The think-in train moved to Malahide, on the sunny and salubrious coast of north Co Dublin on Wednesday morning, where Sinn Féin TDs and senators arrived for their version of the pre-Dáil gathering.
Tanned and sporting a new hairstyle, a chuckling Mary Lou McDonald promised “vigorous” thinking when she spoke to the media in advance of the opening session at the Grand Hotel.
Malahide ladies (and the odd gentleman) of a certain age, gathering at the hotel for morning teas and coffees, seemed unperturbed by the invasion.
In truth, the party has a lot of thinking to do as it seeks to prepare – for third time under McDonald’s leadership – to unseat Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael at the next election.
Just as with the earlier Labour and Fianna Fáil think-ins, the cost of living has been front and centre with Sinn Féin. This is comfortable territory, allowing it to reprise the left-populist (its own description) lines that have defined its economic policies for a decade.
The promise by McDonald and her finance spokesman, Pearse Doherty, of a big reduction in USC has been a staple of the party’s recent alternative budgets – which have been solidly redistributive, promising to tax wealthier people and (some) corporations and transfer the resources to those less well-off. But will it prove any more successful than in the past?
In the wake of revelations about the chaos in the party on immigration policy before the last election, contained in a book by former adviser Siobhán Fenton published this week, McDonald also faced questions on the issue – and will face strategic choices in the future.
One could boil down Sinn Féin’s stance on immigration before the last general election – following the shellacking in the local and European elections in June of 2024 – to promising not to put asylum seekers anywhere near its voters. Something more substantive will be required, one imagines, in the future.
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The party has largely supported the shift to the right on migration that the Government has effected since the last election, though McDonald stopped short of agreeing with the Government’s intention of reducing net inward migration. But she’s headed in that direction.
As Fenton’s book makes clear, immigration is an extraordinarily difficult issue for the party, cleaving a division its progressive (largely middle class, younger) and nationalist (working class, older) wings. There is no easy answer for it, and it will not go away.
Irish unity remains the party’s perpetual lodestar, and also serves as a useful stick with which to beat the Taoiseach, whom the party (and indeed some of his own) regard as insufficiently impatient on the subject. But the push for unity is not something that moves the political dial in the south, where a large majority is vaguely in favour but as a political priority, it is a concern of somewhere between 1-2 per cent, polls suggest.
As the party girds itself for yet another parliamentary term in opposition, it is hard to escape the conclusion that its plan is simply to try harder with the same strategies and messages as before.
This may appeal to the traditional republican psyche as part of a long struggle, after which their day will come. In reality, to be successful, it will likely take something external to change the current political context. Given the uncertain state of the world and its economy, that is eminently possible. But it is at heart, a strategy built on the hope that something will turn up.