Sinn Féin is a democratic socialist and Irish republican party in Ireland which was founded by Arthur Griffith on 28 November 1905 as an Irish nationalist and pro-dual monarchy political party. Sinn Féin was involved in the independence movement during the 1910s, supporting the Irish Republican Army's uprising against the United Kingdom from 1919 to 1921. Almost all of the leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the IRA were Sinn Féin leaders, including Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera, and Arthur Griffith, although the party would be divided into numerous smaller factions after the Irish War of Independence in 1922. The split resulted from disagreements over the Anglo-Irish Treaty; the original party contained pro-treaty leaders such as Griffith and Collins and anti-treaty leaders such as such as De Valera, Cathal Brugha, and Constance Markievicz.
Sinn Féin refused to enter the government of the pro-British Irish Free State, and men such as De Valera and W.T. Cosgrave would break away from Sinn Féin and form parties such as the liberal Fianna Fail party and the conservative Fine Gael party, respectively. The remnants of Sinn Fein were so depleted that they were unable to stand any candidates at the September 1927 general election, and, during the 1940s, a judge ruled that the present party was not the same as the one which had won the 1917 elections in Ireland.
In 1934, Peadar O'Donnell led an exodus of socialist republicans from Sinn Fein and the IRA in response to the IRA's refusal to adopt socialism as its ideology, and Moss Twomey reoriented Sinn Fein and the IRA as conservative-nationalist organizations strongly adherent to Catholic social teachings. In 1947, Sinn Féin began to rebuild itself as party membership became mandatory for IRA members in a move to politicize the IRA campaign, and, inspired by Pope Pius XI, the party began to advocate for the creation of a corporatist Catholic state (while rejecting fascism due to its secularism and centralized nature). In 1955, the party won two seats in the British Parliament.
In 1962, the leftist Thomas MacGiolla was elected President of Sinn Féin, and the party came to see capitalism's "divide and conquer" strategy as the cause of the hatred between the Catholic and Protestant working-classes, while it also began to attract members of the Communist Party of Ireland into its ranks. That same year, the members of the traditionalist "Curragh" faction - which had dominated the IRA during the 1940s and 1950s - resigned in protest as the younger leftist faction became the dominant faction within the party.
In 1970, the leading Marxist faction of the party was ousted by the nationalist wing of the party, which rejected the party's new focus on class warfare, instead advocating for a return to focusing on Irish nationalism. MacGiolla and his followers left to form the left-wing Workers' Party of Ireland and its Official IRA armed wing, while the new democratic socialist and nationalist Sinn Féin became the political wing of the Provisional Irish Republican Army during The Troubles. The Sinn Féin party supported separatist movements in Scotland, the Basque Country, and Catalonia in addition to Ireland, and in 2007 it accepted a power-sharing deal with the pro-United Kingdom Democratic Unionist Party, bringing an end to the political turmoil in Northern Ireland. The party rose in support during the 2000s and 2010s, and, at the 2019 British general election, the Unionists lost their majority in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the first time.
In Ireland, Sinn Fein's main voter blocs included republican and nationalist voters, working-class and disadvantaged communities, younger voters (especially progressives concerned about climate change, social inequality, and affordable housing), anti-establishment and anti-austerity voters, and Irish language and cultural activists.
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