To appreciate the astonishing rise of Sinn Féin consider this: even the IRA once disdained the party. “We used to say it was made up of cowards and women,” a former IRA man told Aoife Moore. “These are people who do the collections, look after your family when you’re inside, but there was no chance that you were sort of taking a political lead from them.”
That was Sinn Féin in the 1970s – a ramshackle instrument of propaganda, a blip on the political radar, and utterly subservient to Irish republicanism’s military wing.
Yet Sinn Féin went on to sideline the IRA and overtake mainstream parties, leaving it poised to lead governments in the north and south of Ireland. How it accomplished that feat is the subject of Moore’s fascinating, insightful, warts-and-all portrait.
From Bobby Sands being elected an MP while on hunger strike in 1981 to Gerry Adams’s takeover of the republican movement, the zigzag path to the 1998 Good Friday agreement and Sinn Féin’s subsequent electoral ascent, a familiar story is spliced with eye-opening insider anecdotes to make supporters squirm. The Long Game will not be on the bookstand at the party’s next Ard Fheis (party conference).
Moore, an award-winning journalist from Derry, is a knowledgable guide. From Derry, she lost an uncle, Patrick Doherty, to the British army rampage on Bloody Sunday. As a correspondent for the Irish Examiner and other outlets she wrote scoops about misbehaviour in Sinn Féin and government parties.
In chronicling Sinn Féin’s arc she pauses to show the human cost of its tardy commitment to non-violence: Charles Love, 16, killed by an IRA bomb in Derry in 1990; Gemma Berezag, who killed herself in 2016, drained by caring for a husband severely disabled by the 1996 Docklands bombing.
Such details taint Sinn Féin, which justified atrocities, but also underline its achievement in weaning the IRA off murder. Adams emerges as cold and machiavellian, which perhaps were essential qualities in his long game of cajoling and manipulating the movement into shedding republican dogma, bit by bit, until it became a constitutional player.
More discomfiting for Adams is Moore’s dissection of his handling of sexual abuse cases, including that of his brother Liam Adams, who was convicted in 2013 of raping his daughter (and Gerry’s niece) Áine. The Sinn Féin president had heard of the allegations in 1987 yet made a statement to police only in 2009, prompting public outrage.
Martin McGuinness and other party figures wanted Adams to step aside, even if temporarily, in 2013, but Adams faced them down and enlisted staffers to shield his reputation, according to Moore. “It was all about Gerry,” said one witness. “I have served in the IRA and spent my life in Sinn Féin, and it was during the Áine Adams revelations that I realised that Gerry Adams is a terrible person.”
Like most quotes, it is anonymous. That is understandable – the party did not cooperate with Moore and ostracises those who speak out – but the shortage of named sources is a weakness.
Adams stepped down as party leader in 2018, revered by the republican faithful, and anointed a successor, Mary Lou McDonald, an articulate, media-savvy, middle-class Dubliner.
Moore says senior IRA figures still exert some sway. “Them people don’t just fucking evaporate,” a former official told her. Allegations of links to criminals still haunt the party. But Moore debunks the notion that semi-retired IRA leaders pull the strings. McDonald and a handful of elected representatives dictate policy to colleagues who stick to the script, often robotically.
Slick fundraising, data-driven campaigning and opponents’ blunders have delivered electoral gains, north and south. The Democratic Unionist party’s (DUP) Brexit antics have coalesced nationalist support around Sinn Féin, making it Northern Ireland’s biggest party. In the republic, a housing crisis and fatigue with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael smooth Sinn Féin’s apparent glide to government as centre-left populists.
So a triumph for Adams’s long game – except for one catch. Despite Brexit and demographic changes a united Ireland still seems distant. Most in the north don’t want it and support in the south is shallow. That may change. In the meantime the party of “cowards and women” can console itself with the prospect of power.
• Rory Carroll is the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent and author of Killing Thatcher: the IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown. The Long Game: Inside Sinn Féin by Aoife Moore is published by Penguin (£17.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
