‘Agents for change’ gather at Sinn Féin leadership conference

THE Sinn Féin leadership met in Dublin last Saturday. Five hundred representatives from all levels of local, regional and national leadership – including MEPs, TDs, MPs, MLAs, and councillors from all over Ireland – were there. It was the most nationally representative party meeting outside an Ard Fheis.

The purpose was to mobilise the widest cross-section of key leaders as a prelude to public meetings in the North and a separate engagement with several thousand republican activists across Ireland by January 2015.

The conference discussed the political situation North and South. It placed an important emphasis on national cohesion and integration, addressed key challenges, and set out the party’s priorities and programme of work between now and December 2016.

It occurred amidst the mass mobilisations against water charges, opposition to austerity across Ireland, the deteriorating political situation and current talks in the north. Many activists spoke about the community-based political momentum being mobilised by the injustice of water charges.

Contributions throughout the day considered the implications of the national political situation; Sinn Fein’s position in government and opposition; campaigning against austerity in Ireland and mainland Europe; the Stormont talks; and negotiations as a site of struggle.

Important presentations were made on ambitious party building targets and plans to celebrate 2016.

● Declan Kearney, Martin Ferris TD, Martina Anderson MEP and Gerry Adams TD take questions from the audience

The conference reflected the buoyancy of republican morale. The party’s electoral preparations, with significant progress on candidate gender balance, are well in hand.

Clear strategy, coherent analysis and political cohesion were hallmarks of this event.

By contrast, the SDLP annual conference took place the same day. It was described elsewhere as a small, lacklustre affair, typifying the political drift which now characterises that party.

Echoing its lack of political strategy, the SDLP rejected Sinn Féin’s proposal two days beforehand for an imaginative approach towards maximising pro-Agreement representation in the next elections and as a counter to the unionist anti-Agreement axis. Earlier this week, an SDLP spokesperson foolishly asserted Sinn Féin was responsible for austerity in the North, cynically ignoring the British Tories’ slashing of the North’s block grant and the Tory assault on the welfare state.

Meanwhile, Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, and Labour continued with their gratuitous slur and slander strategy against the membership of Sinn Féin.

Their unparalleled and sustained vilification of Sinn Féin is totally ideological and electorally motivated. It sits in stark juxtaposition with their indifference to the suffering caused to the working poor, jobless, and vulnerable by the austerity policies for which they are responsible.

During this same period, militarist factions in Derry City issued threats to kill local council workers and community workers.

Once more the militarists extended their range of ‘targets’ and in so doing again exposed their own activities as delinquent and politically bankrupt. Popular community pressure has since forced them to lift their “execution” threats. No one knows why they were issued, and no one will.

These small groups exist based on an interpretation of republicanism no one else understands and one that bears no relationship to reality.

There are real opportunities to transform the political landscape North and South. But that requires agents of change.

The vision must be to realise a multicultural, agreed united Ireland rooted in equality, to bring about change which guarantees the rights of all citizens, identities, traditions and minorities.

The agents of change do exist – they were at Sinn Féin’s conference last Saturday.

➤ See short video here