Where to from here?

ONCE again Sinn Féin has demonstrated its grasp of politics by capturing the presidential campaign with the story of itself.

The well-rehearsed tale that their doings are leading to, and will achieve, a united Ireland reinforces the myth that this goal, when achieved, will make everything all right in the end.

After all, where would the peace process be without them? The party has succeeded brilliantly in the unconscious assimilation of its own narrative into received wisdom.

How does it do it? Does its ideology bear real scrutiny?

Even those who oppose Sinn Féin remain captive to its master narrative. The internalisation of the Sinn Féin storyboard is most complete among those who oppose them most intensely. Eoghan Harris’s formidable forensic attention is a gift that keeps giving for Sinn Féin. By focusing on the deeds it has done, Sinn Féin is allowed escape from scrutiny of what it has failed to deliver. Arguing about the moral responsibility for appalling events is the narrative that the party is least uncomfortable with. It always leads back to the peace process. And in their terms that is its crowning achievement and final absolution. Attacks on the party may reinforce the electoral ceiling it stoops beneath, but they have damaged those who led them.

Sinn Féin’s story is of a brokered peace that led the North into a budding unity. But measuring the party’s achievement against its ambition is sobering. The goal was a united Ireland, firstly by war and then by peace. With that epiphany in the North would come the party’s growth in the Republic. We should remember that our island was convulsed and thousands killed and maimed in an offensive military campaign to drive the British from the North. If the Provisionals have roots in the defence of vulnerable nationalist communities, those are beginnings they rapidly outgrew.

The assertion that the conflict was defensive contradicts what was claimed then as well as the facts.

Explosions in Britain and Germany with explosives supplied by Gaddafi were part of a sustained and ultimately failed offensive military campaign. What revisionist criticism of the provisional movement ignores is that, however repugnant its actions, as a guerilla movement with a self-appointed and self-perpetuating basis of supposed legitimacy, its actions were, within its own paradigm, legitimate.

The damning criticism of Sinn Féin is not the anti-republican view that it fought a war. It is the republican critique that it lost one. By the late 1980s, the provisional military campaign was faltering badly. Infiltration was an increasing problem and scientific developments enhanced the security response.

The development of the Echelon system allowed massive surveillance of electronic communications. Advances in DNA made IRA life ever more dangerous. Sinn Féin's embrace of the peace process was a reaction to the failure of the war, not a result of its success.

Sinn Féin was funnelled by events into a peace process that was managed by sovereign governments.

A constitutional nationalist strategy had evolved over decades. Sean Lemass effectively recognised Stormont by visiting there in 1965. Jack Lynch had faced down Charlie Haughey within Fianna Fáil and forced Kevin Boland out in order to enshrine the principle of unionist consent in party and in state policy.

Garret FitzGerald rescued the principle of an all-island dimension from the ruins of Sunningdale in the Anglo Irish Agreement. In turn Haughey, Albert Reynolds and Bertie Ahern as taoisigh pursued a constitutionalist nationalist agenda to a successful conclusion in the Good Friday Agreement.

It was the governments that managed the peace process. It was Sinn Féin that successfully politically exploited it. And this is its genius. It has bound friend and foe alike in a shared narrative that it has been a driving strategic force of events. From some that is praise, from others it is anathema. In fact, it is a misplaced analysis of a movement driven by the need to pass off failure as success. And in the maelstrom it has succeeded. The party cannibalised the SDLP only to ape it. The long view of history will find Sinn Féin wanting.

Sinn Féin has not advanced unity. Its war made the attainment of the consent that the Good Friday Agreement rightly requires less likely. Its promise of a united Ireland by 2016 is dust and ashes. When the presidential campaign is over, Mr McGuinness will return to his role as deputy head of a devolved British administration in the North. He can fairly claim credit that it exists in a transformed constitutional, political and cultural context. But it is also a context where the refusal of Sinn Féin to meet Queen Elizabeth is nothing more than the party clinging to a final fig leaf to cover its failure to achieve the objectives it set out to attain by war and by peace.

Sinn Féin’s unstoppable onward march across the island is received wisdom that requires colder calculation. Forty years has brought it in 2011 to the number of Dáil seats the PDs enjoyed in 1987.

If it has a small number of younger TDs who are of the first rank, its parliamentary rank and file is underwhelming. And what of Mr McGuinness and Mr Adams? Standing Adams for the Dáil in Louth and McGuinness for the presidency is as much a sign of weakness as of strength. Both are in their 60s. Their star power cannot be replaced. The fact is that Adams was needed by Sinn Féin in Louth to safeguard its seat and McGuinness may raise but he will not smash the Sinn Féin political ceiling in the Republic.

After them and after the peace process, Sinn Féin has a profound problem. How do younger leaders who never took part in armed struggle sustain the inverted charisma of those who did? And how does Sinn Féin expand beyond its base of protest politics without losing the final vestiges of its authenticity? It is too soon to say if Sinn Féin’s momentum is sustainable but it is not unstoppable. Politics may prove as much a poison as a panacea for the party.

*Gerard Howlin is a public affairs professional and was a senior government adviser from 1997 to 2007.