The Irish Revolution, 1916-1923 (12 page)

The Irish Party suffered from having little new to offer. It ran on its record of having achieved land reform, advancing home rule and having the old age pension introduced to Ireland in 1908, a platform that offered little to new youthful voters who had a dim memory of such events. What they did remember was that the IPP had agreed to a partitionist settlement, and this, along with recent government folly in the shape of conscription, all contributed to the annihilation of Irish constitutional nationalism in 1918. Finally, Sinn Féin appears to have resorted to personation and intimidation to ensure its success (Laffan, 1999: 162–4).

The extent of Sinn Féin's victory can also be explained by the abstention of the Labour Party from the election. Labour had initially intended to contest the election, although it promised to join Sinn Féin in abstaining from Westminster afterwards, though not necessarily agreeing to sit in Sinn Féin's alternative constituent assembly. Sinn Féin was very concerned at the prospect of Labour participating in the election, fearing it could win up to 20 seats, many in the highly desirable Dublin City divisions. This resulted in efforts either to persuade Labour to withdraw or, if not, to agree to an electoral pact. By November 1918 Labour was having such great difficulty in finding suitable candidates – many, like Markievicz, who could have stood in the Labour interest, were already committed to Sinn Féin – that the party decided by a large majority (96 to 23) to withdraw from the election (Mitchell, 1974: 95–102).

Labour's decision not to contest the election also took into account its nature as an all-island party that had to consider its supporters in Ulster, many of whom would not have been happy with the alternative options of competing with Sinn Féin by offering an advanced nationalist manifesto or agreeing an electoral pact. To placate its northern wing by contesting the election and trying to avoid taking up a position on the national question would have resulted in losing considerable ground to Sinn Féin and possibly even to the remnants of the IPP (Gallagher, 1977: 99–100).

Historians have debated the impact of abstention on the subsequent political fortunes of the Labour Party, with some arguing that its failure to participate in the election that laid the foundations of the modern Irish state handicapped the party from the outset making it impossible for it subsequently to challenge the hegemony of the two main parties (
Fianna Fáil
and Fine Gael) that were the offspring of revolutionary Sinn Féin. However, an analysis of subsequent electoral contests suggests that Labour was not so terminally damaged; it won a quarter of the seats in the January 1920
local elections for urban councils and 17 seats in the first election for the
26-county state in 1922 (having abstained again in the elections held in Southern Ireland in 1921 under the
Government of Ireland Act (1920)
(Laffan, 1985: 214–17).

Fianna Fáil
: Political party formed by Eamon de Valera in 1926 following a split in Sinn Féin.

The failure of Labour to emerge as one of the two main parties in Ireland until the twenty-first century probably owes more to the conservatism of Irish society, the absence of the largest industrial section of Ireland after partition, the divisiveness of Jim Larkin, the Roman Catholic Church's hostility to socialism and Fianna Fáil's historic success in attracting the urban and rural labour vote than to the party's decision not to contest the 1918 general election. However, had Labour contested the election and taken seats in
Dáil éireann
, it might have been able to steer that assembly towards a more radical social and economic policy.

Government of Ireland Act (1920)
: Legislation partitioning Ireland into the six counties of Northern Ireland and the 26 counties of Southern Ireland that later became the Irish Free State.

Dáil éireann
: Irish Parliament, established by Sinn Féin in January 1919.

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

The role of Collins and Griffith in reorganising Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers in the regions is illustrated well in A. T. Q. Stewart's,
Michael Collins: The Secret File
(Blackstaff, 1997), containing extracts from the RIC's intelligence file on Collins from 1916 to 1920.

The rise of Sinn Féin after the Rising, its transformation into a republican party and replacement of the IPP as the leading nationalist party in Ireland is chronicled in detail in Michael Laffan's,
The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party, 1916–1923
(Cambridge University Press, 1999). The demise of the IPP from the home rule perspective is treated in the standard works on home rule by Jackson and O’Day (see Chapter 1).

The conscription crisis and the 1918 general election are examined by Pauric Travers in ‘The priest in politics: the case of conscription’, in Oliver MacDonagh, W. F. Mandle and Pauric Travers (eds),
Irish Culture and Nationalism, 1750–1950
(Gill and MacMillan, 1983), and in Jérôme aan de Wiel's,
The Catholic Church in Ireland, 1914–1918: War and Politics
(Irish Academic Press, 2003), both of which focus on the role of the Roman Catholic Church in marshalling opposition to conscription. John Coakley's, ‘The election that made the First Dáil’, in B. Farrell (ed.),
The Creation of the Dáil
(Blackwater, 1994) and Brian Farrell's
The Founding of Dáil éireann: Parliament and Nation Building
(Gill and Macmillan, 1971) provide a good explanation of the results of the 1918 election, the full results of which for Ireland can be found online at
www.ark.ac.uk/elections/h1918.htm
.

4 The Political Campaign for Independence, 1919–21

THE FIRST DÁIL ÉIREANN

S
inn Féin's electoral promises to withdraw from Westminster and establish an alternative constituent assembly in Ireland were put into force on 21 January 1919 when the First Dáil éireann was convened in Dublin's Mansion House (the official residence of the city's Lord Mayor). Only 27 of the party's elected members attended as many were still in prison as a result of the German plot arrests of the previous year. The proceedings of the First Dáil's inaugural sitting, held in public, were largely ceremonial. In de Valera's absence, Cathal Brugha was elected president and an interim cabinet was elected. The four foundation documents of the assembly were also issued. The constitution of Dáil éireann was a short document comprising only five articles and declared the legislative supremacy of the Dáil: ‘all legislative powers shall be vested in Dáil éireann’
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. An executive was to be formed consisting of five departments (President, Finance, Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs and National Defence). The ministers who held these posts were appointed and could also be dismissed by the Dáil. The Dáil had ultimate responsibility for finance and the constitution could only be altered by the Dáil.

Although a short document that is often overlooked by historians and overshadowed by the better-known documents issued on that day, the Dáil constitution is a significant document in Irish constitutional and political history. It enshrined the principle of popular sovereignty as the powers of the Dáil were ultimately based on its electoral mandate, and established the model of British cabinet government that survives in Ireland to this day. Many of the features of the Republic of Ireland's modern parliamentary and democratic institutions have their origins in this document, such as the
Ceann Comhairle
and an independent Comptroller and Auditor General. It is also notable as the first modern Irish constitution and acted as the legal basis of the state until the adoption of a more detailed constitution for the Irish Free State in 1922 (Farrell, 1988: 21–2).

Ceann Comhairle
: Chairman or Speaker of Dáil éireann.

The Declaration of Independence, its title copying that of the American colonies in the late eighteenth century, was a direct descendant of the 1916 Proclamation and asserted that the result of the 1918 general election constituted a democratic mandate to establish an independent republic in Ireland
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. Rhetorically, it contained much of the Anglophobia common to Irish republican discourse, repudiating ‘seven hundred years’ of ‘foreign usurpation’ and condemning ‘English' rule in Ireland as being ‘based upon force and fraud and maintained by military occupation against the declared will of the people’. It reiterated the intentionally vague threat of Sinn Féin's 1918 election manifesto to utilise ‘every means at our command’ in pursuit of the goal of establishing the republic. The document was read first in Irish, then French and finally in English.

The use of French indicated that the proceedings of the new revolutionary assembly were designed for foreign press and political consumption. This was most evident with the ‘Message to the Free Nations of the World’, essentially an appeal to the world powers convening at Versailles to draw up a post-war settlement to recognise Ireland's independence
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. Its principal target was the American President Woodrow Wilson and its language mirrored much of that used by Wilson in his famous Fourteen Points, including the right to self-determination, freedom of the seas and anti-imperialism. It was the precursor to the Dáil Department of Foreign Affairs's efforts to seek a hearing at the Paris Peace Conference.

The social and economic vision of the Dáil was espoused in the final document, the Democratic Programme
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. It was largely the work of the Labour Party leader Thomas Johnson, and was a reward for Labour having stood aside in the 1918 general election, as well as reflecting the lack of serious thinkers on social and economic issues within Sinn Féin (Laffan, 1999: 259; Mitchell, 1974: 107). Johnson's initial draft was a very radical document subordinating private property to the public good – ‘no private right to property is good against the public right of the nation’ – and asserting the state's right to appropriate its resources if not properly used – ‘the nation must ever retain the right to resume possession of such soil or wealth whenever the trust is abused or the trustee fails to give faithful service’ (Lynch, 1966: 46). This was unacceptable to Sinn Féin and it was redrafted by Seán T. O’Kelly, who removed the most strident socialist rhetoric.

Nevertheless, the document read in the Dáil contained ideas (described by some as ‘communistic’) that many of the more socially conservative members of Sinn Féin would have been uncomfortable with, declaring that ‘the nation's sovereignty extends not only to all men and women of the Nation,
but to all its material possessions, the Nation's soil and all its resources, all the wealth and all the wealth-producing process within the Nation’. Labour's opposition to private property remained, though it was toned down: ‘we reaffirm that all right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare’. It contained some specific policy aspirations, such as the plan to abolish the poor law, exploit natural resources such as peat bogs and fisheries and promote foreign trade.

In places there were distinct similarities with the 1916 Proclamation
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, which was invoked in the opening paragraph of the Democratic Programme. Both used language that recognised gender equality; the proclamation addressed itself to ‘Irishmen and Irishwomen’, while the Democratic Programme claimed the allegiance of ‘every man and woman’. It also promised ‘to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the children’, protect them from hunger and cold, and provide shelter and education, which could be read as a more detailed espousal of the proclamation's pledge to ‘pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally’. The only policy in the Democratic Programme that was acted upon by the Dáil was the abolition of the Poor Law, which was finally achieved by the new Irish Free State Government in 1925.

Irish governments since independence abandoned both the sentiments and content of the Democratic Programme and it is questionable whether the members of the First Dáil were ever serious about its implementation. Piaras Béaslaí, a Sinn Féin
Teachta Dála (TD)
who read the Democratic Programme in Irish to the Dáil, later wrote: ‘It is doubtful whether the majority of members would have voted for it without amendment had there been any immediate prospect of putting it into force.’ Its passage was no doubt helped by the absence in prison of some of the most socially conservative Sinn Féiners, such as Griffith and de Valera, and by 1922 it was dismissed by the Free State's Minister for Home Affairs, Kevin O’Higgins, as ‘largely poetry’ (Mitchell, 1974: 109–10).

Teachta Dála (TD)
: Member of Dáil éireann.

Following the first ceremonial meeting in January the Dáil did not reconvene until 1 April, sitting for four days. The attendance of 52 TDs was the largest number ever to attend a session of the revolutionary assembly. Many of the leaders who had been in prison in January were in attendance and the interim cabinet was replaced with a permanent one, presided over by de Valera. Ministerial posts were allocated to Arthur Griffith (Home Affairs), Count Plunkett (Foreign Affairs), Cathal Brugha (Defence) and Michael Collins (Finance). New posts of Industries and Labour, not mentioned in the Dáil constitution, were created and given to Eoin MacNeill and Constance Markievicz respectively. Markievicz was only the second woman to hold a cabinet post at the time, alongside Alexandra Kollantai in the USSR; there would not be
another woman minister in Ireland until Dehra Parker was made Northern Ireland's Minister for Health in 1949, while the Republic of Ireland had to wait for the appointment of Máire Geoghegan-Quinn as Minister for the Gaeltacht in 1979. Departments of Fisheries and National Language were added later in the year. In addition there were non-cabinet directorships for Propaganda, Agriculture and Industry and Trade (Mitchell, 1995: 33).