Sinn Féin
Sinn Féin is an Irish republican and democratic socialist political party active in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
The original Sinn Féin organisation was founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith. Its members founded the revolutionary Irish Republic and its parliament, the First Dáil, and many of them were active in the Irish War of Independence, during which the party was associated with the Irish Republican Army. The party split before the Irish Civil War and again in its aftermath, giving rise to the two traditionally dominant parties of Irish politics: Fianna Fáil, and Cumann na nGaedheal. For several decades the remaining Sinn Féin organisation was small and often without parliamentary representation. It continued its association with the Irish Republican Army. Another split in 1970 at the start of the Troubles led to the modern Sinn Féin party, with the other faction eventually becoming the Workers' Party.
During the Troubles, Sinn Féin was associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army. For most of that conflict, it was affected by broadcasting bans in the Irish and British media. Although the party sat on local councils, it maintained a policy of abstentionism for the British House of Commons and the Irish Dáil Éireann, standing for election to those legislatures but pledging not to take their seats if elected. After Gerry Adams became party leader in 1983, electoral politics were prioritised increasingly. In 1986, the party dropped its abstentionist policy for the Dáil; some members formed Republican Sinn Féin in protest. In the 1990s, Sinn Féin—under the leadership of Adams and Martin McGuinness—was involved in the Northern Ireland peace process. This led to the Good Friday Agreement and created the Northern Ireland Assembly, and saw Sinn Féin become part of the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive. In 2006, it co-signed the St Andrews Agreement and agreed to support the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
Sinn Féin is the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, having won the largest share of first-preference votes and the most seats in the 2022 election, the first time an Irish nationalist party has done so. Since 2024, Michelle O'Neill has served as the first ever Irish nationalist First Minister of Northern Ireland. From 2007 to 2022, Sinn Féin was the second-largest party in the Assembly, after the Democratic Unionist Party, and its nominees served as Deputy First Minister in the Northern Ireland Executive.
In the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, Sinn Féin has held seven of Northern Ireland's seats since the 2024 election; it continues its policy of abstentionism at Westminster. In Dáil Éireann it is the main opposition, having won the second largest number of seats in the 2024 election. The current president of Sinn Féin is Mary Lou McDonald, who succeeded Gerry Adams in 2018.
Name
The phrase "Sinn Féin" is Irish for "Ourselves" or "We Ourselves", although it is frequently mistranslated as "ourselves alone". The name is an assertion of Irish national sovereignty and self-determination, i.e., the Irish people governing themselves, rather than being part of a political union with Great Britain under the Westminster Parliament.A split in January 1970, mirroring a split in the IRA, led to the emergence of two groups calling themselves Sinn Féin. The majority group, under the continued leadership of Tomás Mac Giolla, became known as Official Sinn Féin or Sinn Féin . The minority group, led by Ruairà Ó Brádaigh, became known as Provisional Sinn Féin or Sinn Féin . Official Sinn Féin changed its name to Sinn Féin-The Workers' Party in 1977, and in 1982 it changed its name to The Workers' Party. As the "Official" group had dropped all mention of Sinn Féin from its name in 1982, the term "Provisional Sinn Féin" fell out of use, and in 1987 Provisional Sinn Féin registered as a political party in the Republic of Ireland under the name Sinn Féin.
Sinn Féin members have been referred to colloquially as "Shinners", a term intended as a pejorative.
History
1905–1922
Sinn Féin was founded on 28 November 1905, when, at the first annual Convention of the National Council, Arthur Griffith outlined the Sinn Féin policy, "to establish in Ireland's capital a national legislature endowed with the moral authority of the Irish nation". Its initial political platform was both conservative and monarchist, advocating for an Anglo-Irish dual monarchy unified with the British Crown. The party contested the 1908 North Leitrim by-election, where it secured 27% of the vote. Thereafter, both support and membership fell. At its 1910 ard fheis attendance was poor, and there was difficulty finding members willing to take seats on the executive.File:McGuinness- 1917 election.jpg|thumb|The campaign car of Joseph McGuinness, who won the 1917 South Longford by-election whilst imprisoned. He was one of the first Sinn Féin MPs to be elected.
In 1914, Sinn Féin members, including Griffith, joined the anti-Redmond Irish Volunteers, which was referred to by Redmondites and others as the "Sinn Féin Volunteers". Although Griffith himself did not take part in the Easter Rising of 1916, many Sinn Féin members who were members of the Volunteers and the Irish Republican Brotherhood did. Government and newspapers dubbed the Rising "the Sinn Féin Rising". After the Rising, republicans came together under the banner of Sinn Féin, and at the 1917 ard fheis the party committed itself for the first time to the establishment of an Irish Republic. In the 1918 general election, Sinn Féin won 73 of Ireland's 105 seats, and in January 1919, its MPs assembled in Dublin and proclaimed themselves Dáil Éireann, the parliament of Ireland. Sinn Féin candidate Constance Markievicz became the first woman elected to the United Kingdom House of Commons. However, in line with Sinn Féin abstentionist policy, she did not take her seat in the House of Commons.
The party supported the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence, and members of the Dáil government negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty with the British government in 1921. In the Dáil debates that followed, the party divided on the Treaty. The pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty components managed to agree on a "Coalition Panel" of Sinn Féin candidates to stand in the 1922 general election. After the election, anti-Treaty members walked out of the Dáil, and pro- and anti-Treaty members took opposite sides in the ensuing Civil War.
1923–1970
Pro-Treaty Dáil deputies and other Treaty supporters formed a new party, Cumann na nGaedheal, on 27 April 1923 at a meeting in Dublin, where delegates agreed on a constitution and political programme. Cumann na nGaedheal went on to govern the new Irish Free State for nine years. Anti-Treaty Sinn Féin members continued to boycott the Dáil. At a special Ard Fheis in March 1926, de Valera proposed that elected members be allowed to take their seats in the Dáil if and when the controversial Oath of Allegiance was removed. When his motion was defeated, de Valera resigned from Sinn Féin; on 16 May 1926, he founded his own party, Fianna Fáil, which was dedicated to republicanising the Free State from within its political structures. He took most Sinn Féin Teachtaà Dála with him. De Valera's resignation meant also the loss of financial support from America. The rump Sinn Féin party could field no more than fifteen candidates, and won only five seats in the June 1927 general election, a decline in support not seen since before 1916. Vice-president and de facto leader Mary MacSwiney announced that the party simply did not have the funds to contest the second election called that year, declaring "no true Irish citizen can vote for any of the other parties". Fianna Fáil came to power at the 1932 general election and went on to long dominate politics in the independent Irish state.An attempt in the 1940s to access funds that had been put in the care of the High Court led to the Sinn Féin Funds case, which the party lost and in which the judge ruled that it was not the legal successor to the Sinn Féin of 1917.
By the late 1940s, two decades removed from the Fianna Fáil split and now the Sinn Féin funds lost, the party was little more than a husk. The emergence of a popular new republican party, led by former IRA members, in Clann na Poblachta, threatened to void any remaining purpose Sinn Féin had left. However, it was around this same time that the IRA leadership once again sought to have a political arm. Following an IRA army convention in 1948, IRA members were instructed to join Sinn Féin en masse and by 1950 they had successfully taken total control of the party, with IRA army council member Paddy McLogan named as the new president of the party. As part of this rapprochement, it was later made clear by the army council that the IRA would dictate to Sinn Féin, and not the other way around.
At the 1955 United Kingdom general election, two Sinn Féin candidates were elected to Westminster, and likewise, four members of Sinn Féin were elected to Leinster House in the 1957 Irish general election. In December 1956, at the beginning of the IRA's Border Campaign, the Northern Ireland Government banned Sinn Féin under the Special Powers Act; it would remain banned until 1974. By the end of the Border campaign five years later, the party had once again lost all national representation. Through the 1960s, some leading figures in the movement, such as Cathal Goulding, Seán Garland, Billy McMillen and Tomás Mac Giolla, moved steadily to the left, even to Marxism, as a result of their own reading and thinking and contacts with the Irish and international left. This angered more traditional republicans, who wanted to stick to the national question and armed struggle. The Garland Commission was set up in 1967, to investigate the possibility of ending abstentionism. Its report angered the already disaffected traditional republican element within the party, notably Seán Mac StÃofáin and Ruairà Ó Brádaigh, who viewed such a policy as treason against the Irish Republic.