Ourselves Alone: Sinn Féin Behind Closed Doors

Siobhán Fenton

Ourselves Alone: Sinn Féin Behind Closed Doors

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SKU: 9781844887095

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Release Date: 10-09-2026
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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 hamfisted 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.


Siobhán Fenton was a press adviser to Sinn Féin leader, Mary Lou McDonald between April 2020 and September 2022 and thereafter the party’s Deputy Head of Press in Leinster House until December 2024. In both roles she was a spokesperson for the party. She is a former BBC journalist and her writing on Irish and Northern Irish politics has been published by the Guardian, the New Statesman, Vogue and the Independent. She is a political commentator for the Irish Times, the Irish Independent and RTÉ. She lives in her native Belfast.