From Bomb to Ballot: The History of Sinn Féin

Gerry Adams stands down as the President of Sinn Fein and is replaced by Mary Lou McDonald, a middle-class Dubliner with no personal connection to the Troubles.  Sinn Fein achieves an historic result in the 2020 election and announces itself as Ireland’s main opposition party.  That’s until Dublin explodes into far-right riots and Sinn Fein’s uneasy coalition of voters unravels. And the...

In Omagh, a car bomb kills 29 people, including two unborn children. It is the biggest single atrocity of the Troubles and comes just four months after the Good Friday Agreement is signed.  The peace holds… but the Omagh Bomb shows that Pandora’s Box of paramilitary violence opened decades earlier will not be straightforward to close.  Nonetheless, a new generation of Sinn Fein activists...

The Provisional IRA end their ceasefire in spectacular fashion, and the scale of the bomb detonated in the middle of Canary Wharf sparks renewed attempts to end the Troubles.  Britain and Ireland have new Prime Ministers, who share a personal connection and a desire to get an agreement over the line, fast.  And.. behind closed doors, Monica McWilliams is forging connections with Sinn Fei...

Two IRA men – John Crawley and Martin Ferris – are caught with seven tons of ammunition on their boat, just off the coast of Kerry. They are sentenced to 10 years in prison.  Meanwhile, the IRA take their fight to the British mainland with renewed vigour. Bombs explode in Brighton, Hyde Park, and Manchester, killing thousands of innocent civilians and… nearly, Margaret Thatcher.  But, be...

Ten young men starve themselves to death in a prison outside Belfast. One of them – Bobby Sands – is an elected MP. Their deaths bring widespread sympathy to the Republican cause and the Provisional IRA’s little-known political wing, Sinn Féin, is bolstered by increasing electoral success. Two years later – at the height of the hottest summer on record – Gerry Adams, widely believed to be a former...

The Provisional IRA run a disciplined and efficient operation and prove capable of bringing bloody war to the British Army. A cat and mouse game on the streets of Belfast and Derry intensifies with each passing week, each side becoming further entrenched in a brutal cycle of violence that will define the 1970s.  And, at a pub in Armagh, near the Irish border, a young British army officer call...

In 1969, violence explodes across Northern Ireland. Catholics, who were treated as second-class citizens by the Protestant majority, march in protest and are beaten back by the country’s sectarian police force. The British Army arrives to restore order, but the violence escalates further into guerrilla war, led by a revived Irish Republican Army. The Troubles have begun.  All seven episodes o...

Sinn Féin, the party that emerged as the political wing of the Provisional IRA, made history when it won the popular vote in the Ireland’s 2020 General Election and came within touching distance of taking power on both sides of the Irish border. Whatever you think of them, Sinn Féin remain one of the most consequential political movements in recent history, and, more so than any other political pa...