moral core. It called to mind Jonathan Swift’s saeva indignatio, the savage indignation of which W.B. Yeats wrote so movingly.’18Given the tone and length of Martin’s Arbour Hill condemnation, it was inevitable that Adams would feel it necessary to respond in a formal way and in some detail. Normally, the media are informed by email, or at least by text message, in advance of Sinn Féin events that are open to them. But this one was clearly arranged in some haste for the following Wednesday. I was talking to some Sinn Féin staff and politicians in Leinster House when they mentioned ‘Gerry’s keynote speech’ which would be given in a place with the not-very-republican title of Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, a handsome building close to Leinster House.
When I worked as a reporter in Northern Ireland, the Republicans habitually arrived late for press and other public events, and the journalists consoled themselves for the long wait with the wry observation: ‘We’re on Sinn Féin time.’ This is not the case any more, in my experience, and the hall was full at 7pm, when the meeting was due to start. Members of the Sinn Féin parliamentary party were there in strength and sitting at the front. All the leading figures from the Dublin area appeared to be present, including some holding prison records for IRA activities. Adams began his speech with the usual digs at Fianna Fáil’s record in government, where Martin was a cabinet minister for 14 years, and then got to the nub of the matter:
Micheál Martin also raises the hoary old myth of there being a good Old IRA in 1916 and in the Tan War, and a bad IRA in the 1970s, the 1980s and the nineties. Of course, he ignores the reality that Volunteers in 1916 were responsible for killing women and children here in the streets of Dublin and that, through the Tan War, the IRA was responsible for abducting, for executing and secretly burying suspected informers. But he tries to sanitise one phase of war and demonise and criminalise another one. So let there be no doubt about it, war is terrible. All war. War is desperate. And those of us who have lived through the recent conflict are the ones who have worked to ensure that the conflict is ended for good, and that we never – none of us, ever – go back there again. And that’s why Sinn Féin is and was pivotal to the peace process. So those of us – and people died in this city also –but those of us who have come from communities that were ravaged by conflict, those of us whose neighbours were killed, those of us who buried our friends and our family members, who carry injuries to this day, those of us in this state and in the Northern State and in Britain and elsewhere who endured the prisons: we don’t need lectures from Micheál Martin or anyone else about conflict. We have been there [prolonged applause, whistling and cheering]. Let me say this: Republicans did not go to war: the war came to us. So there is an obligation on political leaders to work to resolve conflict, to build reconciliation, not to fight a false war, not to refight a false and scammy-type rhetorical approach at looking at the past in a totally skewed way. Micheál Martin needs to wake up and realise that the war is over. It’s now time to build the peace [applause]. But there has to be a dividend, an economic and social dividend in the peace for everyone, not just in the North but here in this state also. So his selective lookbacks on Irish history convince no one [pause]. We at least are consistent. We are as proud of Bobby Sands and Mairéad Farrell as we are of the Volunteers of 1916, and those who fought the Black and Tans [applause].
The meeting ended after the speech, which lasted twenty minutes. Outside in the corridor, a glass case held mementos of Napoleon Bonaparte, who also knew a thing or two about conflict, albeit on a wider scale. Sinn Féin people said they had been anxious to rebut Martin’s attack on them, but without alienating the Fianna Fáil grassroots. Indeed, Adams said in his speech that he had spoken to long time Fianna Fáil activists, who were ‘disappointed’ and ‘disillusioned’ because the leadership had ‘strayed from its original republican origins’. A Sinn Féin TD told me that Fianna Fáilers in his constituency were unhappy with their party leader’s remarks, as they were hoping to get Sinn Féin transfers in the next election.
All’s fair in love and war and, arguably, Martin needed to have a few swipes at Sinn Féin, not only to express strongly-held convictions, but to shore up his leadership and stop ‘Adams and Co’ from nibbling away at Fianna Fáil’s support. Martin’s position in the party had been under some pressure, due to poor poll showings. His Arbour Hill oration came a week ahead of the annual Fianna Fáil ardfheis (national conference) and a month before a by-election in the Carlow-Kilkenny constituency, where it was considered critical for Martin’s future that Fianna Fáil should take the seat – as it did by a comfortable margin.
There is polling evidence that, between them, Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil and Labour could end up with a majority in the Dáil. However, as Martin pointed out on the Late Late Show, Sinn Féin’s performance in the 2014 local elections was significantly lower than the opinion surveys suggested, whereas Fianna Fáil did better than the polls had indicated beforehand. In any case, given Martin’s constant denunciations of Sinn Féin and what he calls ‘the Provisional movement’, it would be quite a turnaround if he somehow ended up in government with them. In the past, however, the Progressive Democrats and the Labour Party slated Fianna Fáil without mercy, but then decided that their best course of action was to join them at the cabinet table.
At a press conference during the Fianna Fáil ardfheis in the Royal Dublin Society (foreign observers must wonder at the number of places in this Republic with the word ‘royal’ in their titles) on the last weekend of April 2015, I asked Martin what his approach would be in the next Dáil, given that he had ruled out coalition with Fine Gael and Sinn Féin. He replied:
We’re going to fight the election first, Deaglán, and we’re going to fight the election on the issues, which I think is a legitimate position to have. And I have said this to a number of journalists who have been interviewing me in recent times. The debate moves very quickly on to a post-election scenario, as if it’s already happened. It hasn’t happened: we haven’t had the general election. We have to fight the election on the issues and that’s what we’re doing, in terms of the policy issues … and we’re going out there to maximise our vote and our seats so that we can influence, in whatever way that may turn out, the implementation of those policies.
One of Martin’s colleagues later told me that Fianna Fáil had worked out, in fairly precise terms, that Fine Gael stood to lose 22 out of its 69 Dáil seats, and Labour would go down by 16 seats from 34 to 18. (Most observers would find the Labour prediction rather optimistic.) The priority was to ensure that as many of these lost seats as possible went to Fianna Fáil. The attacks on Sinn Féin were motivated by the perception that a good deal of Sinn Féin’s support was ‘soft’, and could be swayed in Fianna Fáil’s direction. Speaking on condition of anonymity, this member of the parliamentary party said there was a strong possibility the next election would result in a minority government which would not last long and that the Dáil would be dissolved again fairly quickly. He ruled out coalition with Fine Gael, but felt that an agreement between Fianna Fáil and an anti-austerity grouping led by Sinn Féin was a real possibility, despite what his party leader was saying. Other parties in the past had denounced their opponents and then gone into government with them: that’s the way the game was played.
Another prominent party figure from a rural area said the attacks on Sinn Féin had been a good idea, but that it was nevertheless likely there would be a Fianna Fáil-Sinn Féin coalition in the end, although he pointed out that any coalition proposal would be subject to approval by a special Fianna Fáil ardfheis. Meanwhile, a prominent Fianna Fáil stalwart based in a Dublin constituency said the party should remain in opposition, as a tie-up with Fine Gael would mean that about one-third of the membership would drop out, and another third would start looking to Sinn Féin. He said that, apart from some office-hungry TDs, there was little appetite for coalition with Sinn Féin either.
The prospect of a coalition involving Fine Gael and Sinn Féin would appear, on the surface at least, to be even more remote. The idea was floated in the past by a senior Fine Gael advisor at the time, Frank Flannery, but this was before the change of mood, symbolised by Syriza, came about in European politics. In the aftermath of the 2007 general election, when no party had a clear majority,
