There were many factors that dictated how Sinn Fein transformed themselves from being the minor political wing of a paramilitary organisation to being a successful political party between 1981 and 2007. One of them was the party’s increasing interest in electoral politics and contesting elections in Ireland rather than only using violent methods to achieve their goals. They began this during a hunger strike of Irish republican prisoners when a by-election was held, a by-election won by the leader of the prisoners on hunger strike, Bobby Sands. The publicity surrounding the hunger strike and subsequent election victory, along with the death of Bobby Sands and nine of his comrades during the hunger strike, led to Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Movement in general taking more of an interest in achieving their goals through legal means rather than purely through violence. They slowly moved away from using violence to becoming more and more involved in politics, by voting to allow their members sit in the Republic of Ireland parliament in 1986, to the first IRA ceasefire in 1994 and final one in 1997, to taking an active part in the negotiations and the final settlement of the Belfast Agreement in 1998 where they agreed to participate in a power-sharing agreement with British unionist in Northern Ireland, to the end of their armed campaign in 2005 and their entry into a power-sharing government along with their former enemies the Democratic Unionist Party in 2007.
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