Sinn Féin’s class-war language is more British than Irish

Many associate the Easter Rising with Sinn Féin, but in terms of its planning, organisation and execution, the Rising was an Irish Republican Brotherhood operation, aided and abetted by James Connolly’s Citizen Army.

Sinn Féin came into their own after the Rising, capitalising on the events. De Valera didn’t even join Sinn Féin until 1917. Ironically, the British authorities created Sinn Féin. By labelling the Rising the “Sinn Féin” rebellion, the British conferred on it the leadership of Irish Republicanism. Once identified with the Rising which they didn’t organise, Sinn Féin grasped the chance to lead Irish nationalism, destroying all before them in the 1918 election.

Fast forward more than a century and the big question is not why today’s Sinn Féin party, a different beast, has recently emerged as a force in Irish politics, but why it hasn’t become a bigger force in the Republic. Mary Lou McDonald’s party peaked at 37 per cent in polling between 2021 and 2023, just after the pandemic. When the pandemic receded, so did their support.

By the November 2024 general election, their first-preference vote had fallen to 19 per cent, down 5.5 percentage points from their 2020 breakthrough and their first vote decline in 35 years.

Maybe one explanation for the party’s inability to regain momentum, is how it frames the economic debate. Anti-capitalist, class-war, Marxist rhetoric might work in the more stagnant, public sector subsidy-dominated North, but doesn’t gain much purchase in the more dynamic, open and commercially minded Republic.

An example of this black and white rhetoric was on display this week in the reaction to the Government’s suggestion that it might encourage people to build modular housing in their back gardens.

Until last weekend, planning exemptions for standalone structures in residential gardens have historically been capped at 25sq m – sufficient for a garden office or shed, not a habitable home. Now the Government is hinting at raising this limit to 40–45sq m for detached, habitable structures, effectively legalising “granny flats” without planning permission.

The State has also moved from its original position that only family members could move into a new home in the back garden and is considering extending the rent-a-room relief scheme, currently allowing homeowners to earn up to €14,000 tax free from renting a room.

In a housing crisis, any increase in supply is a bonus, particularly an increase in areas which are already planned and on the utility grids for transport, electricity and water. Offering a pragmatic additional lever to deliver more housing units in a market that has been severely supply-constrained for the better part of a decade, these additional tax incentives – which will help bring that supply to the market – appear to be a logical (small) part of any strategy to build new homes.

These sorts of initiatives have worked in other countries such as Sweden, the US and Canada. Progress Ireland, a think tank, estimates that there are potentially 348,730 sites across Ireland that meet the physical and financial criteria for a seomra. Such a modest move might add 7,000 new homes per year. Not transformative, but a move in the right direction. For context, we need to build approximately 60,000 homes per year to meet growing demand. But every little helps and no public investment is required. It’s a case of letting people do their thing. What is wrong with that?

Well a lot, according to Sinn Féin’s housing guru Eoin Ó Broin, who dismissed the move to allow landlords rent seomraí as “deeply concerning” and went on to argue that “it will be used by rogue landlords to rack and stack poor quality cabins in back gardens and charge thousands of euros to hard-pressed renters”. The framing of “rogue landlords”, “rack and stack”, and “hard-pressed renters” in class-warfare language seems excessive.

At its core, this policy is about enabling a homeowner to earn €10,000–€14,000 per year to offset against their mortgage, while putting a much-needed small dwelling into the market. By depicting every homeowner as a potential exploiter and every renter as a victim-in-waiting, Sinn Féin is beating an all-or-nothing, Marxist drum – one the Irish public, by and large, does not share.

One of the dilemmas of Marxism, like all religions that derive legitimacy from a single book, is that it claims an all-encompassing catechism to interpret every aspect of society, from history, to politics and economics, and even family relations. Marxism achieves this by stereotyping people into class roles and from there, imputing to them the parameters or incentives of that class.

As a result, all landlords are greedy, rack and stack merchants or rogue operators. Individuals are reduced to archetypes, not real people. We know that daily life is more nuanced and complex.

In terms of class-war language, because they are more obsessed with class in the UK, Sinn Féin’s rhetoric sometimes sounds, oddly for an Irish nationalist movement, more British than Irish. In the Republic, the scope for class war is lower because social mobility is higher than in the UK.

The story of Ireland over the past 40 years has been one of class compression, not alienation. Of course there are extremes, but income inequality after taxes places Ireland among the most equal in the EU.

OECD data found that while the middle classes have been hollowed out in many advanced economies, Ireland is one of only a handful of countries (alongside Chile and Mexico) where the middle class has substantially expanded in recent decades.

In the past two decades, the share of adults in middle-income households grew from 60 per cent in 1991 (the lowest in the cohort) to 69 per cent. The median income of middle-class households in Ireland rose by 71 per cent – again the highest of any country studied, well ahead of Norway (48 per cent) and Luxembourg (37 per cent). The income of lower-income households also rose 73 per cent – more than any other country.

When it comes to education, a clear marker of the middle class, the Republic outshines the North. Only 71 per cent of 15- to 19-year-olds in NI are in education versus 94 per cent in Ireland, and early school leaving rates are three times higher in NI.

Perhaps because the modern Sinn Féin was forged largely in the North, its stance is influenced by the public sector “subvention” of about £11 billion (€12.6 billion) annually, equivalent to roughly a quarter of NI’s GDP. Economic activity is, to an extraordinary degree, a function of how much Westminster decides to allocate, rendering it hostage to the class-war-infected framing of British politics.

By contrast, the Republic’s economy is open, dynamic, multinational, and driven by private sector activity that is not subject to political allocation. Wealth is not simply redistributed – it is created.

A homeowner renting a seomra is not taking from a renter. They are adding a unit to the market, generating a small income, and enabling someone to live closer to their community. This is not exploitation. It is the kind of willing, diffuse, market-mediated wealth creation that a generation of Irish people, across income brackets, have participated in and broadly endorsed.

Ireland has evolved into a significantly different society to the UK and its satellite Northern Ireland. For Sinn Féin to make the breakthrough, it has to become more Irish and less British; 110 years after the Rising, isn’t that an odd place to end up?