In recent weeks, Mary Lou McDonald also wrote to Irish citizens abroad ahead of this month’s election, urging them to ask their family and friends in Ireland to vote Sinn Fein. “As an Irish Citizen living abroad, you should have the opportunity to return and live, raise a family, and prosper in Ireland,” she said, the latest effort by the party to engage the diaspora in an election happening thousands of kilometers away.
‘A Nation Once Again’
For Ireland’s traditional political forces, the popularity of Sinn Féin in the U.S. can sometimes be a source of dismay.
“The unification project does not and should not belong to any one political party,” Leo Varadkar, a former Irish taoiseach, or prime minister, told POLITICO. “It belongs to all parties, civic organizations and individuals that believe in it.”
He contends that many Irish-Americans believe that Sinn Féin “has stronger support at home than it does” — a reference to the fact that the party has been losing ground in the Republic of Ireland in the run-up to this month’s election. Having brought Sinn Féin within touching distance of government, its leader McDonald has seen support slip away as the party has dealt with a number of personnel scandals and struggled to articulate a policy on immigration, a key issue for the Irish electorate in November’s election.
Varadkar, a member of the centrist Fine Gael party who often clashed with McDonald before he stepped down as taoiseach in March, has taken up the banner of reunification since his resignation. In a speech in Northern Ireland in September, Varadkar said that unification should be an “objective” and not just an “aspiration” for whoever is in power after the election.
His intervention is the latest indication that the unification question has moved into the political mainstream, regardless of how Sinn Féin performs in this election. The U.K.’s exit from the EU has also pushed the issue to the forefront, even among the Protestant communities that historically have wanted to remain part of Britain.