The 1918 Election and its Relevance to Modern Irish Politics

Abstract

The 1918 Election and its Relevance to Modern Irish Politics John Bruton In this article I will describe the campaign in the 1918 General Election in the part of Ireland I know best, County Meath, and draw from that local contest broader national themes that marked this election and its aftermath.1 I hope to show that issues arose in that election which remain current in present day politics, such as national self-determination; abstention from Westminster; the pros and cons of being in a customs union; clerical involvement in politics; free speech and the distinctiveness of politics in northeastern Ulster and its relationship to the rest of Ireland From war straight into an election The background was the end of the First World War on 11 November 1918. A general election, for the entire UK of Great Britain and Ireland, was called ten days later. The UK Prime Minister, Lloyd George had called the election very quickly, after active hostilities ceased, to exploit the good feelings and relief that the war had finally been brought to a victorious conclusion by the Allies. This tactic worked. Lloyd George’s coalition of Tories and some Liberals won a landslide in Britain. The landslide went the other way in Ireland. The memory of the war was a particular factor in the Irish election because the conscription crisis of early 1918 was still fresh in people’s minds. Conscription had applied on the island of Britain but not the island of Ireland, from 1916. The big German breakthrough of early 1918 created a panic in the UK government. Manpower was running short and the Americans were slow arriving at the front. So, unsurprisingly, Lloyd George was under political pressure, in Scotland, Wales and England, to raise troop numbers by extending the same conscription to Ireland as applied to them. In March 1918 he announced his intention to do so, which caused a convulsion in Ireland. Until this announcement, the Irish Parliamentary Party had been holding its own politically. It had defeated Sinn Féin in by-elections in South Armagh, The 1918 Election and its Relevance to Modern Irish Politics Studies • volume 108 • number 429 93 East Tyrone and Waterford City early in 1918. Then Lloyd George’s threat of conscription changed all that. It drove Irish Parliamentary Party voters into the arms of Sinn Féin in the second half of 1918. It forced the Irish Parliamentary Party to temporarily abandon parliament in protest, thereby seeming to validate Sinn Féin’s long-held policy of abstention. Then the war ended and the threat of conscription disappeared. If the election had been held over until the spring of 1919, and anger had cooled about the conscription threat, the election result in Ireland might not have been so dramatic. Who could best represent Ireland in Versailles? At the time of the December 1918 election, a peace conference was soon to be convened by the victors of the First World War in Versailles. In Ireland, in anticipation of the peace conference, great expectations had been raised by speeches by President Woodrow Wilson, containing strong declarations in favour of the principle of national self-determination. The concept of selfdetermination acquired a quasi-religious status in some quarters. It was the core message of Sinn Féin in the election. Yet, as President Wilson was to discover when he got down to work in Versailles, this concept of national self-determination was difficult to apply when people with fundamentally different identities and national allegiances lived together in the same geographic area, as was and is still the case in Ulster, and in many other parts of Europe, to this day. What happens if people who live together in the same area self-determine two contradictory outcomes? It was not until the Sunningdale and Good Friday Agreements, of 1973 and 1998 respectively, that an attempt was made to answer that question. The campaign In South Meath, the Sinn Féin campaign got off to a flying start, as it did elsewhere in Ireland. Eamon Duggan was selected early on and was already actively campaigning, while the Irish Parliamentary Party was still trying to find a candidate. Duggan...