WHEN MARY LOU McDonald arrived at the RDS count centre late on Saturday afternoon, she was dismissive of the idea that her party was in trouble.
“Byelections are peculiar,” the Sinn Féin leader told reporters as she stood beside her party’s Dublin Central candidate, Janice Boylan.
“It’s not just around the support of your own party, it’s around transfers, all of the tactical things that happen in a byelection,” McDonald said.
Boylan was only 555 votes behind poll topper Daniel Ennis on the first count, but by the time all of the transfers had been redistributed, that gap had widened to 4,263.
The Sinn Féin councillor was very active on the ground during the campaign and is well regarded in the constituency as a hard worker, but for the party as a whole, it is an embarrassing defeat in Mary Lou McDonald’s own constituency.
In Galway West, the party’s performance was even worse, with candidate Mark Lohan polling behind Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael on the first count with a vote share of 6.7%.
The results should provoke significant self-reflection in Sinn Féin about what exactly went wrong for the largest party in opposition, but the public-facing messaging being delivered by the leadership is that all is well.
When asked on Saturday if Sinn Féin were trying to be too many things to too many people, McDonald dismissed the notion entirely.
McDonald said her party knows exactly what it stands for and represents.
She said there was “no confusion” for voters about whether the party was either left-wing or right-wing.
“We’re an Irish republican party, we’re a party of a united Ireland and we’re a party of the left, we’re a party of social justice, of economic justice and equality,” she said.
“We are very much a party that is about progress, about advancement. We are a party of working people in the first instance, we believe that everybody has to have a decent standard of living, a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.
What the results in Dublin Central show us, though, is that Sinn Féin’s popularity was being eroded from both the left and the right, with votes being lost to the likes of Gerry Hutch and Malachy Steenson on one side, and the Social Democrats on the other.
In trying to appeal to a broad church, the party has been losing ground to candidates and parties who have offered a more definitive message on issues like immigration, public expenditure, and climate change.
While the party leadership may not want to publicly admit that it may have got some things wrong, others in the party have been more willing to acknowledge that there is room for some reflection.
Reflecting on the results, Sligo-Leitrim TD Martin Kenny told The Journal that the party’s message of change has a “sell by” date.
He said Galway West was always going to be a “long shot” for the party to win.
“It could have been a lot better and we would have expected it to be a lot better to be honest, but that’s politics,” he said.
When asked what went wrong, Kenny said he didn’t know but that “for some reason or other, the left-wing vote didn’t come out for us as strongly as we expected it to.”
“There’s always a situation where when a party is a number of years going for elections and putting forward an agenda of change, there is a sell-by date on it… and it becomes tired for people.
“So it’s about refining our message,” he said.
Is Mary Lou McDonald in trouble?
Sinn Féin is long known as a party that runs a tight ship, with its TDs rarely leaking or speaking critically of the party’s direction or leadership publicly.
That remains the case now, with TDs privately telling The Journal that McDonald’s leadership is not in question on the back of these byelection results.
“There’s no talk coming from anywhere about Mary Lou McDonald apart from people in the media asking the question,” Kenny said.
He added: “Mary Lou McDonald is doing an excellent job.”
The Dáil’s two newest TDs, Social Democrats’ Daniel Ennis and Fine Gael’s Séan Kyne will take their seats in Leinster House today.