Ireland’s ultimate change election, December 1918

This blog is aimed at explaining the significance for Ireland of the General Election of December 1918, mainly for the benefit of those in America and elsewhere who may not be fully familiar with the contours of modern Irish history.

For more than three decades from the 1870s onwards, Ireland's electoral landscape was dominated by the Irish Parliamentary Party. It was a formidable political machine that consistently and comfortably won a majority of Irish seats at election time.

Its leaders, Isaac Butt, John Redmond and especially the charismatic Charles Stewart Parnell were all able political operators who sought to use the parliamentary arithmetic at Westminster to advance Ireland's cause. This strategy culminated in Redmond's success in securing the passage of the Irish Home Rule Bill in the summer of 1914. It was Redmond's misfortune that the outbreak of World War 1 caused Home Rule to be deferred until after the war.

Britain and Ireland went to the polls on 14 December 1918 although the results were not declared until a fortnight later. The previous General Election had taken place in 1910 and on that occasion the Irish Party won 73 of the 103 Irish seats with 17 going to Unionists and 8 to the All-for-Ireland League, a Cork-centred offshoot from the Irish Party. That result had given the Irish Party the balance of power at Westminster between the Liberals and the Conservatives, a position that enabled Redmond to press for Home Rule to be delivered by Herbert Asquith's Liberal Government.

The years between 1910 and 1918 were eventful ones for Ireland. The Home Rule crisis of 1912-1914 wracked Britain and Ireland, and led to the creation in Ireland of two rival militias, the Ulster Volunteers dedicated to resisting Home Rule, and the Irish Volunteers set up to mobilise nationalist support. The outbreak of the First World War divided Irish nationalists between those who followed John Redmond in his support for the war effort, which he saw as a means of proving Ireland's fitness for self-Government, and those who were determined to fight Ireland's corner at home. 

The Easter Rising of 1916, to which the Irish Volunteers contributed the bulk of the insurgents, was a dramatic assertion of an Irish desire for independence which, following the execution of the Rising's leaders, captured the imagination of more and more Irish people, especially those of the younger generation. 

The Sinn Féin party was founded by Arthur Griffith in 1904/05 with a policy of withdrawing from the Westminster parliament and pressing for an Austro-Hungarian style dual monarchy, but it made little electoral impact in its early years. Even though it had not been involved in the Easter Rising, Sinn Féin got a new lease of life in the Rising's aftermath as it became the political face of a new national movement devoted to building on the legacy of 1916. A resurgent Sinn Féin inflicted four by-election defeats on the Irish Party during 1917. The Irish Party then staged a mini-revival by winning three hard-fought electoral contests in the opening months of 1918. 

The election of December 1918 took place just one month after the armistice that brought the First World War to an end. The result was an extraordinary triumph for Sinn Féin, which won 73 of the 105 Irish seats. Its successful candidates included Constance Markievicz, the first woman ever to be elected to the Westminster parliament although she refused to take her seat there. 

Sinn Féin's share of the vote, 48%, would have been significantly higher except that 25 safe nationalist seats were left uncontested by the Irish Party.  Unionists won 26 seats, just two of which were in the country's three southern provinces. The Irish Party was reduced to six seats, four of which were won on the back of an electoral pact between the party and Sinn Féin designed to secure nationalist seats in border areas. 

It was, as Charles Townshend has written, "one of the greatest electoral landslides of the century in Western Europe." (The Republic; the fight for Irish independence, p. 60) What caused this remarkable political turnaround? 

There were essentially two reasons for this. First, Sinn Féin had youth and enthusiasm on its side. The Irish Party actually held or even increased its vote in places, but that was in an electorate that had multiplied threefold due to the extension of the franchise to men over 21 and to women over 30.  Irish Party leader, John Dillon, admitted as much when he acknowledged the "absolute lack of organisation and helplessness on our side - against the most perfect organisation and infinite audacity on the other.” The Irish Party were unmistakably the old guard made up of politicians many of whom had faced little or no challenge in previous elections. They were unable to cope with the new political environment in which they unexpectedly found themselves. Seeing the writing on the wall, many sitting Irish MPs decided not to stand on this occasion. As the Irish Party crumbled, membership of Sinn Féin clubs expanded dramatically in 1917 and 1918.

A second reason for the Irish Party's eclipse was the British Government's decision in the spring of 1918 to impose conscription in Ireland. This fatally weakened a Party that had staked its reputation on being able to wield effective influence at Westminster. The conscription crisis exposed their weakness and caused the Party to withdraw from Westminster, thus seeming to validate the abstentionist policy of Sinn Féin. The damage done by conscription, which was quickly abandoned in the face of concerted Irish resistance, was compounded by the arrest in May 1918 of most of the Sinn Féin leadership on the pretext of an illusory 'German plot.'  This meant that 40 Sinn Féin candidates, including the party's leader, Eamon de Valera, were in prison on Election Day or on the run, but this merely gave the party added cachet. Irish Party stalwart, John J. Horgan reflecting on the impact of the conscription issue wrote that: "from that moment the fate of the constitutional movement was sealed." (Parnell to Pearse, p. 328) 

Sinn Féin's election manifesto made an unbridled appeal to nationalist sentiment. The question before the Irish people was whether "to march out into the full sunlight of freedom", or "to remain in the shadow of a base imperialism". It urged the electorate to pursue "with renewed confidence the path of national salvation by rallying to the flag of the Irish Republic."  The manifesto went on to promise: withdrawal from Westminster; opposition to English power in Ireland; the establishment of a constituent assembly; and an appeal to the Versailles peace conference for the recognition of Irish independence. The Irish Party insisted that, as supporters of the war effort, they were better placed to present Ireland's case to the war's victorious powers, but that argument clearly did not wash with the electorate. 

It is interesting to note how differently things turned out in Ireland compared with Britain. Whereas the enlarged Irish electorate, now accounting for 75% of the country’s adult population, took the radical step of choosing a party that sought fundamental change, in Britain the vote buoyed the status quo. There, the governing coalition dominated by the Conservative Party made dramatic gains while the Liberal Party, which had split in 1916, suffered a major reversal and lost its historic role as the main progressive force in British politics, a position it never recovered. 

This was Ireland's ultimate change election. It ushered in a new political reality from which there was to be no going back. The Irish people had expressed themselves in favour of independence, even if this took a further two years of strife to achieve. Dominion Home Rule, which the Irish Party was now promising, no longer satisfied an electorate whose ambitions for Ireland had been reshaped by the Easter Rising and First World War. The Irish Party, although it had polled a respectable 22% of the vote in 1918, quickly evaporated while Sinn Féin, "a popular front of nationalist forces" in 1918 (Joe Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848-1918, p. 162) went on to become the progenitor of the three leading parties in today's Ireland, Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. 

Those elected in December met in Dublin a month later to establish the First Dáil (Parliament) when they issued a Declaration of Independence, but that’s a story to be told in 2019.   

Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador to the United States