Sinn Féin cuckoo ready to fly south
They might have been better off training their binoculars at a couple of species closer to home.
In particular, they could have gone looking for a very famous but very hard to spot little creature called the cuckoo. We all know its familiar calling cry - chuckie, chuckie, chuckie awr law - but may not be so familiar with its mode de guerre.
The cuckoo places its eggs in the nest of an unsuspecting warbler (the SDLP for example), and before you know it, the cuckoo chick has gobbled up all around it, dumped the rest of the chicks out of the nest and won 17 seats in the Assembly elections and five in Westminster.
Most frequently found in the North, it now seems the species is increasingly migrating south. Threatened prey will likely be over-comfortable and over-indolent species like the Labour Party and Fianna Fáil.
The established political parties and independents in the South have all learned to put their guard up from the sucker punch that Sinn Féin might walk them into.
Only Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats are immune to their threat given they are to Sinn Féin what Roy Keane is to Mick McCarthy.
But the bearded one - who increasingly dictates the truth as-he-knows-it to the nation as if we were unruly nine-year-olds - knows in the next phase of the strategy, they will nibble away at the flesh of all others. Fianna Fáil, Labour, the Greens, the Socialist Party and the independents could see Sinn Féin eclipsing them, or swaying a few percentage points of support away (enough in some cases to deprive them of a seat).
The Long War strategy of republicans came to an end, to all intents and purposes, last Monday. But the Long Peace strategy that Sinn Féin will now adopt is likely to prove a more powerful persuader than any bomb or bullet to its political aims. The “long” part is important, for Sinn Féin has a patience - and a military discipline - that other parties don’t have or lost long ago. They are thinking not just of 2007 but of 2012 and even into the 2020s.
Bertie Ahern - a gifted strategist himself - knows the price his party might have to pay for peace. He knows the sacrifices paid by John Hume and the SDLP to bring about peace (and encourage Sinn Féin into the fold). He knows the price that they paid for it as well. He knows too that it is naive to think that the same won’t happen in the South. True, it won’t happen to the same extent. For now. But it will happen and it may have calamitous consequences for Fianna Fáil in 2007.
The other big neantóg (that is to nettle what An Daingean is to Dingle) is the fact there isn’t really an excuse any more for leaving Sinn Féin out in the cold. Ian Paisley will be expected to sup from the same bowl as them in Stormont. The reality is Ahern can no longer claim Sinn Féin has no justifiable claim to be included in government-forming arrangements down South.
Down in Mogeely during the week he acknowledged as much. He referred to his Kilkenny speech of a few years ago when he said Sinn Féin were so close to the IRA no democratic party would consider them as a suitable partner in government.
No more. By January, when the Monitoring Commission issues its full report on the “decontamination period”, all that will be removed.
Then, as Ahern admits, it moves onto purely political considerations: “There’s not a hope in hell of me coalescing with Sinn Féin. They are anti-Europe or anti-everything I’m for,” he said.
But Sinn Féin could come back with 10 seats or more in 2007. They have chances of gains in Dublin North-West, Dublin North-East and Dublin-Central, Wexford, Donegal South-West, and Donegal North-East. If that happens, chances are of a hung parliament. It’s unlikely Fianna Fáil will dare embrace them as coalition partners at that stage. But, the corollary of that is that Sinn Féin will continue to grow in opposition and may find themselves in Government, North and South, by 2012.
It is, as a senior minister gaffed last year, only a matter of time. And for Sinn Féin, alone among all parties, seven years is a short time in politics.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
