On The Campaign Trail

Welcome to the history of Ireland. It was getting to the end of 1918 and Ireland was about to have an election. This was a big deal for a whole heap of reasons. First of all, it was the first general election in like 8 years. 8! That’s a crazy amount of time. Thanks to World War I, Britain and Ireland hadn’t seen an election in nearly a decade. And look, as we’ve seen, a hell of a lot could happen to a political landscape in that time.

Secondly, those eligible to vote had tripled thanks to the representation of the People Act which had just been passed. This gave both women over 30 and working class men the chance to vote. All this meant that a whopping three quarters of the Irish population had never cast a ballot. This change in voter demographics helped radically shift the already changing political landscape. Those between the age of 21 and 29 were voting for the first time, while a lot of older voters had, well, cake for the bucket. And the older voters, they’d been the ones loyal to home rule and the IPP, while those voting for the first time had no such allegiances. People were excited. As the General Inspector of the RIC put it, the entire youth of both sexes has become obsessed with the idea of an Irish Republic. Sinn Féin and nationalism were like the Beatles of 1918. Which I guess makes Dev John Lennon? He definitely wasn’t Paul.

Anyway, let’s look at the numbers in this election and see what everyone was voting on. Ireland had 105 MPs in Westminster as of 1918, out of a total of 707. Now, this might not seem like a lot, but really Ireland was grossly overrepresented. This was because the seats had been set way back in the 1800s, and between then and 1918, Britain’s population had risen dramatically. While Ireland’s had fallen even more dramatically, thanks to a little thing called the famine. While the seats had stayed exactly the same.

On the topic of overrepresentation, I’m going to randomly digress for a second and talk about Irish pubs, for no other reason than it’s interesting and vaguely related. As well as leading to an overrepresentation in Parliament, the famine also led to an overrepresentation of pubs in Ireland. In 1845, there were 15,000 pubs per 8 million people. But by 1871, the number of pubs had increased to 17,000, while the number of people had halved to about 4 million. While the government didn’t fix the overrepresentation of politicians, they did address the overrepresentation of publicans. In 1902, a law was passed that basically set up a one-in-one-out system to sort out the imbalance. You could only get a new licence if another pub had been shut down, or you bought someone else’s. What’s crazy is a similar law is still in place today, making it really hard to start a new pub in Ireland. Now, this is all totally irrelevant to the 1918 election, but it is a fun fact, and who doesn’t like a good fact about pubs?

But okay, back to our regular programming. In the 1910 election, the IPP had won the majority with 73 seats, and the Unionists had won 17. Generally, Irish politics had been kind of a one-party system, with the IPP running unopposed for decades. But this was changing, and there had been a few by-elections, and so in the run-up to the 1918 election, Ireland had four main parties. There was the IPP, the Unionists, Sinn Féin, and Labour.

Labour could have been a ripe pain in the hole for Sinn Féin, but ended up backing out of the election so as not to split nationalist votes. They did remain involved though, and would help direct some of Sinn Féin’s policies. But their power was minimal, and the death of James Connolly in the Rising had really hurt the Labour movement in Ireland. They knew they couldn’t compete with Sinn Féin, and believed they’d actually hurt the Irish independence movement if they tried. Plus, since World War I had ended, the election had taken on new significance. The discussion around the independence of small nations was gathering steam internationally, and Labour didn’t want to get in the way, so instead they came onside.

The IPP, on the other hand, were still gunning for Home Rule, and after years of deadlock, had again nearly come pretty close to a plan all sides could agree on. In December 1917, John Redmond had convinced the Unionists to back an all-Ireland Home Rule, with partial fiscal autonomy. But, at the last minute, his own party members turned against the policy, and the deal died at death. Already weakened from a previous accident, he was then attacked by young Sinn Féin supporters. By 1918, Redmond was in a pretty bad state, and died in March after complications from a surgery. He was 61, and one of the last things he said was, I’m a broken-hearted man.

Redmond came closer than anyone else to finding a political solution to the Irish problem. Would it have been enough? Would it have been a peaceful stepping stone for full Irish independence? It’s hard to know. Throughout his life, his plans were put off by the British, hampered by the Unionists, and thrown up by Sinn Féin. He was commemorated by a bust in Westminster. It’s a pretty good symbol for his relationship with all these groups. It’s bronze, and sits just outside the members’ bar.

As well as having Home Rule kind of implode, the IPP suffered from their own success. All the social reforms they’d been fighting for since the 1800s, land reform and the like, had all been brought in. Some argued that if these social reforms were still an issue, people wouldn’t have had time for Sinn Féin’s more highfalutin ideals.

All through 1917, Sinn Féin had been sneakily winning by-elections. They did this by leaning into their anti-British political prisoner reputation, running with slogans like, Put him in to get him out. And they spent the year kind of figuring themselves out. Everyone agreed that independence was the goal, but that seems to be the only thing they agreed on. Even what counted as independence was up in the air. The leaders, at least, seemed to be locked in on a republic. Arthur Griffith’s dual monarchy had been pushed to the side, and Griffith had come on board to republicanism. Sorta. As one Sinn Féin put it, it was either that or he’d walk the plank. Dev, Sinn Féin’s leader, supported a republic because he believed that the French and Americans would be quicker to recognise an Irish state if it was a republic, rather than it was some form of Griffith-style monarchy.

And then Sinn Féin’s manifesto was also pretty clear in a long-winded kind of way. It stated that Sinn Féin’s aim was to give Ireland the opportunity of vindicating her honour and pursuing with renewed confidence the path of national salvation by rallying to the flag of the Irish Republic. To do this, they would be “…withdrawing the Irish representation from the British Parliament and making use of any and every means available to render impotent the power of England to hold Ireland in subjection.” Phew! Yeah, even some Sinn Féin members were quoted in saying it was a bit wordy. And look, it’s not particularly customer-friendly language. But it did at least kind of state what Sinn Féin’s goals were, even if not all the voters really, maybe, understood it.

And then, to make things more complicated, as previously discussed, most of the moderates had been arrested by the British. Griffith, Dev, Markievicz, they were all in jail. This allowed the more hardline IRB guys, who were still working as a semi-secret organisation within Sinn Féin, to make sure that those being put up for election were military-minded. As discussed, things like the German plot arrests really helped Sinn Féin. The British worked hard to break up meetings, arrest campaigners, and generally harass the Sinn Féiners. But all it did was feed into their rhetoric. Griffith was a master propagandist and had passed his skills on to the rest of Sinn Féin. And locking him up wasn’t enough to stop the propaganda machine. John Dillon, the Redmond successor in the Home Rule Party, argued that British coercion was actually manufacturing more Sinn Féiners. And it’s kind of true.

Sinn Féin used all of this to their advantage. Sinn Féin acted as a highly organised force. They had Irish volunteers canvassing and working to help get people to the polls. And had Cumann na mBan whipping up passionate nationalism among the newly enfranchised women of Ireland. Which was made easier by the fact that the IPP had been against women getting the vote. In fact, the importance of women in the run-up to the 1918 election can’t be overstated. With so many of the men locked up, it was left to the women of the movement to drum up support, organise payments to the widows of 1916, and generally run the whole show.

And, for a lot of the IPP, this was the first time they’d run against anyone. For a very long time, a lot of Irish elections had been completely uncontested. Having to actually fight for their seats was a rude awakening for the IPP. There was even this one guy, the fantastically named Swift MacNeill, who announced that on account of serving as MP for 31 years, couldn’t bear to campaign. He said that he’d find it moral torture to contest the seat and that, I have been too long a member of this constituency to be able, consistent with self-respect, to solicit as a favour votes for my election to Parliament. Not sure you totally get how democracy works there, Swifty. And he wasn’t the only IPP member who didn’t bother. In 25 seats, the IPP didn’t run, leaving them wide open for Sinn Féin to steal.

So, with all that going on, a lot has been said of Sinn Féin’s less-than-honest campaigning. The phrase, vote early, vote often, was pretty popular. And voter suppression probably occurred. There’s even some stories of votes being recounted at gunpoint, but there’s not a huge amount of evidence to back that up. In general, the campaign was a relatively quiet one, and we have accounts of the IPP actually commending Sinn Féin on a well-run campaign. Basically, it seems like Sinn Féin acted no less dishonestly on the campaign trail than anyone else did at that time. They probably carried themselves in a way that we would deem inappropriate or illegal. But, as we’ve already seen, democracy was inherently less democratic back in the day, and Sinn Féin seemed to be no worse than their peers.

So, how did it all end up? Well, take a British government determined to make you look like an underdog in a country where people love the underdog. Combine this with a mobile and organised force, a little bit of election tampering, and a demoralised opponent not used to campaigning, and what do you get? Well, a bloody landslide. The election occurred on December 14th, 1918, and was nothing short of a complete political upheaval. The IPP won a measly six seats. So, they lost 67 and suffered such a crushing defeat that they ended up disbanding soon after. The Unionists won 22, up five, with Labour Unionists winning a further six, with all but two of these seats being situated in Ulster. And then Sinn Féin won a whopping 73 seats, including Countess Markievicz, the very first woman elected to the United Kingdom’s House of Commons. Ha-hey! It was one of the biggest parliamentary wins that had ever occurred in Europe. It was the culmination of the British messing up the aftermath of the Rising, the Conscription Crisis, the RIC boycott, the deportation of food, Sinn Féin’s little bit of land reform, their constant fueling of anti-British sentiment, and, well, everything else we’ve been talking about so far.

In terms of the wider British election, David Lloyd George remained as Prime Minister, and the coalition he’d been leading retained power. We don’t really need to delve into the British political scene, but it’s interesting to see where David Lloyd George stood, and how different the political situation was in Britain. People seemed to be pretty happy with the government. They had just come out on top of World War I, after all.

Though Sinn Féin had won 73 seats, they technically only had 69 actual sitting members, as Griffith, Dev, Owen McNeill, and a guy called Liam Mellows had run and won in two constituencies each. A weird one, that. There was also the further complication that all but 34 of the newly elected Sinn Féin members were locked up. But that didn’t matter a jot. They won, and now it was time to start a government.

Thanks for listening. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you’re enjoying it, tell your friends. It’ll really help. You can also get in touch with us through thehistoryofireland.com, or follow us on Facebook. If I made a mistake, let me know. The History of Ireland was written and produced by me, Kevin Dolan. Additional research and fact-checking by Robert Babington, music by Liam Doyle, and production help from Aoife Murphy. This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Sovereignty was never ceded.