No organisation looms larger over this archive than the Provisional movement, and few changed more across the years it covers. Born in the republican split of 1970 as the political wing of a renewed armed struggle, Provisional Sinn Féin began the period as a small, abstentionist party in the shadow of the IRA campaign and ended it, in 2005, as a serious electoral force on both sides of the border and one of the principal architects of the peace that brought the conflict to a close. This section gathers the movement’s own political literature across that journey: its policy documents and position papers, its election material, its leaflets, speeches, and commemorations.
The papers it produced for a mass readership, chiefly An Phoblacht and Republican News, are held in the separate sections linked above, as are its magazines and local newsletters. What is gathered here is the movement explaining itself in a more deliberate register: setting out its programme in documents such as Éire Nua and Freedom Struggle, arguing its way toward a settlement in Towards a Lasting Peace in Ireland, presenting its candidates to the electorate, and commemorating its dead. Arranged by decade, the collection lets the movement’s transformation be read in its own words, from the politics of the early Troubles to the threshold of a new political era.
Sinn Féin publication sections
There are over 1300 newspapers, newsletters and magazines published by Provisional Sinn Féin between 1970 and 2012 available at the sections below.
1970s – Policy Documents, Position Papers and Booklets
In its first decade the Provisional movement was above all the political voice of the IRA’s campaign, and its literature reflects that. The defining text was Éire Nua, the federal programme for a new Ireland championed by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Dáithí Ó Conaill, set out alongside broader statements of position such as Freedom Struggle and the movement’s first ventures into policy on the economy, energy, and publicity. Electoral activity was slight, constrained by the party’s abstentionism, and the decade’s material is largely given over to explaining and defending the republican case.
1970s – Election Related Items
1970s – Misc. Items
Internal Sinn Féin Publicity Documents (1970s and 1980s)
1980s – Policy Documents, Position Papers and Booklets
The decade transformed the movement. The hunger strikes of 1981 and the electoral successes that followed drew Provisional Sinn Féin into serious electioneering for the first time, and the documents here multiply accordingly: election leaflets for candidates across the North and South, policy papers on culture, education, and the Irish language, and the booklets and lecture series of a party building itself into a political machine. It was also the decade of the leadership’s strategic turn, marked here by the 1986 Ard Fheis material that accompanied the decision to end abstention from Leinster House and the rise of the Northern leadership around Gerry Adams.
1980s – Election Related Items
1980s – Misc. Items
1990s – Policy Documents, Position Papers and Booklets
The 1990s were the decade of the peace process, and the movement’s literature turned decisively toward it. Gerry Adams’s annual Ard Fheis and Bodenstown speeches chart the shift, as do position papers such as Towards a Lasting Peace in Ireland and A Bridge to the Future, while the IRA ceasefire statements of 1994 and 1996 mark its halting progress. Running alongside are the campaigns that defined Sinn Féin in these years: against collusion, for political prisoners, and for the electoral advances that were beginning to reshape its standing.
1990s – Election Related Items
1990s – Misc. Items
2000s – Policy Documents, Position Papers and Booklets
In the years to 2005 the movement consolidated its place in a transformed political landscape. The documents of this final period are those of a maturing party: detailed policy on Irish unity, neutrality, and equality, sustained campaigns on state collusion and on policing, and the manifestos of a Sinn Féin now contesting elections in earnest across the island. The section closes as the long armed campaign it had once accompanied was formally brought to an end.
2000s – Election Related Items
2000s – Misc. Items
 APRN (18 October) |  Save Your peace process leaflet (2002) |  An Phoblacht (29 September) |
 Don’t Join RUC/PSNI Leaflet |  APRN (28 July 2005) (1) |
(1) Donated by @irish_republican_archive
(2) Donated by Brian Hanley
(3) Donated by Txente Rekondo
(4) Donated by Tallaght Sinn Féin
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