Sarah Carey

Well, look, I've always taken the view Sinn Féin is a Republican party.

They want a united Ireland.

That's the number one goal.

And then whatever policies, you know, will help them get there is the overriding concern.

But they have had, probably in common with a lot of other left-wing parties...

is there's a divide between the middle class progressive wing, and the Labour Party in England would suffer from this as well, and then they have their own voters who might take a different wing.

So where they've been losing votes and what's really been hampering them, apart from the fact that there's always been a 75% of voters who are never shinners, like they don't care.

what Sinn Féin policies are they won't have them when they were at one point in the early 30s yeah but when it came to voting when it came to the actual election that did not translate into seats so let's just remember the last election Fianna Fáil got what was it 48 seats and that was a moment when Sinn Féin were expected to make a breakthrough and they didn't I wrote it down somewhere it was at 39 that they were at

But anyway, but the point is now that their voters were drifting away from them because they felt that Sinn Féin were too left wing on issues like immigration and other social and cultural issues.

So they're being eaten into from that side.

And that's where they were seeding votes, you know, to independent Ireland, say in Galway West.

And as Shane is going through in his article, he's going through her transfers, went in Dublin Central.

You know, Hutch and Malachy Steenson in Dublin Central.

So so they're left.

And then they had their own left wing voters who were annoyed with them for opposing the Sock Dems liberalisation of abortion bill in the Dáil there a few weeks ago.

So Sinn Féin are being squeezed on either side.

But then you've got Labour and he makes the point about Ivana, you know, that she's now saying that she's putting distance between herself and Sinn Féin.

And it was clear from Batshek's message, he's saying this week, that her supporters will no longer have to endure the painful sight of her seeing standing silently beside the Sinn Féin leader on the Leinster House plinth.

And I have to admit, you see, that was another mistake I think Labour made, that any time they tended to spike in polls and do really good elections, it was the middle class progressives were moving from Fine Gael over to them on social issues, you know, like abortion and things like that.

So there's this bulk of kind of progressive voters here.