The Election of 1918 and the First Dail

The TDs of the First Dail

As we await the final result of the elections to the 31^st Dail, it seems fitting to look back at the election, the make-up and workings of the first Dail, set up in defiance of the British Government, which claimed legitimate rule over the island of Ireland at the time. Following the much documented events of Easter 1916, the Irish Volunteers and sundry hangers-on, especially taken from among those interned for seditious activities at such prison camps as Frongoch in Wales, galvanised by both the realisation that Home Rule was now in the deep freeze and the rapidly growing fear that the British would introduce conscription among the crown subjects in Ireland, decided upon a course of action which would forever alter the course of British and Irish politics.

Pre-War Irish politics, and pre-1918 Irish politics, was dominated by the Irish Parliamentary Party, the Home Rule Party of Butt and Parnell, who, led by John Redmond, had enjoyed the support of most moderate Nationalists on the island and had, seemingly, brought the country to the brink of some degree of Home Rule before the onslaught of the great War. Faced with growing opposition to his nationalist agenda from the rising Unionist resistance, Redmond urged support for the British war effort in order to show the character of Irish citizens and gain favour from the British administration. As the war dragged on, this course of action proved to be Redmond’s undoing as the shelving of the Home Rule bill feed into the more extreme nationalist’s paranoia that once again they would be denied at the last and support began to grow for insurrection, which duly came and went in 1916. The story of the resistance to the Crown could have ended at this point had it not been for British heavy handedness in dealing with the rebel leaders and anyone with even vague nationalist tendencies (over 3,500 arrested, 90 sentenced to death and 15 finally executed), and the aforementioned Conscription Crisis. This crisis led to the formation of an Anti-Conscription Committee with members including Eamon de Valera and Arthur Griffith, among others, men who would rise to further prominence in the following year. Griffith had founded a party called nationalist republican party called Sinn Fein in 1905, which gained moderate electoral success before financial constraints curtailed its activities and, by 1915, almost caused the implosion of the party. That the 1916 Rising somehow came to be blamed on the Sinn Fein movement proved to be a blessing in disguise for Griffith for, with the Irish Parliamentary Party disgraced by its lack of action with regards to conscription, the only recognisable nationalist political movement firmly opposed to conscription was Sinn Fein. The party was thus used as a vehicle for nationalists of all stamps to unite during this period and devise a strategy for independence. It was decided that Sinn Fein would contest the 1918 elections but, rather than take their seats in Westminster, they would take their election as a popular mandate to form an independent parliament, in defiance of the British Government.

In an election uncontested by the Irish Labour Party, Sinn Fein won 73 of the 105 available seats, the Unionist Party won 29, and the IPP just 6. Due to the nature of the ‘first past the post’ system used in British elections, this victory was seen as a landslide and gave Sinn Fein the impetus to carry out their stated manifesto to establish an independent parliament. So it came to pass in the Mansion House in Dublin on the 21^st January 1919 that the representatives of the First Dail sat to conduct the mundane business of parliament, electing Cathal Brugha as Ceann Comhairle (Speaker), adopting a number of documents including a Declaration of Independence, a brief Constitution, a Democratic Programme and a message to the Free Nations of the World. Members of that first Dail included both Griffith and de Valera, along with the head of the IRB, Michael Collins, the future Taoiseach, W.T. Cosgrave and the first woman elected to Westminster, Constance Markiewicz.

Auspicious times they were and the legacy of the First Dail is found today in the workings of our modern Parliament and the principle of representative democracy we still hold as utterly essential, along with our understanding of our relationship between our Parliament and Westminster in the sense that we created the First Dail, it wasn’t given to us. The physical force republicanism that shadowed the Dail’s workings should not denigrate its memory, some of the most able politicians in the history of the state participated in this experiment and we should hope for their like again this time around.