections. The next Dáil election, assuming Taoiseach Bertie Ahern again serves a full term, may not happen until 2012 while the next presidential election is scheduled for November 2011, thus very possibly putting the target of 20 Oireachtas supporters entirely beyond reach.

I make no secret of wishing the centre left, the left and the further left in this country and on this island well. I think we could see a useful and productive coherency between left parties in the future. But the pragmatist inside tells me that an SF with 20 Oireachtas members is unachievable in less than a decade or two, if ever. I’ve argued here before that there is a niche for SF, that being in or around 7 to 12 TDs. I think that is the best they can hope for. Presently they will do well in 2012 to make 7 or 8 TDs.

Meanwhile, back at the article:

The existence of this secret strategy explains one or two aspects of the way Gerry Adams has conducted himself in recent years. It helps to explain, for instance, why, unlike other Sinn Féin figures, Adams has made persistent denials of any association with the IRA.

Any admission of such activity could become a liability during the election campaign. Many of his trips overseas, some in statesman-mode, now make more sense as does his courtship of Nelson Mandela of South Africa.

Had May’s election produced a happier result for Sinn Féin and Adams was encouraged to run, he would not have to face one obstacle that in the past could have been a burden. The election of Mary McAleese in 1997 means that Southern voters have got used to the idea of a Northerner in the Phoenix Park. Intriguingly the idea for McAleese’s nomination came from Fr Alex Reid, the Redemptorist priest who worked with Adams in developing the peace process.

The beauty of this approach is that it is a single transferable conspiracy. Every action, every event can be compressed to fit the overall thesis. Father Reid is all but presented as dashing off his signature on Adams nomination papers. Mandela is fitted out for the party political broadcast. Yet there are many reasons SF might see high profile meetings with Mandela as important, and they go way beyond the Presidency of Ireland. The denial of association with the IRA could be for any number of reasons – and remember that denial long predates the Peace Process. And being logical for one second, the Peace Process was not an inevitability. It is possible that those opposed to it within the Republican movement might have been stronger, that rather than the Real IRA being a futile splinter it might have taken the bulk of PIRA with it – a sort of reprise of the OIRA/PIRA split as it were. With that as a very real possibility – and not merely prior to that split, but after it as well as the GFA began to bed down – it seems to me that Adams and his allies would do all they could to present themselves as a leadership with important contacts both at home and abroad. To propose that everything merely becomes a backdrop to Adams is, by contrast, to offer a very very selective reading of history.

And the thesis is that Gerry Adams is beyond redemption, utterly malign, cynical, ambitious and so forth. So malign and ambitious in fact that a key ’secret’ dynamic of the Peace Process was to make him President of the Republic of Ireland. The fairly clear subtext being that on the way everything was sold out, that perhaps this secret is ‘the’ secret of the process. But, curiously, that line of argument isn’t made explicit here although the careful ‘reading’ of recent and not so recent Irish political history is shaped to that end. And the last line, after some further discussion of Adams diminished status reads…

The more Sinn Féin behaves itself in the new dispensation, say DUP sources, the less support there will be for their own dissidents.

How are we to read this? That this arch manipulator has been brought to heel by the DUP, now has to ‘behave’ in order to stave off Unionist ‘dissidents’. Some small comfort for the rest of us , perhaps, that minor detail that Adams and the PSF leadership managed to bring themselves and the overwhelming Republican constituency to a negotiated settlement within the six counties. That we see Adams and Paisley sit together, what was it? Barely half a year ago. And in a context where for the first time in generations the propensity for armed struggle has been replaced by the appetite for engagement. No comfort at all clearly for Ed Moloney.

* My apologies to the Golden Horde for robbing their lyric in part…