Will Labour give in to Sinn Féin’s demands?

It’s not often that Irish republican party Sinn Féin hosts events in London, but the group included the UK capital in its post-election victory lap this week. Five of its seven MPs gathered in a dimly-lit hall in Hammersmith’s Irish Cultural Centre on Tuesday as the room filled with jubilant supporters, with many a Guinness in hand. There is certainly cause for celebration in the party: Sinn Féin has achieved a ‘perfect hat-trick’, as Belfast West MP Paul Maskey described it, becoming the largest group in local government, the Stormont Assembly and now Northern Irish party in Westminster. Retaining all seven of its seats, Sinn Féin increased its vote share in the general election by four points to 27 per cent.

‘We really had a tremendous result and we’re really, really proud of that,’ Mid Ulster MP Cathal Mallaghan told the crowd, grinning: ‘There may have been a few people in here who could possibly have voted in the election through postal or proxy, but we’ll say nothing about that.’ It’s not just their own fortunes that Sinn Féin politicians lauded – despite Labour being a unionist party, there was a tangible excitement in the air that the Tories are out. South Down’s Chris Hazzard suggested that there is now ‘an opportunity with the new Labour administration’. New MP Pat Cullen was more scathing: ‘Nothing could be worse than what we had with the Tories.’ Indeed Sinn Féin’s leader Mary Lou McDonald and First Minister Michelle O’Neill met Sir Keir Starmer and Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn just three days after the election. There, the case was made for more money for public services, the repealing of the Legacy Act – laid out in the King’s Speech on Wednesday – and ‘the need for immediate funding to be released’ for potential Euros 2028 site, Casement Park.

The project is a source of contention – and came under scrutiny this week when Starmer’s chief of staff Sue Gray was accused of ‘subverting’ cabinet in a bid to direct more funding towards it. Currently the Sinn Féin government, Ireland and the GAA have pledged less than a fifth of the projected £310 million needed. Sinn Féin hopes that the UK government will make a significant contribution. One Stormont insider divulged to the Times that Gray is ‘very close’ to the party’s finance minister Conor Murphy, while Maskey insisted on Tuesday that Benn ‘has promised that it is top of his to-do list at this particular stage’.

Despite hopes it would be mentioned in the King’s Speech, it wasn’t to be. Instead, negative briefings about Gray have not only brought her own connections to Ireland into the spotlight – the daughter of Irish parents, she ran a pub in County Down during the Troubles – but to the politics at play in the Casement Park project. Unionist groups are opposed to the revamp because they believe it will only be used for Gaelic football and hurling post-Euros while others are concerned about it being located in a republican area. That’s if it’s used at all for football – Sinn Féin politicians themselves are reticent to commit to a firm timeline, with Maskey admitting: ‘I have no doubt [it will be delivered]. Whether it’s done in time for the Euros, that’s a different question.’

While the party seems more upbeat about a Labour government there are challenges on the horizon. Namely, the issue of a referendum on the future of Ireland – which is at the top of Sinn Féin’s agenda. ‘We’re using the next five years to put as much pressure on the British government to call a border poll,’ Maskey insisted, as his new colleague Dáire Hughes made clear the importance of the Irish diaspora. ‘United Irish indy is an idea whose time has come,’ Hughes proclaimed. ‘All we have to do this time is convince people. You have to use every site of struggle available to you. Every staff canteen, every community centre, every pub, every restaurant.’ 

The Good Friday Agreement states that the Secretary of State should allow a border poll if there is majority support for a united Ireland. But what exactly a ‘majority’ is taken to mean isn’t quite clear – and there is frustration among London’s Irish community that Benn (whose name was consistently met with groans) hasn’t yet stated what Britain’s criteria for such a poll would look like. There’s time yet: Sinn Féin’s timeline is less immediate than that of the Scottish nationalists and instead has set 2030 as its target.

But issues in the Republic of Ireland complicate matters somewhat. Criticism of the South’s fee-paying health service cropped up, while one audience member pointed to an increasingly ‘anti-EU movement’ developing across the 26 counties. Certainly, the rise of the far right in Ireland is something the party has growing concerns about. Just last Monday, 15 people were charged after violence broke out during an anti-immigration protest in Dublin – with missiles lobbed at police and deliberate firemaking taking place in the village of Coolock. Sinn Féin sees itself as a progressive group but there are tensions within the party over its immigration stance – with grassroots activists leaning rightwards on the issue – and it has been suggested that the party could lose supporters to right-wing rivals. McDonald’s solution has been to explain away anti-migrant feeling as a symptom of failing public services, and her new MPs remained on message.

The republicans are determined to get down to delivery – and remain convinced that abstention will not hold them back. Facing down one sceptical audience member, Hazzard was clear: ‘We have a mandate not to take our seats, and that’s a mandate that’s been overwhelmingly endorsed in the last election. During the past 14 years of Tory misrule, it would have been personally very satisfying to stand up and roar. But you wouldn’t have changed a damn thing.’

Yet the party’s MPs insist Sinn Féin is fostering good cross-party relations, not just with Starmer but the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the SNP. While Labour harps on about its change agenda, the Irish group is determined to convince people it, too, has evolved. Hazzard insisted the popularity of First Minister O’Neill outweighed that of ex-SF president Gerry Adams – who ended up developing a close relationship with Labour’s Tony Blair – remarking: ‘It shows you the great positivity that there is around the Sinn Féin project.’ Using a softer rhetoric than past iterations of the party, Sinn Féin is beginning to offer a little more clarity on its vision for the future both within and outside of the United Kingdom. But with the Troubles a not-so-distant memory for many, the party has a long road ahead if it is to convince a UK government to help it radically overhaul the constitution.