Ben Lowry: Two by-elections in the Republic showed that Sinn Fein is still not popular south of the border

​Bertie Ahern had been Irish prime minister for 10 years and Sinn Fein was expecting to make its long-predicted breakthrough in the Dail – but didn’t.

Last weekend it became clear that Sinn Fein had performed badly in two Dail by-elections in the Republic, not even coming close to victory in the contests in Dublin and Galway, when – as a non governing party – it would have hoped to perform strongly.

This is a party that taunts unionists about the inevitable absorption of Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland, yet – as the party that pushes such constitutional change more than any other – it has rarely persuaded more than one in five southern Irish voters to back it.

In those Dail elections of 2007, when Sinn Fein anticipated a surge, it won 6.9% of the overall first preference vote across Ireland. In fact, Sinn Fein would again fail to get the results it hoped for south of the border in the next Irish general election of 2011 (9.9%), and not in the contest after that either, 2016 (13.8%). It was only in 2020 that it got its best ever Dail vote share, 24.5%. This was almost 40 years after anti-H Block candidates (pro hunger strikers) got 42,803 votes, 2.4% of the total, in the 1981 Irish general election, which marked the start of the provisional movement contesting elections in its dual ballot box/armalite strategy.

At the most recent Irish general election, in late 2024, Sinn Fein fell back again from 2020, dipping just under 20% of the vote. The web version of this essay will link to a column I wrote then about how that vote fell and fell the further constituencies were from the border. Its support is still strongest in Ulster, or parts of the Republic that are near to Northern Ireland such as Sligo and Co Meath.

It is too early to dismiss the idea of Sinn Fein forming a government in the south, or even of it topping the poll in a future Dail election, as it almost did in 2020. But there seem to be two key problems.

The first is the very long timespan that it has taken for Irish voters to forget its links to IRA. More than half of voters in the Republic are under the age of 40, which means they have no meaningful memory of the Troubles before the first IRA ceasefire of 1994.

The second is that Sinn Fein now faces an anti immigrant form of Irish nationalism that almost prevailed last weekend in Galway, and draws support from its own natural base. In the Galway West by-election, a candidate from Independent Ireland, a party that is critical of mass immigration, almost won – when all other candidates had been excluded and their preferences transferred, it was on 16,519 votes compared to 19,218 for the victorious Fine Gael candidate. Sinn Fein were out of sight on 6.7% of the initial vote. Sinn Fein is deeply nationalistic yet has long been dismissive of nationalists who oppose immigration.

SF did better in the Dublin Central by-election than in Galway, coming second on 17.5% of the first preference votes. But this is a constituency in which Mary Lou McDonald typically tops the poll in general elections. The party should be doing at least as well in a by-election, in which voters traditionally punish the government (in this case Ireland’s Fianna Fail-Fine Gael coalition).

Sinn Fein lost votes in Dublin to Gerry Hutch, a candidate who has previously been imprisoned and who denies being a criminal gang leader or suggestions of criminal activity since those jail terms. SF, as it tries to burnish its governing credentials, can hardly draw comfort from the fact that many of its voters are drawn to to such a blunt anti-establishment character such as Hutch.

With regard to the first problem for Sinn Fein, the IRA link, as someone who lives in Dublin once described it to me, people in the Republic grasped the essence of the provisionals and wanted nothing to do with them.

From the early 1980s until the 1998 Belfast Agreement, Sinn Fein got around three per cent of the vote in Republic polls. The party that defended violence was rejected thumpingly on both sides of the border, by a two-to-one margin in favour of the SDLP, by northern nationalists, the people on behalf of whom that campaign was supposedly fought, and almost entirely by voters in the country it wanted to join, the Republic (95%+). In the Dail election of 1997, for example, weeks before the second IRA ceasefire, Sinn Fein under Gerry Adams got a derisory 2.5% of the vote, and only one TD out of 166. For years after that, Sinn Fein was still toxic.

It isn’t toxic now, but it still isn’t popular.