Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on 31-May-2026.
The week the left began contesting Sinn Féin’s place in it, and what the contest revealed about the form the moment requires
| Photo by Dimitry Anikin on Unsplash |
Section I: The week the question came out loud
The seventh essay closed on a count. Two electorates had answered a question the political ground had spent a week putting to them, and the answer in both constituencies was that the form a counter-hegemonic project requires does not currently exist in any single party. That essay published on the Saturday the Dublin Central result became clear. The Galway West seat was decided the following day, when Fine Gael’s Seán Kyne overtook Independent Ireland’s Noel Thomas on the eleventh count, carried over the line by transfers from Labour’s Helen Ogbu.
What happened next was not a settling. It was an escalation.
Within forty-eight hours of the last seat being filled, the parties of the Irish left began, in public and on the record, to contest whether Sinn Féin belongs in the left at all. The argument had been audible for some time at the level of analysts and pollsters and podcasters. By the middle of the week it was being conducted by party leaders, through the mechanism of a Seanad by-election, in the pages of the national press.
The Labour leader Ivana Bacik put it without hedging. “For us in the Labour Party,” she said, “we have never accepted that Sinn Féin are a left-wing party.” She named the terrains on which, in her account, the party had moved rightward: climate, tax, and migration. And she tied the claim directly to the weekend’s results, saying voters did not believe Sinn Féin was left wing, “which is so evidently borne out by the transfer pattern in the byelections.”
The argument took institutional shape almost immediately, and the institution was the Seanad. Kyne’s election to the Dáil had vacated his Seanad seat, which must be filled by a by-election within six months. On the Tuesday evening, Bacik wrote to the Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns and to the Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman, proposing that the three of them meet to discuss running an agreed candidate. Sinn Féin was not included in the invitation. Neither was People Before Profit. The Labour explanation was that Bacik had said since before the 2024 general election that she wanted to build a common platform on the left with the Greens and the Social Democrats, and that this was the platform she had in mind.
On the Wednesday, Cairns wrote to a wider group. Her letter went to Bacik and O’Gorman, but also to the leaders of Sinn Féin and People Before Profit, proposing a meeting to agree a unity candidate across the broader left. So by midweek there were two competing proposals running at once. One was a narrow centre-left bloc that excluded Sinn Féin. The other was a wider meeting that included it. Bacik agreed to attend the wider meeting as well. The two letters were not, on their surface, a dispute about a single Seanad seat. They were a disagreement about who the left is.
Cairns was not only convening. She was also, in the same week, the sharpest critic of Sinn Féin’s recent direction among the party leaders. She declared a left-wing government “within touching distance.” She called Sinn Féin’s abstention on the Social Democrats’ reproductive rights bill “a huge mistake.” And she described Sinn Féin as a party “at a crossroads” that needed to “iron out what their position is” on a range of questions.
Sinn Féin’s response was to assert the identity that was being questioned. The party’s TD Louise O’Reilly, asked on national television whether Sinn Féin had been squeezed from both the left and the right, reasserted the party’s connection to its communities and its left-wing credentials. Sinn Féin, she said, is a “left republican party,” and “we know what we stand for.” Mary Lou McDonald, asked about her leadership after the results, said there was no question over it, that “pressure is for tyres,” and that the party would conduct a review “as we have a review after every electoral contest.”
This was the week. The reading the previous essays had been building, and that a number of analysts and writers had been building alongside them, stopped being a reading. It became the open business of the Irish left, conducted by its leaders, in the week after two electorates had declined to give Sinn Féin the seat it wanted.
Section II: What the discourse had already seen
The party leaders did not arrive at this question first. They arrived at it last.
For weeks before Bacik wrote her letter, the reading that Sinn Féin had moved rightward, and that the move was strategic rather than accidental, had been worked out in the places where Irish political analysis actually happens now. Not in the newspaper columns, though it reached them eventually, but in the podcasts and the polling threads and the long-running arguments of the political internet, where the people who follow the numbers closely had been describing the shift in detail while the mainstream commentary was still treating the by-elections as a story about Mary Lou McDonald’s leadership.
The most precise account of when the shift happened came from the solicitor and commentator Simon McGarr, speaking on Tony Groves’ podcast in the days after the count. McGarr located the inflection at a specific moment: the Dublin riots of November 2023, when a knife attack on children outside a school became the occasion for the worst night of street disorder Dublin had seen in decades. In McGarr’s reading, that night was the point at which Sinn Féin’s posture changed. Faced with the mobilisation of anti-immigration sentiment as a street force, the party made a calculation. Rather than contest the ground, it would attempt to occupy some of it. The recalibration that the body of work has been tracking across seven essays, in the procedural absorptions and the strategic silences and the abstentions, has a date, and the date is the night Dublin burned.
The pollster who writes as ‘The Foggy Jew’ was reading the same shift through the transfer data. Sinn Féin’s transfer performance, he noted, had never been strong, but it had been improving; what the by-elections showed was a hard reversion, a sense that the party had alienated a substantial body of voters who would once have transferred to it. The sportswriter and commentator Philip O’Connor had been making a parallel argument in his own writing. And in the days after the count, the People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy set the case out at length in Rupture.ie, naming the rightward shift explicitly, pointing to a Dublin Central leaflet headed “Sinn Féin will manage migration,” and citing the figure that crystallised the whole argument: almost fifty per cent of People Before Profit transfers in Dublin Central went to the Social Democrats, against twenty-three per cent to Sinn Féin.
This is the diagnostic discourse, and it had seen the structural fact clearly before the party leaders said a word. What it had largely not done, because it was not its job to do, was connect the strategic reading to the larger contest the previous essays have been describing. McGarr dated the inflection. ‘The Foggy Jew’ read the reversion in the numbers. Murphy named the shift and prescribed the socialist alternative. Each was right about the piece they were holding. The question the body of work has been asking is what the pieces amount to when they are put together, and the answer to that question is not a story about a leaflet or a transfer percentage or a single bad night in 2023. It is a story about what kind of contest Irish politics is now having, and about why a party that calculates its way around that contest cannot win it.
That is the work this essay is trying to do. Not to dispute the diagnostic discourse, which has been ahead of the commentary throughout, but to read what it has found through the frame the previous essays built. The strategic calculation McGarr dates to November 2023 is real. The transfer reversion the numbers show is real. The rightward shift Murphy names is real. What follows is an argument about why all three are aspects of a single structural fact, and about why that fact is the reason the form the moment requires does not yet exist.
Section III: The calculation
A calculation has a logic, and the logic of this one can be reconstructed.
By late 2023, Sinn Féin had spent four years as the largest party in the opinion polls and the obvious government-in-waiting. The support was built on housing and the cost of living, on a generation locked out of the things their parents had taken for granted, and on the sense that the party was the only vehicle large enough to break the century-old duopoly. Then the ground moved. The anti-immigration mobilisation that had been building in towns across the State found its sharpest expression on the streets of Dublin in November 2023, and it became clear that a portion of the working-class vote Sinn Féin regarded as its own was available to be organised on lines that had nothing to do with housing and everything to do with who belongs.
The calculation, as best it can be inferred from what the party did next, was this. The disaffection being mobilised by the far right was real, and it overlapped with Sinn Féin’s base. To hold that base, the party would need to avoid being positioned as the enemy of the people the far right was recruiting. That meant not getting too far out in front on the questions the far right had made into dividing lines. It meant a leaflet in Dublin Central headed “Sinn Féin will manage migration.” It meant abstaining, two weeks before the by-elections, on a Social Democrats bill to expand abortion rights, despite having voted in the previous Dáil for a more far-reaching bill from People Before Profit. It meant a caution on the social terrain that the party had not shown when the social terrain seemed all upside.
The reasoning is not stupid. In a proportional system, where seats turn on transfers and on the second and third preferences of voters whose first preference went elsewhere, a party that wants to be the largest in a coalition has to be broadly acceptable across a wide span of the electorate. If the disaffected working-class vote was drifting toward the anti-immigration right, then a party that planted itself firmly against that drift risked being locked out of it. The calculation was that ambiguity would hold the widest possible coalition together. Be the party of housing for the left, be acceptable on migration to the disaffected, gather the transfers, win the seats.
The by-elections were the first real test of the calculation, and the calculation failed in both directions at once.
It failed on the left because the voters the party was trying not to alienate noticed what it was doing, and left. In Dublin Central, the progressive vote did not transfer to Sinn Féin. It transferred to the Social Democrats. Almost half of People Before Profit’s transfers went to Daniel Ennis; under a quarter went to Janice Boylan. The left-minded majority in the constituency, the very voters a left party needs, declined to treat Sinn Féin as their natural home, because they had watched the party hedge on abortion and migration and concluded that it would abandon marginalised groups for a calculated electoral advantage. The hedge did not read as breadth. It read as a party that could not be trusted to hold a line.
And it failed on the right, because the votes the hedge was meant to attract did not come either, or came from the wrong place and ran out too soon. In Dublin Central, the transfers that did reach Boylan came disproportionately not from the progressive parties but from the eliminated candidates of the anti-system right, from Malachy Steenson and from Gerry Hutch. Her transfer base sat to her right, among voters whose first preference was an explicit anti-immigration independent or an independent running on grievance. Those are not the foundations of a left coalition. They are the foundations of nothing stable at all, because the moment a more committed candidate of the right is on the ballot, those voters have somewhere better to go. In Galway West, where Pearse Doherty and Matt Carthy were highly visible on the ground, the party’s candidate did worse still, eliminated early on a first-preference share below seven per cent, behind both Labour and the Social Democrats.
This is what a failed calculation looks like in a transfer system. Not a single catastrophic defeat but a double squeeze, a party that has made itself the second choice of the left and the second choice of the right and the first choice of neither. The hedge was supposed to widen the coalition. What it did was hollow out the centre of it.
And here is the part the strategic framing cannot quite reach on its own. A calculation that fails can usually be corrected. You ran the numbers wrong, you adjust, you run them again. But the body of work has been arguing for seven essays that this is not, at bottom, a numbers problem, and the by-elections are the evidence. The pattern that produced the hedge is the same pattern that produced the procedural absorptions during the fuel week, the hedge on migration, the abstention on reproductive rights. It is not a series of tactical choices that happened to go wrong. It is a single structural feature, operating across every terrain, every time the substantive question is hard. The calculation is not the disease. The calculation is a symptom of it.
Section IV: What the party said about itself
The party defended itself, and it did so at three levels, each more considered than the last. Reading them in ascending order is the quickest way to see what the defence can and cannot do.
The first level was the soundbite. Asked on television, in the days after the count, whether her party had been squeezed from the left and the right at once, the Sinn Féin TD Louise O’Reilly did not concede the premise. She reasserted the identity. Sinn Féin, she said, is a “left republican party,” and “we know what we stand for.” It would be easy, and cheap, to treat that as self-evidently absurd in light of everything that precedes it. It is not absurd. A great many people inside Sinn Féin believe it, and there is a real argument underneath it. The trouble is only that an assertion is not the argument, and the question the by-elections posed was never whether Sinn Féin knows what it stands for. It was whether the voters do.
The second level supplied the argument the soundbite gestured at. On the 27th May, Seán MacBrádaigh published a piece arguing that Sinn Féin’s left-wing credentials are not up for debate, and his case was sociological and careful. The weak transfers between Sinn Féin and the soft-left parties, he wrote, do not reveal an ideological verdict. They reveal a difference of class background and life experience. The base of Labour, the Greens, and much of the Social Democrats is comfortable, urban, professional, a constituency that moves easily between those parties and Fine Gael because it wants the existing settlement civilised rather than replaced. Sinn Féin’s base is PAYE workers, renters, the young locked out of housing, small farmers, the rural and the stretched. When those two bases decline to transfer to each other, MacBrádaigh argued, that is not the working class judging Sinn Féin insufficiently left. It is two different experiences of Ireland expressing two different politics.
Much of this is simply true, and the body of work has never said otherwise. MacBrádaigh is right that “the left” is not one tribe. He is right that the soft-left parties get an easy ride from a media that finds them safe, and that Sinn Féin is still treated in parts of the establishment as a dangerous outsider despite its size. He is right that left nationalism is a real and democratic current, that in working-class communities and in six-county nationalism is not experienced as reactionary, and that in the republican tradition the national question and the social question were never separate, a lineage he traces from Connolly and Mellows to Sands. And he is right, finally and to his credit, that none of this lets the party off. He ends his piece by saying the by-elections raised real questions for Sinn Féin, that support did not consolidate, that the message and the strategy must be examined, and that a left government remains necessary and possible and must be built through cooperation across the broad left. That is an honest argument honestly made.
The third level is where the trouble enters. Two days later, Chris Hazzard MP published a response that took MacBrádaigh’s frame and did something different with it. Hazzard reached for Thomas Piketty’s account of the “Brahmin Left,” the transformation of Western left parties into vehicles for an educated professional caste, and he turned MacBrádaigh’s observation about class difference into a sharper claim: that the soft-left’s progressive positions are not just differently rooted but are themselves caste markers, the lifestyle politics of people shielded by their class from the sharpest edges of the state. And where MacBrádaigh had gestured at “debates around immigration” and moved quickly on, Hazzard planted a flag. He made the positive case that a genuine left-populism must take “a firm grip” on the core functions of sovereignty, that immigration must be managed “fast, efficient, and firm,” that policing and community safety are questions the metropolitan left abandons out of squeamishness and that republicans must not. Where MacBrádaigh kept the alliance door open, Hazzard closed it: stop seeking certification from the establishment, he wrote, and start organising our people for power.
The distance between those two essays, written two days apart by two committed left republicans, is the thing worth looking at. Because the second is further right than the first, and it got there by taking a true premise and asking it to carry a weight it cannot bear.
Here is the weight. The class analysis is real, and on one terrain it genuinely illuminates. The pressure that unplanned migration places on under-resourced communities, the anxiety about anti-social behaviour in areas stripped of youth services and visible policing, the sense that the state has been more responsive to developers than to the people living with the consequences, these are real, they are material, and they are felt more sharply lower down the income distribution than higher up. On these questions MacBrádaigh’s frame and even Hazzard’s instinct are pointing at something the metropolitan left does too often dismiss. A left that treats every working-class worry about safety or services as mere reaction is making both a moral and a strategic mistake, and the body of work has tried throughout not to be that left.
But the frame is then carried onto terrains where it does no work at all, and the carrying is the move. Sinn Féin’s most recent hedge was not on policing. It was the abstention, two weeks before the by-elections, on the Social Democrats’ Reproductive Rights (Amendment) Bill, after the party had voted in the previous Dáil for a more far-reaching bill from People Before Profit. And reproductive rights are precisely the terrain on which the Brahmin Left frame inverts. The pre-repeal reality was never that working-class women did not have abortions. It was that the route to one was governed, at every step, by what a woman could afford. The better-off booked a flight and a clinic and were home the same day. The worse-off took out credit union loans against what little they had saved, or borrowed through the government microfinance scheme set up to keep people away from illegal moneylenders, or sold what they could, or scraped the fare together coin by coin, and because that took time, they had their abortions later, which meant more expensive procedures further along. Those without the immigration status to travel at all, asylum seekers and women in the direct provision system, faced a court process to obtain the documents, or ordered pills online and took them without medical supervision because there was no other way. The whole arduous landscape is set out in Stephanie Lord’s 2017 guide to having an abortion while in Ireland, a document that reads as a manual for the under-resourced. The right vindicated at home was worth most, in other words, to precisely the women a class analysis should claim to care about most. To file reproductive rights under the lifestyle politics of a shielded professional caste is not just to get that backwards. It is to recycle, perhaps without knowing it, the claim the Irish anti-choice movement leaned on for years before repeal, that abortion was really a middle-class concern. The frame that was meant to defend the party’s working-class fidelity ends up borrowing the argument the working class’s opponents once used against it.
And notice that MacBrádaigh sensed this, which is why he would not defend the abstention and slid past the social votes with the phrase “disagreement on individual policy questions.” Hazzard, going further, made the positive case and in doing so exposed the bundle: the genuine class question about migration and the entirely different question about reproductive rights, packed into a single argument so that fidelity on the first can launder a retreat on the second. This is the integrated terrain the sixth essay described, and it is the structural feature this body of work has been tracking, now operating not in a procedural manoeuvre but inside the party’s own best thinking. The far right integrates these terrains so that a position on one carries the others. Hazzard’s essay performs the same integration from the other side, and the elaborateness of the apparatus required to do it, Piketty and Mouffe and four continents of comparison and the whole lineage from Connolly to Sands, is itself the tell. A party that simply holds left positions does not need a theory of why its hedges are the truest form of leftism. The theory grows to fit the retreat, and it grew visibly larger between the 27th May and the 29th.
There is one move left in all of this, and it is the shield. Who, MacBrádaigh asks, gets to define the left? Stop seeking the establishment’s certification, Hazzard answers. And against the enemy they name, the point lands cleanly. Sinn Féin does not need permission from Fine Gael or the Dublin 4 commentariat to call itself left, and a tradition built in the communities that carried the conflict owes no deference to people who discovered the working class at a seminar. But the verdict the party is actually answering did not come from that enemy. It came from the working-class voters of Dublin Central, who declined to transfer to it. It came from the women who wanted the bill passed. It came from a People Before Profit electorate whose preferences flowed to the Social Democrats rather than to Sinn Féin. You cannot use the metropolitan elite’s lack of standing to dismiss a judgment the metropolitan elite did not deliver. The shield is real, and it is pointed at the wrong attacker, because the attack this time came from the very base the shield is meant to protect.
And this is what the three levels of the defence, taken together, finally reveal. A party can be entirely sincere in its self-description and still be incapable of the role the moment requires. O’Reilly means it. MacBrádaigh means it. Hazzard, most elaborately of all, means it. The sincerity is not in question. What the by-elections exposed is that the structural feature this body of work has been diagnosing operates regardless of sincerity. A party that absorbs hard questions into procedure, that hedges on the defining terrain and then builds a theory to explain why the hedge is the truest fidelity, will be read by the electorate as a party without a fixed position, no matter how firmly, or how thoughtfully, it asserts its own coordinates. “We know what we stand for” is not refuted by the by-elections. It is, more troublingly for the party, rendered beside the point by them. The electorate was not asking what Sinn Féin knows about itself. It was telling Sinn Féin what it had learned.
Section V: The form and the scale
If the contest is not, at bottom, about Sinn Féin, then it is about what stands in Sinn Féin’s place. And the week supplied an unusually clear picture of the alternatives, because the same days that produced the left-credentials row also produced a small, revealing fight about a single Seanad seat.
The seat was Kyne’s, vacated by his move to the Dáil. Two proposals to fill it appeared within twenty-four hours of each other, and the gap between them is the whole argument in miniature. Bacik proposed that Labour, the Greens, and the Social Democrats meet to agree a candidate, with the larger purpose, stated openly, of forming a three-party centre-left bloc that could negotiate after the next election as an equal with Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil, and Fine Gael. Cairns proposed a wider meeting of the whole left, Sinn Féin and People Before Profit included. The first proposal treats the left as something Sinn Féin is negotiated with. The second treats it as something Sinn Féin is part of. A Seanad by-election that ordinarily nobody outside the Oireachtas would notice became the vehicle for a genuine disagreement about the shape of the thing.
Bacik’s bloc has a logic of its own, and it is the mirror image of Sinn Féin’s calculation. Where Sinn Féin hedged on the integrated terrain to keep its right flank, Bacik’s proposal is to assemble the parties that did not hedge, the parties that held the line on climate and migration and reproductive rights, into a unit with enough combined weight to set terms. It is an attempt to build, out of the cleaner-on-the-terrain parties, the coherent left pole that Sinn Féin has declined to anchor. Whether it can work is a separate question. Labour, the Greens, and the Social Democrats are not obviously a natural bloc, and at least one of them is wary of the other two. But the instinct behind it is the right instinct: that the terrain has to be held, and that a vehicle which holds it has to be assembled out of whatever materials are actually available.
And here the body of work runs into the question it has been circling since the fourth essay, the question that the diagnostic discourse has mostly not asked because it is not a question about Sinn Féin. Paul Murphy, in his Rupture.ie piece, made the case that People Before Profit already holds the integrated terrain in full. The prescription, he wrote, is “a principled socialist approach with a strategy of serious organising,” which means “holding firm on questions of migration, LGBTQ rights and women’s rights while organising on housing and the cost of living.” That is, almost word for word, the integrated terrain the sixth essay described. Murphy is right that People Before Profit holds it. The party holds it more cleanly and more consistently than anyone. And People Before Profit has, at present, a handful of seats.
So the form question turns out to be two questions, and the week has separated them.
The first is the scale question. There is a party that holds the integrated terrain whole, and it is small. There is a party with the scale to govern, and it does not hold the terrain. Between them sit the Social Democrats, growing, now twelve TDs after Dublin Central, clean enough on the terrain to be gathering the transfers Sinn Féin is shedding, but with a coalition posture that is itself unresolved. Cairns has not ruled out talking to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and Murphy’s sharpest question in the Rupture.ie piece is aimed not at Sinn Féin but at the Social Democrats: whether they will, in the end, repeat the trajectory of Labour. The terrain and the scale are held by different parties, and no existing party holds both.
The second is the harder question, and it is the one the body of work cannot answer and will not pretend to. If holding the terrain whole requires the politics that People Before Profit has, and governing requires the scale that Sinn Féin has, then the form the moment requires is not any of the parties as they currently exist. It is something that does not yet exist: either a larger party built on the uncompromised terrain, or an alliance disciplined enough to hold the terrain together at scale, or a transformation of one of the existing parties into something it is not currently willing to be. Bacik’s bloc is one attempt at the third option. Murphy’s organising strategy is a bet on the first. The Seanad fight is what it looks like when several incompatible answers to the same question are being worked out at once, in real time, over a seat almost nobody was watching.
That is the state of the question. Not who is the largest party of the left, but whether the form that could hold the framework can be assembled at all from the parties that exist, and if not, what would have to be built.
Section VI: The question that was asked out loud
The week began with a count and ended with a question, and the question was older than the week.
For four years the Irish left had a working assumption, rarely stated because it did not need to be: that Sinn Féin was the vehicle. Whatever its imperfections, it was the party large enough to break the duopoly, and the smaller parties of the left arranged themselves around that fact, sometimes resentfully, as a planet arranges itself around a star. The presidential campaign that elected Catherine Connolly was the high point of the arrangement, five parties pulling together behind a single candidate, the star and its planets briefly in alignment. The by-elections and the week that followed were the arrangement coming apart in public.
What came apart was not a friendship and not a tactical alliance. It was an assumption. When Bacik says her party has never accepted that Sinn Féin is left-wing, when Cairns calls the abstention a huge mistake and declares a left government within touching distance without Sinn Féin at the centre of the sentence, when the Seanad seat becomes a fight about whether the left is something Sinn Féin leads or something Sinn Féin is merely one of the parties in, the thing being renegotiated is the assumption that Sinn Féin is the vehicle. The other parties have started to behave as though it might not be. That is the news of the week, and it is bigger than any leaflet or transfer percentage.
The body of work has been arguing toward this for eight essays, and it is worth being precise about what the argument was and was not. It was never that Sinn Féin is insincere, or that its activists are not doing the work, or that its housing policy is secretly right-wing. It was that a single structural feature, the absorption of every hard question into procedure and the hedge on every contested terrain, would eventually be read by the electorate as the absence of a fixed position, and that on a terrain where the contest is for the framework itself, a party without a fixed position cannot anchor the counter-project. The by-elections were that reading arriving. The left-credentials row was the other parties beginning to act on it. The Seanad fight was the first attempt to imagine what replaces the assumption now that it is gone.
And the replacement is the thing that does not yet exist. This is where the week leaves us, and the body of work will not dress it up. There is a party that holds the integrated terrain whole and lacks the scale to govern. There is a party with the scale to govern that does not hold the terrain. There is a growing party in between with a coalition posture it has not resolved, and a centre-left bloc being assembled by a leader whose own party is unforgiven for the last time it governed. None of them is the form. The form would be larger than People Before Profit, more disciplined on the terrain than Sinn Féin, and more willing to rule out the comfortable coalition than the Social Democrats have so far been. It would be something built, and nobody has built it.
That is not a counsel of despair. The assumption that held for four years was itself a kind of avoidance, a way of not having to ask whether the vehicle was the right vehicle because it was the only one large enough to bother asking about. The week stripped the avoidance away. The question is now being asked out loud, by the people with the standing to ask it, in the institutions where it has to be settled. A question asked out loud is further along than a question nobody will name. The Irish left spent four years assuming it had a vehicle. It now knows it has a question instead. Whether it can build the answer is the only thing that matters, and it is the one thing this essay, like the seven before it, cannot tell you, because it has not happened yet, and because it will be decided not by the argument but by the people the argument is engaging.
The week began with a count. It ended with the left, for the first time in a decade, genuinely unsure what it is. That uncertainty is not the crisis. It is the precondition for anything honest being built. The body of work is eight essays long now, and the question it has been circling since the first one has finally been said in the open, by the people who will have to answer it. The answer is not written. It was never going to be written here. It is going to be written, if it is written at all, by them.
References
The Dublin Central and Galway West by-election results, May 2026. RTÉ News, The Journal, the Irish Examiner, Galway Bay FM.
Ivana Bacik on Sinn Féin’s left-wing credentials, and the Seanad by-election pact proposals. The Journal and the Irish Times, late May 2026.
Holly Cairns on a left government, the abortion abstention, and Sinn Féin “at a crossroads.” The Journal and the Irish Times, late May 2026.
Louise O’Reilly and Mary Lou McDonald on the party’s left-republican identity and the by-election result. RTÉ’s The Week in Politics and the Irish Times, May 2026.
Paul Murphy, “Five takeaways from the by-elections,” Rupture, May 2026.
Seán MacBrádaigh, “Why Sinn Féin’s left-wing credentials are not up for debate,” 27 May 2026.
Chris Hazzard, “Beyond the Brahmin Left: Class, Sovereignty, and Reconquest,” 29 May 2026.
Thomas Piketty on the “Brahmin Left,” referenced as deployed in Hazzard’s piece.
Stephanie Lord, “How to have an abortion when you’re in Ireland” (A Rough Guide to Ireland, Part 1), 2017.
The Dublin riots, 23 November 2023, referenced as background. RTÉ, the Irish Times, the BBC.
The sixth and seventh essays in this body of work.
