I grew up in the west of Ireland in the ’80s and ’90s at a time when the country clung to its post-colonial nationalist identity with one hand while reaching out to the world culturally and economically with the other. For many rural communities, the grip of the past had not relaxed. The Irish national school curriculum, written after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921, was deeply nationalistic and gave pride of place to the Irish language, history, and culture, which were idealised in opposition to their British counterparts. Many rural primary schools, like mine, were bastions of parochialism where old scores with the Brits lingered, cosmopolitanism be damned. Time that should have been spent on science and civics was more often spent reading revolutionary ballads and recounting local atrocities by the Black and Tans.
In the Republic of Ireland, the Troubles of the north were not abstract. Close to where I grew up, in the international airport town of Shannon, Co. Clare, there was a lively enclave of (alleged) IRA exiles. The airport was used by the IRA to transport weapons and to circumvent terror listings when travelling to the United States. Older teens would speak in reverent tones about Shannon, and only the toughest would go there on a night out.
Throughout my formative years, Irish history was a miserable dirge of oppression that, without explicit contextualisation by teachers, led us implicitly to understand that the English were the cause of all of our problems. We were trained to be nationalists, and that nationalism was built squarely on a hatred of the Brits.
A Loss of Faith
There was another kind of nationalism: a romantic, cultural nationalism. I played fiddle, drums, and banjo in the local band. Set dancing on weekends was a given. But by the ‘90s this more romantic cultural nationalism was fast slipping from habitual to staged for the tourists. The transition from fireside to Broadway was complete in 1994 when Riverdance took the world by storm. The hand that reached out to the world packaged and exported our culture for profit. An absence of authenticity in these cultural areas at home was papered over by a national obsession with sports. In every rural village, young men would play Gaelic Games. A refusal to do so was a direct act of betrayal of one’s parish, county, and ultimately, one’s nation. Blood was spilled and bones were broken in these rituals of masculinity, toughness, and pride.
To us, these sports stretched back through the mists of time to our Celtic forefathers. In reality, they too, like our music and dance, were offshoots of the late 19th and early 20th century nationalist movement. The Gaelic Revival had become the cultural engine house of revolutionary Ireland in the early 20th century, combining three branches: the GAA to promote Irish sports, the Abbey Theatre (founded by W. B. Yeats and others) to drive the literary revival, and the Gaelic League to preserve and promote the Irish language.
The essential purpose of the Revival was to establish a national identity, albeit romanticised, that would undo centuries of Anglicisation in Ireland. However, it became a recruiting ground for the militant cause and eventually whipped up a frenzy of emotion that led, in part, to the 1916 rising. This same cultural nationalism was handed down to us in diluted form at school. It had given us an Irish identity, won our independence and it was now, increasingly, commercialised by the Irish tourism industry. As our music, dance and literature were sold to the world, young men turned ever more to the brute remnants of that Revival sport.
As a teenager, I began to question this nationalist inheritance. It was the custom to go to the pub after a hurling game, and those evenings inevitably wound down with a singalong of nationalist ballads. Drunk and passionate, a cheer of “Up the ’RA” (IRA) and “F*ck the Brits” would go up between verses of “The Fields of Athenry.” But I grew frustrated. These boys with whom I grew up, all well-trained nationalists, were sitting in the pub after a fierce game of hurling for the pride of the parish, singing “F*ck the Brits” while decked out in Manchester United and Liverpool football shirts.
It was a seminal moment. I saw that they were not strident revolutionary nationalists. If they were, they wouldn’t wear those shirts in the first place. These young men were caught between fractured identities. They had no interest in the music, dance, or literature of Ireland. Their music came from America, their beer from Amsterdam, and their football shirts from England. The more Irish culture was prepackaged and exported the more it was replaced by Anglo-American pop culture.
Irish cultural identity was reduced to athletic prowess, drink, rebel songs, and revolutionary nationalist grievances handed down by their teachers. This beat a bastard nationalism into these boys, one that amounted to little more than “F*ck the Brits.” Country pubs were fertile recruiting grounds for revolutionary nationalists looking to mire a nation in violent conflict and grievance politics. Enter Sinn Fein.
Folk memories and Arab terrorism
It was only after the Irish Republic was established in 1949 that Irish political parties were forced to develop a platform broader than old Civil War identities. In the 1970s, it was Gerry Adams, sympathetic to Marxist ideas and influenced by the radical left People’s Democracy party, who moulded Sinn Fein/IRA into a revolutionary nationalist socialist movement that made traditionalist, conservative, and military-focused IRA members feel welcome. It was Adams’s great talent to cultivate public support behind Sinn Fein/IRA by being ambiguous enough to make people feel that he was fighting for whatever they were fighting for.
He perfected his strategy on the international stage. Much of the funding from America to the IRA in the 1970s and ’80s came through NORAID, an organisation that channelled money from wealthy Irish Americans and fraternal organisations to the IRA under the guise of providing humanitarian aid to victims of the Troubles. However, according to the U.S. State Department in 1987, “What NORAID contributors know about Ireland seems to derive from hazy folk memories of the potato famine and the brutality of the British during the 1919 revolution.”
In other words, although they believed that they were funding their ancestors’ revolution, they were instead financing Adams’s socialist vision—something they had no intention of doing, as demonstrated by Irish America’s rejection of Marxist revolutionary republican (not Sinn Fein) Bernadette Devlin in 1969. On a fundraising tour, Devlin had persistently drawn parallels between the civil rights movements of Northern Irish Catholics and black Americans. She aligned with the Black Power movement and shamed prominent Irish American donors for not finding common cause. Devlin returned home in disgrace with relations to Irish American donors in tatters. Irish America had sent a powerful message: they were willing to fund guns, not Marxism.
For Gerry Adams, this posed no strategic conundrum. While conservative dollars were flowing in, so too were money and weapons from Arab Socialists in the Middle East. Arab Socialism tailored socialist ideals into a revolutionary nationalist and Muslim framework. Much of their ire was directed at British imperialism for its various divisions of Arab lands throughout the early to mid-20th century. This struck a chord with Gerry Adams who was, like Arab Socialist figureheads Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi, attempting to meld anti-British revolutionary nationalism and socialism into a coherent movement. For funding, Adams looked west; for ideology, he looked east. The IRA received four massive arms shipments from Libya in the 1980s. The PLO funded and trained the IRA throughout the ’80s and IRA members attended military training camps in Libya with PLO terrorists in the 1970s.
Adams’s balancing act between conservative Irish-Americans, socialist Arab terror organisations, and traditionalist revolutionary nationalists at home—a monumentally complex web of people and ideologies—ultimately boiled down to Adams’s public ambiguity and deference to a devastatingly simple sentiment: “F*ck the Brits.” Never has such a simple idea meant so many different things to so many different people.
Gerry Adams’s affinity with socialism held strong after the IRA disarmed in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. It allowed Sinn Fein to focus solely on its socialist political ambitions. But the cause of Hamas and Palestine was never far away. Adams met with Hamas legislators in the West Bank in 2006 after the terror party took power in the Gaza Strip. He met with Hamas again in 2009. Still a vocal advocate for Hamas-run Gaza into the present day, he drew sharp criticism for a tone-deaf tweet in support of Palestine on the day after Hamas’ October 7th terror attack in Israel. Sinn Fein also drew criticism for their apathy towards the victims of October 7th.
Sinn Fein, a socialist party, has managed to become the Republic of Ireland’s most popular political party by turning the art of ambiguity— developed during their IRA days—on the people of Ireland. Just as Gerry Adams understood the need to subtly couple revolutionary nationalism to socialism, so too does current party leader Mary Lou McDonald.
Ambiguous socialism
The Party’s 2020 manifesto opens with a masterful rewriting of Sinn Fein and Ireland’s history: “2020 witnesses the centenary of key events in the struggle for Irish freedom. It’s timely therefore to measure the reality of Ireland in 2020 against the ideals of those who, 100 years ago fought to establish an egalitarian republic and a reign of social justice for the Irish people.” In those two sentences, the party invokes its claim to Ireland’s revolutionary past while subverting it by inferring that heroic Irish nationalists fought for a 21st century notion of ‘social justice.’
In public, McDonald just as carefully couches her socialist and social justice ideals in practical everyday grievances so as to attract a broad base. In the 1970s, the party harnessed the anger of the working class by demanding rent control along with better workers’ rights and securities through the robust support of trade unions. Today, McDonald is effectively tapping into 21st century grievances fomented by the international social justice agenda: supporting a push for open borders, trans rights, the redistribution of wealth, and localising American race relations.
As the George Floyd and Antifa riots of the past few years have shown, there is a renewed taste for violence among the international Left. Sinn Fein, with its militant IRA legacy, is deadly fashionable for Irish leftists and Sinn Fein has been quick to reciprocate. After Floyd’s death, Northern Ireland’s first minister and Sinn Fein member Michelle O’Neill tweeted out a Black Lives Matter image and said, “Racism has no place in society and must be eradicated. Whether it’s Ireland or the USA—an injustice to one, is an injustice to all.” A mural of Floyd was given pride of place on the International Wall of the Falls Road, Belfast, where republicans pay homage to fallen international revolutionaries. It brings back obvious echoes of Bernadette Devlin’s tour of the USA in 1969 and demonstrates just how entwined Sinn Fein republicanism now is with the international radical Left solidarity movement.
In the EU, Sinn Fein sits proudly alongside the continent’s most prominent socialist and communist parties in ‘The Left’ alliance, but at home there is no overt mention of such radicalism. McDonald is savvy enough to keep up a good front for the traditionalists. With the 2025 general election in sight, she recently announced a plan to tour Europe to canvass for a united Ireland. It is a quixotic but politically savvy move aimed directly at those hoodwinked boys from my youth.
Those boys are now all men. Many still sing their rebel songs while wearing their Manchester United and Liverpool shirts, not having shaken that bastard nationalism of their youth. Mary Lou McDonald is banking on that hollowed out cultural nationalism of drink, rebel songs, and revolutionary grievances. Like the conservative Irish-Americans who funded the IRA in the ’70s and ’80s, her gamble is that these men will turn a blind eye to Sinn Fein’s socialist platform because of their commitment to a single, simplistic sentiment: “F*ck the Brits.”
