'Maybe we took our eye off the ball': Sinn Féin reflects on its poor election performance

Mary Lou McDonald pictured in the RDS count centre

“I AM SORRY we didn’t do better,” Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said earlier this week once the dust had begun to settle after the local elections.

Whatever way you dice it, it has not been a great election for Sinn Féin.

Although the party gained an additional 21 seats, it has not managed to return to the 159 seats it held in 2014.

Now with 102 seats across the country (11%), Sinn Féin has fared much worse than pollsters predicted.

Just ahead of the election on May 31 a Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks poll had the party at 22%, a 5 point drop from two months earlier.

Party members have reflected on this in different ways.

Some have questioned the candidate strategy implemented by party leadership; some have suggested that not enough young people went out to vote; and others said it came down to an identity crisis within the party.

Without any exit polls carried out for this election, we have no way of assessing the claim about young people not turning out to vote, but both other points are views widely held among Sinn Féin grassroots members.

The Journal caught up with a number of Sinn Féin candidates this week to assess the mood after what McDonald herself described as a disappointing election.

In Newbridge in Co Kildare, first-time Sinn Féin candidate James Stokes is feeling positive despite losing out.

At just 18 years of age, Stokes, a member of the Travelling Community and a student at Maynooth University, made headlines this week as he battled it out for the last remaining seat in the country.

Four recounts were ordered with Stokes and Aontú candidate Melissa Byrne having just a vote between them at different points. On the final recount, Stokes was up two votes and Byrne bowed out leaving him in contention for the final seat with Independent Tom McDonnell.

It was McDonnell’s victory in the end, with the independent immediately courting controversy when he called for women to “breed” more in the aftermath of his win.

Taking to X, formerly Twitter, Stokes said: “Personally if I was elected, I wouldn’t have said that..just saying.”

Speaking to The Journal, Stokes said he is proud of coming within “touching distance” of a seat and claimed that this week is only the beginning of his political career.

Reflecting on why it didn’t go his way this time, he suggested that his youth may have gone against him.

Although he will be too young to contest a seat in the next general election (you must be 21 to hold a seat in Dáil Éireann), Stokes said he would love to do so in the future.

Until then, he plans on continuing his studies to be a primary school teacher and remaining active in Sinn Féin, and remarked on the strong sense of unity among his party colleagues.

“We are together, we are united and we are going to come into this next general election stronger than ever,” Stokes said.

Looking at the broader picture, Stokes doesn’t accept that it has been a bad election for the party.

“It’s not the worst for Sinn Féin. We made gains, we were obviously hoping to make bigger gains but we’ll learn from the mistakes and hopefully do better in the general election,” Stokes said.

However, not all of Sinn Féin’s unsuccessful candidates have been as positive as Stokes.

‘Failed to master its own destiny’

One candidate who lost out and did not wish to speak on the record told The Journal that they believe the Sinn Féin vote was fractured in this election because of immigration, with votes being lost to groups on both the left and the right of the party.

They added that Sinn Féin’s candidate strategy of running three or four candidates in certain LEAs “may have been a mistake”.

For example, in Cabra-Glasnevin and the North Inner City in Dublin, both traditionally Sinn Féin strongholds, the party only managed to return one candidate in each.

The candidate took the view that Sinn Féin should have been more clear on its immigration position and that the party “failed to be the master of its own destiny”.

“I do think our room to manoeuvre on the issue is negligible – we can’t track to the right but we can stand up for the working class and I think that’s where we failed,” the candidate argued.

“The burden [of asylum seeker accommodation centres] doesn’t get shared, Sinn Féin maybe took their eye off the ball,” they said.

“We arrived at a coalition of voters in 2020 and in the interim we pursued non-working class voters. We have to reflect,” they said.

This is an idea that is echoed across other grassroot members of the party, with one member telling The Journal ahead of the election that there have been attempts to drive a wedge between Sinn Féin and the working class communities where it traditionally performs best.

They maintained that the party’s contradictory positions on immigration did not help this.

In recent months, Sinn Féin has been accused by some of pandering to the far-right with its stance on “open borders”, the party however has flatly denied this and instead argues that it is pushing back on far-right narratives.

Fresh faces

Putting this to one side though, and looking at things on a more local level, Sinn Féin had very positive results in certain pockets of the country.

In Cavan, the party had a great day, tripling its representation from one to three councillors.

However, this was at the expense of veteran councillor Paddy McDonald who lost his seat to first-time Sinn Féin candidate Stiofán Connaty.

McDonald, who continues to hold the role as Sinn Féin chairman in Cavan, had been a councillor for 20 years.

He was not the only sitting Sinn Féin councillor to lose his seat to a fresh face in the party: in Cork city Orla O’Leary also lost her seat and was replaced by a first-time Sinn Féin candidate.

Speaking to The Journal, McDonald was gracious in defeat and said overall that he was happy with the result in Cavan.

“We ran an extra candidate in the area – maybe it wasn’t the right decision, maybe people wanted change with young blood, I’m not sure,” he said when asked what went wrong for him.

“There’s more to life than politics, that’s the way I look at life,” he said.