By NiallO’Dowd

Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness pulled off the most remarkable sea change in the direction of Republican politics in history last weekend.

With their party base lining up over 90% behind them, the duo succeeded in placing the Irish Republican movement on a political path to peace and progress, and eschewing the old mentality of militarism.

It has been an astonishing accomplishment, one that has often hidden in plain sight as the Northern Ireland peace talks seemed to bog down at almost every turn.

Yet when the broad sweep of history is written, Adams and McGuinness have succeeded in making Irish Republicanism more popular in Ireland than at any time since its heyday in the 1920s. They have set the movement on a course to share power in the North and likely be part of a future government in the Irish Republic.

This from a party that in the early 1980s, before the Hunger Strikes, that was pegged at about 2% support in Northern Ireland and negligible support in the Irish Republic.

It was a party that was an international pariah, whose leaders’ voices were banned from the airwaves and which constantly seemed at the mercy of the latest IRA actions.

There are few leaders in the western world who could have taken such an unpromising position and turned it into the extraordinary vehicle which Sinn Fein has become today. McGuinness spoke about his desire that Sinn Fein become the largest party in the North — a definite possibility as the SDLP loses ground and the two Unionist parties split their vote more evenly than Nationalists do.

In the south Sinn Fein hovers in the high single digits and may well become a coalition partner, if not in the next government then the following one. As Adams stated in his Ard Fheis (convention) speech on Sunday, there are now more Republicans in both parts of Ireland than there were at any time in the past 75 years.

Yet the secret to success for Sinn Fein is no secret really. It is about developing a visionary strategy and then undertaking incredible hard work to achieve it.

The strategic vision of Adams and McGuinness was to make Sinn Fein a political player in such a way that they could no longer be demonized or ignored. To do so they knew they had to take on the Holy Grail, the armed struggle, and turn it into a political struggle.

Taking an armed revolutionary movement, one notoriously prone to splits and disputes, and launching it on a political path was a Herculean task. Yet it was achieved with a combination of patience, foresight and sheer hard work.

It was in this manner that the IRA ceasefire was attained, that the American involvement by President Bill Clinton was first brought about. It was this painstaking approach that paid off big with the Good Friday accords and later the St. Andrews Agreement.

Now they have delivered in typical fashion on policing. Through sheer hard work, holding meetings the length and breath of the North and consulting endlessly with party members, they succeeded in heaving one of the largest obstacles off the road to progress.

Adams and McGuinness were helped by the paucity of their opponent’s arguments. Those opposed to the Sinn Fein strategy could never define what they would do, except a rerun of the quarter century war that had ground everything in the North to a standstill.

It is obvious too that Unionism has refused to undertake the same exercise. Ian Paisley’s party is ill prepared for the shuddering change that just transformed the political landscape.

Little wonder they are looking on with ill concealed envy as Sinn Fein completes the journey to constitutional Republicanism.