The coins came from above. Siobhán Fenton was canvassing in a Dublin inner-city block of flats in May 2024, knocking on doors in what should have been friendly territory, when she felt a sharp sting on her neck. Then her shoulder. Then her forearm. A man on a balcony was hurling loose change at her and roaring: "Sinn Féin traitors! Mary Lou Mohammad! Ireland is full!" The bruises and gashes those coins left were a preview of what was about to happen to her party at the ballot box.
A party that expected to govern
For much of the period between 2020 and 2024, Sinn Féin operated with the quiet confidence of a party whose turn had come. The OECD's data on Irish household costs confirmed what voters felt: a housing emergency, a cost-of-living squeeze, a political establishment that seemed unable or unwilling to respond. Mary Lou McDonald, who succeeded Gerry Adams as leader in 2018, presented herself as the antidote, particularly to younger voters priced out of homeownership.
The 2020 general election appeared to vindicate that pitch. Sinn Féin took 24.5% of first preference votes, overtaking both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the two centrist parties that had traded power for a century. The result was extraordinary for a party once treated as a political pariah because of its links to the Provisional IRA. But Sinn Féin had run too few candidates to translate that vote share into seats. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, rivals since the Irish civil war, stitched together enough support to form a coalition. Sinn Féin went back to opposition, but the prevailing assumption in Dublin was that the next election would deliver the party into government.
The mood inside the party was captured by a Belfast colleague who half-jokingly told Fenton when she joined in early 2020: "Don't fuck it up." A senior figure in Northern Ireland, where Sinn Féin had become the largest party at Stormont in 2022, paving the way for Michelle O'Neill to become first minister, was handing the southern operation a simple instruction: do not squander this moment.
The backlash that nobody in leadership saw coming
Fenton's new book, Ourselves Alone: Sinn Féin Behind Closed Doors, published this week, breaks with the party's reputation for secrecy and internal discipline to chronicle how that moment was squandered. The core argument is that Sinn Féin's leadership was caught off guard by the speed and depth of anti-immigrant feeling within its own base. Working-class communities that had supplied the party with votes and activists for decades were, by 2024, absorbing conspiracy theories and hostility directed at Muslims and asylum seekers. The party apparatus, weakened by pandemic-era restrictions on canvassing and an increasing focus on the parliamentary party over local organisation, failed to detect the shift.
"By the time the party realised how bad things had gotten it was almost too late," Fenton said. "The far right had infiltrated lots of Sinn Féin strongholds and we hadn't picked up on it." She described a leadership that experienced genuine panic as it struggled to respond to a sentiment it had not anticipated and did not know how to address.
The Ireland that produced this backlash was one shaped by intersecting pressures. A chronic housing shortage, acute in Dublin, had pushed rents and purchase prices to levels that locked out a generation. Frontex data on arrivals to Europe tracks the broader migration flows that also reached Ireland, where the number of international protection applicants rose sharply. Cost-of-living inflation bit hard. Far-right activists, organised on social media and present on the streets, offered a simple narrative: outsiders were to blame, and any party that disagreed was complicit.
McDonald's missteps compounded the problem
The party's difficulties were not solely external. McDonald made at least two significant errors of judgment that alienated constituencies she could ill afford to lose. In November 2023, after a riot devastated parts of central Dublin, she appeared to blame the police rather than those responsible for the violence. The comment drew criticism from across the political spectrum and reinforced doubts about her readiness for high office.
More damaging was her suggestion that the average Dublin house price should fall to around 300,000 euro. For younger renters desperate to buy, this sounded like a promise. For existing homeowners, many of them in the very working-class communities Sinn Féin relied upon, it sounded like a threat to the value of their single significant asset. The remark revealed a tension at the heart of the party's coalition: the people who needed cheaper housing and the people who already owned it were often the same voters, viewing the question from different angles depending on whether they were on the ladder or beneath it.
A grassroots hollowed out during Covid
Fenton identifies a structural cause behind the leadership's blindness. Covid-19 restrictions from 2020 onwards prevented the door-to-door canvassing and community meetings that had traditionally kept Sinn Féin connected to its base. The party's energy shifted towards the parliamentary operation in Leinster House. Local organisations withered. By the time restrictions eased, the ground had shifted. Activists who had once knocked on doors and gauged the mood in person were absent, and the spaces they might have filled were occupied by online conspiracy networks and street-level agitators.
Fenton argues that the party should have responded by redoubling its grassroots work: going door to door, engaging with community anxieties directly, and making an explicit case against scapegoating immigrants and refugees. Instead, leaders hesitated. The result was a vacuum, and the far right filled it. Working-class voters who had seen Sinn Féin as their vehicle came to regard it as another establishment party indifferent to their concerns about rapid demographic change.
The election results that confirmed the damage
The May 2024 local and European elections were supposed to be a springboard. Instead, they confirmed the bleeding. Support bled away in the very areas that had once been the party's foundation. McDonald was branded a traitor by people who had previously canvassed for her. Months later, the general election delivered the final verdict: Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael remained in power, and Sinn Féin stayed in opposition, its trajectory reversed.
Fenton's contract was not renewed. She returned to Belfast and now works as a writer and analyst. She is no longer a member of Sinn Féin. Her departure, and her decision to write the book, represents a rare breach in a party culture that has historically valued loyalty and discretion above all else.
A pattern across Europe
The dynamic Fenton describes is not unique to Ireland. Left and centre-left parties across Europe have spent years grappling with the same tension: how to maintain solidarity with migrants and refugees when a significant portion of their traditional electorate wants tighter borders. The Eurostat migration statistics track the scale of arrivals that have reshaped politics from Sweden to Italy. In country after country, parties that prioritise open-door rhetoric have lost working-class voters to movements promising restriction. Those that pivot towards restriction have lost progressive supporters. Few have found a formulation that holds both.
Sinn Féin's case is distinctive because of its particular history. A party born from armed struggle, long accustomed to operating outside the political mainstream, might have been expected to possess sharper antennae for shifts in working-class sentiment. The fact that it did not is partly a story of institutional change: a party that once organised through tightly controlled local structures had, by the 2020s, become more dependent on media strategy and parliamentary performance. The trade-off was responsiveness. The leadership could command a news cycle. It could no longer read a room.
An unresolved dilemma
Immigration remains the issue that Sinn Féin cannot settle. Fenton suggests the leadership may be tempted to avoid it until the next election, then adopt a position based on whatever the political climate demands at that point. The calculation is understandable but risky. Avoiding the question cedes ground to parties willing to talk about it, whether the far right or mainstream competitors toughening their rhetoric. Taking a clear position, meanwhile, risks splitting the coalition between working-class voters who want restrictions and middle-class progressives who favour integration.
Fenton herself is candid about the scale of the challenge. The party she served, and the broader progressive movement she identifies with, has not yet found a way to acknowledge legitimate anxieties about housing, services and rapid change without conceding the argument to those who blame newcomers for problems that predate them.
People mentioned
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Siobhán Fenton
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Mary Lou McDonald
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Michelle O'Neill
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Gerry Adams
Organisations
Sinn Féin · Fianna Fáil · Fine Gael · Social Democratic and Labour Party
