Although, at first sight, one might have thought it was not the most interesting speech Gerry Adams has ever delivered. Nor was it the most ideological. Was it a left Republican speech? Well… hmmm….I know Garibaldy has some thoughts on the Ard Fheis which he will present in the next few days, but here are my thoughts for what they’re worth.
Sure, there were ideas in it that were leftish. Two mentions of equality, one of the equality agenda, one of equality of opportunity. Stimulus measures. And so on. But the term left wasn’t used once. Nor was the word socialism. We got ’social entitlements’ and ‘common good’. It leaned heavily upon the past as a legitimation, some of it quite pointed indeed:
This summer marks the 40th Anniversary of the IRA appearing on the streets of Belfast when Republicans joined with the people of the Ballymaccarett in the defence of St. Matthews chapel and An Trá Ghearr.
That single act of resistance. This stand against the Orange State marked the beginning of a journey for many activists. That journey has seen struggle and strategies played out on the streets, in the jails and round the negotiating table.
And…
The British army, the heavy gangs, the old Orange regime and slíbhín governments here could not break us. Censorship, the prisons and the death squads could not break us.
And no amount of black propaganda in the Tony O’Reilly press will break us either.
Which is hardly surprising.
It also attracted the eye of the Irish Times editorial writer who opined:
It was as appealing as homemade apple pie. But, in urging people to take a stand against authority, there were hints of a public disobedience campaign.
Well. Perhaps… perhaps when Adams said this…
But let me be clear about this. I am not talking about leaders coming down to us from on high. I am talking about everyone who is prepared to stand against corruption, greed and injustice.
Every woman, every man, every citizen who makes such a stand is a leader.
Every little act of resistance, of rebellion, of protest, makes change possible.
Most struggles aren’t won by single actions. Or by iconic leaders. Though they have their role.
They are won by people, taking individual actions, which accumulate into irreversible change.
It was true of the suffragettes. It was true of the anti-apartheid movement. It was true when Rosa Parks wouldn’t give up her seat and it is true here in Ireland.
… perhaps he was issuing a call to such measures. I’d be a little dubious though.
The vision thing though – what of that? Hard to say. The words about ‘establishment’ parties are fine, but difficult to determine what precisely makes Sinn Féin distinctive by contrast.
Perhaps it was this that led to some intriguing thoughts on the Republic:
Sinn Féin believes in a genuine republic. Not a nominal dictionary republic, but one in which the people are truly sovereign.
The Proclamation of the Republic asserts the need to cherish all the children of the nation equally. It doesn’t say 26 counties of the nation. It speaks of all the nation and all its parts. All 32 counties.
The Proclamation speaks to all the children of the Nation. It doesn’t say – unless you are poor or elderly. Or unless you have autism; or learning difficulties; or disabilities. Or unless you come from a remote rural area. Or from Moyross or Sheriff Street; or Strabane or Ballymena.
The establishment parties, like us, know that republicanism is in many ways the conscience of the Irish people. Little wonder that they wrap themselves in republican rhetoric while avoiding any genuine examination of the real meaning of republicanism.
And an explicit appeal to…
The key to building the new republic, democratically shaped by the people, is to start now. We have to embrace our strengths. Our language. Our unique culture. Our history.
While some parties do indeed wrap themselves in the ‘Republic’, this tends to be to different degrees. The very meaning of the term splinters depending upon which party one chooses to examine and some might be quite leery about the use of it. While Fianna Fáil have taken the term and made it their own – to some extent, neither Fine Gael nor Labour have used it in quite such a whole-hearted fashion and the meaning has been largely detached from the particular usage in an Irish context. One of the more intriguing byways Michael McDowell went down some years back – perhaps mischievously – was his rather public musings on the PDs and Republicanism, in the abstract sense of the word. And it has been that more abstracted sense which has found most favour with FG and Labour, when thought about at all.
Whether there is a position to found that can steer away from that latter definition while simultaneously remaining distinct from the FF usage remains to be seen. For me, and I suspect many others, a clear left Republican stance would make most sense (and by the by I’m entirely aware of the problematical aspects this raises as regards those who would have no truck with any of the above who consider SF insufficiently ‘Republican’ by their lights).
Sinn Féin appear caught in a difficult time. I’ve pointed out previously that talk of their demise is wildly overstated. The increase they saw in their local representation in the 2002 period onwards has positioned them well for elections. Their poll numbers while not delivering the seat gain they might expect remain constant across the past two or three years. They appear to have a disciplined party line and in most instances their rhetoric on various issues is on the progressive side of the fence and in some places by quite some way.
Of course the problem is that straddling a border, and doing so in such a way that they are in government in the North, has generated near unavoidable contradictions. How can they be a party positioned well to the left on the political spectrum of the South while sitting in power implementing centre right political policies across a range of areas? There is the obvious riposte that the situation in Stormont is sui generis, that being representative of Republicanism in the Assembly, and more importantly in government outweighs socio-economic policy at this point in time.
But there’s the problem in starkest outline. As soon as a formation begins to prioritise in this way it must, of necessity, bid farewell, or at the very least become somewhat detached from elements of its support. One could wonder that the remarkable aspect of all this is not that there has been fragmentation but that that fragmentation has been quite well contained.
It’s possible to posit that SF peaked too soon in the North and that the constraints within which they operated meant that they had to enter government with all that that entails at a point which was out of sync with the situation in the South. A year or two later and I wonder if we would have seen the splintering of some of their left support to other formations? And that support might have seen them bring home a number of other seats thereby giving them a greater potential in terms of government formation, a situation that they simply lacked with four TDs in 2007.
And I think that that goes beyond the analysis we keep hearing that somehow North and South are irredeemably different in some qualitative way. Of course, there are differences, but you’d be hard pressed to recognise SF as a party that has had a presence in this state for decades from some of the thoughts expressed by various commentators. And let’s not set too much store in the idea that their only fairly, indeed faintly, constitutional status until recently thereby has locked them off from an ‘understanding’ of the situation. This is a party which while rhetorically of the left has managed the interesting feat of having significant representation in rural constituencies. And I’m not attempting to suggest that the words rural and progressive are in continual opposition to one another, but rather that contemporary SF has managed – granted in small numbers – to represent a radical voice in a rural context. I find that most interesting and worthy of greater examination.
In any case, therefore I do find some of the boilerplate analysis a little hard to accept. Sure Gerry Adams was pretty grim in the debates in 2007, and there’s a strong case that a different figure put front and centre could have done them no harm, and might even have done some good. But note Deaglún de Breádún’s thoughts, again in the IT…
His policy prescriptions caused confusion among some listeners.
He wanted a third rate of tax on earnings over €100,000 but failed to specify whether this would apply to joint as well as individual incomes exceeding that figure. He proposed a “solidarity tax” of 1 per cent on assets over €1 million, excluding farm land, but did not spell out whether ability to pay was a consideration in coming up with the payment of €10,000 to the Revenue.
Not for the first time one had the feeling that the Northerners who make up the dominant force in Sinn Féin really need to do a lot more work to enhance their understanding of politics in the South and the sensitivities of its highly sophisticated electorate.
The idea of a the ‘highly’ sophisticated Southern electorate, and I remember hearing it from a broad range of sometimes unlikely sources over the years, surely has to have taken some bashing over the past decade or so. What looks like a studied ambiguity on the part of SF to pitch their message, and I’m not as it happens being complimentary here, to a Southern audience is taken as read as being evidence of a North/South divide.
Other than that it was good to hear a political party proposing a stimulus package and interesting to hear the reference to a social clause in public contracts contextualised by Minister for Regional Development, Conor Murphy and note taken of Michelle Gildernew’s work as Minister for Agriculture with disadvantaged farmers and rural women. One wonders is it possible that that sort of approach locking policy proposals into the new found experiences in the North might well be no harm for a party whose economic plank in the past, although much less so in recent years, appeared low on their list of priorities.
But this raises an interesting question. Why has Sinn Féin been self-evidently, given the polling data, unable to garner support from Fianna Fáil during the time of FFs greatest travails? Now I don’t want to dismiss the fairly remarkable achievement in getting to a consistent eight to ten per cent of the share in polls, and the not inconsiderable vote they managed to see at the General Election. But look at the graph between 2007 and today and you will see that they sit two or three per cent above their position at the 2007 General Election. Much as they did prior to the 2007 election. Somehow it seems that Labour has been the beneficiary of a portion of the Fianna Fáil vote, and clearly Fine Gael as well. Small reward for positioning themselves as the Republican party. But this speech is crafted not for yesterday but tomorrow and the day after that.
So is that what this rhetoric was about? An appeal to Fianna Fáil voters who have gone to Labour or are staying put? An attempt to redefine themselves as a somewhat more radical version of FF, more public-sector friendly but also able to bridge the urban and the rural comfortably? A rhetoric of Republic and Republicanism that is particularly familiar to those who have consistently voted for one party in this state across decades. A rhetoric that would be calculated to prise away those voters from their historic attachments.
And is that why there is no language of ‘left’ alliances, no explicit language of the left at all? Why remind such people that Labour exists? Why try to link Sinn Féin conceptually with a political terrain, that of the left and further left, that such voters are utterly unaware of and disinterested in. Or if they are aware treat it in many cases with disdain. Furthermore why try to upset the apple cart in terms of potential coalitions by ruling them out?
So, while quite a dull speech it may have been fashioned for relatively subtle ends.
How and where the left fits into all this is an interesting question. And what of explicitly left Republicanism?
Worth watching to see if we see more of this “new” Republicanism from Sinn Féin spokespeople over the next while.
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