Fox Hunting at Stormont? Inside Sinn Féin’s 2026 Ard Fheis

On 24th and 25th April 2026, Provisional Sinn Féin gathered in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast for an Ard Fheis that revealed much of the party’s present condition. This was not the gathering of a revolutionary Republican movement nor even of a party seriously troubled by the constitutional arrangements under which it operates. It was instead the gathering of a party concerned with institutional reform, citizens’ assemblies, public strategies, delivery frameworks and the careful language of respectability politics.

None of this is surprising. PSF has been travelling in this direction for decades. Since the early-to-mid 1980s, it has steadily diluted and ultimately entirely departed from Republicanism in pursuit of electoral acceptability: first discarding Éire Nua and the older Republican programme of national reconstruction, then accepting participation in the 26-County parliament, later embracing the Good Friday Agreement which entrenched partition and sectarianism, accepting the St Andrews settlement and endorsing British policing under the rebranded structures of the RUC/PSNI. The Belfast Ard Fheis was not a new departure, but the latest stage in the conversion of its energy into constitutional management.

This respectability politics was also clear in the party’s handling of immigration. Matt Carthy’s admission that PSF had made mistakes on the issue and ought to have been clearer much sooner, showed that the party recognises its old habit of dismissing public concern as reactionary or far-right is no longer electorally sustainable. Yet the correction remains technocratic rather than in any way nationalist in character. The question is still not framed in terms of sovereignty, borders, culture, social trust or even of how immigration materially affects industrial relations at the point of production. PSF asks only how migration might be better administered by a more competent manager of the existing order.

Mary Lou McDonald’s remarks sharpened the problem. In suggesting that many of those attacking PSF on immigration simply wish to keep Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in power, she avoided the more uncomfortable question: what exactly would PSF replace them with? A party that has spent decades diluting its Republicanism, and which some would argue departed from it entirely decades ago, cannot credibly present itself as a civilisational alternative to the Dublin consensus. Having liberalised its social policy, implemented austerity in the Six Counties, accepted the structures of partition and adopted the assumptions of managerial liberalism, PSF increasingly resembles the very parties it claims to oppose.

The fox-hunting controversy revealed another problem. The point is not whether one supports or opposes the practice. Many people, including many conservatives, find it distasteful. The real question is why PSF suddenly discovered the language of moral prohibition on this issue after having been perfectly willing to accommodate rural representatives associated with the blood sport. Martin McNamara, the Galway councillor who resigned after the Ard Fheis backed a ban on fox hunting with dogs, was not some unknown eccentric who slipped unnoticed through the party’s vetting process. He had been openly involved in such circles for years and even PSF’s own material described him as an equestrian.

That episode exposed the party’s selective moral seriousness. PSF could accommodate a fox-hunting councillor when it suited its rural ambitions and present itself as sensitive to country life, local tradition and inherited practice. But when the activist mood shifted, condemnation arrived quickly enough. Meanwhile, this same party had already made its peace with the liberalisation of abortion, accepting the killing of the unborn up to 12 weeks as part of the modern rights-based consensus. In PSF’s hierarchy of moral concern, certain rural customs may be condemned in the name of what the liberal order calls progress, while the gravest questions of life, family and conscience are neutralised under the language of rights, autonomy and modernisation.

This is not merely hypocrisy. It is a window into the kind of “new Ireland” PSF imagines: not a recovered moral community rooted in inheritance, obligation and national continuity, but a more efficiently managed “progressive” state. Rural Ireland is welcome insofar as it can be represented, canvassed, consulted and modernised. The unborn child, the family, the father, the parish, the local custom and the inherited moral order have little place in the party’s public imagination except as problems to be handled, sensitivities to be navigated or relics to be discarded.

The Redmondite spirit runs through PSF’s strategy for Irish unity by 2030. The party speaks of green papers, citizens’ assemblies, referendum planning and institutional preparation as though national freedom were a project-management exercise. Yet the premise remains that Irish sovereignty must be pursued through procedures permitted by the British state, within a framework designed to domesticate the national question and reconcile Irishmen to partition. This is not a Republican doctrine of national self-determination. It is constitutional nationalism.

In modern social-democratic form, PSF now repeats the old error that Irish national aspirations can be advanced through respectable constitutional channels, imperial toleration and gradual accommodation. The party does not proclaim the existing settlement illegitimate, it prepares for its possible evolution. It does not assert the sovereignty of the Irish nation as an existing right, it waits for the triggering of mechanisms created under British authority. It does not speak as a Republican movement demanding national restoration, but as an aspiring administration preparing the paperwork for a managed transition. A nation does not become free by asking its jailer to supervise the terms of its release.

Its approach to violence against women and girls follows the same pattern. No serious person can deny the scale of the crisis in the Occupied Six Counties. But PSF’s language is overwhelmingly bureaucratic: strategies, frameworks, agencies, reporting mechanisms, awareness campaigns, delivery plans and institutional coordination. More seriously, it increasingly treats Crown Forces as legitimate partners in social reform, rather than as instruments of British authority in Ireland. Administrative coordination may have its place, collaboration with Crown Forces does not. A serious politics would also have to ask harder questions about family breakdown, fatherlessness, pornography, alcohol and drug abuse, atomisation, male formation, community discipline and the erosion of shame.

This is a great weakness of liberal managerial politics. It can describe social collapse, count it, fund it, staff it and launch initiatives around it. What it cannot do is name the disorder at its root. It cannot say that men must be formed into husbands, fathers, protectors and disciplined members of a community. It cannot say that family breakdown has consequences. It cannot say that a society saturated with sexual commodification, narcotics, rootlessness and contempt for restraint will produce brutality. Such language would offend the liberal consensus, so PSF speaks instead in the approved dialect of the modern administrative state.

The call for Stormont reform is perhaps the clearest evidence of PSF’s constitutional surrender. No Republican worthy of the name should be seeking to make Stormont work better, because Stormont is not a broken Irish institution. It is a British institution functioning exactly as intended. It exists to administer partition, normalise the Unionist veto, convert the national question into a permanent sectarian balancing act and train former Republicans in the habits of devolved subservience.

To complain that Stormont is blocked, inefficient or in need of reform is already to accept the legitimacy of the cage. The problem with Stormont is not that it occasionally fails to deliver stable government. The problem is that it exists at all. It is the administrative mechanism of a partitionist settlement, designed to transform the Irish national struggle into a dispute over departments, budgets, petitions of concern and executive formation. The Republican position is not that the machinery of partition requires modernisation. It is that the machinery of partition requires abolition.

This is why the Belfast Ard Fheis matters. It showed a party that can still gesture towards Republican memory, but increasingly thinks in the categories of managerial liberalism. PSF can speak of unity, but only as a controlled process licensed by Britain; of social crisis, but only through strategies and agencies; of immigration, but only as an administrative failure to be handled more competently; of rural Ireland, but only so long as rural Ireland accepts “progressive” correction; and of Stormont, but only as an institution to be reformed rather than rejected.

A genuinely Republican politics would begin from entirely different premises. It would understand Ireland not as a future policy platform, but as a nation with a moral, historical, indefeasible and inalienable claim to wholeness. It would treat sovereignty not as a reward granted through British-designed procedures but rather as a right of the Irish people themselves. It would speak not only of services and systems, but of family, duty, inheritance, place, sacrifice, memory and the common good.

PSF’s tragedy is that it remembers enough of the old language to sound historically rooted, but not enough of the old doctrine to be dangerous in the right way. Its leaders can still summon the symbols of struggle, the songs, the martyrs and the invocations of a new Ireland. But beneath the symbols, the content has changed. Having once claimed to embody a living Republican challenge to British rule, it now accepts the constitutional limits set by that rule. Having once spoken in the language of national liberation, it now offers itself as the competent administrator of a liberal order hostile to the moral inheritance of the nation.

The Belfast Ard Fheis was therefore not a Republican gathering in any meaningful sense. It was a managerial conference in Republican costume.