McGuinness’s presidency bid looking like a masterstroke

McGuinness making strides in Aras race


Off the fence
Trevor Quinn

The common perception when Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness announced his candidacy for the presidency was that his IRA past would scupper any real aspirations of success, but the momentum now seems to be very much with Sinn Féin and the Derry man.
McGuinness stands an outside chance of becoming the ninth UachtarΡn na hÉireann after encouraging Irish Times and Red C poll results placed him in third place behind Michael D Higgins and SeΡn Gallagher on 16 per cent.
What will interest Sinn Féin supporters much more is The Irish Times/ Ipsos MRBI poll which revealed on Friday that Sinn Féin are now the second most popular party in the land, overtaking battered political rivals Fianna FΡil.
These results reveal a seismic increase in support for the party as a result of Martin McGuinness’s presidential election campaign. These poll results surely would have been seen as impossible just a few short years ago.
McGuinness’s claims appear to have been buoyed by the anti-establishment stance of Sinn Féin. Their populist distrust of Brussels comes during a period of economic turbulence and stringent austerity measures imposed by successive governments.
Sinn Féin are without doubt one of the major benefactors of the changing of the political landscape in Ireland. Their decision to benefit from such political upheaval looks like a masterstroke, and they are surely now targeting 2016.
Even if McGuinness does not win the presidency there is a very real chance that by standing up to the huge scrutiny over his IRA past now, and convincing a proportion of the electorate  to vote for Sinn Féin, the party will be much better primed to win more seats and maybe even enter into a Coalition government in five years time. 
McGuinness has said he believes he should be judged on his record as a peacemaker, as someone who has transformed the political situation in the north, and as someone who loves Ireland as opposed to his links to the IRA.
While huge doubts remain about when he left the IRA, McGuinness’s impressive campaign to date will help to increase support for Sinn Féin ahead of a defining term in opposition.
McGuinness recently took a new stance on the conflict in the North and said, “I accept that in the circumstances where innocent people lost their lives, it’s quite legitimate for the term murder to be used.”
This is a massive shift in the unilateral language consistently used by Sinn Féin who always maintained that IRA killings were part of an armed struggle or war. The significance of this statement cannot be underestimated.
In a country where everything appears possible in politics, Sinn Féin’s new maturity allied with a new enriched profile for McGuinness could very well propel them from political makeweights to a genuine force in Irish politics.