Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I: Defining the Community
- Part II: The Historic Compromise?
- Introduction to Part II
- 4 The Ideological Origins of New Sinn Féin
- 5 On the Long Road: The Provisional Politics of Transition
- 6 The Historic Compromise?
- Conclusion: The End of a Song?
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The Ideological Origins of New Sinn Féin
from Part II: The Historic Compromise?
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I: Defining the Community
- Part II: The Historic Compromise?
- Introduction to Part II
- 4 The Ideological Origins of New Sinn Féin
- 5 On the Long Road: The Provisional Politics of Transition
- 6 The Historic Compromise?
- Conclusion: The End of a Song?
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great deal of morbid symptoms appear.
It is too early to say. [Chinese leader Zhou Enlai in 1989, when asked about the effects of the French Revolution.]
The party of moderate progress within the bounds of the law?
Sinn Féin's decision in January 2007 to accept the legitimacy of the PSNI completed a process that fundamentally changed the nature of Provisional ideology, and radically transformed the contours of politics throughout Ireland. The hand of history was felt on a great many shoulders in this period, but, for once, the description ‘historic’ was no mere political soundbite. The logic of Provisional politics from the late 1980s seemed to lead inexorably towards this point, a process described by one Provisional as ‘moving from an historical position, strategy and culture of resistance to one of engagement, negotiation and governance’. It reflected a widely-held view that the vote signalled not merely the end of one form of Provisionalism, but, more generally, the passing of militant Irish Republicanism as a historic force.
Beginning with the abandonment of abstentionism in 1986 and ending with the vote on policing in 2007, the Provisionals had revised so many positions previously regarded as fundamental and crossed so many Rubicons that this sense of a qualitative historical shift within Republicanism seemed fully justified. Just as cultural critics had defined Ireland as a ‘post-nationalist’ society, it now seemed possible to use similar terminology to define the Provisionals as ‘post-Republican’.
It became commonplace to compare the Provisionals’ trajectory with other revisionist projects. For example, the Provisionals’ effective public relations and ideological modernization drew comparisons with New Labour's vacuous politics of presentational slickness and abandonment of core values. Other comparisons were prompted by historicist parallels between the Provisionals’ evolution into ‘constitutional revolutionaries’ in the 1990s and Fianna Fáil's embrace of ‘slight constitutionality’ in the late 1920s. The Big Lad was following The Chief: the latest ‘legion of the rearguard’ had been transformed into yet another ‘party of moderate progress within the bounds of the law’.
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- The New Politics of Sinn Féin , pp. 138 - 173Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007