The Party of Tomorrow? Sinn Féin’s Appeal to Ireland’s Young Voters

Patrick McSweeney received his PhD from Georgetown University in December 2024. His dissertation explored generational conflict within the American Democratic Party. He currently works as a research specialist at Georgetown’s Civic Education Research Lab (CERL) and as an adjunct lecturer in the Government Department. Learn more about Patrick’s research at his website.

Recent elections in the Republic of Ireland have demonstrated the fluidity of the party system in the country. A regular series of scholarly election analyses, “Ireland Votes,” described 2007 as “the earthquake that didn’t happen,” 2011 as “the earthquake election,” 2016 as “the election nobody won,” and the most recent election, 2020, as the “end of an era.” Many of these changes can be credited to young voters who have abandoned the two traditional center-right parties and are embracing a left-leaning bloc led by an emergent Sinn Féin.

Young voters are an important group to study as they represent the future of the country and the parties. Young people enter an election with their political worldviews still in development. As a result, the political events of their formative years can have a lasting impact on their political identity and attitudes. For many of the younger voters, this includes the aftermath of a recession, two referendums, and Brexit. Young voters saw the status quo as something that could be changed, and they built a coalition big enough to make a difference.

In this post, I use data from the 2020 UCD Online Election Poll to explore two main narratives associated with vote choice in the 2020 election— ideology and government frustration. Ireland has often been seen as the odd man out for its lack of ideology in electoral politics. There is little difference between the policies of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, as they are both considered to be center-right. However, these two parties have dominated Irish politics over the last century. The 2020 election was a continuation of a trend toward more ideologically sorted parties where issue positions and ideology were increasingly correlated with party choice (Muller and Regan 2021). For young voters, many of the issues they care about, such as climate change and the housing crisis, are seen as priorities for the left. We would expect to see that young Sinn Féin voters have embraced both a left-leaning ideology and issue positions.

Figure 1 shows that amongst young people there is a clear ideological divide. Respondents were asked to place themselves on a scale of 0 to 10 on a number of issues. The dark green bar represents the young voters, ages 18 to 35, who indicated a first preference vote for Sinn Féin (n = 208). The ideology response shows a clear difference between a left bloc and a more centrist bloc represented by Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. Young Sinn Féin voters are among the most liberal, even more so than Green Party supporters.

Questions about specific issues reveal a congruence between ideology, issue attitudes, and party support (see Costello 2021 for more details about this trend). Sinn Féin supporters are slightly less concerned with the environment than other members of the left bloc, but appear to prioritize income differences and Irish unification, an issue that has been the centerpiece of the party’s manifestos for decades.

Another main narrative associated with young people turning to Sinn Féin is frustration with the status quo. The Fine Gael government appeared to be in a good place entering the 2020 election. The economy was performing well, and while Brexit still needed to be resolved, there was little conflict amongst the parties on what the solution should be. For Sinn Féin, Mary Lou McDonald’s position as the replacement to Gerry Adams as party leader started with disappointing results in European and local elections, making many Sinn Féin members nervous about wasting a prime opportunity. To perform well in 2020, Sinn Féin had to show they could go from a party of problem identifiers to a party of problem solvers ready to clean up the mess.

Sinn Féin has often used populist messaging that suggests the government is not listening to the people. In 2020, this appears to be a message that resonated with young Sinn Féin supporters. Figure 2 shows that over 40 percent of young Sinn Féin supporters feel that corruption in government is widespread. Apart from People Before Profit – Solidarity, the ideological blocs we saw previously have vanished.

Sinn Féin identified the housing crisis as a salient issue, especially for young people, that they could blame on the current government. By many metrics, the economy was in a good place. However, housing prices and availability have become a major issue throughout the country, especially in Dublin and other urban centers where large numbers of young people are living. This crisis is likely driving the evaluations of young Sinn Féin voters toward the economy and the government’s performance. They do not consider the economy and the government to be serving their interests, and feel like this is a problem that has gone unaddressed for too long. Sinn Féin campaigned on ideas to address these concerns, and young people showed they were willing to give them a shot.

Sinn Féin has been able to take advantage of the liberal young people in the country. It may be too soon to claim this is actually the “end of an era,” and much will depend on whether Sinn Féin performs well enough to maintain and grow this support. Young people, however, appear ready for a new Irish Politics where their issues are heard. Currently, they see Sinn Féin as the best option to capture this future.