WHEN Sinn Fein publishes its 2004 accounts in Dublin next month and declares that it has gone into the red for the first time in several years there will be chuckles of derision from politicians on both sides of the Irish border.

The figures will show a deficit of some €400,000 (£278,315), according to a report published last month in The Irish Times, bringing Sinn Fein into line with the Republic’s main political parties which operate on overdrafts.

But as a party inextricably linked to the Provisional IRA — which is accused by the British and Irish governments of stealing £26.5 million from the Northern Bank — and which can call upon an army of unpaid volunteers, a more alarming picture emerges of a movement bloated on concealed wealth derived from a wide range of legal and illegal sources.

The peace process has transformed Sinn Fein into Ireland’s wealthiest party, according to politicians and security experts. As an all-Ireland party it receives €1 million a year from British and Irish government funding, according to a recent investigation by the Dublin-based Sunday Business Post.

“Unusually among political parties, Sinn Fein is in an extremely healthy financial position,” the newspaper said, relying upon the party’s own unpublished accounts which it had seen. However, the newspaper implicitly questioned the value of the documents, since they refer only to the party’s central organisation. Local party units are allowed to fundraise and spend as they see fit.

It produces three sets of accounts: one covering all of Ireland’s thirty-two counties, another for the twenty-six counties of the Republic and the third for the six counties of Northern Ireland.

The Republic’s Standards in Public Office Commission — to which all parties must make an annual financial declaration — is authorised to examine only the 26-counties report and in any case has never conducted an audit of any political party, saying that it accepts the accounts at face value.

But the Sunday Business Post said that it had discovered anomalies between the three sets of accounts, for instance a declaration of “admin expenses” was three times more in one than in another. There were also widely different figures for donations between all three accounts.

The accounts show that one of the party’s greatest strengths is its extremely low running costs. Fine Gael, the main opposition party in the Republic, spends around €1.6 million a year on salaries.

By contrast Sinn Fein pays out just over €500,000 for its all-Ireland operation.

Des Mackin, the Sinn Fein finance director, told the news-paper: “We’re a party with a core of voluntarism. We don’t have to pay anyone to put up posters. We don’t have to pay people to do anything.”

Mr Mackin was the subject of another Dublin newspaper investigation two weeks ago.

Ireland on Sunday described him as a multimillionaire businessman who served a three-year prison sentence for IRA membership and who eluded extradition from the US over the attempted murder of an SAS officer in Belfast in 1978.

The newspaper said he was listed as a director of four Dublin companies — three of which effectively ceased trading before he took up his positions with them. He also owns at least eight properties, worth an estimated €2.5 million.

People-power in the shape of the McCartney sisters threatens to put off Irish-American donors this week during the St Patrick’s Day celebrations, but the accounts of the USregistered Friends of Sinn Fein show that the US has been a profitable source of funding during the peace process.

In spite of its present difficulties, experts on terrorist finance are sceptical that pressure over the Northern Bank raid and Robert McCartney’s murder will make much difference to the party’s murky financial arrangements.

“The top politicians say that you cannot differentiate between the IRA and Sinn Fein and that equally applies to their finances,” an expert source said.

“But there is a lack of political will to tackle this issue. Calls for Sinn Fein to sever its links with the IRA and for the military wing to disband are nonsense.

“The only way for Sinn Fein to become a wholly ‘clean’ normal political party would be for it to close down altogether and start all over again.

“Today the two parts of the same organisation feed one another and feed off each other, with money being channelled into projects such as electioneering or arms buying or members’ welfare as and when necessary.”

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