DUBLIN – For Sinn Féin chief Mary Lou McDonald to become Ireland’s next prime minister, she will have to negotiate a delicate path over the newly hot-button topic of immigration.

Tensions about Ireland’s overwhelmed refugee system have shot to the top of the political agenda following race riots in Dublin — and now pose challenges for all parties ahead of elections later this year.

While centrists in Ireland’s coalition government face their own backroom tensions over immigration policy, it is the main opposition party, Sinn Féin, which is considered most at risk of splitting its base and shedding support to right-wing rivals.

Such a development would undercut Sinn Féin right on the cusp of an historic breakthrough in the Republic of Ireland, where it appears poised to gain power for the first time following decades of expansion from its longtime stronghold in neighboring Northern Ireland. The Irish republicans, with popular anti-establishment messages and strong working-class roots, have held a commanding lead in every opinion poll since 2020 — an advantage that could slip away as public unease over immigration spikes.

Unusually for a nationalist party in Europe, Sinn Féin principally fishes for votes on the crowded left of the Irish political divide, not the relatively empty right – where, according to polling, many of its traditional supporters are flowing as they seek a tougher line on asylum seekers.

Since November 23 — when an Algerian man stabbed three schoolchildren and a teacher in central Dublin, igniting rioting and vandalism by hundreds of protesters chanting bigoted slogans — Sinn Féin has seen its popularity fall below 30 percent in national polls for the first time in two years. Much of the lost support has drifted to rural independent politicians and right-wing fringe parties, among them Sinn Féin defectors now free to express immigration-critical views.

Rank and file Sinn Féin politicians have been warned internally not to post anything on social media at odds with McDonald’s immigration stance, which focuses on the impact on services — reflecting a hyper-twitchy environment in which commentators are primed to pounce on any perceived hardening in her position.

McDonald wants her party to stay focused on housing, specifically its core pre-election promise to build tens of thousands of public housing units beyond the government’s own expanding commitments.

She sees anti-immigrant sentiment as tied to the soul-crushing struggle to secure an affordable home in a country where property prices and rents are among the highest in Europe. This market dysfunction reflects a Europe-leading population boom amid tight supply.

‘I share that anger’

The pace of social change has been staggering, particularly on the relatively impoverished north side of Dublin. Barely a generation ago, Ireland had only 3.5 million people and almost no immigrants in a country where its own people were its biggest export. By contrast, a fifth of today’s nearly 5.3 million residents were born outside Ireland.

The population boom has been fueled by nearly a decade of strong multinational-driven economic growth and, more recently, a disproportionate intake of 100,000 Ukrainian war refugees and more than 26,000 other asylum seekers, hundreds of whom are now sleeping in tents in parks and side streets. Starting later this month, the government is poised to cut benefits to new Ukrainian arrivals in a bid to reduce them coming via other EU states, where benefits are lower.

“If you are a person who can’t get a home, or your son or daughter can’t get housed, and then you reckon that lots more people are coming to the country, naturally enough, you’re going to say: ‘Well, how am I going to be housed?’” McDonald told the Business Post, the latest in a series of interviews in which she portrays anti-immigrant sentiment as both understandable and unfair.

“All of that anger about housing, I share that anger,” she said. “But that’s on the government, not on new people coming into the state.”

It’s an argument that, behind the scenes, McDonald and senior party lieutenants are having with their own supporters, whose anti-immigrant sentiment has been vividly captured by pollsters if not permitted on official Sinn Féin platforms.

According to the most detailed recent survey isolating the views of each party’s grassroots, Sinn Féin voters came out as the most anti-immigrant.

While majorities of voters for other parties identified continued immigration as positive, Sinn Féin’s took the opposite tack. More than 70 percent said too many immigrants were arriving, with a majority associating this with “an increase in crime” and Ireland “losing its personality.” Only 38 percent viewed immigration as “beneficial for the economy.”

Tapping into those sentiments are a disparate array of right wing upstarts. Among them is Aontú (Unity), a party founded by ex-Sinn Féin lawmaker Peadar Tóibín, and the Rural Independents, a loose grouping of lawmakers including another Sinn Féin defector, Carol Nolan. Two other Rural Independents from Cork and Limerick have just founded a new party, Independent Ireland, which they bill as offering “a comfortable alternative” to Sinn Féin.

Independents could potentially hold the balance of power following the next general election, which must come by March 2025 but is widely expected in late 2024.

First, however, these and other rising voices on the far right will get the chance to build grassroots organizations in local council elections, which take place in June alongside European Parliament elections. Likely candidates include anti-immigrant activists who have led protests outside vacant properties earmarked for housing asylum seekers, some of which have subsequently been torched.

Police have failed to bring charges in relation to any of these arson attacks, which began in 2018 and escalated in size and frequency in the past year.

McDonald – a Dubliner who succeeded Gerry Adams as Sinn Féin leader in 2018 – has started to experience heckling from far right activists as she attends meetings with local groups in her central Dublin constituency. These critics vow to field candidates for June’s council elections, potentially gaining a toehold in democratic institutions for the first time.

Some are members of the Brexiteer-aping Irish Freedom Party, which predicts shelters “will continue to burn” unless government policy on immigration is reversed. Others back the far-right National Party, although its divided leadership is mired in dispute over the ownership of €400,000 in gold bars seized by police from the party’s HQ.

The irony of Irish people demonizing immigrants is not lost on government ministers tasked with salvaging Ireland’s tourist-focused image of céad míle fáilte – “a hundred thousand welcomes.”

When Nolan introduced a Rural Independents anti-immigration motion in parliament last month, Green Party Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman recalled how Ireland had “closed the doors” to Jews fleeing the Holocaust and should never act that way again – particularly given millions of Irish had emigrated since the 18^th century in search of a better life.

Referring to the motion’s claim that placing “unvetted single males” in rural towns and villages presented “grave potential consequences for residents,” O’Gorman said the opposition should vet their own family trees.

“Can any of us put our hand on our heart and say there is not a male member of our family who has not gone abroad seeking work?” he said. “There are ‘unvetted’ male migrants in every one of our families. We are lucky as a country that other countries let them come in and contribute to the system.”