Irish protest party Sinn Fein is set to reap the rewards of opposing austerity with a major breakthrough at elections this month, but its push to enter government has stumbled over an improving economy and unease about its ties to the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Party leader Gerry Adams, the face of IRA bombing campaigns for many in Britain, confounded critics by steering his party’s support from 10 percent in the last parliamentary election in 2011 to an opinion poll rating of 26 percent this time last year.
Boosted by its opposition to an unpopular EU/IMF austerity program, it has said it hopes to emulate the success of other protest parties in Greece and Portugal to enter government and reverse cuts.
However, its support slipped back to an average of 18 percent in opinion polls this year as Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny’s coalition has presided over the fastest-growing economy in Europe.
Sinn Fein is still fighting for an unprecedented second place in an election where polls suggest no party is likely to have enough votes to govern alone. However, rivals’ aversion to the party due to its past IRA links means it is unlikely to secure a spot in the next government coalition.
“This is going to be a great election for Sinn Fein ... but we are a long way from the kind of scenarios we have seen in Greece and Portugal,” said David Farrell, a professor of politics at University College Dublin, citing the party’s “toxicity” to some voters and potential partners.
“If we imagine a future election in four or five years time, on this sort of trajectory, then we could be talking about a Sinn Fein government at that stage,” he added.
Sinn Fein was the political wing of the IRA, which was responsible for more than half of the 3,600 killings during three decades of violence between Irish Catholic nationalists seeking an end to British rule in Northern Ireland, and the British Army and Protestant loyalists who defended it.
The party insists the IRA — designated a terrorist group by Britain — “left the stage” in the wake of a 1998 peace deal.
It is now benefiting from support among a new generation too young to remember IRA attacks, said Sinn Fein candidate Chris Andrews, who analysts say is a serious contender in a Dublin constituency where the party had previously never stood a realistic chance of victory.
“Most of the people here canvassing were only toddlers when the first ceasefire happened,” Andrews said. “The electorate see that Sinn Fein is moving on and becoming a very central part of politics in Ireland.”
Sinn Fein’s progress has been built on support in working class areas worn down by tax increases, spending cuts and high unemployment as Ireland has toiled under an austerity program that was a condition of its 2010 international bailout.
The party has particularly benefited from a decline in support for center-left junior coalition partner Labour, accused by some voters of backing down to Kenny’s center-right Fine Gael in allowing new water charges, property taxes and cuts to services they say have hit the poor hardest.
However, Sinn Fein weakened last year as its voice of protest carried less weight among some voters in the face of an economy that expanded by about 7 percent and falling unemployment.
Some rivals accuse the party of inheriting a tight-knit culture of secrecy and lack of respect for the law from when it was banned in the UK in the early 1970s because of its ties to the IRA.
In the past year, revelations about the IRA’s failure to go to the police with allegations of sexual assaults by a member of the group in the 1990s and Adams’ defense of the alleged former chief of staff of the IRA after a tax evasion conviction have done little to dispel such perceptions.
Dismissing the possibility of serving in a coalition with Sinn Fein, the leader of the biggest opposition party Fianna Fail, Michael Martin, last month described it as operating “like a mafia organization.”
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