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Ourselves Alone: Sinn Féin Behind Closed Doors
'Lifts the lid on a debacle that ambushed the party on the path to power . . . a cautionary tale'
Guardian
‘A fantastic read … the most interesting and best written insider view of contemporary Irish politics I’ve read in quite a few years ’ Hugh Linehan, Irish Times Politics Podcast
'Political correspondents frequently complain that Sinn Féin doesn't leak, doesn't lay bare its internal workings . . . Well, here you go, folks' Pat Leahy, Irish Times
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What really goes on behind closed doors in Ireland’s most secretive political party?
Long defined by message control and secrecy, Sinn Féin has rarely allowed outsiders a glimpse behind the curtain. Ourselves Alone, by former communications adviser and party spokesperson, Siobhán Fenton, is therefore a unique insight into its inner workings.
Fenton’s recruitment in 2020 reflected Sinn Féin’s ambition to broaden its appeal as it pushed toward government in the Republic. A Belfast native with a career in Northern Irish and British media, and no republican pedigree, Fenton was an unlikely insider. What she found – watching the leadership shape policy and strategy, dealing with the fall-out when these unravelled – was not the slick political machine many assumed, but an organisation grappling with the same pressures, misjudgements, and human frailties as any other, stresses that would eventually prove ruinous for its hopes.
Charting the years when Sinn Féin seemed poised for power, with Mary Lou McDonald set to become Ireland’s first female Taoiseach, Fenton traces how its momentum faltered. Particularly revealing is her account of the party’s ham-fisted response to the Dublin riots, a critical turning point. With nuance and candour, she recounts strategic missteps, the strains on its leadership, and her own role in a project that lost its way.
Part political memoir, part insider history, Ourselves Alone is an illuminating portrait of a pivotal moment in modern Irish politics—and of a party confronting the limits of its own myth-making.
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‘Considered and insightful … revealing and courageous’ Dion Fanning, The Currency
'Highly detailed . . . an unflinching account of Sinn Féin's errors' Financial Times
'I don't actually need to read the tell-all account of Sinn Fein. I lead Sinn Fein. I'm very much on the inside and I know what we're at' Mary Lou McDonald
‘Well written & well considered’ Eoin Ó Broin TD, Instagram
‘Fenton praises McDonald’s seriousness and sincerity, yet she also highlights multiple howlers for which the leader was wholly responsible’ Sam McBride, Irish Independent
‘A fantastic read … the most interesting and best written insider view of contemporary Irish politics I’ve read in quite a few years ’ Hugh Linehan, Irish Times Politics Podcast
'Political correspondents frequently complain that Sinn Féin doesn't leak, doesn't lay bare its internal workings . . . Well, here you go, folks' Pat Leahy, Irish Times
---
What really goes on behind closed doors in Ireland’s most secretive political party?
Long defined by message control and secrecy, Sinn Féin has rarely allowed outsiders a glimpse behind the curtain. Ourselves Alone, by former communications adviser and party spokesperson, Siobhán Fenton, is therefore a unique insight into its inner workings.
Fenton’s recruitment in 2020 reflected Sinn Féin’s ambition to broaden its appeal as it pushed toward government in the Republic. A Belfast native with a career in Northern Irish and British media, and no republican pedigree, Fenton was an unlikely insider. What she found – watching the leadership shape policy and strategy, dealing with the fall-out when these unravelled – was not the slick political machine many assumed, but an organisation grappling with the same pressures, misjudgements, and human frailties as any other, stresses that would eventually prove ruinous for its hopes.
Charting the years when Sinn Féin seemed poised for power, with Mary Lou McDonald set to become Ireland’s first female Taoiseach, Fenton traces how its momentum faltered. Particularly revealing is her account of the party’s ham-fisted response to the Dublin riots, a critical turning point. With nuance and candour, she recounts strategic missteps, the strains on its leadership, and her own role in a project that lost its way.
Part political memoir, part insider history, Ourselves Alone is an illuminating portrait of a pivotal moment in modern Irish politics—and of a party confronting the limits of its own myth-making.
---
‘Considered and insightful … revealing and courageous’ Dion Fanning, The Currency
'Highly detailed . . . an unflinching account of Sinn Féin's errors' Financial Times
'I don't actually need to read the tell-all account of Sinn Fein. I lead Sinn Fein. I'm very much on the inside and I know what we're at' Mary Lou McDonald
‘Well written & well considered’ Eoin Ó Broin TD, Instagram
‘Fenton praises McDonald’s seriousness and sincerity, yet she also highlights multiple howlers for which the leader was wholly responsible’ Sam McBride, Irish Independent
272 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 10, 2026
About the author
Siobhan Fenton
2 books5 followersSiobhán Fenton lives in Belfast, where she reports on British and Northern Irish politics for the UK media. She writes for The Independent, The Guardian, The New Statesman and The Spectator and has guest presented for BBC Radio 4 on Northern Irish politics.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 12, 2026
The first half is an early-career memoir, written from the point of view of the author, Siobhán Fenton, a woman from a middle-class background, part of the generation of children born in and around the time the peace process was getting underway. With her success in journalism and post-graduate research, Fenton was offered the gig of press officer of Sinn Féin as part of a recruitment process the party embarked on to hold onto the middle-class, highly educated cohort who gave them an unexpectedly high number of first-preference votes in the 2020 General Election. Foremost among the personal set of values motivating the author into taking the job is the creditable wish to find practical avenues to make the world better; for her Sinn Féin represent a plausible vehicle for the introduction of badly needed social policy serving the needs of vulnerable or unhoused women, but for the most part Fenton is explaining her job here, providing a tour of Sinn Féin’s back office operation, the publications which arrived every day, reading them, what the salary is like, how the party interfaced with the social media team to engage and intervene in the news cycle. The comparison of the vibes in the National Conference Centre versus Leinster House for example reminded me of nothing so much as Sally Rooney’s novels, where there is a lot of down-the-line descriptions of the number of people in a particularly room, the colour of the walls, when and why they look at their phones, whether they’re smiling. There is a real literary impulse here, a constitutive impressionism particularly because people are only referred to by the names when they are described doing things extremely in the public domain. There are no legal risks being taken with this book whatsoever, and with no original research, interviews or anonymous but reliably sourced quotes. English people reading this will therefore find plenty of scaffolding; what TDs are, how constituency clinics work, Sinn Féin’s journey from paramilitary force to prospective party of government — readers with a Lost Revolution Extended Universe shelf will be disappointed with the quantity of filler.
The second half of the book is where Sinn Féin’s lead over the bourgeois parties begins to narrow. I think Fenton is absolutely right to tell this as a story of a contradictory class coalition squeezed between left and right, with the latter as prime mover given their metastasis in what the party would have regarded as their working-class heartland. The left-liberals who voted more against FFG than for Sinn Féin in 2020 defect to one of the other squishy parties when faced with a confused, if not straightforwardly reactionary response to the changing situation. Varadkar’s departure — an easier target than Harris by Fenton’s estimate, Martin left unconsidered — FFG’s tax credits and other handouts do the rest. Fenton frames this as panic and aimlessness rather than a thought-out pivot. Antics such as Louise O’Reilly waving a photograph of a man drinking a can near to where a child was stabbed the day before during a debate in Leinster House arises from having no other ideas, similarly a no-confidence motion in the justice minister Helen McEntee. I have no gauge for whether or not these, or other issues Fenton focuses on such as McDonald’s commitment to reduce the price of houses in Dublin to €300k, cut through at Sinn Féin’s expense. This seems to me to promote a very McDonald-centric view of Sinn Féin’s decline and one which de-emphasises the unrelenting hostility Sinn Féin were confronted with after the 2020 result. Daily we had McDonald or Doherty’s working-class credentials litigated, whether they had apologised for doing the Troubles, if their apology was sincere enough, platforming concerned members of the Orange Order or Protestants who fear for their lives in a United Ireland, did they condemn Putin etc etc. When this green-baiting is discussed it’s limited to the Independent, which only represents part of the story; SF’s legitimacy was constantly up for debate in a way no other party is. There’s no doubt that they were caught without their homework done by the overlapping set of crisis tearing their way through our societies over the past say, six years, but even before the far-right became a fixture of our politics the media reproduced lines on immigration which shifted the blame from provision or delivery to stresses introduced by migrants. Once it became clear that there was a potential for immigration to split Sinn Féin’s voting coalition, they poured fat on the fire at every opportunity. I know Fenton was let go from their job, presumably wants to get back into this mostly anti-SF milieu, but I wouldn’t want establishment culpability to be lost here; the left were beaten into retreat from above as well as below.
There are any number of critiques of what Sinn Féin could have done differently from within the left. There’s Tommy McKearney’s vision of a less militarised IRA capable of collaborating with civilian brigades or trade unions. Anti-Imperialist Action consider the potential that was apparently present in Tyrone for a flying column strategy which would have made cells less permeable to British intelligence. Odrán de Bhaldraithe locates the problem in going into parliaments. Common to all these is an injunction to hit stop on the ascendance of the technocrats, the political operators, the professionalisation or PR-ification of a party that is supposed to be representing the interests of the working class rather than getting into power to administer things as they are. Fenton comes to this same conclusion, arguing Sinn Féin should have made the creation of a grassroots movement in the same style as Repeal their vehicle for power rather than taking the 2024 general for granted. As they focused more on building for office they ignored the class they should not just be among, but of. If you’re looking for insights as to how this could be done, and why it’s so difficult, not just in Ireland but everywhere else, you won’t find much here. You could do worse than trying Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics, which parses out the contradictions of a high-politicisation, low-mobilisation civic life in the west.
Overall I find the experience of reading this book very depressing. Like a few others I know Sinn Féin’s breakthrough motivated me to read up on Irish history and the national question; I started learning Irish again. Even though I knew, even though I could see that Sinn Féin were moderating their rhetoric they were also concrete proof of the widespread legitimacy which was available for a credible coalition capable of arguing for extensive public investment in housing, health and care sectors. You have that line coming from an organisation which has a claim to so much of our history in terms of opposition to empire and pride in Irishness rooted in internationalism rather than chauvinism and you have really a better set-up to break a far-right tide than you could ask for. What happened next was an anti-democratic movement based on intimidation and violence run by conniving petty drug-dealing thugs and screen-damaged cultists, who out-organised those who may have been more humane and thoughtful, but couldn’t keep pace strategically. I saw Matt Carty on the news the other day making the case for Sinn Féin’s policies on immigration. What it had to recommend it, in his view, was that it would be a system that works. Why would it work? Because it wasn’t being run by Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. Womp womp. Based on a dispatch produced by Chris Hazzard, the current Sinn Féin position is closer to Keir Starmer than James Connolly, dismissing the woke liberal ‘Brahmin left’ who, when they tell you that you can’t build a more equal society by leaning into neo-colonialism imperialism or racism, are just virtue signalling because being a real vehicle of the real authentic Irish working class means being racist; that’s just the kind of tough stuff the real authentic working class like. It’s the road to hell, and they don’t even know it.
One episode that to me represents what this book could have been, comes in the course of a description of a canvass in an apartment complex in the inner city, when Fenton is attacked by men shouting ‘Sinn Féin traitors’, ‘Ireland is Full’, ‘Mary Lou Muhammad’ and so forth. Fenton talks with an older woman who tells her that drug gangs have been expropriating accommodation in the area, taking homes over, putting people out on the street so they can run their operations out of sight. As the conversation continues she notes the flat is infested with mould. Fenton reflects on the gap between what is most often meant when the housing crisis is discussed among the class strata best represented in Saorstát civil society — exorbitant rents, sharing with other people into your middle-age, sleeping on other people’s couches, sub-lets — and a vision of lives completely beyond the imagination of most of these people. It is as stark an indicator of the situation we are actually in than I’ve come across in a long time.
The second half of the book is where Sinn Féin’s lead over the bourgeois parties begins to narrow. I think Fenton is absolutely right to tell this as a story of a contradictory class coalition squeezed between left and right, with the latter as prime mover given their metastasis in what the party would have regarded as their working-class heartland. The left-liberals who voted more against FFG than for Sinn Féin in 2020 defect to one of the other squishy parties when faced with a confused, if not straightforwardly reactionary response to the changing situation. Varadkar’s departure — an easier target than Harris by Fenton’s estimate, Martin left unconsidered — FFG’s tax credits and other handouts do the rest. Fenton frames this as panic and aimlessness rather than a thought-out pivot. Antics such as Louise O’Reilly waving a photograph of a man drinking a can near to where a child was stabbed the day before during a debate in Leinster House arises from having no other ideas, similarly a no-confidence motion in the justice minister Helen McEntee. I have no gauge for whether or not these, or other issues Fenton focuses on such as McDonald’s commitment to reduce the price of houses in Dublin to €300k, cut through at Sinn Féin’s expense. This seems to me to promote a very McDonald-centric view of Sinn Féin’s decline and one which de-emphasises the unrelenting hostility Sinn Féin were confronted with after the 2020 result. Daily we had McDonald or Doherty’s working-class credentials litigated, whether they had apologised for doing the Troubles, if their apology was sincere enough, platforming concerned members of the Orange Order or Protestants who fear for their lives in a United Ireland, did they condemn Putin etc etc. When this green-baiting is discussed it’s limited to the Independent, which only represents part of the story; SF’s legitimacy was constantly up for debate in a way no other party is. There’s no doubt that they were caught without their homework done by the overlapping set of crisis tearing their way through our societies over the past say, six years, but even before the far-right became a fixture of our politics the media reproduced lines on immigration which shifted the blame from provision or delivery to stresses introduced by migrants. Once it became clear that there was a potential for immigration to split Sinn Féin’s voting coalition, they poured fat on the fire at every opportunity. I know Fenton was let go from their job, presumably wants to get back into this mostly anti-SF milieu, but I wouldn’t want establishment culpability to be lost here; the left were beaten into retreat from above as well as below.
There are any number of critiques of what Sinn Féin could have done differently from within the left. There’s Tommy McKearney’s vision of a less militarised IRA capable of collaborating with civilian brigades or trade unions. Anti-Imperialist Action consider the potential that was apparently present in Tyrone for a flying column strategy which would have made cells less permeable to British intelligence. Odrán de Bhaldraithe locates the problem in going into parliaments. Common to all these is an injunction to hit stop on the ascendance of the technocrats, the political operators, the professionalisation or PR-ification of a party that is supposed to be representing the interests of the working class rather than getting into power to administer things as they are. Fenton comes to this same conclusion, arguing Sinn Féin should have made the creation of a grassroots movement in the same style as Repeal their vehicle for power rather than taking the 2024 general for granted. As they focused more on building for office they ignored the class they should not just be among, but of. If you’re looking for insights as to how this could be done, and why it’s so difficult, not just in Ireland but everywhere else, you won’t find much here. You could do worse than trying Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics, which parses out the contradictions of a high-politicisation, low-mobilisation civic life in the west.
Overall I find the experience of reading this book very depressing. Like a few others I know Sinn Féin’s breakthrough motivated me to read up on Irish history and the national question; I started learning Irish again. Even though I knew, even though I could see that Sinn Féin were moderating their rhetoric they were also concrete proof of the widespread legitimacy which was available for a credible coalition capable of arguing for extensive public investment in housing, health and care sectors. You have that line coming from an organisation which has a claim to so much of our history in terms of opposition to empire and pride in Irishness rooted in internationalism rather than chauvinism and you have really a better set-up to break a far-right tide than you could ask for. What happened next was an anti-democratic movement based on intimidation and violence run by conniving petty drug-dealing thugs and screen-damaged cultists, who out-organised those who may have been more humane and thoughtful, but couldn’t keep pace strategically. I saw Matt Carty on the news the other day making the case for Sinn Féin’s policies on immigration. What it had to recommend it, in his view, was that it would be a system that works. Why would it work? Because it wasn’t being run by Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. Womp womp. Based on a dispatch produced by Chris Hazzard, the current Sinn Féin position is closer to Keir Starmer than James Connolly, dismissing the woke liberal ‘Brahmin left’ who, when they tell you that you can’t build a more equal society by leaning into neo-colonialism imperialism or racism, are just virtue signalling because being a real vehicle of the real authentic Irish working class means being racist; that’s just the kind of tough stuff the real authentic working class like. It’s the road to hell, and they don’t even know it.
One episode that to me represents what this book could have been, comes in the course of a description of a canvass in an apartment complex in the inner city, when Fenton is attacked by men shouting ‘Sinn Féin traitors’, ‘Ireland is Full’, ‘Mary Lou Muhammad’ and so forth. Fenton talks with an older woman who tells her that drug gangs have been expropriating accommodation in the area, taking homes over, putting people out on the street so they can run their operations out of sight. As the conversation continues she notes the flat is infested with mould. Fenton reflects on the gap between what is most often meant when the housing crisis is discussed among the class strata best represented in Saorstát civil society — exorbitant rents, sharing with other people into your middle-age, sleeping on other people’s couches, sub-lets — and a vision of lives completely beyond the imagination of most of these people. It is as stark an indicator of the situation we are actually in than I’ve come across in a long time.
September 18, 2026
3.5/5. The final third is where it really gets going, with some really raw and human accounts of the mood in Dublin around the Parnell square stabbing, the far-right and some great insider moments around the €300k housing figure given by mlmd in an interview and the scramble to find a policy on immigration being the most interesting bits.
The first two thirds had too much “I went there, I did this..” etc. It almost read like a list of CV achievements or something, which just isn’t what I picked this book up for. Felt oddly surface level. Maybe it’s all too recent and the author couldn’t give that deeper analysis because it’s so fresh.
I’m not sure if I have really learned more about SF from reading this book than from following media and politics generally but it’s still well worth a read and the author does deserve credit for being so candid about experiences that are so recent, with many of the subjects surely still in situ, either as elected reps or in staff positions.
Personal nitpicks:
- apparently completely random standard for what statement/piece of research gets a footnote and what doesn’t
- pat leahy probably could argue he should’ve got some cash for this book considering how many times he’s cited and mentioned in it
- some baffling typos, inconsistencies or turns of phrase. This honestly seems par for the course with editing in so many books nowadays but it’s so annoying
The first two thirds had too much “I went there, I did this..” etc. It almost read like a list of CV achievements or something, which just isn’t what I picked this book up for. Felt oddly surface level. Maybe it’s all too recent and the author couldn’t give that deeper analysis because it’s so fresh.
I’m not sure if I have really learned more about SF from reading this book than from following media and politics generally but it’s still well worth a read and the author does deserve credit for being so candid about experiences that are so recent, with many of the subjects surely still in situ, either as elected reps or in staff positions.
Personal nitpicks:
- apparently completely random standard for what statement/piece of research gets a footnote and what doesn’t
- pat leahy probably could argue he should’ve got some cash for this book considering how many times he’s cited and mentioned in it
- some baffling typos, inconsistencies or turns of phrase. This honestly seems par for the course with editing in so many books nowadays but it’s so annoying
September 27, 2026
Predictable. No real insight into Sinn Féin but written as a clear demarcation for Siobhán Fenton to easily re-enter the world of journalism
September 29, 2026
This was a great read and insight into the rapid surprise rise and even quicker fall of a political party that seriously threatened to break the 100-year duopoly on power of Ireland’s two largest parties. The author takes us behind the scenes and shows us through her eyes how the dream of an alternative Irish government came crashing down. By telling the story from a staffer, rather than politician’s perspective, we get to see the authentic on-the-ground truth and all the struggles and turmoil involved.
September 21, 2026
A decent overview of Irish politics for this decade for those who don’t follow it day to day.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews