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Irish (UK) general election, 1918

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The Irish general election of 1918 was that part of the 1918 United Kingdom general election that took place in Ireland. It is seen as a key defining moment in modern Irish history. This is because it saw the overwhelming defeat of the moderate nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), which had dominated the Irish political landscape since the 1880s, and a landslide victory for the radical Sinn Féin party, which had never previously enjoyed significant electoral success.

The aftermath of the elections saw the convention of an extra-legal parliament, now known as the First Dáil, by the elected Sinn Féin candidates, and the outbreak of the Irish War of Independence.

Contents

Background

In 1918 the whole of Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and was represented in the British Parliament by just over one hundred MPs. Whereas in Great Britain most elected politicians were members of either the Liberal Party or the Conservative Party, from the early 1880s most Irish MPs were nationalists, who sat together in the British House of Commons as the Irish Parliamentary Party. The IPP strove for Home Rule, that is self-government for Ireland within the United Kingdom and were supported by most Catholics in Ireland. Home Rule was opposed by most protestants in Ireland, who formed a majority of the population in the northern province of Ulster and favoured maintenance of the Union with Great Britain (and were therefore called Unionists). The Unionists were supported by the Conservative Party, whereas from 1885 the Liberal Party was committed to enacting some form of Home Rule. This was finally achieved with the passing of the Home Rule Act 1914. The implementation of the Act was however temporarily postponed with the outbreak of World War I, expected to be over in a year. As the war prolonged, the more radical Sinn Féin began to grow in strength.

Rise of Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin was founded by Arthur Griffith in 1905. He believed that Irish nationalists should emulate the Ausgleich of Hungarian nationalists who, in the 19th century under Ferenc Deák, had chosen to boycott the imperial parliament in Vienna and unilaterally established their own legislature in Budapest. Griffith had favoured a peaceful solution based on 'dual monarchy' with Britain, that is two seperate states with a single head of state and a weak central government to control matters of common concern only. However by 1918, under its new leader Eamon de Valera, Sinn Féin had come to favour achieving separation from Britain by means of an armed uprising if necessary and the establishment of an independent republic. In the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising the party's ranks were swelled by participants and supporters of the rebellion as they were freed from British gaols and internment camps, and at its 1917 Ard Fheis (annual conference) de Valera was elected leader and the new, more radical policy adopted.

Prior to 1916, Sinn Féin had been a fringe movement having a limited cooperative alliance with William O'Brien's All-for-Ireland League and enjoyed little electoral success. However between the Easter Rising of that year and the 1918 general election the party's popularity increased dramatically. This was due to the perceived failure of the IPP to have Home Rule implemented immediately, but also popular antagonism towards the British authorities created by the execution of most of the leaders of the 1916 rebels and by their botched attempt to introduce military conscription in Ireland.

Sinn Féin demonstrated its new electoral capability in three by-election successes in 1917 in which Count Plunkett, W.T. Cosgrave and De Valera were each elected, although it did not win all by-elections in that year and in at least one case there were allegations of electoral fraud1. Overall, however, the party would benefit from a number of factors in the 1918 elections.

Changes in the electorate

The Irish electorate in 1918, as with the entire electorate throughout the United Kingdom, had changed in two major ways since the preceding general election. Firstly, because of the intervening Great War, which had been fought from 1914 to 1918, the British general election due in 1915 had not taken place. As a result, no election took place between 1910 and 1918, the longest such spell in modern British and Irish constitutional history. Thus the 1918 elections saw dramatic generational change. In particular: Secondly, the franchise had been greatly extended by the Representation of the People Act 1918. This increased the Irish electorate from around 700,000 to about two million. All men over 21 and military servicemen over 19 gained a vote in parliamentary elections without property qualifications. It also granted voting rights to women (albeit only those over 30) for the first time.

Overall, a new generation of young voters, the disappearance of much of the oldest generation of voters, and the sudden influx of women over thirty, meant that vast numbers of new voters of unknown voter affiliation existed, changing dramatically the makeup of the Irish electorate.

Political factors

The election

Voting in most Irish constituencies occurred on 14 December, 1918. While the rest of the United Kingdom fought the 'Khaki election' on other issues involving the British parties, in Ireland four major political parties had national appeal. These were the IPP, Sinn Féin, the Irish Unionist Party and the Irish Labour Party. The Labour Party, however, decided not to take participate in the election, fearing that it would be caught in the political crossfire between the IPP and Sinn Féin; it thought it better to let the people make up their minds on the issue of Home Rule versus a Republic by having a clear two way choice between the two nationalist parties. The Unionist Party favoured continuance of the union with Britain (along with its subordinate, the Ulster Unionist Labour Association, who fought as 'Labour Unionists'). A number of other small nationalist parties also took part.

In Ireland 105 MPs were elected from 103 constituencies. Ninety-nine seats were elected from single seat geographical constituencies under the Single Member Plurality or 'first past the post' system. However, there were also two two-seat constituencies: University of Dublin, (Trinity College) elected two MPs under the Single Transferable Vote and Cork City elected two MPs under the Bloc voting system.

In addition to ordinary geographical constituencies there were three university constituencies: the Queen's University of Belfast and the University of Dublin (which would return two Unionist MPs), and the National University of Ireland (which would elect a member of Sinn Féin).

Of the 105 seats in Ireland many were uncontested. In some cases this was clearly because there was a certain winner, and the rival parties decided against devoting their money and effort to unwinnable seats. However there were also allegations that republican militants had threatened potential candidates to discourage non-Sinn Féin candidates from running. For whatever reason, in the 73 constituencies in which Sinn Féin candidates were elected 25 were returned unopposed.

Results

Sinn Féin candidates were elected in 73 constituencies but three party candidates (Arthur Griffith, Eamon de Valera, Eoin MacNeill and Liam Mellows) were elected for two constituencies and so the total number of individual Sinn Féin MPs elected was 69. Despite the isolated allegations of intimidation and electoral fraud on the part of Sinn Féin supporters, the election was seen as a landslide victory for the party.

The party returned with the second-largest number of seats was the Irish Unionist Party with 22 seats. The success of the Unionists was largely limited to Ulster, however, and in the rest of Ireland Unionists were elected only in the constituencies of the University of Dublin and Rathmines.

The IPP suffered a catastrophic defeat and even its leader, John Dillon, failed to be re-elected. The IPP won six seats in Ireland, all but one of which were won in Ulster. The sole exception was Waterford City, the seat previously held by John Redmond, who had died earlier in the year, and retained by his son Captain William Archer Redmond. Four of their Irish seats were a part of the arrangement brokered by Cardinal Logue between Sinn Féin and the IPP to avoid unionist victories in Ulster, a deal which saved some seats for the party but may have cost it the support of protestant voters elsewhere. IPP came close to winning other seats in Louth and Wexford South, and in general their support held up better in the north and east of the country. The party was represented in Westminster by seven MPs because T. P. O'Connor won an election from emigrant votes in the English city of Liverpool. The IPP's losses were exaggerated by the first-past-the-post system which gave it a share of seats far short of its rather larger share of the vote.

Party Seats  Votes2
Number Per cent Number Per cent
Sinn Féin2 73 69.5   476,087 46.9
Irish Unionist 22 20.9   257,314 25.3
Irish Parliamentary 6 5.7   220,837 21.7
Labour Unionist 3 2.8   30,304 3.0
Belfast Labour — — 12,164 1.2
Independent Unionist 1 0.95 9,531 0.9
Independent Nationalist — — 8,183 0.8
Independent Labour — — 659 0.1
Independent — — 436 0.0
Totals 105 100.0   615,515 100.0

Aftermath and legacy

After the election the elected Sinn Féin candidates, although entitled to sit as MPs in the British parliament, chose to boycott the Westminster body and instead assembled as a revolutionary parliament they called Dáil Éireann: the Irish for "Assembly of Ireland". However Unionists and members of the IPP refused to recognise the Dáil. At its first meeting on 21 January, 1919 the Dáil issued a Declaration of Independence and proclaimed itself the parliament of new a state called the "Irish Republic".

On the same day, in unconnected circumstances, two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary were ambushed and killed at Soloheadbeg, in Tipperary, by members of the Irish Volunteers. Although it had not ordered this incident the course of events soon drove the Dáil to recognise the Volunteers as the army of the Irish Republic and the ambush as an act of war against Great Britain. The Volunteers therefore changed their name, in August, to the Irish Republican Army. In this way the 1918 elections lead to the outbreak of the Anglo-Irish War.

The train of events set in motion by the elections would eventually bring about the first internationally recognised independent Irish state, the Irish Free State, established in 1922. Furthermore the leaders of the Sinn Féin candidates elected in 1918, such as de Valera, Michael Collins and W.T. Cosgrave, came to dominate Irish politics. De Valera, for example, held at least some form of elected office from his first election as an MP in a by-election in 1917 until 1973. The two major parties in the Republic of Ireland today, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, are both descendants of Sinn Féin, a party that first enjoyed substantial electoral success in 1918.

Question of interpretation

The correct interpretation of the results of the 1918 general election has been the subject of some controversy. This is because Sinn Féin treated the result as a mandate from the Irish people to immediately set about establishing an independent, all-Ireland state, and to initiate a war of separation from Great Britain.

In 1921, under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, Ireland was divided into two separate jurisdictions: six counties in the northeast became Northern Ireland, and the rest of the country that would eventually become the modern Republic of Ireland. 1918 was therefore the last occasion on which a general election occurred across the whole of Ireland, north and south, on the same day. For this reason many radical republicans have regarded the election as conferring a mandate for a united Ireland that was still unchanged over eighty years later. Indeed the 1918 general election has become a potent symbol for militant republicans who have argued that the elections conferred legitimacy both on the anti-Treaty faction in the Irish Civil War of 1922–1923 and on the violent campaigns of later groups such as the Provisional IRA that erupted many decades later.

Critics of these interpretations make a number of arguments. Some question the legitimacy of the original mandate won by Sinn Féin. It is argued that Sinn Féin practiced widespread intimidation and electoral fraud and that this called the result into question. Some also argue that the use of the first-past-the-post electoral system and/or the large number of uncontested constituencies exaggerated the effect of the pro-Sinn Féin vote so that, while the party won around 70% of the total number of Irish seats, its share of the vote may have been less than 50% and so not have amounted to a majority. Turnout in contested seats was only 68%; quite low by the standards of the time especially for such a crucial election.

Because of the large number of uncontested constituencies, it is impossible to know with certainty what share of the vote Sinn Féin would have won had all seats been contested, except that it would have increased. However, this has not stopped some historians attempting to speculate, for example by extrapolating from the vote counts in constituencies neighbouring those that were uncontested3.

Unionists argue from a different perspective. They insist that, regardless of the result, no election result considered on an all-Ireland basis could justify the imposition of a united Ireland on the Unionist minority in the north-east. Some still point to the fact that Unionists won a majority share of the vote, in both the historical northern province of Ulster and in the six counties that would later become Northern Ireland, to argue that the 1918 election in fact established a mandate for the north-east, at least, to remain within the United Kingdom.

Other arguments, leaving aside the immediate politics of 1918, dispute the capacity of any 1918 mandate for a united Ireland to legitimise acts of violence committed then or later. Although the 1918 general election was the last held throughout the whole of Ireland on a single day, in every election held since 1921 candidates advocating violent resistance to the partition of Ireland have fallen far short of winning a majority in either part of Ireland.

In 1998 both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland voted on the same day in referenda on the Belfast Agreement. Voters in both jurisdictions endorsed the agreement which, among many other provisions, enshrined the principle that a united Ireland should only be brought about by peaceful, constitutional means. Whether or not it should only be prevented by peaceful, constitutional means is still debated hotly in some circles.

Prominent candidates

Elected unopposed

Elected in contests

Defeated

Footnotes

  1. On one occasion the 'victory' of a Sinn Féin candidate in the Longford by-election is said to have been achieved through putting a gun to the head of a returning officer and telling him to "think again" when he was about to announce an IPP victory. On doing a 'recheck' the official 'found' new uncounted ballot papers in which votes were cast for the Sinn Féin candidate. Tim Pat Coogan, (Hutchinson, 1990) p.67.
  2. The percentage of votes given is a percentage of the total number of votes cast and therefore does not take into account the preferences of voters in constituencies where no contest occurred because of the overwhelming support for Sinn Féin there. It is impossible to know with certainty what the final shares of votes cast might have been had all constituencies been contested.
  3. See for example [The Irish Election of 1918], a paper by Nicholas Whyte discussing the level of support for Sinn Féin that can be inferred from the 1918 election results; from [Northern Ireland Elections].
  4. King's County is now known as County Offaly.
  5. Queen's County is now known as County Laois (old spelling, 'Leix').

See also

Further reading

 

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