Introduction

Almost one hundred years ago, on 14th December 1918, Irish people voted in an election that was arguably the most significant exercise in democratic expression in twentieth century Ireland and set this country on course for independent nationhood.

Irish history is often controversial terrain and people will take very different interpretations from the salient facts, but I don’t think anyone will dispute that some of the giants of Irish history, names that have held a dominant role in our history books, were participants in that election.

As a former politician and someone who contested 10 general elections, I can tell you that election candidates are always interested in the other names on the ballot paper! Or indeed the names that are not on the ballot paper. So, in preparing for today’s conference one of my first points of research was to look at the list of various candidates in 1918, as I searched for understanding of an election that was fought a centenary ago with a very different electoral demographic than today.

First-Past the Post versus PRSTV

This was also an election that was fought under rules different to our own modern electoral procedures. Here I am thinking specifically of the fact that the 1918 election was fought under a first-past the post system, as proportional representation, which has been a staple of Irish elections post-independence, was not introduced until 1921.

In more modern times, it is probably ironic that my former party Fianna Fail tried to do away with PRSTV in failed referenda in 1959 and 1968, yet undoubtedly the scale of Fianna Fail’s losses in 2011 would have been even further magnified had there been a first past the post system. This is exactly what happened to the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1918.

The Irish Parliamentary Party entered meltdown territory in this election, which most likely would have been avoided in a proportional representation scenario. In 1918, the Irish Parliamentary Party won six seats in the first past the post system, five of these seats were in Ulster, where they may have benefited from some tactical voting by Unionists while the only seat the Irish Parliamentary Party won in what now constitutes the twenty-six county state was in Waterford city, a seat which was previously the political base of John Redmond who had died some months earlier.

Though people talk about the Irish Parliamentary Party vote imploding, they actually won a fairly respectable 21.7% of the vote on an all-Ireland basis in 1918. Under a proportional representation electoral system they would have easily won far more seats and arguably done enough to make the party sustainable into the future. How that would or would not have changed the direction of Irish history is one of those ‘what ifs’ that could give rise to endless speculation?

1918 Election Candidates – De Valera

Rather than do that, at this point, let me return to the runners and riders of candidates in the 1918 General Election. Given my own political background, I hope people will forgive me if I start with one of my predecessors, Eamon de Valera, subsequently the figure who would dominate twentieth century Irish politics as leader of Fianna Fail, but at this stage the leader of Sinn Fein.

De Valera was actually returned for two constituencies in the 1918 election. Building on his by-election victory in 1917, de Valera, was elected unopposed for Clare East in 1918, but he also won a contested seat in Mayo East, ending the political career of John Dillon, who had taken over the leadership of the Irish Parliamentary six months earlier in March 1918, at a very difficult and transformative time.

Cosgrave and Griffith

W.T. Cosgrave was also elected unopposed in Kilkenny North, Arthur Griffith was elected unopposed in Cavan East and he also won a contested constituency in Tyrone North West, comfortably beating an Irish Unionist William Thomas Miller. Griffith’s victory was one of the few Sinn Fein wins in the north-east. Though undoubtedly the 1918 General Election was a triumph for Sinn Fein, Unionists acutely increased their overall representation by five seats.

On an all-island basis people voted in a more polarizing manner, either for the union or for a republic, as moderate nationalists were swept away. Some might argue that the seeds of partition were accordingly sown in this election, but this process can even be traced even further back to Parnell’s inability to make inroads into Unionist Ulster.

Uncontested Candidates

Other famous uncontested candidates in 1918 were the legendary Michael Collins, in Cork South, who was already making a name for himself; Terence Mac Swiney in Cork Mid, who would lose his life after 74 days of hunger strike in Brixton prison less than two years later; and, Sean Hales in Cork West.

Hales ended up fighting on the opposite side of the Civil War from his brother Tom, showing that the “brother against brother” description of the Civil War was no cliché, as the remarkable republican unity that had existed from 1917 until 1921 truly unravelled in the cataclysmic and blood stained events of 1922-23, which remains one of the great tragedies of our history.

Contested Constituencies

In contested constituency elections, Sinn Fein were rampant. Sean T. O’Kelly, a future two-term President of Ireland was victorious in College Green, easily defeating an Independent Nationalist, Joe Briscoe.

Desmond Fitzgerald, the father of a future Taoiseach, was elected in Dublin Pembroke, despite a good showing from an Irish Unionist John P. Good. And Countess Markiewicz, made history when she was elected in Dublin St Patrick’s, with 66% of the vote, becoming the first woman to be elected an MP, though as we all know she declined to take her seat in Westminster, staying true to her election pledge of abstentionism from the British Parliament.

A Distorted Election?

Overall twenty-five Sinn Fein candidates in 1918 were returned unopposed in the 73 constituencies where Sinn Fein candidates were elected. Geographically, the largest province where Sinn Fein candidates were not opposed was Munster, which was the bedrock of republican activity in the Civil War and arguably also in the War of Independence. 17 Sinn Fein candidates were returned unopposed in Munster in 1918.

A revisionist historian argument is that high levels of violence or the threat of violence distorted the 1918 General Election and anti-republican candidates were discouraged from running by threats. Not surprisingly, this argument was also made by the censored British controlled press in Ireland at this time one hundred years ago.

With the benefit of hindsight and genuine historical research, it is clear that the uncontested seats were the result of Sinn Fein and the Irish Parliamentary Party finding common ground in some constituencies and, in other constituencies, the acceptance of electoral realpolitik, where it was realized that Sinn Fein were going to be the certain winners.

Those who continue to suggest that the uncontested constituencies unfairly distorts the 1918 election results ignore the reality that subsequently in these constituencies, in future elections, republican candidates performed very, very strongly. This indicates that these constituencies were most likely also a hot bed of republican support in 1918 and that non-republicans saw it as pointless to contest these seats.

Further Interesting Candidate Insights

Like the uncontested constituencies, those constituencies where there were contests in 1918 provide some interesting insights into history. Eoin MacNeill actually fought and contested two constituencies in 1918 and won them both, in the then parliamentary constituencies of Londonderry City and also the National University of Ireland. Edward Carson, a Dublin born lawyer and former Trinity hurler, won 81% of the votes cast in Belfast Duncairn.

More surprisingly maybe for some of us today, Maurice Dockrell, an Independent Unionist Alliance candidate in Dublin Rathmines, convincingly won a seat in 1918. Unlike the bulk of Irish MPs elected in this election, Dockrell did take his seat in the House of Commons, however, his grandson, also Maurice, in the post-independence era became a long serving Fine Gael TD in Dail Eireann.

Interestingly Maurice Dockrell Senior’s vanquished opponent in Rathmines in 1918 was PJ Little, who did not let this defeat deter his appetite for politics, as he was subsequently a long-serving member of de Valera’s Fianna Fail cabinets in the 1930s and 1940s.

Two men who were to be casualties of Civil War bitterness, Kevin O’Higgins, for Queen’s County, now thankfully County Laois, and Harry Boland for Roscommon South, were also winners of contested constituencies in 1918.

And for those who think that West Belfast was always a Sinn Fein stronghold, it might be interesting to note that Joseph Devlin, an Irish Parliamentary Party candidate, won 72% of the vote in the constituency of Belfast Falls, easily defeating his only opponent, who was none other than Eamon de Valera, the Sinn Fein leader.

As a political leader, I used to tell my party colleagues that a General Election was a series of local elections and the personalities, the demographics and issues in local constituencies can submerge a national trend. There is no doubt that this is what happened in Belfast Falls in 1918, but in this General Election this was the exception rather than the rule.

Background to 1918 Election

The immediate background to the 1918 election explains the overall national surge to Sinn Fein. The 1916 Rising and the executions had transformed and radicalized nationalist Ireland as never before. Yeats spoke of all being changed and a terrible beauty being born and the events of Easter Week seemed to have given impetus to the cause of an Irish republic and a shift away from what had been the Irish political orthodoxy of Home Rule.

Sinn Fein won all four by-elections in Ireland in 1917, but the swing to Sinn Fein seemed to have dissipated by early 1918 when the Irish Parliamentary Party retained three seats in by-elections early that year.

While local factors and sympathy votes may have been a factor, there are also grounds to believe that passions had abated since the executions in 1916 and the Irish public were prepared to give constitutional nationalism – and the Irish Parliamentary Party in particular – one last chance of achieving a workable solution.

The Failure of the Irish Convention

The failure of the Irish Convention by March 1918, the Conscription Crisis of April 1918 and the German Plot of May 1918, where Sinn Fein leaders were arrested on trumped up charges by the British authorities, all served to push momentum back in the direction of Sinn Fein and led to the death knell of the Irish Parliamentary Party.

Last year, it was my pleasure to speak in Trinity College at the centenary of the opening of the Irish Convention, alongside former Taoiseach John Bruton.
When this convention opened in July 1917, Britain was in a life or death struggle for its survival and its way of life and the Great War, which had broken out in 1914, was still perched on a knife edge.

In my view, the Irish Convention was a cynical manoeuvre by the British Prime Minister Lloyd George. The Convention was about keeping Unionists and Nationalists on board with the war effort by kicking the problem of the Government of Ireland down the road. It was also hoped that more militant nationalists, such as Sinn Féin, would engage with the Irish Convention and that this would keep them occupied rather than engaged in further military action.

The failure of the Irish Convention by spring 1918 and also the failure of the Irish Parliamentary Party to secure anything better than Home Rule with partition persuaded nationalist Ireland that it was time to seek new solutions and that Sinn Fein could perhaps provide more dynamism and energy.

Lloyd George’s betrayal

It would be naïve of any of us to think that Lloyd George was a friend of nationalist Ireland. He ultimately betrayed John Redmond and John Dillon who had backed the British war effort. By linking the introduction to Home Rule with Conscription, Lloyd George was putting British interests first and foremost and placing the Irish Parliamentary Party in an impossible position.

On the official announcement of the dual policy of Home Rule and Conscription in April 1918, Dillon led the Irish Parliamentary Party members out of the Commons never to return. The electoral tide was now unstoppably moving towards Sinn Fein.

Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, convincingly won the East Cavan by-election on 20th June 1918, defeating the Irish Parliamentary Party’s John F. O’Hanlon by over 1200 votes and winning a seat that had been held by Home Rulers since the constituency was established in 1885.

The December 1918 Election

The December 1918 General Election that followed was known as the Khaki Election and was called immediately after the Armstice with Germany. Lloyd George campaigned on a slogan of “Make the Germans Pay” – and we all know how that tragically worked out – and he won a huge victory in Britain, but the Irish vote was a sea-changer for separatism as Sinn Fein won 73 seats, the Irish Parliamentary Party 6 seats and Unionists 26 seats.

Sinn Fein’s landslide was helped by the fact that Irish soldiers returning from the front, who were least likely to vote for a severing of the link with Britain, had difficulty in obtaining ballot papers.

Furthermore, the extension of the franchise to a younger generation – men over 21 and females over 30 – was of great benefit to the more radical Sinn Fein rather than to the conservative and middle-aged male dominated Irish Parliamentary Party.

I am not a sociologist or a political scientist, but nearly forty years’ experience of General Elections has taught me that young people are more willing to embrace change and to reject establishment parties, as the Irish Parliamentary definitely was in Ireland in 1918.

The ongoing and unnecessary arrest of Sinn Fein directors of election during the campaign by the British authorities also generated sympathy and offended the Irish electorate’s sense of fair play.

Sinn Fein also benefited from the Labour Party’s decision to sit out the 1918 General Election to allow the electorate focus on the national question. However, I don’t go along with the sometimes cited excuse that the historical weakness of the Labour Party in Ireland is explained by this decision because it deprived the party of supporters from the beginning. Voters cast their ballots on the policies and the more recent track-record of political parties, not what they did or didn’t do in 1918.

In my view the outcome of the 1918 General Election is historically and politically significant because it signaled democratic support for the philosophy that underpinned the Easter Rising and it gave a mandate, in their time, to those wishing to push on with the work of building a sovereign, independent nation in Ireland.

If one thing annoys me about Irish revisionist historians, it is a tendency that some of them have to take cheap shots at the leaders of the Easter Rising. The 1916 leaders were Irish democrats, and that is not recognised sufficiently often. They were or became revolutionaries, because they refused to confine their vision to a limited devolution in a truncated Ireland that would remain in the UK as a satellite of the British Empire.

That was the only concession that could be expected in a British-imposed constitutional framework. The sacrifice they made of their own lives was the catalyst for a sea-change in public opinion, expressed at the ballot box in Ireland in December 1918, which henceforth supported complete independence.

Those who criticise the leaders of the Rising ignore the fundamental democratic principle that one country does not have the right to govern another without its consent. Yet this is what Britain had been doing in Ireland for centuries.

The vision and bravery of the men and women of 1916, in their lives and in their deaths, was recognized by the Irish people, who in December 1918 decided to back the cause of an Independent Republic by a massive and sweeping majority. The justice of the cause, not just the willingness to fight for it, contributed much to its success.

Irish democratic institutions were formed at the first available opportunity, following the overwhelming victory of Sinn Féin in the 1918 General Election, on the twin principles of self-determination and government by consent. From then on, Ireland had an elected government of its own in Dáil Eireann, which first sat on 21st January 1919.

We are now well into the decade of centenaries. As Taoiseach, I announced in October 2005, that my Government would put a particular focus in the 90th anniversary of the Rising and that we would commence planning for a major commemoration of the 100th anniversary in 2016.

When I made this announcement, it was the subject of some criticism, even from some of those who are now today firm supporters of the programme of historic commemorations.

But I am really glad that successive governments have all played their role in marking, in the most inclusive possible manner, the passage into history of both the great achievements and deep wounds associated with Ireland’s transition to political independence.

It is important that we commemorate our past and that we also learn from it and, in this context, I want to say that the decision to downgrade history in our secondary schools and to make it a non-compulsory subject was short-sighted and quite frankly ill-considered.

I know that the current Minister for Education is revisiting this decision and I hope he will recognise that our young people learning about the suffering and loss and sacrifices that have taken place to give this country its nationhood emphasizes the imperative of building for the future a just and peaceful island for everyone.

In this regard, I am tempted to say that the compulsory teaching of Irish history should also be included on the syllabus in Britain!

One of the many major disappointments of the Brexit debate is the sheer ignorance (and sometimes arrogance) of the realities of Irish history and Irish political affairs, as expressed by some Brexiteers.

I can certainly think of a few former Eton and Oxford students who have been contributing vocally if not sensibly to the Brexit debate, who could do with a crash course in the lessons of Irish history.

Brexit, as I have said so many times, cannot be allowed to unravel the good work of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Twenty years ago, the people of this island voted for a shared future that would be based on democratic ideals and would underpin a new era of prosperity and progress for all of us.

On 22nd May 1998, the people of this island voted by a huge majority in both jurisdictions to end, once and for all, the wrenching conflicts of the past.

Nobody here needs reminding that our generation has borne witness to the tragic results of a conflict that has cost thousands of lives and caused colossal damage and disturbance to the lives of many more people, holding back the natural progress of a whole society and indeed an entire island.

It has been in human terms one of the most costly history lessons, one that we should have been able to steer clear of or at any rate cut short.

The Good Friday Agreement was the culmination of many years’ effort devoted to the peace process, of the three strand talks which began over a quarter of a century ago in 1991, and involved the dedicated work of four Taoisigh.

The Agreement represents the product of perhaps the most rigorous negotiations ever seen in these islands involving Nationalists and Unionists, Loyalists and Republicans. The significance of the Good Friday Agreement should never be under-estimated and to use modern parlance it was a game-changer.

The ratification by the Irish people north and south of the Good Friday Agreement on 22nd May 1998 was the first concurrent act of self-determination by the people of Ireland as a whole since the General Election of 1918.

The Yes vote in the referenda of more than 85% of the total poll in the whole island of Ireland was a rare expression of near unanimity by the people of this island and a clear signal that they were not prepared to countenance any false remnant of democratic self-justification for further acts of paramilitary violence from any quarter.

The idea for concurrent referendums, north and south, and to build democratic consensus around the Good Friday Agreement belonged to John Hume and I was very glad to help implement this idea.

John was always an astute politician with a huge intellectual depth and someone deeply read in Irish history. He saw the dangers of militant Irish nationalism being irreversibly wedded to a long expired and disputed mandate, given in the 1918 general election. He wanted to empower a new generation to write and shape their own version of history.

And for John Hume and for me, this had to be underpinned by a fair and honourable accommodation between unionists and nationalists based on partnership, co-operation and mutual respect – in relationships within Northern Ireland, between North and South, and between Ireland and Britain.

All of us who engaged in the Good Friday talks had come to understand that this does not mean an end to difference. It did not spell defeat for either of the two great traditions of Nationalism or Unionism. Instead, it spelt victory for the people who wanted to co-exist in peace and harmony on this island.

The 1918 General Election in Ireland gave rise to the Dail and our democratic institutions on this island, but, on the same day that Dail sat for the first time, on 21st January 1919, the first shots rang out in the War of Independence.

It is right that we never forget our history and we remember, a centenary on, those who fought for or campaigned to vindicate the Irish people’s right to self-determination.

But it is this generation’s duty to ensure that we leave a lasting political framework on this island, which will mean no-one will ever again have to fight or die for Ireland’s sake and that all of the people on this island can live in peace, prosperity and harmony.