Ben Lowry: Support for Sinn Fein is still more of a northern thing on this island
For years republicans have mocked unionists that people in the rest of the UK do not consider people from Northern Ireland to be British.
(Click here to read Ben Lowry on how the Dail results are a blow to the idea that an all island state is inevitable)
This taunting intensified after the Brexit vote in 2016. The thumping Westminster endorsements of a border between NI and the mainland, imposed by a supposed Conservative and Unionist Party, was cited as the final proof of that.
Most unionists from Northern Ireland who have lived in England, Scotland and Wales will accept that few people there think much about NI – a degree of indifference which is a latent peril to our position within the UK. But what about nationalists in Northern Ireland and their own position within the Ireland that they want to join?
Unionists could point out that swathes of voters in the Republic of Ireland seem to show a parallel indifference to NI.
In the recent general election, a mere 19% of voters there voted for the only party on the island that is fixated on abolishing Northern Ireland and creating an all-Ireland state, Sinn Fein. More than four out of five voters did not give such support to a republican movement that tells everyone that its triumph across the island is inevitable and imminent (SF increased by two its TDs on last time but the overall number of TDs also went up, so the party’s share of them actually went down).
Even if you go back to Sinn Fein’s breakthrough election – the 2020 Dail contest – it was still only getting the support of 24.5% of the Irish electorate. Even then, 25+ years after the IRA ceasefire, more than three quarters declined to support the party that is obsessed with creating a single Irish state.
The results this year are even more challenging for republicans than the 19% figure suggests.
If you look at the constituency by constituency results, Sinn Fein’s support is still skewed towards the border.
The party got a huge share of the vote in the four constituencies that hug the frontier with Northern Ireland – Donegal (41.8% of the vote), Sligo Leitrim (22.7%), Cavan Monaghan (32.8%) and Louth (32.4%).
In those constituencies, Sinn Fein collected 87,341 first preference votes (out of the 418,627 votes cast for SF across the Republic). A fifth of the entire Sinn Fein vote came from the four most northerly constituencies that make up less than 10% of the total number of constituencies across the country (there are 43 of them).
If you exclude those four seats, Sinn Fein got 331,286 first preference votes out of the 1,935,949 votes in the 39 non-border constituencies, which is a 17% share. Much of that non-border vote also comes from the constituencies in the northern half of the country, that are close to Ulster – Meath, for example, is very republican.
If you go down to the nine constituencies in the most southwesterly part of Ireland – Clare, Limerick City, Limerick County, Kerry and the five Cork constituencies – Sinn Fein does not reach its 19% national average vote share in any of them. That is a large chunk of the Republic, making up 20% of the overall Dail constituencies, and it includes places with a strong republican tradition such as Kerry and west Cork.
Sinn Fein does, however, have a stronghold that is located well away from the border: Dublin.
The party gets more than 30% of the vote in three of the 12 Dublin constituencies (Dublin Mid West 32%; Dublin South Central 31%; Dublin NW 31%). It gets almost a quarter of the vote in another three (Dublin Central 23 %; Dublin Fingal West 23%; Dublin West 21% and Dublin South West 21%). In the remaining four Dublin constituencies, SF polls modestly.
But Sinn Fein, for all its ongoing electoral success in the Irish capital, seems to be more vulnerable there than it is in its northerly base. The perception of it as a pro immigrant party seems to be a reason the Sinn Fein vote fell sharply in Dublin, which has been hit by a wave of anti immigrant feeling. Having said that, anti immigrant candidates performed poorly inside and outside Dublin.
Whatever the exact reason why, the Sinn Fein vote plunged in parts of Dublin. In Dublin Mid West, the party was down by more than 10 points, from 43% in 2020 to 32% this time, and it dropped even more in Dublin North West, 44% to 31%. In Dublin South Central it was down from 39% four years ago to 31% on November 29.
Outside of Dublin and the northern areas, Sinn Fein has only one very strong constituency: Waterford, where it got 33% of the first preference votes. The party did well in the city this year in its otherwise disastrous Irish council elections, and it has a popular TD there, David Cullinane, who topped the poll in 2020 and 2024. Waterford was one of only a handful of constituencies across Ireland where SF elected more than one TD.
It is fair to note that Aontú doubled its Irish vote share to 3.9% in this election, most of which came from Sinn Fein, so the parties most devoted to an all-Ireland got 23% of the nationwide vote. Yet if an all-island state was a priority for Irish voters you would expect such parties to be on at least double that vote share, 46%+.
Sinn Fein can also point out that it does get a respectable vote across Ireland – there are only four constituencies where it polled less than 10% of the first preferences: Tipperary North 9.5%; Dun Laoghaire 9.0%; Dublin Rathdown 7.3%; Cork SW 4.8%. So it can clearly say that it is an all Ireland party. But in only 15 of the 43 constituencies did its candidates attract the first preference of more than one in five voters, and these are almost all in Dublin or the most northerly parts of the Republic.
Polling on the constitutional question suggests that most people in Northern Ireland aren’t much interested in an all Ireland. And the further south you get from the border in the Republic, ‘partionist’ voters don’t seem interested either.
• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor