1918 Election handbill. The election occurred a century ago today.
It is difficult to imagine political canvassers tossing “rotten eggs, dead cats and rats” at one another today. A century ago this week, that is exactly what happened on the Falls Road in West Belfast, as supporters of the Irish Parliamentary Party candidate, Joe Devlin MP, attempted to drive young Sinn Féin canvassers from the district. The election, described beautifully by one Royal Irish Constabulary report as “the triumph of the young over the old”, pitted a youthful Sinn Féin against an ageing party which had dominated Irish politics for decades. For many tens of thousands of Irish people, it was a first taste of the ballot box in a General Election. The Representation of the People Act, which made its way through the House of Commons earlier that year, had increased the Irish electorate from some 700,000 people to 1.9 million. Here in Dublin, the election produced the first female M.P in the history of Westminster.
Much coverage of the centenary of the 1918 election has focused on the granting of the vote to women (of a certain age and class), though the Representation of the People Act was also transformative in giving a voice to millions of working class men. Now, all men over 21 found themselves entitled to partake in a General Election. It was an unprecedented mass exercise of democracy in these islands, but in Ireland it was dominated by the national question.
The Irish Parliamentary Party had achieved much through its participation in Westminster politics, including meaningful land reforms and the seeming inevitability of Home Rule itself, but buckled before the mass appeal of a young and confident Sinn Féin. In October 1917, Sinn Féin has been transformed into a new fighting machine, spearheaded by Éamon de Valera, elected in the East Clare by-election of 1917. The party jettisoned the ambiguous language of its founder Arthur Griffith’s in favour of that of republican separatism. Now, in its own words, Sinn Féin aimed “at securing the international recognition for Ireland as an independent Irish republic.” Throughout 1917 and 1918, the party had fought a series of bitter by-elections against the Parliamentary Party, with very mixed fortunes. Anger at the very real fear of conscription in 1918 had moved many towards support for the party, while the language of some leading Parliamentary Party figures on the question of women’s suffrage would not have endeared them to sections of the newly enlarged electorate. To John Dillon MP, the vote in the hands of women would “be the ruin of our Western civilisation. It will destroy the home, challenging the headship of man, laid down by God. It may come in your time – I hope not in mine.”
As women made their way into the ballot box for the first time in a General Election setting, they encountered female candidates, providing they lived in either Belfast’s Victoria Ward or Dublin’s Saint Patrick’s Ward. In Belfast, Winifred Carney stood for Sinn Féin. A veteran of Easter Week, Carney had served faithfully as James Connolly’s secretary, earning her place in history as ‘the typist with the webley’. A veteran of Belfast labour politics, her election manifesto stated that she stood for a ‘Worker’s Republic’, which was not Sinn Féin policy. There was little desire to stop her expressing that ambition, and in the decidedly Unionist electorate, she came away with a mere 539 votes. In Dublin, Countess Markievicz was elected, becoming the first female MP in the history of the Westminster parliament. Markiecicz took her seat from the Parnellite William Field, in office since 1892 – ironically, he himself was a something of a suffragist and had supported votes for women – it proved his undoing in the end.
There were tensions between Sinn Féin and the Irish Women’s Franchise League, who felt the party had not stood enough women, or supported the women who stood sufficiently. Markiecicz’s campaign on the ground was curiously absent – while she herself was in prison – IWFL leaders complained in private about a perceived lack of enthusiasm in the constituency from Sinn Féin. Margaret Connery of the IWFL complained to Hanna Sheehy Skeffington that “the very nerve of Sinn Fein sets my teeth on edge… Why should the work be left to the chance care of outsiders as they are so fond of calling us.” Still, the election of Markievicz was a triumph for both the women’s movement and the national movement, and emerged as one of the international headlines of the election.
Constance Markievicz, elected in Dublin’s Saint Patrick’s Ward.
What violence did occur happened largely in West Belfast and Waterford, where the IPP had strong bases. Kevin O’Shiel, having gone north to canvas for de Valera in West Belfast, recalled:
I shall never forget that wild, yelling, maddened Hibernian mob that pelted us for two hours with sticks, stones, rivets, rotten eggs, dead cats and rats. Only for a strong draft of Volunteers and, later, some belated help from reinforced R.I.C., I doubt if any of us would have survived intact.
The hostility of the Ancient Order of Hibernians to youthful Sinn Féin canvassers there was unlike anything witnessed elsewhere. It took uniformed men to police and protect Sinn Féin meetings in the district. Patrick J. Whelan, a Harland and Wolff worker and a local Irish Volunteer, remembered that:
During the general election of 1918, C. company acted as bodyguard for Sinn Féin. election speakers. The speakers wont by brake from meeting to meeting in the Falls Road division, and rather rowdy meetings were held. The opposition was provided mostly by mill workers and not the Orange mobs. These mill workers were enthusiastic supporters of Joseph Devlin, the Nationalist M.P. for West Belfast. At one of the meetings which was held in King Street, Belfast, I was struck on the head by a brick and rendered unconscious. When I recovered, I was brought to a first-aid station on the Falls Road, and had my injury attended to by local Cumann na mBan.
Absent from proceedings were the Irish Labour Party. In popular history, this boils down to the idea that ‘Labour must wait’, and that the party were somehow brushed aside prior to polling. In reality, the party leadership had initially intended to contest the election, but later stepped aside of their own volition. The national executive of the party voted 96 to 23 not to contest the election. Jason Knirck has suggested that Labour leaders “may have feared a decisive defeat for their party if they had entered the election. Cooperating with Sinn Féin, even as a junior party, was preferable to the delegitimation of the entire cause. while Labour did gain some concessions from this agreement, it also simplified Sinn Féin’s recurrent claim to speak for the entire Irish nationalist population.” The party would perform incredibly well in the local elections of 1920, and see 17 of their 18 candidates elected in the 1922 General Election following the birth of the state. If 1918 was Labour’s great missed opportunity is a question that has been pondered for a century now.
Dublin offered some interesting results. Here, the only Unionist MP’s outside of Ulster were elected, with two Unionist seats in Trinity College Dublin and the victory of Maurice Dockrell in Rathmines. For southern Unionism, the election had been a disaster, and at a crisis meeting in the Freemason’s Hall shortly after the election the tone was downbeat. 79,000 votes were cast in Dublin for Sinn Féin candidates, who took eight of the nine contested seats in the capital.
In the end, the IPP won six seats across the island, only one of which, Waterford City, was outside Ulster. The British ‘First Past the Post’ system makes their result look truly dismal; in reality, Votes cast for the IPP were 220,837 (21.7%) for 6 seats (down from 84 out of 105 seats in 1910). Sinn Féin votes were 476,087 (or 46.9%). In many parts of Ireland, the status quo held up. Some IPP candidates received only marginally smaller votes than they had in 1910, but were swept aside by the enormous new electorate. The significant number of uncontested seats is sometimes pointed to as evidence of Sinn Féin intimidation of opponents, though in reality there were less seats uncontested than in the previous General Election.
On 21 January 1919, elected representatives of the Sinn Féin party met in Dublin’s Mansion House, proclaiming themselves to be the legitimate government of Ireland. Reading a roll call that included Unionist MP’s like Lord Edward Carson (unsurprisingly as lathair, or absent!), the gathering constituted just 27 parliamentarians, with many others imprisoned or exiled.
The meeting was loaded with political symbolism. Choosing the Mansion House, residence of the Lord Mayor of Dublin and a centre of civic political leadership, the parliamentarians sought to present themselves as statesmen before the world. Their ‘Message to the Free Nations of the World’ was read in Irish, English and French, seeking to place Ireland in the post-war Europe of peace, as she believed “permanent peace of Europe can never be secured by perpetuating military dominion for the profit of empire”.
On the same day that the Dáil met, the opening shots of the War of Independence were fired in the Soloheadbeg ambush in county Tipperary. This occurred without the sanction of the Dáil, with IRA leader Dan Breen recounting that “Seán Treacy had stated to me that the only way of starting a war was to kill someone, and we wanted to start a war.” In the eyes of the world’s media however, the two events were intrinsically linked, and Ireland was now at war.