After two years of electoral plenty we must prepare ourselves for three years of famine. In the past 24 extraordinary months, we have had every possible electoral poll that Ireland can have: local, mayoral and European elections, the general election, the presidential election – and of course two by-elections.

Now, the clear electoral road stretches ahead to June 2029, when we will have fresh local and European elections, followed swiftly by the deadline for the next general election – if of course the Dáil lasts that long!

Whereas that election extravaganza was generally a period of reaffirmation for the Grand Coalition parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, it marked a significant Sinn Féin retreat. 

Any party that ignores electoral reversals is committing a cardinal political sin – ignoring what the voters are saying. And the voters have spoken to Sinn Féin.

We are now pretty much halfway through this Dáil. Cast your mind back to this stage of last Dáil cycle, summer 2022. Since the February 2020 election Sinn Féin had been riding high. 

The election had seen the two-and-a-half party system blown up by Sinn Féin’s incredible 24.5 per cent result. It is easy to forget why there was such a storm about SF – it forced FF and FG together like shipwrecked sailors in a raging sea.

Micheál Martin’s front bench, with the party riding as high as 32 per cent in polls, were picking out the State cars, but they crashed from 24.3 per cent in 2016 to 22.2 per cent, with a loss of six seats. 

Leo Varadkar’s party plummeted from 25.5 per cent to 20.9 per cent, shedding 15 seats. SF got an extraordinary swing of 10.7 per cent. 

SF went from 13.8% and 23 seats under Gerry Adams’ leadership in 2016 to 24.5 per cent and 37 seats under its relatively new leader who had only ascended into office in 2018. 

FF had pipped it for seats, by one, but SF had the largest vote share of any party and was now, officially, the largest party in the State.

Crucially, the victory was down to its young, female leader, Mary Lou McDonald. From south Dublin she was apparently untainted by the Troubles, and when she chose, she had charm.

The opinion polling continued to terrify Martin and Varadkar. In June 2022, a Red C poll for the Business Post had SF at 36 per cent. FG lagged behind at 19 per cent and FF was languishing at 14 per cent – or 33 per cent collectively. 

We did not know it then, but it was to be the zenith of the long-threatened SF tsunami.

Slowly the Civil War rivals recovered sufficiently to make a second Grand Coalition a possibility. But in June 2022 SF was the on-trend, vibrant, coming force in Irish politics.

Now? Mary Lou McDonald and her front bench appear listless. Some are despondent. 

Polls might seem okay. The party is at 24 per cent in one poll to FG at 18 per cent and FF at 19 per cent. But, as SF now knows, elections pay the rent. And the latest by-elections continue to tell a tale. 

SF threw everything into Dublin Central, realising early, with internal party dissent and more vocal public dissent, it couldn’t win Galway West.

Yet, in the leader’s own constituency it was hammered by the Social Democrats. Problems were already evident in Dublin Central, when McDonald couldn’t get her preferred candidate on the ticket.

She and her then running mate, Janice Boylan, took 23.34 per cent of the first-preference vote in the 2024 general election, but this fell by nearly six per cent in the by-election, when Boylan on her own took 17.5 per cent. 

Tellingly, this is almost the exact figure by which SF fell nationally from 2020 (24.5 per cent) to 2024 (19 per cent). The 2024 general election followed a bigger collapse in the local and Europeans that year, with the tsunami dissipating like a mirage in an electoral desert.

SF is a big party now, and I have many sources in it, and they all agree that there is something fundamental wrong within their party. They just don’t know what to do about it.

Clearly, to any dispassionate observer, the most obvious route is change at the top. SF saw the success brought by the stepping down of Adams. 

It soon surged by 10 per cent. But SF for all its apparent radicalism, where it had once appeared to have a youthful, progressive front bench with new ideas, is caught in the past.

During its early days in Belfast and Derry, what was Provisional Sinn Féin assumed for itself a left-wing identity, adhering to Marxism and all the constrictive political baggage that came with it. Yet, it was never really a left wing party – bullets are apolitical.

Its central identity as it grew was its belief in a United Ireland – that and faux socialism, since down South it has primarily attracted supporters in working class heartlands and economically deprived areas. 

In modern, global Ireland, people in these areas are often competing with immigrants for low-cost housing and employment – fertile ground for anti-immigration sentiments stoked by bad actors. 

This was one key reason behind Sinn Féin’s decline before the 2024 election, which took place a year after SF was completely wrong-footed by the Dublin riots.

Since the election, there has been internal criticism of figures like Matt Carthy, for leaning too much towards this right-wing element. 

Yet even though they have been friends a long time, the party’s housing guru, Eoin Ó Broin, is unashamedly a committed socialist.

There was more confusion for SF supporters recently when it forced a vote on the three-day abortion wait period. 

This appeared a tack left, but concurrently spurns the right-wing element. (Remember the anti-abortion, immigration-sceptic Aontú is led by former SF TD Peadar Tóibín who, it should go without pointing out, is sound on the national question.)

And if SF goes left, it is competing with the newly on-trend Soc Dems and a modestly resurgent Labour. 

There was high-minded talk about a left-wing alliance, but with SF’s immigration stance an anathema to those parties, that is not going to _happen. Besides, they are way off on numbers.

In the last Dáil, SF tried the trick of opposing FF publicly while privately working on a future Coalition. 

To publicly oppose and then effect a U-turn into a Coalition is a notoriously subtle political manoeuvre. It has been pulled off before, the most momentous being Dick Spring in December 1994. 

That kept Labour in power for two-and-a-half more years after the 1992 Spring Tide. But the electoral punishment meted out to Labour in 1997 shows that Irish voters punish such chicanery.

Ultimately, SF emerged from a damaging electoral cycle with the same leader, deputy leader and strategically positioned front-bench TDs. A display of continuity, a continuity of failure. SF unquestionably requires a new leader or huge personnel overhaul.

McDonald wards off any questions over her leadership by saying, the leadership is decided by the party conference in Belfast. She thinks that’s a strength. She should know that to Southerners, who have a natural affinity with both democracy and politics, that stinks. 

The Irish centre has been brought up on a diet of heaves and leadership changes, and electoral trends being subsumed and reflected by parties trying to represent them. If something is wrong, they expect a party to fix it.

Meanwhile, Pearse Doherty has been front-bench finance spokesman for the same ludicrous 15 years that Martin has led FF. Eoin Ó Broin’s socialist housing policies, admirably researched and motivated by genuine belief, are not catching on with the electorate. A cultural overhaul must come too, mustn’t it?

Politics, in a still-robust democracy, is a very different game from guerrilla politics in a failed state. Sinn Féin’s problem is that the party’s culture and political identity were forged in those dark days. 

Now, in the white heat of elections in the South, that political identity has been exposed as not an identity at all. Where does the party sit in a modern political arena? Left or right? Progressive or conservative? Who can it turn to next as leader?

You can pursue political ambiguity for a while, but long-term it is not sustainable, and the 2024 general election and the by-elections have confirmed that.