Is Sinn Féin a party of the Left?

By Eamonn McCann

The 2009 Brass Neck of the Year award goes to Jim Gibney of Sinn Féin for his column in the Irish News on November 12th.

Reporting on the ICTU rallies against cuts and in defence of the public service, Gibney wrote that, “Sinn Féin ministers in the executive have made their position crystal clear in opposing any attempts to cut front-line services or introduce privatisation measures... It was therefore disappointing to hear union leaders at the rally in Belfast accuse all the parties in the executive of being in favour of cuts...”

In fact, all the executive parties backed the budget, which has made savage cuts in services inevitable. The budget incorporates the three percent year-on-year “efficiency savings” demanded by the British Treasury. SF, like the DUP, has swallowed this whole. 

They can go to Downing Street and bang the table for hundreds of millions to smooth the way towards devolution of policing. But there’s no banging of tables for adequate resources for health or education or public sector jobs.

The 2008-09 budget for youth services has been slashed by seven percent by SF Education Minister Catriona Ruane.  She has also inflicted severe cuts on after-hours schools provision, which involved breakfast clubs, homework sessions, various extra-curricular activities, etc.

These are front-line services attacked by a SF Minister.

Massive job losses are threatened under the “review” of local government, through which the number of councils will be reduced from 26 to a projected 11. SF is not only going along with this but is actively promoting the scheme – and the job cuts.  Their only concern has been the Orange-Green breakdown of the new arrangements.

In Derry, prominent Sinn Feiner and  former mayor, Cathal Crumley, publicly told council workers to “shape up or ship out”.

Hundreds of jobs have gone in the water service, as the private-sector “government-owned company”, Northern Ireland Water (NIW), slims the operation down in preparation for privatisation. Regional Development Minister, Conor Murphy, insists that NIW won’t be fully privatised. But he and SF adamantly oppose taking the service back into the public sector, which is the only guarantee against privatisation.

Minister Murphy hasn’t awarded a single roads contract which hasn't involved private finance.

In the Assembly in June, SF Assemblymen Daithi McKay and John O’Dowd were first on their feet to welcome DUP Minister Edwin Poots’ Local Government Bill, which eases the way for privatisation of council facilities such as leisure centres, refuse collection and recycling depots. 

This is not to suggest that SF is more gung-ho than the other Executive parties about cutting frontline jobs and privatising services. They are much of a muchness. The SDLP may be marginally to the Left of SF, but it’s a close-run thing.

Despite all this, Sinn Fein – showing as much honesty as Gerry Adams insisting he was never a member of the Provisional IRA – presents itself as a party of the Left.

One reason for their brazenness is that Right-wing commentators regularly attack them for supposedly socialist beliefs. This is the same crowd who, with as much plausibility, denounce David Begg, Jack O’Connor, etc. as dangerous revolutionaries!

Political parties reveal their true colours when they are in office. In opposition in the South, SF can put a Left face forward. But had they succeeded in forming a Coalition with Fianna Fail after the last election, they would have proven as tamely conservative as they are North of the border.

The excuse that, for the sake of the “peace process”, they have to maintain an alliance with the DUP is bare-faced dishonesty. They have been willing to threaten to collapse the institutions over other issues – policing, an Irish Language Act – but not over the interests of the working class.

Nothing more clearly demonstrates that SF is a Nationalist Party, not a socialist party. The Left should expose the likes of Jim Gibney every time they present a false prospectus.