That’s why its politics have never matched up neatly with the left–right dichotomies of Europe.
On the continent, the contrasts between social democracy and Christian democracy, socialism and liberalism, or left and right nationalism have defined the ideological contours of party systems.
Ireland is different. The two dominant Irish parties of the 20th century, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, don’t represent coherent ideological traditions so much as groupings of notables, heirs to rival factions in the Civil War, and—more recently—custodians of power for its own sake. Their longevity owes less to conviction than to patronage, organisation, and the inertia of a political culture that did not need to conform to continental lines.
It’s this absence of a clear ideological spine that has left Irish politics oddly suspended.
Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have oscillated between economic liberalism and welfare expansion, depending more on circumstance than doctrine. Both have cultivated close ties with the Catholic Church. Both succumbed to cronyism. And both have been compromised by scandal.
As Fintan O’Toole mordantly observes in We Don’t Know Ourselves, his tremendous history of Ireland, the cascade of revelations that broke Ireland’s silence—the clerical abuse scandals, the banking and real estate collapses, the endless corruption inquiries—were not episodic ruptures but systemic exposures. They revealed a society in which power was diffuse but unaccountable, and in which the leading political actors were always just one tribunal away from disgrace.
It was this void of credibility that Sinn Féin, long marginalised by its associations with the IRA and concomitant fixation on national unification, eventually moved to fill.
For decades, Sinn Féin was the outsider, tolerated at the fringes of the Dáil, caricatured as the political wing of the Provos, and electorally hemmed in by its own militancy.
Political systems abhor a vacuum, however. Ireland’s lack of a serious left party, coupled with the rolling disgrace of the incumbents, gave Sinn Féin an opportunity. By broadening its program beyond the single issue of a united Ireland—pivoting toward housing, health, and inequality—it managed to reinvent itself as something resembling a normal European left party.
That, in itself, was no small irony. A movement born out of insurgency and sustained by the rhetoric of armed struggle now began to prosper by promising rent controls and hospital beds.
In a country desperate for affordable housing and weary of elites feathering their nests, the shift worked. By the late 2010s and early 2020s, Sinn Féin had surged in the polls, overtaking both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and thereby endangering the duopoly that had structured Irish politics since independence. For the first time, it seemed plausible that a party of the left might govern Ireland.
The twin elections of 2016 and 2020 demonstrated just how far Sinn Féin had come. In 2016, the party won 23 seats—an impressive, yet still insufficient number to threaten the dominance of the old Civil War parties. Four years later, however, Sinn Féin captured 37 seats, topping the popular vote in the February 2020 general election. It was, as commentators quickly noted, the first real electoral earthquake in decades for Irish politics.
The result was hard to absorb. The party system had long depended on Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael rotating in and out of power, occasionally requiring the support of smaller partners but never facing an existential challenge.
Sinn Féin’s surge disrupted this arrangement.
It was not simply that the party had grown; it had overtaken. Opinion polls suggested that younger voters, urban voters, and working-class voters were all shifting decisively toward Sinn Féin. For a moment, Ireland seemed on the verge of achieving the European standard: a polity with a credible social democratic party capable of governing.
Yet the very shock of this success revealed the fragility of Sinn Féin’s position. It had neither the depth of organisation nor the coalition partners to govern immediately. The pandemic and the inertia of the system ensured that government was once again formed by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, now awkwardly united in coalition, with the Greens drafted in as ballast.
The symbolism was stark: for the first time in history, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael set aside their inherited rivalry to exclude Sinn Féin. This cordon sanitaire, of sorts, was a tribute to Sinn Féin’s strength but also a reminder of its continued isolation.
Power in Ireland has always come with a price: scandal.
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael both paid it repeatedly, with tribunals stretching across decades and exposing a culture of casual corruption. The irony—one might almost say inevitability—is that Sinn Féin, too, has begun to encounter the same gravitational pull. Allegations about financial impropriety, questions about the opaque role of party activists in Northern Ireland, and controversies surrounding candidates have dented the party’s once pristine outsider appeal.
Scandal in Ireland is not incidental; it is structural. The lack of ideological cleavage means parties do not discipline themselves around shared doctrine or program. Instead, they operate as loose federations of local notables, clientelist machines in which the temptation to trade favours is irresistible.
Sinn Féin once positioned itself as the clean alternative to this rot, the party unsullied by bankers and bishops alike. But success has brought scrutiny, and scrutiny has brought familiar problems. The whiff of hypocrisy—the revolutionary party succumbing to the sins of the establishment—is especially damaging. It damages the party’s credibility, undermining the sense that something genuinely different is on offer.
This does not mean Sinn Féin is finished. But it does mean that, after a dizzying ascent, it has plateaued, at least for the moment.
The party that promised to be the Irish version of Podemos or Syriza, tempered by the pragmatism of government-in-waiting, has found itself caught in the same cycle of embarrassment that consumed its rivals. The electorate, once willing to gamble on the outsiders, is pausing for a second look.
One cannot discuss Sinn Féin’s fortunes without reference to Brexit. The United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union has had profound consequences for Ireland, both north and south, reordering political priorities and reframing Sinn Féin’s longstanding arguments.
Brexit was not simply a British melodrama that dragged in an unwilling Ireland; it was an event that reopened dormant questions, destabilised previously “settled” arrangements, and reshaped the terrain of Irish politics.
The most immediate and visible consequence materialised along the border. For decades, the Good Friday Agreement had allowed the boundary between Ireland and Northern Ireland to melt into the landscape—crossed daily by commuters, farmers, and shoppers, monitored only by the absent-minded glance of a signpost changing from miles to kilometres.
Brexit threatened to reimpose this frontier as a customs border between the United Kingdom and the European Union. For the Republic of Ireland, this was an economic calamity in the making: trade patterns depended on frictionless movement, agricultural supply chains crossed the line countless times. Indeed, peace in the North had been underpinned by the very invisibility of the border.
For Sinn Féin, however, the crisis created opportunity. The party’s central claim—that the partition of Ireland was not only unjust but also impractical—was vindicated by the absurd prospect of customs posts reappearing in South Armagh.
Brexit thus lent Sinn Féin’s demand for Irish unity a sudden aura of realism. What had often seemed like a romantic fixation, fit for speeches on anniversaries rather than everyday politics, now appeared as a plausible solution to a practical problem.
Dublin mandarins and Brussels technocrats who had politely nodded at Sinn Féin’s slogans now found themselves contemplating, however cautiously, the logic of realignment across the island.
Opinion polls began to show growing support, particularly among younger voters in Northern Ireland, for the principle of a border poll. The mere fact that mainstream commentators discussed the timetable for such a poll was itself a transformation.
Yet Brexit also introduced complications. Sinn Féin’s electoral surge in the Republic had been built not on unity but on housing, hospitals, and inequality. These were the issues that mobilised younger generations locked out of the property market, families languishing on waiting lists, and workers struggling with precarious jobs.
The irony was that just as Sinn Féin had successfully rebranded itself as a party of the social democratic left, Brexit tempted it back toward the narrower terrain of constitutional nationalism.
In public debates, questions about the National Health Service in a united Ireland, the fiscal implications of integration, or the cultural accommodations required to reassure unionists began to surface. These questions could inspire passion, but they did not make coalition-building in Dublin any easier.
Moreover, Brexit reanimated Northern Ireland as a site of political instability.
Unionist parties, particularly the DUP, turned Brexit into both a rallying cry and a trap, first championing it as a reassertion of sovereignty, then recoiling from the compromises of the Northern Ireland Protocol. Sinn Féin, positioned as the defender of the Protocol and of Northern Ireland’s EU links, gained credibility among nationalists but also risked reinforcing polarisation.
The political stalemate at Stormont, where power-sharing collapsed amid disputes over the Protocol, created a paradox. Sinn Féin became the largest party in the North, yet the institutions through which it might demonstrate competence remained paralysed. As a consequence, its symbolic victories risked outpacing its practical achievements.
The Republic, too, felt Brexit’s ripple effects.
The Irish government’s strategy of aligning closely with Brussels during negotiations won praise abroad but also underscored the dependence of Ireland’s prosperity on European goodwill. Sinn Féin, though supportive of EU membership, found itself navigating a delicate position: critical of Brussels austerity in the eurozone crisis, but now aligned with Brussels against London over Brexit.
The party’s historic suspicion of European integration jarred with its newfound credibility as the champion of Ireland’s European future. Its leaders had to tread carefully, reframing the party as pro-European in the Brexit context while retaining a sceptical edge on issues of fiscal discipline and neoliberal orthodoxy.
That’s why the net effect of Brexit for Sinn Féin was double-edged. On the one hand, it gave the party a renewed relevance, placing its historic cause at the heart of public debate and lending its rhetoric a pragmatic sheen. On the other hand, it pulled the party away from the bread-and-butter issues that had fueled its recent surge in the South.
Housing crises do not disappear simply because customs posts threaten to reappear; health service underfunding cannot be remedied with slogans about unity. Voters who turned to Sinn Féin for social democracy might not be easily convinced that constitutional transformation was the necessary precondition for social justice.
In this sense, Brexit magnified Sinn Féin’s dilemmas rather than resolved them.
Brexit allowed the party to project itself as both the defender of Irish sovereignty and the herald of European belonging, both the voice of nationalist aspiration and the tribune of working-class grievances. But balancing these roles is exhausting and politically perilous.
Every time Sinn Féin emphasises unity, it risks alienating voters who want better housing. Every time it emphasises housing, it risks appearing to forsake its historic mission. Brexit gave Sinn Féin a powerful new legitimacy, but it also forced the party to perform a delicate balancing act, one in which missteps are not only possible but inevitable.
The fate of Sinn Féin matters beyond Ireland. In an era when social democracy has been in retreat across Europe—eroded by neoliberalism, challenged by populists, outflanked by greens—Sinn Féin’s rise appeared to offer a new model.
Here was a party with radical roots, a history of insurgency, reinventing itself as a plausible social democratic alternative. Its appeal to young voters, its emphasis on inequality, its break with the corrupt duopoly: all resonated with the broader European search for renewal on the left.
Sinn Féin’s struggles also illustrate the difficulties threatening to temper that renewal.
Scandal corrodes both outsiders and insiders. National questions—in this case, Irish unity—distract from the bread-and-butter issues of social democracy. And the institutional inertia of old parties, however discredited, often suffices to keep them in power. In this sense, Ireland mirrors broader European trends: the promise of regeneration, the drag of old structures, and the ever-present risk of disappointment.
Sinn Féin’s trajectory implies a warning. The European left, hungry for examples of revival, must be wary of overinvesting in parties whose appeal rests more on the failures of others than on their own organisational solidity.
Social democracy cannot be rebuilt on scandal fatigue alone. Nor can it thrive if its protagonists repeat the very errors that discredited their predecessors.
The irony of Sinn Féin’s rise is that it made Ireland’s politics more normal just as it exposed the abnormality of its own position. For decades, Irish politics was defined by the absence of a left–right cleavage. Then Sinn Féin introduced one, only to find itself ensnared by the same pathologies that had hollowed out its rivals.
Sinn Féin’s success forced Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael into coalition, revealed the exhaustion of old patterns, and gestured toward the possibility of a genuinely social democratic politics in Ireland. Its faltering exposed the fragility of that possibility.
For Europe, the lesson is chastening. Renewal on the left cannot be outsourced to parties whose main virtue is their outsider status. It requires deeper reconstruction: new institutions, new norms, and a willingness to confront scandal not just when it afflicts others but when it seeps inward.
Sinn Féin’s rise was real, its promise genuine, and its partial decline instructive. In that sense, Irish politics, with all its peculiarities, may be less exceptional than initially seems to be the case. It is simply another theatre in the continental drama of a left struggling to regenerate amid the wreckage of old regimes and the temptations of populist shortcuts.
Whether Sinn Féin recovers or whether another force emerges to occupy the social democratic space, the underlying story remains.
Ireland’s post-Brexit political landscape is unsettled, and in that unsettledness lies both danger and opportunity. The task for the left—in Ireland, and in Europe more broadly—is to learn how not merely to exploit scandal, but to transcend it.
Photograph courtesy of Sinn Féin. All rights reserved.
