Gavan Reilly: In crisis comes opportunity...Can Sinn Féin roll with the punches?

No doubt there are Sinn Féin supporters who feel a bit sorry for themselves this week. You can understand why. A general election could be called in the next two weeks and, if the political winds were blowing in another direction, Sinn Féin would be starting in better shape than it has ever begun a general election campaign before. A major health policy, a counterpart to Eoin Ó Broin’s housing blueprint, is out next week.

Supporters will argue that Sinn Féin is not the only party with some dubious behaviour in its ranks, and that’s true. Senior figures in the two large coalition parties have written character references for convicted sex offenders. One former Fianna Fáil TD allowed his cousin to canvass for him even though he was aware of allegations he had sexually abused children. A Fine Gael member of the Oireachtas has previously apologised over unsavoury ‘prank’ photos, involving an unconscious friend and a foreign object, taken at a music festival. A Social Democrats councillor has resigned over inappropriate contact with a teenager.

On white collar issues, there are of course the documented controversies surrounding the planning affairs of Niall Collins and Damien English.A Fianna Fáil TD resigned only a few years ago contending that the party leadership were ignoring the input of elected deputies. At least one former Fine Gael TD is running solo now because party supporters in her constituency see her as an unauthentic culchie blow-in.

None of these issues were brushed under the carpet by the media. But they occurred over a lengthy period of time. Sinn Féin finds itself in a situation where two TDs have resigned, for entirely independent reasons, in the space of a few days; both within a few weeks of press officers resigning over employment references given to a colleague who was being investigated for sexual crimes.

The confluence of timing might simply be misfortune for Sinn Féin, but such are the vicissitudes of public life. None of these incidents have been drummed up by the media, or concocted by political opponents. All are what tennis analysis might call ‘unforced errors’. Nobody made these Sinn Féin figures do these things. But they did them.

There is some value to the public in this process: it is a stress test of leadership capability. Save for the calamities of late 2010, it is hard to imagine a similar string of individual catastrophes besetting a single party, let alone a single government. The Irish people will never get a better chance to test-drive a prospective government and to see how they deal with the crises thrown up by the tides of politics.

So this might well be the breaking of Sinn Féin; it could result in the 20 per cent poll rating becoming 15 per cent, which is hardly where a prospective government party wants to start a campaign. Or it might be their making: it might be where a leadership under the kosh can figure out how to demonstrate more capably that it can rolling with the punches, and capably bat away the curveballs that come its way.

Gavan Reilly is Political Correspondent with Virgin Media News and Political Columnist with the Meath Chronicle. Column appears first in Tuesday's paper!