An bhfuil ár lá tagtha? Sinn Féin, special status and the politics of Brexit
| Author | Mary C Murphy,Jonathan Evershed |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/13691481211026153 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211026153
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2022, Vol. 24(2) 243 –258
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481211026153
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An bhfuil ár lá tagtha?
Sinn Féin, special status
and the politics of Brexit
Jonathan Evershed and Mary C Murphy
Abstract
In this article we critically examine how Sinn Féin responded to Brexit, why, and with what
consequences. By destabilising the UK’s territorial constitution and intensifying debate about
Ireland’s constitutional future, Brexit has represented a moment of unprecedented opportunity
for Irish republicanism. However, this has been offset by the very real political and economic
risks it has posed for the island of Ireland. We argue that Sinn Féin’s pursuit of ‘Special Status’ for
Northern Ireland represented an attempt to mitigate Brexit’s risks, rather than to leverage its
opportunities. This approach came with political costs for the party, whose recent electoral surge
has arguably been in spite of rather than because of it. We demonstrate how Brexit has served
to reshape Sinn Féin’s politics, and how it has functioned to further moderate its ‘Eurocriticism’.
Keywords
Brexit, British politics, Irish politics, Irish unity, Northern Ireland politics, special designated
status, Sinn Féin
Introduction
On the morning of 24 June 2016, in the wake of the United Kingdom’s surprise decision
to leave the European Union, Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness addressed a press confer-
ence from the bottom of the Stormont Castle steps. The then Deputy First Minister of
Northern Ireland told the assembled reporters (Belfast Telegraph, 2016):
our focus is clearly on the democratically expressed wishes of the people here in the North. And
achieving a 56 percent vote was brought about as a result of Unionists, Nationalists and
Republicans voting together to remain in Europe . . . . We do believe that there is, against the
backdrop of this decision – which has been so detrimental to everybody on this island – a
democratic imperative for a border poll.
Thus, McGuinness outlined the narrative which has defined his party’s subsequent
approach to Brexit, which is founded on the view that it is ‘detrimental to everybody on
this island’.
University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
Corresponding author:
Jonathan Evershed, University College Cork, O’Rahilly Building, Cork, Ireland.
Email: jonathan.evershed@ucc.ie
1026153BPI0010.1177/13691481211026153The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsEvershed and Murphy
research-article2021
Original Article
244 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 24(2)
Brexit has posed profound political and economic risks for Ireland, North and South
(see Connelly, 2017; Murphy, 2018: 67–96, 2019). And it has represented an existential
threat to the achievements of the Good Friday Agreement – not least among which is the
open and largely invisible border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, which has
facilitated increased North-South political, socio-cultural and economic integration and
given expression to Nationalist political identity and aspirations. According to Sinn Féin,
these risks posed by Brexit provide the logic and impetus for a referendum on Irish unity,
which, under the terms of the Northern Ireland Act (1998), the Secretary of State for
Northern Ireland is mandated to call, ‘if at any time it appears likely to him (sic) that a
majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be
part of the United Kingdom and part of a united Ireland’.
Support for Irish unity has indeed been growing since the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Tonge (2020a) notes that although recent polling in Northern Ireland confirms majority
support for the constitutional status quo the margins have narrowed considerably.
Moreover, three of the five most recent polls (to February 2020) have recorded more
respondents supportive of unity than against. While it is both possible and necessary to
question the accuracy, validity and biases of this polling (Working Group on Unification
Referendums on the Island of Ireland, 2020), there is mounting evidence that Brexit, in
general, and the prospect of a hardening of the border, in particular, have increased
demand for a border poll, catalysed debate about the constitutional future of the island of
Ireland and made a united Ireland – though far from inevitable – a more immediate pos-
sibility (see Connolly and Doyle, 2019). This co-exists alongside increasing support for
Scottish independence, growing Scottish National Party (SNP) agitation for an ‘Indyref2’
and burgeoning ‘indy-curiosity’ in Wales (Shipman and Allardyce, 2021). In sum, Brexit
has represented a marked challenge to the integrity of the United Kingdom’s territorial
constitution (Wincott et al., 2020). For Sinn Féin, these developments represent an unpar-
alleled opportunity for the completion of the Republican project in the short term. This is
at the root of what one former Sinn Féin MLA described as a ‘dilemma’ for his party: that
‘actually, the harder Brexit is, I suspect, the more support there will be for a united Ireland.
But despite that, we are trying to mitigate or ameliorate the worst aspects of Brexit’.
(Interview with author, 2018, original emphasis).
In what follows, we draw on interviews with senior party-members, members of
opposing parties and EU officials, as well as party manifestos, policy documents and
statements, to investigate this dilemma and interrogate the tensions between risk and
opportunity that have defined Sinn Féin’s approach to Brexit. In so doing, we seek to
draw and build on studies whose understanding and analysis of Sinn Féin go beyond a
primary interest in (para)militarism and the party’s relationship with the Provisional Irish
Republican Army (PIRA) (see, for example, Finn, 2019; Taylor, 1997) and which seek to
engage with it on its own terms as a(n increasingly ‘normal’) political party (see, for
example, Bean, 2007; De Bréadún, 2015; Maillot, 2005; Ó Broin, 2009; Whiting, 2016):
one aspiring to power on both sides of the Irish border and whose attempts to influence
the course of Brexit’s critical constitutional juncture (Todd, 2017; cf. Cotton and Fontana,
2018) are wrought with political dilemmas, internal contradictions and (sometimes
fraught) policy debates, not all of which are directly related to the party’s continuing (re)
negotiation of its violent heritage.
Through semi-structured interviews with senior party figures, in particular, we have
sought to gain insight into and bring a degree of analytical clarity to some of these debates
and their consequences, which can often be obscured by Sinn Féin’s particularly strong
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