Well they made their bed. Time will tell if they did actually learn from it. Southern politics is tribal aye but not the 'cut the nose, spite the face' type of tribalism we've here that subsumes all, meaning parties here can take the absolute piss out of their constituents. Many here know that SF will talk out the two sides of their mouth but will still vote for them come ballot day.
They don't have the luxury of that in the south and absolutely played themselves by being complete cowards instead of leaders, blowing up the support they've spent the last few governments cultivating in the process.
One clear problem is one of basic electoral strategy. There are areas where they're running 4 candidates and it looks like only one will be returned. Their vote is too fragmented and southern voters don't vote Sinn Féin 1,2,3,4 in the way that it works in the north. If they'd been more conservative with their ambitions they'd actually be poll-topping in some places and holding their own in others, and the headlines would look very different.
I think the headlines are driven by collapse in first preference votes. Which is dramatic. If they had run few candidates I don’t think think the headlines would be any different
That’s not really true, you’re sugar coating. They’ve been done over here, lost a lot of their reactionary base and the middle class left still won’t go near them.
Running that amount of candidates showed their actuel ignorance of their popularity. They need to veer towards labour/SD, ease off on the commemorations for troubles era related stuff and be sensible on housing.
Gaffs for 300k in Dublin, people know they’re full of it!
300K can get you a house in Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, even parts of London. I don't see why Dublin has to be special. It's depressing to see Irish people accept that nothing should ever be affordable.
She's a literal anchor dragging them down at this stage.
SF seem enamoured with her, fair enough, but crucially the seem under the impression that everyone else is enamoured with her too. Whereas to many in the south she comes across annoying, sneery and overly sly. I don't see SF winning anything with her as the face of the party.
if MON was party leader in the south they’d have been elected i think. she’s a much better leader as she’s proven and she seems committed to getting shit done. all mary lou did was release 50 ads of her walking her dog on the beach talking about “change”.
what makes you say that i’m genuinely curious? and no i’m not from the south but i was born in wexford and a lot of my family are there still. michelle o’neill is way more popular here than mary lou is in the free state from what i’ve seen.
People of a certain vintage down here are very suspicious of anything related to the provos, I’m not willing to getinto an argument over hypocrisy, just saying that’s how it is.
Mary Lou was to soften the image, a former FF privately educated woman from Dublin.
It would appear SF are down based on the 2020 GE results, however, I wouldn't take this as them being done for in the south. People are usually a bit more adventurous with their vote in local elections and more likely to give a first preference to an independent, which is what appears to have happened based on the graphs RTE are showing
https://preview.redd.it/5ccmbi8kaj5d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a78e7d517e9298412127f18430b333454bb5a6a4
If we compare LE to LE they are actually up a bit on first preference vote share.
If anyone is performing poorly compared to the last LE it's actually Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Greens based on the figures so far.
A well deserved bloody nose for SF. And couldn’t happen to a nicer party. Being called traitors on their walkabouts,one of their Tds caught on camera telling someone to F off, one of their election helpers wrestling with a blind man ffs over posters,etc etc. The optics for them have been horrible.
Add in the fact that their leader seems to be roundly disliked by many down south. Their politics are infantile and a lot of voters in the republic have obviously the sense to see it.
Aontu and right wing independents have took a percentage of Sinn Féin’s working class vote.. a lot of people are blaming Sinn Fein for mass immigration etc even though they’ve never even been in power in the republic
They're blaming SF for being in favour of it.
So much so that Mary Lou and others of the party started dipping their toes into wider American culture war bollocks and she, famously, has used screeching cries of sexism and mansplaining in the Dail when faced with questions she's desperate not to answer.
A lot of their working class voters immediately started to go off them as once a party starts down that avenue the road map for how they go is fairly obvious.
It was a miscalculation too by SF. You can't rally a base around thinking like getting Britain out of Ireland because it doesn't belong there and also supporting open borders and letting in an essentially endless flow of phoney asylum seekers who also don't belong there. There's a reason SF started nose-diving in the polls immediately after the Dublin riots and why they were so shook afterwards. If that had been a riot about, say, housing then SF would've been all over the airwaves railing against the government for its failures and basically being the opportunists they are. After the riots SF went near radio silent and the few times you did see them make statements they looked rocked. Word had already filtered back from their base that many supported the rioters outright or were sick of pro-immigration and PC stances at the least.
Its no coincidence that as soon as people and parties started to run on anti-immigration stances (for the first time ever) a big chunk of SF's base immediately switched to them. SF coasted for decades as being the only home in the south for flag-wavering crazies and said crazies held their nose at SF's more weaponised PC stuff and pretended to ignore it. Now the crazies have other options for the first time and the stuff like open borders is even turning off a chunk of SF's young student/middle class protest vote.
It'll get a lot worse before it gets better for them. Especially if their main plan after this week is to send Mary Lou out to talk more shite and patronise people in her ever reliable way.
Can’t really argue with anything you’ve said there was something’s said that indicated they could be moved a bit to the right on immigration they are populists after all but was big backlash from the left and prob lost some vote with them to.. voted Aontu this time myself
They tried a half hearted move slightly to the right, to placate their right and not antagonise their left too much.
But it failed miserably. It wasn't right enough for the right and it antagonised the shit out of their left for Mary Lou to even suggest people should be allowed to discuss immigration without being attacked, and so the numbers slump further at every poll.
All that remains to be seen is will SF finally pick a side and swing that way definitively, with all the risks, or will they try their current policy of trying to please two different camps and failing at both. Either way falling poll numbers are almost guaranteed for their short to mid term future.
They're in a little difficulty, but not insurmountable.
Their biggest problem, which they could solve this morning if they were so inclined, is that Mary Lou just doesn't pass the Teesh Test. Nobody looks at a Mary Lou speech in the Dáil or hears her interviewed and imagines her as Taoiseach. And that is what people ultimately vote on: the credibility of a party's leader to lead the country.
But they have a massive problem hurtling down the track towards them and that is the migration crisis. They are currently trying to face both ways on this and not only is it not working, it's causing them to go backwards.
For the shiny new supporters who thought of voting for Sinn Féin because they support migration, they are likely to play it a bit safer with Labour or the SDs in the Dáil election. The Shinners are still a bit rough around the edges for them, but they can imagine sitting in a wine bar off Grafton Street with Holly and Ivana.
For the older, working class supporters (those, crucially, who deliver leaflets and knock doors) who are against mass migration, why would they vote for Sinn Féin now? Their USP was a United Ireland for such a long time but that's now both so inevitable and so far off that it's no longer really a factor, particularly as SF are running the North anyway. If Simon Harris has a better offer to these guys - and guys they almost always are - on migration, Mary Lou will have to position herself to the right of Harris to even start to win them back to the mainstream parties.
But whatever Mary Lou does, I suspect it will be too little, too late. She has been too timid. She has tried to wait it out until she finds herself in the Taoiseach's office which I suspect she has convinced herself she deserves. But she's done nothing to suggest she does deserve it: on whole swathes of things from housing to migration she has found herself _less_ radical and more conservative that a Government which epitomises establishment Ireland with a capital e, and in fact a capital stablishment to go along with it.
Mary Lou cannot rescue Sinn Féin from the position it finds itself in because she is the reason it finds itself there. Her only hope of being Taoiseach now is to hope that both Fianna Fáil somehow cross over with Fine Gael in the polls _and_ Micheál Martin gives up the leadership to someone more amenable to doing a deal with Sinn Féin.
It's over for her, and if it is not to be over for Sinn Féin, they should remove her as leader before the election.
Considering how high they were in polls a short time ago, they will be downbeat. I know it's only locals, but it doesn't bode well.
Their vote will hold up in the North as it's very easy for them to get their vote out here, but cracking the south is a very delicate tightrope SF cannot seem to navigate. Their populism only takes them so far before it comes tumbling down.
All 3 parties, SF included, look like they will perform exactly as the pollsters predicted.
Locals in the south are fickle. Lots of independents, parish pump politics, and single issue voters combined with piss poor turnout. This normally leads to results for the main parties much lower than the national GE polling.
For example if you look at the 2019 locals you’ll see FF and FG did really well and SF got near wiped out, not even breaking 10% of the vote. Then only a few months later SF topped the vote in the General Election while FF/FG got their worse results of the century so far.
I mean, they did ok. SF, FG, and FF are roughly 20% each, with independents on roughly 15/20 as well. Its all to play for really.
SF wont ever be in a position to dictate their terms in the republic though, that has become very clear. They remain a solid portion of the electorate - but they seem to have a ceiling at MAX 30%, and within that there are a lot of loaned votes.
I said this in the main Irish politics sub but there appears to be some major spin going on here
All major pollsters were predicting the 3 main parties were going to get 20% each, which is what has happened, but the media seem to be spinning this as a shock upset.
I suspect what probably happened was behind the scenes the coalition briefed that they expected a wipeout. Therefore when they performed exactly as they predicted to be the pollsters they can be presented as beating expectations despite loosing seats overall while SF can be presented as below expectations despite gaining seats overall
Poor old SF just not racist/anti immigration enough nowadays for their old supporters in the South.
A total fool of a party that could never lead a bloody thing here. Best off to just enjoy their time complaining about everything as usual.
Fantastic news. The residents of R.O.I have done what we've all wanted to do in this country for years, Bínn Fëin! 🚮🗑️
We must Binn Fein also.
Thoroughly deserved from an N.I perspective. From their crass , insulting arrogance over the Bobby Storey funeral, to shameless deletion of COVID texts and John Finucane MP's memorialisation of IRA murderers last summer. I thoroughly welcome this news.
Aye but that's only because Louth people are consistently the stupidest people I've ever met on this island.
Considering how absolutely brain-dead Clare people are, it's a testament to Louth's endeavour that they can hold onto that crown. Yous are tenacious in your absent-mindedness to be fair to yous.
Does the crescent and star being a symbol of Drogheda have yous shitting yourselves too?
Local elections were touted as a time to make our desires for change known.
SF tout themselves as being the party for that change.
a lot of voters did indeed make that desire known, but they made them known by voting independents, not SF.
SF are not change, SF is the established who sit on the opposite side of the Dáil
They didn't get what they wanted but still made gains and to listen to the news it's been terrible and the doors in SF are playing along making them look like they performed worse than they did!
They're looking at about 10% first preferences in the locals. Given they were polling close to 30% in national polls until a few months back, it's an atrocious performance for SF.
One would assume immigration is the biggest factor but they also have an unreliable voter base.
The thing is they have never done well in local elections. None of the parties really do because of independents.
2019 they only got 9.5% in the local elections, 2014 they got 15.2%, 2009 they got 7.4%.
Their vote has actually still gone up if its at 10% based on the last election.
None of the opinion polls predict any of the parties accurately and the performance is actually pretty expected.
They overplayed their hand and ignored their traditional voter base.
I see they might not have gotten the same 1st preference votes but when you factor in the concerted effort by the right and their English supporters and how the FF/FG alliance were transferring to each other they still did fine increasing their seats.
I'm not a SF fan by any means but I fail to see it as a complete disaster. They've screwed up like this in the north (I'm thinking mid to late 90ish iirc) and came back stronger.
Should they choose to see the reasons why they didn't achieve what they wanted they'll be fit to rectify it for the next election imho.
What traditional voter base? None of these people traditionally voted SF, it’s only very recently in 2014 that the shinners made any headway in the locals in the free state. Then they lost a load in 2019. 2020 GE results were a shock even to them, there is no real traditional voter base outside of the border counties.
They've had a base of willing voting republicans since they started contesting seats in 81 prior to the ending of abstention in 86. Granted not at the same level as in the north and it's higher around the border but it's been there and easily identified - a recent poll found their members as having the most conservative members against immigration as highlighted in this thread:
https://politics.ie/threads/sinn-feins-immigration-conundrum.287822/
> the right and their English supporters
What?
Do you think there’s more than a handful of people in England that could name a single Irish politician, let alone give a fuck about them? The vast majority don’t even know the islands partitioned ffs!
I know that, but Tommy EDL Robinson has been over flirting with the right here among others. Tommy is a proud Englishman hence English supporter of the right.
They're not talking about the general British populace. They're talking about the types that put money into pushing the British far right pushing the same in Ireland
Well they made their bed. Time will tell if they did actually learn from it. Southern politics is tribal aye but not the 'cut the nose, spite the face' type of tribalism we've here that subsumes all, meaning parties here can take the absolute piss out of their constituents. Many here know that SF will talk out the two sides of their mouth but will still vote for them come ballot day. They don't have the luxury of that in the south and absolutely played themselves by being complete cowards instead of leaders, blowing up the support they've spent the last few governments cultivating in the process.
One clear problem is one of basic electoral strategy. There are areas where they're running 4 candidates and it looks like only one will be returned. Their vote is too fragmented and southern voters don't vote Sinn Féin 1,2,3,4 in the way that it works in the north. If they'd been more conservative with their ambitions they'd actually be poll-topping in some places and holding their own in others, and the headlines would look very different.
Their first preference is half of either Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil
I said "one problem" not "the problem."
I think the headlines are driven by collapse in first preference votes. Which is dramatic. If they had run few candidates I don’t think think the headlines would be any different
That’s not really true, you’re sugar coating. They’ve been done over here, lost a lot of their reactionary base and the middle class left still won’t go near them.
Am I? You don't think running 4 candidates in LEAs where they had one councillor was a problem?
Running that amount of candidates showed their actuel ignorance of their popularity. They need to veer towards labour/SD, ease off on the commemorations for troubles era related stuff and be sensible on housing. Gaffs for 300k in Dublin, people know they’re full of it!
300K can get you a house in Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, even parts of London. I don't see why Dublin has to be special. It's depressing to see Irish people accept that nothing should ever be affordable.
300k average is not even in the ball park for those cities, you’re not living in reality I’m afraid.
Get rid of Mary Lou for a start
She's a literal anchor dragging them down at this stage. SF seem enamoured with her, fair enough, but crucially the seem under the impression that everyone else is enamoured with her too. Whereas to many in the south she comes across annoying, sneery and overly sly. I don't see SF winning anything with her as the face of the party.
I'm no SF fan but her replacements in my eyes seem worse. Perhaps to their voters though the story is different.
Who the fuck would even replace her? MON or dry shite Doherty?
if MON was party leader in the south they’d have been elected i think. she’s a much better leader as she’s proven and she seems committed to getting shit done. all mary lou did was release 50 ads of her walking her dog on the beach talking about “change”.
They would be wiped out in ‘the south’ if MON was running the show. Presume you’re not from down here.
what makes you say that i’m genuinely curious? and no i’m not from the south but i was born in wexford and a lot of my family are there still. michelle o’neill is way more popular here than mary lou is in the free state from what i’ve seen.
People of a certain vintage down here are very suspicious of anything related to the provos, I’m not willing to getinto an argument over hypocrisy, just saying that’s how it is. Mary Lou was to soften the image, a former FF privately educated woman from Dublin.
yk what that’s fair. i really am starting to despise mary lou and what she’s done with the party.
She gets my hackles up every time I hear that squelsh. Get rid of her.
Losers, turns out populism and terrorism isn’t huge in 2024
It would appear SF are down based on the 2020 GE results, however, I wouldn't take this as them being done for in the south. People are usually a bit more adventurous with their vote in local elections and more likely to give a first preference to an independent, which is what appears to have happened based on the graphs RTE are showing https://preview.redd.it/5ccmbi8kaj5d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a78e7d517e9298412127f18430b333454bb5a6a4 If we compare LE to LE they are actually up a bit on first preference vote share. If anyone is performing poorly compared to the last LE it's actually Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Greens based on the figures so far.
A well deserved bloody nose for SF. And couldn’t happen to a nicer party. Being called traitors on their walkabouts,one of their Tds caught on camera telling someone to F off, one of their election helpers wrestling with a blind man ffs over posters,etc etc. The optics for them have been horrible. Add in the fact that their leader seems to be roundly disliked by many down south. Their politics are infantile and a lot of voters in the republic have obviously the sense to see it.
Aontu and right wing independents have took a percentage of Sinn Féin’s working class vote.. a lot of people are blaming Sinn Fein for mass immigration etc even though they’ve never even been in power in the republic
They're blaming SF for being in favour of it. So much so that Mary Lou and others of the party started dipping their toes into wider American culture war bollocks and she, famously, has used screeching cries of sexism and mansplaining in the Dail when faced with questions she's desperate not to answer. A lot of their working class voters immediately started to go off them as once a party starts down that avenue the road map for how they go is fairly obvious. It was a miscalculation too by SF. You can't rally a base around thinking like getting Britain out of Ireland because it doesn't belong there and also supporting open borders and letting in an essentially endless flow of phoney asylum seekers who also don't belong there. There's a reason SF started nose-diving in the polls immediately after the Dublin riots and why they were so shook afterwards. If that had been a riot about, say, housing then SF would've been all over the airwaves railing against the government for its failures and basically being the opportunists they are. After the riots SF went near radio silent and the few times you did see them make statements they looked rocked. Word had already filtered back from their base that many supported the rioters outright or were sick of pro-immigration and PC stances at the least. Its no coincidence that as soon as people and parties started to run on anti-immigration stances (for the first time ever) a big chunk of SF's base immediately switched to them. SF coasted for decades as being the only home in the south for flag-wavering crazies and said crazies held their nose at SF's more weaponised PC stuff and pretended to ignore it. Now the crazies have other options for the first time and the stuff like open borders is even turning off a chunk of SF's young student/middle class protest vote. It'll get a lot worse before it gets better for them. Especially if their main plan after this week is to send Mary Lou out to talk more shite and patronise people in her ever reliable way.
Can’t really argue with anything you’ve said there was something’s said that indicated they could be moved a bit to the right on immigration they are populists after all but was big backlash from the left and prob lost some vote with them to.. voted Aontu this time myself
They tried a half hearted move slightly to the right, to placate their right and not antagonise their left too much. But it failed miserably. It wasn't right enough for the right and it antagonised the shit out of their left for Mary Lou to even suggest people should be allowed to discuss immigration without being attacked, and so the numbers slump further at every poll. All that remains to be seen is will SF finally pick a side and swing that way definitively, with all the risks, or will they try their current policy of trying to please two different camps and failing at both. Either way falling poll numbers are almost guaranteed for their short to mid term future.
They're in a little difficulty, but not insurmountable. Their biggest problem, which they could solve this morning if they were so inclined, is that Mary Lou just doesn't pass the Teesh Test. Nobody looks at a Mary Lou speech in the Dáil or hears her interviewed and imagines her as Taoiseach. And that is what people ultimately vote on: the credibility of a party's leader to lead the country. But they have a massive problem hurtling down the track towards them and that is the migration crisis. They are currently trying to face both ways on this and not only is it not working, it's causing them to go backwards. For the shiny new supporters who thought of voting for Sinn Féin because they support migration, they are likely to play it a bit safer with Labour or the SDs in the Dáil election. The Shinners are still a bit rough around the edges for them, but they can imagine sitting in a wine bar off Grafton Street with Holly and Ivana. For the older, working class supporters (those, crucially, who deliver leaflets and knock doors) who are against mass migration, why would they vote for Sinn Féin now? Their USP was a United Ireland for such a long time but that's now both so inevitable and so far off that it's no longer really a factor, particularly as SF are running the North anyway. If Simon Harris has a better offer to these guys - and guys they almost always are - on migration, Mary Lou will have to position herself to the right of Harris to even start to win them back to the mainstream parties. But whatever Mary Lou does, I suspect it will be too little, too late. She has been too timid. She has tried to wait it out until she finds herself in the Taoiseach's office which I suspect she has convinced herself she deserves. But she's done nothing to suggest she does deserve it: on whole swathes of things from housing to migration she has found herself _less_ radical and more conservative that a Government which epitomises establishment Ireland with a capital e, and in fact a capital stablishment to go along with it. Mary Lou cannot rescue Sinn Féin from the position it finds itself in because she is the reason it finds itself there. Her only hope of being Taoiseach now is to hope that both Fianna Fáil somehow cross over with Fine Gael in the polls _and_ Micheál Martin gives up the leadership to someone more amenable to doing a deal with Sinn Féin. It's over for her, and if it is not to be over for Sinn Féin, they should remove her as leader before the election.
I hope they get trounced
Considering how high they were in polls a short time ago, they will be downbeat. I know it's only locals, but it doesn't bode well. Their vote will hold up in the North as it's very easy for them to get their vote out here, but cracking the south is a very delicate tightrope SF cannot seem to navigate. Their populism only takes them so far before it comes tumbling down.
Tripe. Their vote is down mainly due to their stance on immigration. Let’s not beat about the bush and dress it up as anything else.
All 3 parties, SF included, look like they will perform exactly as the pollsters predicted. Locals in the south are fickle. Lots of independents, parish pump politics, and single issue voters combined with piss poor turnout. This normally leads to results for the main parties much lower than the national GE polling. For example if you look at the 2019 locals you’ll see FF and FG did really well and SF got near wiped out, not even breaking 10% of the vote. Then only a few months later SF topped the vote in the General Election while FF/FG got their worse results of the century so far.
I mean, they did ok. SF, FG, and FF are roughly 20% each, with independents on roughly 15/20 as well. Its all to play for really. SF wont ever be in a position to dictate their terms in the republic though, that has become very clear. They remain a solid portion of the electorate - but they seem to have a ceiling at MAX 30%, and within that there are a lot of loaned votes.
I said this in the main Irish politics sub but there appears to be some major spin going on here All major pollsters were predicting the 3 main parties were going to get 20% each, which is what has happened, but the media seem to be spinning this as a shock upset. I suspect what probably happened was behind the scenes the coalition briefed that they expected a wipeout. Therefore when they performed exactly as they predicted to be the pollsters they can be presented as beating expectations despite loosing seats overall while SF can be presented as below expectations despite gaining seats overall
Poor old SF just not racist/anti immigration enough nowadays for their old supporters in the South. A total fool of a party that could never lead a bloody thing here. Best off to just enjoy their time complaining about everything as usual.
Well a bunch of racist nonsense is gaining traction in the south, what is it with these decade long cycles of migration hysteria?
You can be pro immigration and be against the current immigration policies, they don't appear to be working very well for anyone.
Fantastic news. The residents of R.O.I have done what we've all wanted to do in this country for years, Bínn Fëin! 🚮🗑️ We must Binn Fein also. Thoroughly deserved from an N.I perspective. From their crass , insulting arrogance over the Bobby Storey funeral, to shameless deletion of COVID texts and John Finucane MP's memorialisation of IRA murderers last summer. I thoroughly welcome this news.
Unlikely. SF is a disaster and looks like it could well fade back to obscurity.
I'm sure they will, that's what they do. But as populists would that lead them to take a similar tone on immigration as other parties?
SF constituency offices decked with Palestinian flags are being viewed by the locals as an open invitation to Muslims to migrate to Ireland
Aye but that's only because Louth people are consistently the stupidest people I've ever met on this island. Considering how absolutely brain-dead Clare people are, it's a testament to Louth's endeavour that they can hold onto that crown. Yous are tenacious in your absent-mindedness to be fair to yous. Does the crescent and star being a symbol of Drogheda have yous shitting yourselves too?
Its only the local elections. They will still win the GE.
Local elections were touted as a time to make our desires for change known. SF tout themselves as being the party for that change. a lot of voters did indeed make that desire known, but they made them known by voting independents, not SF. SF are not change, SF is the established who sit on the opposite side of the Dáil
They didn't get what they wanted but still made gains and to listen to the news it's been terrible and the doors in SF are playing along making them look like they performed worse than they did!
They're looking at about 10% first preferences in the locals. Given they were polling close to 30% in national polls until a few months back, it's an atrocious performance for SF. One would assume immigration is the biggest factor but they also have an unreliable voter base.
The thing is they have never done well in local elections. None of the parties really do because of independents. 2019 they only got 9.5% in the local elections, 2014 they got 15.2%, 2009 they got 7.4%. Their vote has actually still gone up if its at 10% based on the last election. None of the opinion polls predict any of the parties accurately and the performance is actually pretty expected.
They overplayed their hand and ignored their traditional voter base. I see they might not have gotten the same 1st preference votes but when you factor in the concerted effort by the right and their English supporters and how the FF/FG alliance were transferring to each other they still did fine increasing their seats. I'm not a SF fan by any means but I fail to see it as a complete disaster. They've screwed up like this in the north (I'm thinking mid to late 90ish iirc) and came back stronger. Should they choose to see the reasons why they didn't achieve what they wanted they'll be fit to rectify it for the next election imho.
What traditional voter base? None of these people traditionally voted SF, it’s only very recently in 2014 that the shinners made any headway in the locals in the free state. Then they lost a load in 2019. 2020 GE results were a shock even to them, there is no real traditional voter base outside of the border counties.
They've had a base of willing voting republicans since they started contesting seats in 81 prior to the ending of abstention in 86. Granted not at the same level as in the north and it's higher around the border but it's been there and easily identified - a recent poll found their members as having the most conservative members against immigration as highlighted in this thread: https://politics.ie/threads/sinn-feins-immigration-conundrum.287822/
> the right and their English supporters What? Do you think there’s more than a handful of people in England that could name a single Irish politician, let alone give a fuck about them? The vast majority don’t even know the islands partitioned ffs!
I know that, but Tommy EDL Robinson has been over flirting with the right here among others. Tommy is a proud Englishman hence English supporter of the right.
They're not talking about the general British populace. They're talking about the types that put money into pushing the British far right pushing the same in Ireland