inside Sinn Féin's crisis over migration
Sunday Independent, September 6th, 2026
In this exclusive extract from her new book, ‘Ourselves Alone’, the former party press adviser Siobhán Fenton tells how Sinn Féin and its leadership became paralysed over the burning issue of the day
On a summery May afternoon, I stood in front of a block of flats in Dublin's south inner city, squinting up at the sun as I waited for a group of Sinn Féin activists to arrive. The local and European elections polling date of 7 June was just weeks away and across the country teams of candidates and activists were knocking doors to canvass for votes.
As I waited on the first doorstep, I felt a cold snap on the nape of my neck. This was followed in quick succession by another sharp strike on my shoulder. I looked up, wondering if the source was rain or a leak from one of the balconies above. But as a third strike hit my forearm, the sting of metal was unmistakable, as was the sound of it clinking on to the balcony around me. I looked down, and there were coins around my feet. These were now followed by a man's voice spitting out the unmistakable chant of "Sinn Féin traitors”, "Mary Lou Mohammed”, "Ireland is full” and "Ah, here you are looking for votes when Sinn Féin do f**k-all for us otherwise”.
I tried to see where the shouts and coins were coming from, and it seemed to be from a balcony of one of the flats opposite me. I squinted up quickly, worried about getting the blow of a coin to my eyeball.
The stream of coins continued to cascade down on me. My plan was to give myself as a sacrificial lamb, in the hope that whoever was doing this would have run out of ammunition by the time the candidate joined me. As I had hoped, after another few minutes there were no more coins being aimed at me, either because the hands behind them had flung all they had or had lost interest.
At the end of that long day, as I stepped out of the shower and the steam evaporated from the mirror, I stared in shock at my reflection as it appeared bit by bit through the fading vapour. There were angry red marks across my skin. I stepped closer to the mirror. I traced my fingertips across the pockmarks scattered over my clavicle, shoulders and forearms. I carefully ran my fingers through my hair and found the same indents on my scalp as well.
I stood staring at the indents, their small, tender red slashes like the gills on a fish, until the shower steam faded entirely and I was looking at my full reflection in the mirror.
For the first time since the coins had struck me, I felt the pain rush across my body. I had been subjected to so much stress and exhaustion every day for months now, my body so flooded with adrenaline and the stress hormone cortisol, that I felt a deep disconnect between my mind and body. I had spent the last few months focusing on getting through one crisis and on to the next, firefighting constantly, and as a result the physical sensation had been suppressed until the sight of the marks made this suppression impossible.
I looked into my tired, bloodshot eyes and wondered when I had made a decision that accepting physical pain on behalf of the party was part of my job. I wondered what my limits and boundaries were in a situation that was clearly out of control.
As Sinn Féin was preparing for the local and European elections and talking to people on the ground, our politicians and activists came to realise that a pernicious and disturbing radicalisation had taken place since the 2020 general election among some working-class communities who had previously voted consistently for the party. We were now hearing racist rhetoric and conspiracy theories that had once been traded only in WhatsApp groups and online forums, and it was turning the anger the voters had once directed towards the government into anger directed at immigrants.
Blindsided
Sinn Féin was blindsided by the emergence of these sentiments and by the plummet in support for the party as working-class communities turned against it. The party didn't have a specific spokesperson on immigration. Some of the issue came under the party's spokesperson on integration, while other parts came under the remit of the spokesperson on justice.
Every few weeks, a new poll would be published by one of the newspapers showing another slump in support for Sinn Féin. The crux of this loss of support stemmed from working-class communities' demand that Sinn Féin state clearly if the party agreed with tighter controls on immigration and on the granting of refugee status to asylum-seekers. Would the party support the measures they were calling for, or not?
The events and emotions around immigration and asylum-seekers were affecting the party's grassroots and the whiplash turn from support to condemnation was shocking. Every time I logged into the Sinn Féin social media accounts, I was confronted with a barrage of vile sexist and racist abuse.
The Sinn Féin TDs and senators started to report to me disturbing instances of being followed and chased in public by far-right agitators. Some politicians were verbally abused and threatened while they sat on the train, or while doing their grocery shopping with their young families. Some received phone calls from terrified constituency office staff, who were in tears after aggressive people turned up in their office and refused to leave.
Sinn Féin had been on the wrong side of public opinion in the Family and Care referendums, and taking from that lesson, the cold, strategic thing to do would be to lurch to the right on immigration now to consolidate our voter base.
The party could, for instance, call for reduced migration numbers, for services or support for asylum-seekers to be reduced or cut, or suggest support for some of the protesters. Indeed, many commentators who had long denounced Sinn Féin as populist expected the party to do exactly that. What happened instead was that it became paralysed by how to respond to the changing political climate.
In meetings, Sinn Féin's politicians described feeling deeply uncomfortable about not listening to working-class communities but also uncomfortable about siding with anti-migrant rhetoric. Support for the marginalised and oppressed, versus support for the Irish working classes, had never been an either/or choice before. It was a circle the party couldn't square.
Advisers held repeated meetings on the topic, but the outcome was always the same: the politicians expressed their distress and confusion in circular conversations that ended in agreement that the party should come up with a plan on how to address the emergence of immigration as a political issue, but no one could ever agree what that plan should be.
Throughout all of these meetings and in every discussion I had with her, I never heard Mary Lou express any opinions on immigration policy herself, either to the left or to the right of the argument. I am unsure if the party's mishandling of the Dublin riots, followed by the referendums in quick succession, meant she was questioning her own political judgment and worried about committing another misstep.
Throughout the parliamentary term, she had led many discussions about the party's main policy focuses, spearheading conversations where she had been animated, curious and driven by a sense of purpose. In previous years, she had pressed the party's politicians and advisers for ambitious, detailed and costed policy solutions on issues ranging from childcare to the housing crisis, tackling violence against women and girls or anti-poverty measures. In those meetings, she was often visibly affected by moving stories from people in her own constituency or others who came up to her in the street or at events and told her about the challenges they faced. Now she seemed distant, as though she was watching us all through a pane of frosted glass.
Lack of clarity
The media reports at the time suggested the party's lack of clarity in its public utterances was a clear ploy, that it was trying to ride two horses at once and play to both middle-class and working-class audiences for as long as possible, but my experience was vastly different. Privately, the party's politicians seemed to be grappling with a genuine crisis of conscience that they struggled to view through a strategic lens. Far from a clever and devious ploy of deliberate ambiguity, decisions were not being communicated because they weren't being made.
This left me in a challenging position as a press adviser. My role was not to set policy or strategy for the party, but to help the party communicate the decisions it reached. Throughout 2024, the party simply did not have a coherent policy on immigration to articulate. The issue was one of the most pressing topics in contemporary politics, featuring on every news bulletin, in every radio phone-in show and TV studio debate. And yet the largest political party in Ireland, the one still tipped to enter government later that year, had nothing in particular to say about it.
The role of a spin doctor is often described as being tasked with putting lipstick on a pig. Being asked to communicate Sinn Féin's immigration policy during this time felt like that, but there was no lipstick and there was no pig.
The party's strategists reassured me time and again that Sinn Féin was on the cusp of making a decision on immigration policy, on the party's strategy for the election, on Mary Lou's role in the campaign and how it would affect my media plan. A decision was always due later that day, then tomorrow, then soon, then imminently.
The grazes left by the coins on my collarbones slowly morphed from red marks to violet bruises, and finally to silver dashes of scabs, serving as one of the few signs of the passage of time for me in what increasingly felt like being trapped in a constant state of stasis.
Meanwhile, Mary Lou McDonald's staff became increasingly anxious that an attack designed to cause her physical harm or psychological humiliation could be around every corner or on any doorstep, ready to be filmed, uploaded online out of context and spread by the far right.
One morning, we stood on the edge of St Stephen's Green, after emerging into the sunlight from recording a podcast in the basement of the Shelbourne Hotel. We left the hotel and went out on to a busy St Stephen's Green, filled with tourists, horses and carts, shoppers and office workers.
A problem on SF’s doorstep
Mary Lou, another adviser and I had a five-minute walk back to Leinster House, but suddenly we faced a problem. While we had been in the hotel basement and without signal, a Sinn Féin staffer had texted to warn us of a smattering of protesters gathered at the gate to the Dáil, who could be in touching distance of Mary Lou as she walked through the security gates. We stopped in our tracks on the pavement and tried to work out a way to get her back in safely.
As I discussed the situation with her senior adviser, Mary Lou stood in silence beside us, looking utterly despondent. All of the confidence and ease she had displayed during the podcast recording was drained from her.
It was striking that this woman, who was ostensibly one of the most powerful and influential politicians in Ireland, was being reduced to such a vulnerable figure.
Whatever stress and exhaustion I had come to feel throughout 2024, at least I had the power to slip off my Sinn Féin associations like a jacket and blend into a crowd when I needed to. By contrast, she was always Mary Lou. Her immediately recognisable glossy bob and voice had once been a PR blessing in making her a household name and setting her apart from men in suits in the Dáil chamber. Now they made her vulnerable to being recognised and attacked.
She bore the brunt of this stress and the terror of this vulnerability in every waking second she spent outside of her home or the controlled environment of her Leinster House office. It stalked her on every pavement she walked, in every trip to the shop, in every moment a passerby stopped, did a double-take and walked over to her, while she tried to gauge their intentions. It was relentless for her.
Some TDs asked for advice about whether they should be candid in media interviews about the abuse and hostility they were facing while canvassing. Most were worried about being perceived as looking for sympathy or becoming a lightning rod for further far-right anger.
In cold political communications terms, I was also conscious of the history of Irish republicans attacking politicians during the Troubles and knew this would be raised as a rebuttal in any media interviews where Sinn Féin politicians were thought to be seeking sympathy for the aggression they now faced from the far right.
How could a political movement that some associated with support for attacks such as the Brighton bombing now argue that violence against politicians was an unacceptable form of protest?
This is an edited extract from 'Ourselves Alone: Sinn Féin Behind Closed Doors' by Siobhán Fenton, published by Penguin Sandycove on September 10
Memorial to IRA murderer is an insult to true nature of my home town
TOMMY CONLON, Sunday Independent, September 6th, 2026
In my home town of Ballinamore, Co Leitrim, stand two stone monuments about 500 metres apart.
The newest one is dedicated to the memory of Private Patrick Kelly and Recruit Garda Gary Sheehan. It was unveiled with full military and police honours on December 16, 2024. The date was deliberately chosen: it was the 41st anniversary of their murder by the IRA in Derrada Wood, five miles from Ballinamore.
The second memorial is dedicated to a man who was complicit in their murder.
John Joe McGirl was a longstanding vice-president of Sinn Féin, a county councillor, a one-term TD and a founding member of the Provisional IRA. He died in 1988. In 1994, his monument was unveiled by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. It has a prominent position at the bridge over the Shannon-Erne waterway that runs through the town.
On a recent visit home, I noticed a new sign on metal stilts had been erected beside McGirl's monument. It is a tribute board to Séamus McElwain, the IRA serial-killer from Monaghan who was shot dead by the SAS in 1986.
In 1982, he was convicted of two murders. One of the victims was Aubrey Abercrombie, a farmer who lived near Enniskillen. A father of four boys, Abercrombie was sitting on his tractor in a field when McElwain shot him in the back of the head. McElwain was jailed for life, but escaped during the mass breakout from the Maze Prison in September 1983. He made his way over the Border and in to Leitrim, where he found sanctuary in a safe house provided by McGirl.
By then, a plan within the IRA was under way to kidnap Don Tidey, managing director of the Quinnsworth chain of supermarkets. On the morning of November 24, 1983, as he left his Dublin home for work, Tidey was dragged at gunpoint from his car, beaten and abducted.
That night, under cover of darkness, he was spirited into Derrada Wood in Leitrim. McGirl had set up the hideout there in advance, organising the camping equipment and food. For the next 22 days, he aided and abetted the gang who held Tidey hostage.
McElwain was a member of that gang, alongside another IRA mass murderer, the late Brendan 'Bik' McFarlane. Tidey was shackled to a tree for the duration. He was chained at the wrists and the ankles, he was blindfolded and his ears were covered to ensure complete sensory deprivation. He slept in a hollow in the ground with little protection from the relentless rain and cold.
As the days passed without word of Tidey's whereabouts, the security forces and the coalition government led by taoiseach Garret FitzGerald were under intense pressure to find him. The largest manhunt in the history of the State was launched. It culminated on December 16, 1983, when a cohort of unarmed guards, backed up by soldiers, stumbled upon the hideout.
Gary Sheehan was 23 and from Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan; Patrick Kelly was 36. Originally from Ballinamuck in Co Longford, Private Kelly served in Custume Barracks, Athlone, and lived in Moate where he had settled with his wife. He was also the father of four boys, the youngest of whom was 11 weeks old.
The IRA gang were wearing khaki gear and balaclavas, and held automatic weapons. Sheehan called out to them to identify themselves. The response was stunning in its violence. The young garda recruit and the army private were gunned down in a hail of bullets. Sheehan was killed instantly; Kelly bled to death on the forest floor.
The nation was shocked. The funerals were national events. FitzGerald and President Patrick Hillery attended both ceremonies.
‘Doing their duty’
Only a few weeks earlier, Gerry Adams had been elected president of Sinn Féin. The murder of a serving soldier and garda had caused a national outcry. Under pressure to respond, Adams said that the IRA gang were "doing their duty”. At a meeting of Leitrim County Council, Councillor McGirl refused to join the other representatives in extending sympathies to the grieving families.
For over 32 years, the people of Ballinamore have been misrepresented by the monument to McGirl. It is a memorial that doubles as a billboard: an advertising slogan that announces to every passing motorist that the community condones the actions of the man it commemorates.
In fact, the opposite is true. The people of the town and most of the surrounding hinterland have supported An Garda Síochána and the rule of law since the founding of the State.
It is there in the electoral record. Ballinamore was the political power base of the Reynolds family for three generations. A member of the Reynolds family was returned to Dáil Éireann for Cumann na nGaedheal/Fine Gael in 15 general elections in the 20th century, while McGirl was elected once. The score is 15-1.
The original law-and-order party was the party of choice for the majority of the local community, not Sinn Féin. Most of the rest supported Fianna Fáil.
History is one thing, propaganda another. I grew up in Ballinamore; I played football, man and boy, for the local GAA club. We were never consulted about the McGirl memorial, it got no mandate from us.
But people were afraid to speak out, not least because we all saw what happened to one local solicitor after he had the courage to face the RTÉ cameras in December 1983 and declare that the silent majority was outraged by the murders of Kelly and Sheehan. A few nights later, the windows of his law practice were smashed in.
There had been intermittent intimidation in the community throughout the 1980s. Therefore, no one was ever going to publicly object when plans for the McGirl monument were revealed.
The memorial to Patrick Kelly and Gary Sheehan that was finally erected less than two years ago is a true reflection of the community from which I come. It is a quiet assertion of our actual values.
The monument to McGirl remains a blot on our good name; the tribute to McElwain compounds that travesty further.
Tommy Conlon is the co-author, with Ronan McGreevy, of 'The Kidnapping' (Penguin)
