Breandán wrote:
I think avoiding
sinn féin altogether just because there happens to be a political party by that name is going a bit overboard. By that reasoning, we would never be able to use the words "democratic", "republican", "labour", "union", "liberal", etc. Common sense and context usually spare us from such madness.

The difference is that the other ones are just single words used as parts of phrases, usually with a definite article and ‘party’ tacked on at the end, while Sinn Féin is just the complete name of the party. Using
sinn and
féin on their own won’t cause any misunderstandings, but using the phrase together, exactly identical to the name of a political party that’s been the cause of some debate in the country, is quite a bit more likely to be (intentionally or unintentionally) misunderstood.
If I were (very theoretically) discussing an infrared antenna, I would similarly be quite hesitant to abbreviate that as ‘IRA’, because of the specific connotations of that abbreviation.
And here in Denmark where the Danish People’s Party (
Dansk Folkeparti) have over the past 15 or so years become quite a cause of strife (being close to the likes of Jörg Haider in Austria—basically, the ‘clean’ racist party), I wouldn’t name any kind of venture ‘the Danish People’s XYZ’ anymore. Even if people didn’t actually misunderstand anything, there would be a high level of probability that they would notice and wonder if I purposely used this wording/nomenclature as a reference to Sinn Féin/the IRA/the DPP.