THE CONFLICT had been bloody, with no end in sight. But many in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) wanted to keep trying to drive the British out of Northern Ireland by force. They had no interest in its sister party, Sinn Fein, contesting elections, believing that this would legitimise the status quo. But the party’s leader, Gerry Adams, wanted to open a second front in the fight—one that didn’t involve guns.

In 1981 one of his advisers, Danny Morrison, asked a question at a Sinn Fein meeting: “Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box?” And a second: “Will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite [rifle] in the other, we take power in Ireland?” This two-fold strategy held until the peace accord signed on Good Friday 1998. Today Sinn Fein is the largest and wealthiest party on the island of Ireland. If and when Ireland is ever reunified depends on much more than its electoral performance. But the ballot box’s ascendancy over the Armalite has reshaped both the party, and politics and policy on both sides of the border.

In the north, Sinn Fein has been in government since 1999, and is expected to become the largest party and lead the government after elections in May. In 2020 it became the Republic’s most popular party, with 24.5% of the vote. Its path to coalition was blocked by Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, big centre-right parties, but it looks likely to enter government in the coming years.

Its exclusion from government reflected a mainstream consensus that its paramilitary history and former Marxist economic policies put it beyond the pale. But that may be fracturing, says Diarmaid Ferriter, a historian at University College Dublin. Elections are due by May 2025, by which point Fine Gael may be ready for a rest after 14 years in office. Fianna Fail, which first came to power in 1932 as a defender of IRA violence, is likely to want to stay in government. It and some smaller parties may decide that a deal with Sinn Fein would not be too high a price to pay.

The party has an army of activists, both former IRA members who shifted into politics and a much larger group who joined after the killing stopped. It has reached beyond the pro-IRA vote by appealing to young people priced out of housing. “Our programme for government will be unlike any seen in the state up to now,” promises Eoin Ó Broin, its shadow housing minister in Dublin. It proposes to end the Republic’s reliance on private builders and landlords, and to invest in 20,000 new social-housing units a year—“the largest public house-building programme in the history of the state”. It has pledged to spend €1.2bn ($1.4bn) over two terms of government to introduce free, universal primary health care, and to stop state-salaried doctors and private health-insurance companies from running side practices in public hospitals.

Its Marxism has gone the same way as its defence of violence. In 1979 Mr Adams, the pre-eminent leader of Republicanism for almost half a century until he stepped down from the party leadership in 2018, declared that Sinn Fein was “opposed to big business, to multi nationalism…to all forms and all manifestations of imperialism and capitalism”. Now Pearse Doherty, its finance spokesman in Dublin, says multinationals “know that Sinn Fein isn’t going to go after them”. Its ministers in the north have signed off on private companies building and managing schools, and called for a big cut to corporation tax.

But paramilitary discipline has endured. Irish security authorities have said it was funded, at least in part, by the IRA’s criminal assets (Sinn Fein denies this). Its critics allege that power lies with shadowy figures trusted by the IRA, not with elected politicians. Five years ago evidence emerged of the Sinn Fein finance minister in the north asking a veteran unelected Republican trusted by the IRA whether he would be “content” for the minister to take a decision worth hundreds of millions of pounds. A year earlier a security assessment—which police in Northern Ireland say still stands—concluded that Sinn Fein’s members believe the IRA still controls the party and retains guns.

For its part, Sinn Fein denies that the IRA still exists, let alone acts as the power behind the throne. Its aims, however, remain unchanged. Every party in the Republic says it seeks a united Ireland; only Sinn Fein makes reunification its priority. Yet it remains to be seen whether the electorate would be willing to bear the costs.

Opinion polls show strong support for a united Ireland: one in May found that 67% of voters favoured reunification, with only 16% opposed. But many southerners would balk at subsidising the north to the tune of £10bn ($13.3bn) a year, as mainland Britain does now. Only 22% said they would be prepared to pay more tax to fund reunification, while 63% said they would not.

Pressing for reunification might therefore cost Sinn Fein some of its social-democratic support in the Republic, as well as alienating a growing constituency in the north that sees itself as neither nationalist or unionist, and might be attracted to the secular, crowd-pleasing policies it now offers south of the border. Mr Ó Broin suggests that his party would seek to lead public opinion, with a dedicated unit to steer discussions about what unity might look like, and its potential benefits.

Mr Morrison, who coined the “ballot box and Armalite” phrase, is now 68. He sidesteps a question about whether he will live to see a United Ireland. “The state that I live in is not the state that I grew up in,” he says. “I no longer feel vanquished.” Ireland has indeed changed in the past four decades. So, in their search for respectability and electoral success both north and south of the border, have Republicans. ■