Sinn Féin (political party)

Sinn Féin is the largest political party in Northern Ireland and is also a major political force in the Republic of Ireland. It was founded in 1905 as an activist movement for ending British colonial rule of Ireland. It was later redesigned as the political branch of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a militant organization dedicated to Irish republicanism. This is the belief that all of Ireland should be united as one independent republic, free from the rule of the larger United Kingdom.

In 1921, following the cease-fire of the Irish War of Independence, Sinn Féin negotiated with the United Kingdom for the creation of the Irish Free State, which later became the independent Republic of Ireland. Northern Ireland remained a territory of the United Kingdom.

The Sinn Féin party that is active in Northern Ireland and Ireland in the twenty-first century formed in 1970 as a strictly political organization. Northern Irish politician Gerry Adams became president of Sinn Féin in 1983 and continued serving in this position until 2018, at which point Mary Lou McDonald took his place. By the 2020s, Sinn Féin had become the main opposition party in the Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the legislature in the Republic of Ireland. By 2024, the party had become the largest party in Northern Ireland, outperforming the Democratic Unionist Party. In the politics of Northern Ireland the UK, aside from its various other political goals in British politics, Sinn Féin still worked to free Northern Ireland from British rule.

Background

Irish journalist and political activist Arthur Griffith founded Sinn Féin, meaning "we ourselves" in Gaelic, on November 28, 1905. The group was a combination of various other Irish republican political movements founded by Griffith and fellow Irish republican Bulmer Hobson. Griffith did not believe that Irish armed resistance against the United Kingdom was the correct way to gain Irish independence. He instead supported passive protest as the means of achieving this end. Griffith called for such measures as recalling Irish members of Parliament from England, refusing to pay British taxes, and boycotting British goods.

Sinn Féin initially struggled to gain political traction. Its candidates for office earned some local government seats in Dublin, but the party failed to elect one of its own to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. By the mid-1910s, however, Sinn Féin became more famous throughout the United Kingdom due to its unrelenting propaganda campaign against British rule of Ireland. The organization and its motives had become so well known by 1916 that many people throughout the United Kingdom believed Sinn Féin had organized and executed that year's Easter Rising. This was an ultimately unsuccessful armed rebellion staged by Irish republicans in Dublin and elsewhere against British forces. While the Easter Rising failed, the decision by British authorities to execute sixteen people who had been involved in the rebellion helped generate wider sympathy for the Irish republican cause.

Griffith had avoided associating Sinn Féin with the Easter Rising, a decision that angered the staunch Irish republican Michael Collins. Over the next few years, Collins restructured Sinn Féin to include several militant Irish republican groups, although the party remained a coalition of both extremist and moderate republicans. In this way, Sinn Féin became the political wing of the militant Irish Republican Army.

Sinn Féin won 73 of 105 Irish seats in the United Kingdom's parliamentary elections in 1918, but, in protest, the winning candidates refused to assume these seats. Sinn Féin then retreated from the British Parliament and formed its own parliament, the Dáil Éireann, in Dublin. The United Kingdom responded with force, and the Irish War of Independence resulted. The conflict ended in 1921 with the United Kingdom's creation of the Irish Free State, later the Republic of Ireland, on most of the island. The northeastern part of the island became Northern Ireland, a territory of the United Kingdom.

This delicate arrangement generated significant opposition from Irish republicans; a particular concern of these groups was the ongoing marginalization of Northern Ireland's significant Catholic minority, who had traditionally been shut out of many of Northern Ireland's Protestant-dominated political and economic institutions. Efforts to improve the civil rights situation for Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland gained significant traction throughout the 1960s, although this period also saw increased sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholic. In 1969 the British military was deployed to Northern Ireland with the stated goal of keeping the peace, though the British Army eventually drew criticism for its collaboration with Protestant paramilitary groups and acts of violence against civilians. In particular, the British Army was criticized for carrying 1972 "Bloody Sunday" massacre in Derry, during which British soldiers killed fourteen Catholic civilians.

By the early 1970s, Northern Ireland had become a battleground for three warring factions: the British military and government of Northern Ireland; Unionists, who were mostly Protestant and supported Northern Ireland remaining part of the UK; and Irish republicans, who were mostly Catholic and supported a single, unified Irish state free from British rule. This period of sectarian violence became known as the Troubles and lasted from roughly the late 1960s until 1998. Roughly 3,500 people, many of them civilians, died in the conflict.

In 1970, as the conflict gained momentum, Sinn Féin split into two factions, one that wanted to abandon the fight for full Irish independence and one that fervently wished to advance it. The former group eventually became the Workers' Party of Ireland. The latter remained known as Sinn Féin and went on to become a major political party in Northern Ireland. Despite its association with the violence of the IRA, Sinn Féin in the twenty-first century was devoted to producing a united Ireland by peaceful means. In the Republic of Ireland, Sinn Féin was known for its embrace of a number of democratic socialist policies, including affordable housing and a more generous welfare state.

Overview

Sinn Féin became a legitimate mainstream political movement throughout the United Kingdom in the early 1980s because of its large-scale campaign to build public support for a unified Ireland. The success of this campaign allowed Sinn Féin member Gerry Adams, who had long been associated with the IRA, to be elected as the United Kingdom's member of Parliament for West Belfast in 1983. That same year, Adams was elected president of Sinn Féin.

Adams was a controversial figure within Sinn Féin, as he advocated for peaceful diplomacy rather than armed rebellion as the means of achieving a free Ireland. This stance angered republican hard-liners; Adams survived multiple assassination attempts in the 1980s but continued pressing for a peaceful resolution to the Troubles. His secret negotiations with John Hume of Northern Ireland's Social Democratic and Labour Party led to an IRA cease-fire in 1994. Four years later, the Good Friday Agreement between Northern Ireland and the government of the United Kingdom granted Northern Ireland more political autonomy.

Adams continued working with Northern Irish and other British political parties into the twenty-first century to try to acquire more Northern Irish autonomy. In 2011, Adams was elected as a Teachta Dála, a member of the Parliament of the Republic of Ireland, to try to include Ireland in Sinn Féin's activism.

In 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union (EU) in a referendum informally known as Brexit. Adams claimed the vote presented an opportunity for Sinn Féin to resume its call for a united Ireland. He argued that the idea of Northern Ireland leaving the European Union while the Republic of Ireland remained in it was senseless. British politicians further discussed the issue of a unified Ireland in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, as many voters in Northern Ireland continued to express concerns over the possible negative economic impact Brexit could have on cross-border trade between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

In 2018, Mary Lou McDonald, at that time a Teachta Dála (elected representative) in the legislature in the Republic of Ireland, replaced Adams as the leader of Sinn Féin. Following the 2020 elections in Ireland, Sinn Féin became the largest opposition party in the Republic of Ireland's government and McDonald became leader of the opposition.

Meanwhile, Brexit and its associated economic concerns remained major issues for voters in Northern Ireland. During the May 2022 elections in Northern Ireland, where Unionist parties supportive of remaining in the UK had historically dominated electoral politics, Sinn Féin scored a decisive victory with 29 percent of the vote. This was the largest share of votes for any single party in that election. Sinn Féin's victory, which marked the first time in Northern Irish history that an Irish republican party won the most seats in an assembly election, eventually resulted in the appointment of Michelle O'Neill as first minister of Northern Ireland in February 2024. O'Neill was the first Irish nationalist or republican to hold this title, and her appointment generated speculation that the issue of Irish reunification and independence could once again come to the political forefront in Northern Ireland.

Bibliography

Ferguson, Amanda. "Sinn Fein Largest Northern Ireland Party in UK Parliament For First Time." Reuters, 5 July 2024, www.reuters.com/world/uk/sinn-fein-becomes-largest-northern-ireland-party-uk-parliament-2024-07-05/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2025. 

"Gerry Adams: Profile of Sinn Féin Leader." BBC, 19 May 2015, www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-27238602. Accessed 8 Feb. 2025.

"History." Sinn Féin, www.sinnfein.ie/history. Accessed 8 Feb. 2025.

"Irish Free State Declared." History.com, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/irish-free-state-declared. Accessed 8 Feb. 2025.

Landler, Mark. "As Britain Turned Away From E.U., Northern Ireland Turned to Sinn Fein." The New York Times, 7 May 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/05/07/world/europe/northern-ireland-sinn-fein.html. Accessed 8 Feb. 2025.

Landow, Charles, and James McBride. "Moving Past the Troubles: The Future of Northern Ireland Peace." Council on Foreign Relations, 16 Feb. 2024, www.cfr.org/backgrounder/moving-past-troubles-future-northern-ireland-peace. Accessed 8 Feb. 2025.

McDonald, Henry. "Irish Republican Socialists Call on Real IRA to End 'Armed Struggle.'" TheGuardian, 4 May 2015, www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/04/irish-republican-socialists-paper-real-ira-groups-end-armed-struggle. Accessed 8 Feb. 2025.

O'Doherty, Malachai. "English Brexit Vote Has Revived Calls for a United Ireland." Time, 28 June 2016, time.com/4383916/brexit-vote-revived-calls-united-ireland/. Accessed 8 Feb. 2025.

"Sinn Féin." Sinn Féin, vote.sinnfein.ie. Accessed 8 Feb. 2025.