The failure of unionism in Dublin, 1900

Abstract

The election contests of 1900 in St Stephen’s Green and South County Dublin were covered in detail by newspapers throughout the British Isles and have been treated as a political watershed by more recent and scholarly commentators. This interest has had a partly personal and biographical inspiration since one of the unionist candidates for South Dublin was the agrarian reformer and junior minister, Horace Plunkett; but the significance, symbolic and actual, of these contests has been seen as extending beyond the participation of one prominent Edwardian Irishman. The defeat of two unionist M.P.s, Plunkett and Campbell, in a fairly static Irish electoral arena would in itself have been worthy of comment. But the association of these men with a constructive administrative programme for Ireland, combined with the fact of their defeat by dissident unionists, gave the contests a broader notoriety and a significance for policy formulation which they would not otherwise have had. With the benefit of hindsight it has also been suggested that the repudiation of Plunkett and Campbell was a landmark in the gradual decline of southern unionism in Ireland. For, though South Dublin briefly returned to the unionist party between 1906 and 1910, the defeats of 1900 effectively marked the end of unionism as a significant electoral movement outside Ulster. After 1900, as the historian W.E.H. Lecky observed, ‘Ulster unionism is the only form of Irish unionism which is likely to count as a serious political force’.