BELFAST — Sinn Féin, the Irish republican party that wants to abolish Northern Ireland, has become the U.K. region’s biggest player in Britain’s parliament — even though its MPs refuse to take their seats there.
Sinn Féin cruised to a string of often lopsided victories Friday as it easily defended its seven parliamentary seats. It even came within 179 votes of gaining another from the main pro-British party, the Democratic Unionists, who saw their own support slump in post-Brexit disarray to a quarter-century low.
The result completed a hat trick of first-place finishes north of the border for Sinn Féin, which won the most seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2022 and the most seats on its local councils in 2023. Now it holds the most House of Commons seats of any Northern Irish party, thanks to the DUP’s collapse to just five seats.
This has boosted Sinn Féin morale following its recent struggles in the Republic of Ireland, where the party has never been in government but hopes to mount a breakthrough in an election expected later this year.
Sinn Féin’s party Leader Mary Lou McDonald and First Minister Michelle O’Neill reserved their biggest smiles Friday for the victory of the party’s newest high-profile recruit, former U.K. nursing union chief Pat Cullen.
The surprise recruitment of Cullen — a well-regarded figure in British labor union politics, who had never run for political office before — reflects Sinn Féin’s focus under McDonald on moving away from its Irish Republican Army roots and toward a more conventional left-wing platform delivered increasingly by women.
Cullen won in Fermanagh-South Tyrone, the sprawling border constituency where IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands was elected MP from his prison death-bed in 1981 — an electoral earthquake that inspired Sinn Féin to start contesting British elections for the first time.
In the decades since, and particularly following the IRA’s 1990s cease-fires, Sinn Féin and unionists turned Fermanagh-South Tyrone into the U.K.’s most tightly contested constituency — but no longer.
Cullen romped home Friday with a 4,500-vote majority on her moderate unionist challenger, even though the Democratic Unionists had stepped aside to make a Sinn Féin win harder.
Even more surprisingly, Sinn Féin sharply narrowed the DUP’s margin of victory in predominantly Protestant districts which have always been represented by unionists since the state’s foundation in 1921. It even came within 179 votes of wresting East Londonderry from the DUP’s longest-serving lawmaker, Gregory Campbell.
The Democratic Unionists did lose three solidly unionist constituencies to other parties — including, against all expectations, their supposedly safest seat of all, North Antrim, which the DUP’s firebrand founder, Ian Paisley, won for the first time back in 1970.
The Paisley dynasty reigned in North Antrim without serious challenge for 54 years until Friday, when the late preacher’s son, Ian Paisley Jr., lost re-election by 450 votes. The winner, Jim Allister, is a former DUP lawmaker who denounces Northern Ireland’s peace process — and the DUP’s belated support for it — as likely to deliver a united Ireland.
Source: The BBC
By contrast, as Sinn Féin keeps building its support base in Northern Ireland, its campaigners barely mention their long-term aim of pushing the territory out of the U.K. and into the EU state next door. Instead, they emphasize the need for better British-funded services, particularly to the most foundational of them all, the National Health Service. Waits for specialist appointments and surgeries are worst in Northern Ireland, a problem Cullen vowed to highlight as an MP with her nursing background and connections to carers.
Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord does include a British government commitment to hold a referendum on uniting Ireland once political attitudes on the ground appear likely to produce a pro-unity majority vote in Northern Ireland. But the incoming Prime Minister Keir Starmer has emphasized that such a vote is highly unlikely in Labour’s coming five-year term.
Yet some analysts see Sinn Féin’s growth in Northern Ireland within a growing Catholic community as inevitably paving the way for such a referendum, a trend strengthened by Friday’s results. These highlighted how younger voters on the Irish nationalist side of Northern Ireland’s divide powerfully back Sinn Féin, not its moderate rival, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), which retained its own two MPs.
“The under-30s in the nationalist community overwhelmingly support Sinn Féin. They look to Sinn Féin and want to vote for change — a party that wants nothing to do with Westminster,” said Brian Feeney, a one-time SDLP politician and former history teacher in Belfast who now analyzes Northern Irish politics.
“As the demographics keep changing in the favor of nationalists, the north of Ireland is changing,” said Feeney, who sees East Londonderry as destined to fall to Sinn Féin as the party keeps turning the electoral map from unionist orange to nationalist green. “Next time, Gregory Campbell or whoever the DUP candidate is will lose the seat.”
For now, Sinn Féin is sticking to its policy of refusing to let its MPs take their place on the green benches of the House of Commons, citing the obligation to give an oath of allegiance to King Charles.
However some commentators, such as Sam McBride of the Belfast Telegraph, think it’s only a question of time before Sinn Féin ends its boycott on British parliamentary politics — if only to gain a powerful new platform for demanding a vote on a united Ireland.
They cite Sinn Féin’s slow march away from its pre-Bobby Sands existence as an IRA mouthpiece committed to overthrowing governments, not running them.
“History is littered,” McBride argued, “with the debris of Sinn Féin’s discarded positions.”
