As the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis (national congress) meets on April 15-16, a great deal of attention will focus on what leader Gerry Adams has to say and considerably less on the character of the party he leads. It has become common place to talk about the skill of the party's spin doctors and the professionalism of the new Sinn Fein politicians in suits. However, these remain stylistic changes which mask a deeper political transformation beyond suits and sound-bites.
Sinn Fein's transformation from an armed revolutionary movement to a conventional political party is recognised in both Dublin and London. Ulster Union Party leader David Trimble privately accepts the Republican leadership's bona fides and looks forward to the day when he can publicly say, "Well done, Gerry!". The photos of Sinn Fein ministers at the executive cabinet table suggest the accolade shall not be dismissed.
Middle-class pressure
Despite a media fixation with individual leaders, the best way to understand the changes is not to focus on the personalities of the leadership, but to look at the growth of the republican movement as a political bureaucracy against a background of wider social and economic change allied to British counter-insurgency initiatives.
British governments have used high levels of public spending as part of a strategy to "normalise" the conflict and reconcile sections of the nationalist population to the status quo in the north. Targeted at low-income groups and the unemployed, the Peace and Reconciliation Fund, European Social Fund, New Deal and the Training and Employment Agency are all means of controlling potentially volatile groups.
This funding has encouraged the growth of a network of community, local enterprise, training and education and ex-prisoners' organisations as a channel for distributing funds and employment opportunities.
With so many middle-class Catholic careers dependent, directly and indirectly, on the state and its levels of public expenditure, it would be unusual if this did not influence the politics of the nationalist population.
In Sinn Fein, as in any other party, MPs, assembly members, councillors and community activists provide both a political base and a centre of power for channelling both British and EU funds to deprived nationalist areas in the north. One result of these developments has been the emergence of a new Catholic middle-class "in search of a state". Many of the new Sinn Fein's middle ranking leadership, and its electoral support, comes from this social group, and they have had an impact on republican thinking.
These government strategies have brought a managerial republican stratum closely into the embrace of the state that they were once pledged to overthrow. One need only glance at the letters page of West Belfast's Andersonstown News to find that some of those most vociferous in their denunciation of republican critics are to be found in salaried positions within this stratum.
Not unique
These developments are not unique to the north. Governments throughout the Western world attempt to stabilise conflict by reaching an accommodation with alienated communities by using former revolutionary movements as channels of influence. In a forthcoming BBC series, Peter Taylor will outline this strategy of influence, which is an important part of what he describes as "Britain's intelligence war in the North".
Republican leaders have become conventional politicians working the system and lobbying the state on behalf of a section of the nationalist electorate. This transformation from a revolutionary movement to a bureaucratic party means that Sinn Fein will continue to be a potential party of government, north and south. But in terms of republican ideology none of this is cost-free.
Electoral politics and pragmatic accommodation have become the raison d'etre of Sinn Fein. As former IRA Belfast commander Brendan Hughes recently argued, in relation to who the real beneficiaries of the armed struggle have been: "No real change has occurred. A few republicans have slotted themselves into comfortable positions and left the rest of us behind."
Republicanism is well down the road to incorporation, trodden by other revolutionary parties in the 20th century. An ever-widening gap between the traditional rhetoric of Easter 1916 commemorations and the everyday parliamentary politics will develop.
Both political observers and opponents have been surprised at the ease with which Sinn Fein has fitted into the political system, north and south. With their ministerial advisors and dutiful attention to parliamentary etiquette, the new kids on the block have taken to the political stroke play with all the style of seasoned professionals.
Sinn Fein is following the path of the Workers Party and Fianna Fail, not because of some personal weakness or original sin within republicanism, but because wider political and social forces have transformed the movement into a part of the status quo.
[Kevin Bean is a research student specialising in Irish republicanism at the Institute of Irish Studies, Liverpool University. This article was first published in the Sunday Tribune.]
BY KEVIN BEAN