In the past week, the expansion of a factory involved with the global arms trade, bombing Palestinians and Iranians, was overseen by Sinn Féin and Unionists in the North. Many may expect this from unionists. But, the question of why an apparently ‘left’ or progressive party would greenlight the further manufacturing of the tools of genocide and warfare has left many reeling.
What does Sinn Féin represent?
For much of the last two decades, a central question facing observers of the Irish left has been what Sinn Féin represents. Is it a radical nationalist party moving towards a break with the old political order and gathering wide support among working people? Or is it a party whose sometimes radical language has increasingly become disconnected from its political practice? Socialists have long debated Sinn Féin’s economic programme, its relationship with working-class movements and its strategy of electoralism. As the party has grown, particularly among younger voters and in working-class communities frustrated with the failures of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, those debates have become increasingly important.
Unlike Ireland’s traditional governing parties, Sinn Féin did not emerge simply as an electoral machine. However, republicanism has always been marked by a central ambiguity. While it has often produced movements prepared to confront the state, it has not consistently challenged the class relations on which that state is built.
Republican organisations have repeatedly found themselves pulled between fighting for social change and fighting for ‘the nation’ as an ill-defined and often conservative entity. Nevertheless, for many people, particularly those politicised by austerity, the housing crisis and international struggles such as Palestine, Sinn Féin appeared to represent a break with the conservative consensus that has dominated Irish politics. That appeal should be understood rather than dismissed. Many activists looked towards Sinn Féin not because they believed republicanism itself resolved the question of class politics, but because Sinn Féin seemed to offer the most credible vehicle through which resistance to the political establishment might be expressed.
Contradictions
However, the closer Sinn Féin has moved towards government in the South, while already being deeply embedded in the institutions of government in the North, the sharper the contradictions within its politics have become. A party can maintain radical language while outside power in a way that becomes much more difficult once it deems taking over government to be its political lodestar.
This has demonstrated a fork in the road when it comes to the priorities of Sinn Féin: whether to put its weight behind movements for justice in the truest sense, or to move rightward in the interests of being perceived as a ‘safe pair of hands’, in the eyes of the most conservative sections of society or multinational corporations.
When confronted with the divide between Sinn Féin’s actions and rhetoric across the border, a common argument is that they are forced to concede because of the presence of unionists. It is simply ‘a different context’. Though official orange hegemony is no longer possible in the way it was prior to the Good Friday Agreement, Stormont has replicated the same sectarian divide in how it functions. Sometimes, this is to the benefit of Sinn Féin, who frequently benefit from the dissolving of issues into a battle of green and orange; they present themselves, after all, as the ‘green’ in that equation. They are straight nationalists and this presents a particular contradiction for Sinn Féin. A party whose historic legitimacy came from opposition to the structures of the British state has also become one of the main administrators of the institutions established to manage – not overturn – the Northern state. The argument that every compromise is forced by unionism therefore misses the deeper issue: participation in these institutions limits what a party can do and, over time, changes the kind of politics a party conducts.
Across a series of issues, from Palestine and reproductive rights to migration and trans healthcare, a pattern has become clear. Sinn Féin has attempted to occupy a middle ground: a radicalism to retain support among younger people, working-class communities and social movements alongside a cautious conservatism to reassure establishment institutions and avoid challenging ‘contentious issues’ too much.
The questions facing socialists in 2026 are therefore not whether Sinn Féin is left wing or right wing, as has been discussed widely since the Sinn Féin surge in 2020. The case of Sinn Féin asks what happens when a party built around the language of resistance becomes focused above all on becoming a party of government? Crucially, how can a socialist organisation offer an alternative that remains rooted in principled internationalist politics yet can also have a mass appeal?
Palestine and Anti-Imperialism
Sinn Féin’s relationship with Palestinian liberation illustrates one of the central contradictions of its current politics. The party has long drawn parallels between Irish republicanism and the Palestinian struggle, presenting itself as part of an international tradition of opposition to occupation, colonialism and imperialism. However, anti-imperialism cannot only exist as a language. It has to involve political choices. The question facing any organisation claiming solidarity with Palestine is not simply whether it condemns Israeli actions or expresses support for Palestinian rights. The question is whether that solidarity extends to challenging the institutions and economic interests that enable imperial violence.
Palestine may be one arena in which Sinn Féin’s aesthetic of revolution may have faced its most obvious contradictions. Despite ongoing commemorations of volunteers and republican events, since October 7th Sinn Féin has repeatedly condemned resistance in Palestine. While historical contradictions exist, such as the meeting with Likud in 2016, the failure initially to support the vote to expel the Israeli ambassador was a glaring misstep with the newly mobilised masses. Shortly after, their visit to the White House in March 2024, despite giant marches in opposition north and south, cemented a glaring clash with the party who once made up the majority of Palestine activists. Needless to say, despite the defence that they were attending to be a voice to hold the white house accountable, not a word was heard, nor action against genocide taken, after the shamrocks were handed to Joe Biden.
The most egregious example of Sinn Féin deviating from their mask of anti-imperialism to a party of government, is perhaps its ongoing complicity in the global arms trade. In the decades of Sinn Féin having power in Stormont, the Department for the Economy has financed and enticed companies towards taking more lucrative defence contracts. Their current head of the Department, Caoimhe Archibald, oversees Invest NI, which uses taxpayer funds. Research has shown that over £20 million has gone to 5 companies directly involved with the F-35 Program, a program that directly and indirectly assists Israel. For several years, the Mid Ulster IPSC has exposed one of the factories, Moyola Precision Engineering in County Derry, for its F-35 airframe part contracts, and the local council’s complicity, such as school visits to the arms factory. The outrageous approval of an extension to the factory days ago, was only possible because the Sinn Féin councillors abstained to let the Unionist vote decide. A larger extension just under two years ago received no opposition on the council. An argument in defence of Sinn Féin, is that rejecting the application would open up the council to a legal dispute, but exposing the flow of genocide parts in court, particularly with factories funded by their own minister, is not on the agenda of a party claiming to oppose the imperialist status quo.
This question has a long history in Ireland. The anti-apartheid movement did not limit itself to statements condemning apartheid South Africa. Activists, often at great personal cost, fought for boycotts and concrete sanctions against the apartheid state because they understood that solidarity meant confronting the systems that allowed oppression to continue. The same principle applies today. If Israel’s actions are understood as part of a system of occupation, apartheid and indeed genocide, then solidarity must involve challenging the political, economic and military relationships that make those actions possible. More fundamentally, it requires not being in favour of the existing two-state proposals which have facilitated ethnic cleansing and genocide, and standing squarely for the dismantling of the Israeli state. For a united Ireland, but for the partition of Palestine – this is a deep contradiction brought about by how Sinn Féin sees its role in the existing imperialist order.
Bodily Autonomy & Abortion
The struggle for abortion rights provides another example of the tension between the politics of movements from below and the politics of seeing government as the ultimate goal.
The repeal of the 8th Amendment was one of the most significant victories for social movements in modern Irish history. It was achieved because over four decades of organising by feminists, healthcare workers, survivors and activists transformed public consciousness and forced political institutions to respond, thus changing not only the law but the political horizons for a generation of activists.
However, the granting of legal abortion does not automatically mean reproductive justice. The option of ‘conscientious objection’ for GPs and other healthcare providers has left many areas without access to abortion. An arbitrary time limit forces at least 240 women to travel to England every year, according to the National Women’s Council.
This is why the recent debate in the Dáil around the right to choose was significant. Sinn Féin opposed the recent motion by the Social Democrats’ to extend the timeframe on access to abortion and to scrap the three-day wait. Shortly afterwards, Sinn Féin pushed its own bill, exclusively focusing on removing the three-day wait. The vision of access to abortion put forward by Sinn Féin in this context straddled between ‘trusting’ women, and framing abortion as a tragedy that women should be supported in enduring. David Cullinane was eager to reassure the Dáil that abortion would not be allowed “at the first consultation”, further framing abortion not as a right to choose, but as an issue to be managed. Worse, Cullinane’s long explanation in the Dáil appeared to place ‘the rights of the unborn’ alongside those of a woman which was clearly reaching out to Catholic conservatism.
True reproductive justice begins from the principle of bodily autonomy: that people should have control over decisions affecting their own bodies and lives. This was the argument behind People Before Profit’s earlier abortion legislation, which argued not only for increasing the time limits on abortion service and removing the three-day wait, but also for addressing the systemic issues that mean access to abortion remains unequal. The greatest victories have never come because politicians voluntarily expanded rights, as the likes of Leo Varadkar claim towards the end of the Repeal campaign. They have come because organised movements forced them to do so.
Immigration
Immigration has perhaps been the clearest example of this balancing act. Sinn Féin’s messaging has often shifted depending on the audience it is addressing, with more restrictive language around immigration appearing in some literature directed at the more hard-pressed working-class communities while being largely absent elsewhere. The recent Dublin Central by-election illustrated this tension, as debates around housing and immigration were frequently framed in ways that risked accepting the premise that migrants themselves are responsible for crises created by government policy and decades of underinvestment.
This approach reinforces the racist politics of divide and rule by normalising the idea that migrants must justify their presence in the community, or that immigration is a genuine cause for the housing or cost-of-living crises. More fundamentally, it reveals the wider political direction of the party. When faced with a choice between supporting movements demanding fundamental change and accommodating the assumptions of conservative parties and a growing far-right movement, Sinn Féin has increasingly moved towards the latter.
Trans Liberation and Healthcare
The struggle for trans healthcare provides another example of the tension between the politics of liberation and Sinn Féin’s politics of caution. Over recent years, trans people have become the target of an increasingly coordinated backlash internationally, including amongst some liberals and feminists. Across Britain and the United States in particular, and increasingly in Ireland, right-wing forces have sought to transform the existence and rights of trans people into a culture war issue, often presenting basic healthcare, recognition and equality as matters of ‘safety’ rather than questions of human rights.
For socialists, the starting point has to begin from solidarity with an oppressed minority and the principle that everyone should have the ability to live freely and safely, whoever they are.
This is particularly significant in the North, where the issue of puberty blockers demonstrates the contradiction at heart of Sinn Féin clearly. Sinn Féin voted, along with the DUP, in favour of extending the UK ban on puberty blockers in the North. The debate has often been framed through the language of caution and controversy, but for young trans people it is not an abstract political discussion. It concerns access to healthcare and the ability of people to make decisions about their own lives with appropriate medical support. Despite pushing to be front and centre previous at Pride marches in the past, this move was seen as betrayal of the LGBT movement, which responded by excluding all parties in the Executive from almost all Pride marches in the North, and Sinn Féin from Trans and Intersex Pride in Dublin.
The significance of these debates goes beyond any individual vote. It is about whether politics begins from the demands of oppressed people themselves or from calculations about what positions are most electorally advantageous.
The Politics Behind the Shift
The examples reflect a deeper political transformation taking place within Sinn Féin as it prepares to take the reins of power, North and South. For socialists, this is not primarily a question of individual politicians ‘selling out’. It is a question of political strategy and the means by which political parties seek to implement that strategy.
A party whose central objective is to win state power without unsettling the current capitalist order inevitably faces pressures to demonstrate stability, responsibility and to concede to the right. In this context, institutions shape the priorities, assumptions and horizons of those who seek to administer them. This is particularly significant for Sinn Féin because of the political tradition from which it emerged.
Republicanism has never been a fixed or politically uniform tradition. Throughout its history it has contained radical, socialist, conservative and constitutional currents, each attempting to define what republicanism means in their own time. Nor is anti-imperialism a guarantee of socialist politics. Political traditions are continually reshaped by the balance of forces around them.
Nevertheless, some of the most radical moments within Irish republicanism drew their strength not from parliamentary representation alone, but from organisation, mass mobilisation of people and confrontation with existing structures of power. Whatever disagreements socialists may have had with those traditions, their political force rested on the capacity to organise people beyond the limits of established political institutions. This is why figures like James Connolly attempted to relate to that tradition in the early part of the twentieth century, though it quickly proved its limitations.
The recent vote on hare coursing provides another example of this broader tendency. People Before Profit introduced legislation to ban hare coursing, following years of campaigning by animal rights activists. Sinn Féin voted alongside government parties to oppose the bill. The hare coursing vote is uniquely revealing in that it is arguably less ‘pressurised’ than other issues, or as closely tied to global debates about culture war politics. The vote highlights a growing preference for institutional caution from Sinn Féin, in this case for the acceptance – for voting reasons – of a stereotypical view of rural Ireland, over embracing principle and an alignment with movements outside parliament.
Sinn Féin’s running of the Department for the Economy comes to the fore again on the issue of goldmining, where in Spring 2025, Minister Caoimhe Archibald granted 7 licenses to mining firms for prospecting in Fermanagh, Tyrone and Armagh. The statement in defence was the “jobs and wealth” the extraction would bring to the local community, not unlike the defence for InvestNI funded factories involved in the arms trade.
Political representation and struggle
Political traditions are not developed when organisations continue to wear their symbols or repeat their slogans. They survive because successive generations reproduce the methods of organisation and struggle through which those traditions acquired their political meaning in the first place, even where the circumstances in which they operate have changed beyond recognition. Republicanism, socialism and anti-imperialism have never existed as fixed sets of ideas handed down intact from one generation to the next. A tradition of resistance inevitably begins to change when its principal expression becomes about representation within the institutions that resistance originally sought to confront.
Across Europe, parties that emerged from radical movements have faced similar pressures once they entered government. The experience of parties such as Syriza and Podemos demonstrates a wider problem facing the left today: electoral success can create new possibilities, reach new audiences and force socialists to sharpen their politics, but it can also create pressures to accommodate the structures that a party originally sought to transform. The example of Syriza is particularly instructive in this case. It entered government promising to challenge austerity and break with the demands imposed by European institutions. However, once in office, it faced enormous pressure to accept the limitations imposed by those institutions. The lesson is not that elections are irrelevant or that reforms fought for under capitalism are meaningless. It is that without organised movements capable of exerting pressure from outside the state, even radical governments can find themselves constrained by the forces they seek to challenge.
Moreover, without a real mass movement of people outside the parliament, the compromises of an ostensibly “left” government can become demobilising to the very forces that created their rise. When people are told that change is possible through elections alone, and then experience those elections producing little or no change, the result can be a disillusionment with “politics” in general. This is often where the far right seeks to intervene, presenting anger at social failure through the language of nationalism, racism and scapegoating rather than collective struggle or challenging the state.
Irreconcilable contradictions
This is the central contradiction facing Sinn Féin today. In the North, where it has spent almost two decades in part presiding over the institutions established by the Good Friday Agreement, and in the South, where it increasingly presents itself as the obvious party of government, the political centre of gravity has shifted. The language of struggle remains an important source of support for Sinn Féin, but its practical emphasis has changed. Anti-imperialist slogans occasionally feature in speeches, commemorations and party literature, from Easter Rising and Volunteer commemorations to the wide variety of merchandise available on their shop, but the habits of government are what ultimately decide the actions of Sinn Féin when it is forced to choose between the politics of the street and the state.
We see what Sinn Féin’s priorities are when solidarity with Palestine stops short of opposing the extension of the arms industry. When a visit to the White House and King’s Coronation during a genocide, matters more than opposing those institutions. When reproductive rights become the preserve of ‘exceptional cases’ rather than bodily autonomy. When immigration is discussed through the language of ‘concern’ rather than solidarity, or when defending trans healthcare becomes secondary to avoiding political controversy. On their own, these examples could be interpreted as expected if disappointing decisions. Together they paint a picture of a party increasingly attempting to reconcile two contradictory political projects: preserving the legitimacy that comes from a tradition of resistance while demonstrating the moderation expected of a party seeking to take power in the existing order.
The major political and social advances won in Ireland were not gifts from governments or the product of particularly persuasive parliamentary speeches. They were conceded because organised mass movements created the political conditions in which those institutions could no longer refuse them. When a political tradition becomes detached from that understanding, it risks preserving the memory of past struggles while losing sight of the methods through which those struggles achieved anything at all. A wreath laid on a grave, an Easter Lily worn on a lapel, or a speech honouring the sacrifices of previous generations cannot by themselves carry forward a tradition of struggle. Without organisation and collective action, the symbols of resistance become nothing more than a memorial to battles no longer being fought.
It would be comforting to imagine that this dynamic is unique to Sinn Féin, or simply the inevitable consequence of engaging in parliamentary politics. It is neither, which further demonstrates that even the most radical of political traditions are not immune from a rightwards drift. Across Irish republicanism more broadly, organisations that continue to define themselves as radical have also shown signs of adapting to the political terrain created by a resurgent right. In recent debates around migration, for example, groups such as the IRSP have increasingly framed their position around acknowledging people’s “legitimate concerns” rather than beginning from a straightforward socialist commitment to internationalism and working-class solidarity. The language may be different from that of the far right, but the territory has been ceded. This suggests that the problem actually runs deeper than one specific party. A stronger far right, a weaker trade union movement and an electoral landscape that increasingly makes way for far-right talking points create pressures that even organisations with radical histories can begin to accommodate.
The answer is therefore not to fly more tricolours or chant the old slogans more loudly, but to rebuild the movements capable of bringing the best of Ireland’s revolutionary tradition to life.
