When the polls were declared on 28 December, Sinn Féin swept the old party away. The near-totality of its obliteration was of course due to the British electoral system, and was belied, to some minds, by the modest proportion of the overall Irish poll Sinn Féin secured – not quite 48 per cent. But its share of the vote outside the six north-eastern counties – where Sinn Féin fielded candidates in hopeless contests – was probably a truer reflection of Sinn Féin’s strength: 68 per cent. Sinn Féin now had sixty-nine members of parliament (all but twenty-six of whom were in gaol). Sinn Féin and the Volunteers together seem to have overwhelmed the opposition both physically and psychologically. (Boland’s opponent in South Roscommon philosophically accepted defeat as ‘the passing away of a great movement, to be succeeded by another’.)
Sinn Féin’s victory was secured in part by the intensive campaigning of the Volunteers, seasoned with a fair amount of personation – Cumann na mBan women celebrating the extended franchise with special enthusiasm. ‘We dressed in different clothes and voted in the name of absentee voters.’193 Some activists liked to boast in later years that they had voted dozens of times.194 Republican crowds intimidated some polling officials to overlook under-age voting. Intimidation was nothing novel in Irish elections, however, or particular to Sinn Féin. In the old party stronghold of Waterford during the March 1918 by-election, ‘no man could walk out singly carrying a Sinn Féin emblem without being almost beaten to death.’195 The high proportion of uncontested seats in the general election has often been seen as evidence of intimidation, but actually fewer seats were uncontested in 1918 than had been normal in the first decade of the century – twenty-five as against forty-one in 1910. And the influence of intimidation and personation should not be overstated: much of it was done out of bravado rather than a belief that it was necessary.196 It was a function of Sinn Féin’s organizational strength, and may indeed be seen as a reflection of a wider pressure for unanimity – or intolerance of dissent – characteristic of ‘rural Ireland’.197 The election as a whole was, in comparative perspective, fair enough: the voters made a clear choice of party. But whether they really knew what the party stood for is another issue.
Ever since, there has been some doubt about the precise platform Sinn Féin fought the election on. This was an issue that grew dramatically in importance three years later when many republicans based their rejection of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on the popular mandate for independence they claimed the election result represented. All later recollections were inevitably but perhaps fatally coloured by the eventual murderous split between pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty republicans. But it seems undeniable that through 1918 Sinn Féin’s policy, even after the 1917 Convention, had remained ‘studiously vague’.198 At the hustings some candidates declared that a vote for Sinn Féin was a vote for the Republic, while others later claimed they had never used the word. The Volunteers in Cork certainly complained about their inability to hear the word at election meetings.199 It seems likely that more people talked about freedom or independence than invoked the Republic as such. Figgis thought that most of the speeches in the election built on the theme of Woodrow Wilson’s speeches of 4 July and 28 September 1918 – in other words, national self-determination. Some indications were quite gnomic. One candidate declared that ‘Sinn Féin stood by the policy of Parnell,’ another that it would ‘carry out the programme of that flag that was hoisted upon that occasion’.200
According to its manifesto, which Sinn Féin campaigner Kevin O’Shiel thought ‘wordy’, Sinn Féin gave Ireland ‘the opportunity of vindicating her honour and pursuing with renewed confidence the path of national salvation by rallying to the flag of the Irish Republic’. It aimed at ‘securing the establishment of that Republic’, by ‘withdrawing the Irish representation from the British Parliament’ and ‘making use of any and every means available to render impotent the power of England to hold Ireland in subjection’. It ‘stands by’ the 1916 proclamation in ‘reasserting the inalienable right of the Irish Nation to sovereign independence’.201 O’Shiel thought that ‘the Republic was there certainly, but, as P. S. O’Hegarty writes … “in fact what was sold to the electorate … was not Sinn Féin, not the Republic, but Easter Week”.’202 Even those who, like Boland himself, invoked their own action in 1916 spoke of ‘fighting for Ireland’ – rebutting the charge that they had treacherously fought for Germany – rather than for the Republic. Kevin O’Higgins and indeed Michael Collins himself made no mention of the Republic as such in their election addresses. Collins held out ‘the supreme, absolute and final control of all this country’ as the objective.203 But there is no doubt that their opponents denounced them as republicans. The old party’s key argument had always been that the Sinn Féin programme was ‘impossible to realise’ precisely for that reason – Britain would concede Home Rule but never a republic. In the end, SF Vice-President Michael O’Flanagan recognized that while ‘the people have voted for Sinn Féin, what we have to do now is explain to them what Sinn Féin is’.204
‘THE IRISH PEOPLE CAN PRODUCE THEIR REPUBLIC AT WHATEVER MOMENT THEY LIKE’
Sinn Féin’s post-election strategy had been mapped out long in advance by Arthur Griffith. Abstention from Westminster was the most unambiguous plank in the Sinn Féin platform, and though Lord French predictably suggested that the new MPs would be unable to resist the lure of £400 a year, there was never any question of abandoning it. (Markievicz did apparently sneak into the Palace of Westminster to see her name on the brass plate by her coat-hook, a forgivable lapse for the first woman MP perhaps.) Less certain was the way that Griffith’s concept of a constituent assembly or ‘National Council’ would be brought into being, and what this would mean in legal terms. Even before the election results were announced, on 19 December, the Sinn Féin Executive decided to ‘convoke the Dáil Éireann’ – the national assembly – as the October 1918 Ard-fheis had resolved, and a committee under Seán T. O’Kelly set about preparing for this. Several questions were aired at this stage: were there enough representatives (even if they were all at liberty) to constitute a credible assembly? (The number having, of course, been set by the logic of the UK system.) If not, could others be co-opted? Should the assembly declare a republic?
The fact that the decision to declare an independent republic seems to have been unproblematic reflected the untheoretical nature of republicanism itself. The issue was simply not considered. It would, in theory, have been possible to take the view that the creation of the new state was the task of the constituent assembly – that was certainly Figgis’s and most probably Griffith’s view – and should not be pre-empted. The initial (private) meeting of all available Sinn Féin members – called ‘Deputies of the Dáil’ in English, in Irish ‘Teachtaí Dála’, but usually re-Anglicized as ‘TDs’ – on 7 January 1919 seemed to follow this line. The group pledged merely to ‘work for the establishment of an independent Irish Republic’. But it was soon clear that the work would be brief, and that the Republic was already effectively in being. It seems to have been assumed that there had to be some kind of notional state underpinning the assembly, and as the Dáil’s first Speaker Michael Hayes put it, ‘what other name could it have been given?’ Interestingly, though, the constitution prepared for the first meeting actually made no mention of a state – it was not the constitution of Ireland, but the constitution of the Dáil.
This was to be a single-chamber parliament with an internal cabinet type of executive. The British constitutional model was reflected here, as in all the Dáil’s rules of procedure, and in its general working assumptions. For instance, although this was effectively a one-party assembly, the practice of ‘whipping’ was started immediately (with Piaras Béaslaí as chief whip) to assemble the ‘Republican Representatives’ for the first private meeting on 7 January. That meeting was ‘modelled on established parliamentary procedure, with carefully organised Orders of the Day’, including motions to appoint select committees to draft a constitution and
standing orders, along with the declaration of independence.205 This burst of casual Anglicization did not pass entirely unchallenged. One contributor to the radical journal New Ireland charged the Dáil with being ‘simply Westminster put into Irish’. But nobody in the assembly seems to have been unduly concerned.
The proceedings of the first public session of Dáil Éireann on the afternoon of 21 January, carefully stage-managed by Béaslaí, a veteran of many amateur theatricals, were described as ‘dull, but … electric’ – an interesting paradox. They were conducted soberly, in Irish (aside from Count Plunkett’s warning to the small audience not to cheer), and – sending another unconscious message – opened with a prayer read by Fr Michael O’Flanagan, the Vice-President of Sinn Féin. This must have seemed natural enough, though it confirmed, in unionist eyes, that the Republic was a Catholic project. It was the historic significance of the event itself that was most clearly felt – the ‘enormity’ of the occasion, as one reporter put it.206 The precise form of the constitution and the three declaratory statements adopted by the assembly may have seemed less important. Kevin O’Shiel remarked that none of the six articles of the ‘extremely brief’ constitution contained ‘any reference to, much less a definition of, the Irish Republic or what area it covers’. But it did set up the executive apparatus of a new state, vesting ‘all legislative powers’ in Dáil Éireann and ‘all executive powers … in the members, for the time being, of the Ministry’ (Aireacht). The ‘President’ of the ministry – not, it should be noted, of the Republic – was to be elected by the Dáil. (‘It was manifest’, Béaslaí insisted, ‘that Dail Eireann could not arrogate to itself the right of electing a “President of the Irish Republic”.’)207
If, as New Ireland had claimed, ‘the Irish people can produce their Republic at whatever moment they like’, the three headline statements adopted by the Dáil at its first meeting did something, but not much, to flesh out the nature of the state it represented. The Declaration of Independence ratified the establishment of the Irish Republic (‘proclaimed in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916 by the Irish Republican Army acting on behalf of the Irish people’), asserting that ‘the Irish people is resolved … to promote the common weal, to re-establish justice … with equal right and equal opportunity for every citizen.’ The Message to the Free Nations of the World called on ‘every free nation to support the Irish Republic by recognising Ireland’s national status’ based on the natural ‘radical’ distinction of its race, language, customs and traditions from those of ‘the English’. Ireland was ‘the last outpost of Europe towards the West’, whose independence was ‘demanded by the Freedom of the Seas’.208 The Democratic Programme – ‘hastily prepared’, Béaslaí suggested, though it had actually been carefully prepared by Tom Johnson and hastily edited by Seán T. O’Kelly – gestured in Pearsean style towards a wider social responsibility. (Indeed it contained ‘more of the social doctrine of the Proclamation of the Republic than the electorate could be considered to have sanctioned’.)209 The fact that it was not in Griffith’s style was not insignificant.
With most of the moderate leadership in prison, Dáil Éireann became (as the imprisoned Figgis lamented) ‘less a house of consideration than a regiment of battle’ in which a military kind of discipline would rule: ‘most would look to a few men who knew what that duty should be.’ First among those few on this day was Cathal Brugha, elected ‘President of the Ministry pro tem’; whose brusque assertion after the Declaration of Independence was adopted – ‘Deputies, you understand from this that we are now done with England’ – pushed the Sinn Féin spirit to its limits. For Figgis, Brugha had ‘a Republic as clear before his eyes as the sun in heaven’. Roger Chauviré saw the same Sinn Féin trope he recognized elsewhere operating here. When one Sinn Feiner explained to him that the Dáil, as the only government acknowledged by the Irish people, ‘was the de facto Government’, Chauviré naturally corrected him: ‘de jure if you like, but not de facto; the de facto Government is the one that sends its opponents to prison.’ The reply was simply ‘English rule … being illegal, does not exist in fact.’210
‘A COUNTRY’S CONSULS ARE ITS MOST VALUABLE CIVIL SERVANTS’
The international situation looked to be exceptionally propitious for the new-born Republic, as the world’s statesmen assembled in Paris to settle the new global order on the basis of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination. Everyone who had studied the national movements of the nineteenth century knew how Cavour, by sending a contingent to fight in the Crimean War, had secured a place for Piedmont at the 1856 Paris Peace Conference, and paved the way for the unification of Italy. Indeed the reasoning of Redmond’s party had been exactly that by playing its part in the war Ireland would earn its freedom at the end. Unfortunately, the separatists had opposed this line, and to the extent that they had taken part in the war, it was on the wrong side. The connection with Germany was not in itself fatal to any favourable response to the appeal to the ‘free nations’, but the situation was less promising than Sinn Féin believed. (Quite apart from the legacy of 1916, Griffith had queered the pitch with France by his intemperate wartime propaganda portraying Germany as a ‘free state’ fighting against ‘imperial states’ that had ‘blotted out the local self-governing communities’.)
The Declaration of Independence may have been the inevitable result of Brugha’s dominance; but Figgis thought it was a strategic error in international terms. The Peace Conference would now be asked not to investigate and adjudicate a national claim, but to recognize an already existing republic, approving an act hostile to a great power. This may well have made a favourable outcome even less likely, but one was scarcely on the cards in any case. The Dáil’s three appointed delegates to the Peace Conference, Plunkett, Griffith and de Valera, never even managed to get visas to travel to Paris. Though for a while optimists could believe that the Irish-American lobby would be strong enough to overcome British resistance, this was highly improbable. The hard-headed Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, who had secured a meeting with Woodrow Wilson in 1918 to present a Cumann na mBan petition urging Ireland’s claim to self-determination, was optimistic about the President himself. ‘From my experience, from what he said and left unsaid, I am convinced that while he might have preferred the Irish question to be settled domestically [by the Irish Convention], he will now see the force of having it settled internationally for the sake of the peace of the world.’211
Seán T. O’Kelly, who managed to get to Paris as a representative of the Dublin Corporation and then declared himself to be the ‘Representative of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic’, may have damaged the Republic’s position by the ‘pompous’ letter he sent to Woodrow Wilson. While O’Kelly might conceivably have secured a meeting with Wilson as representative of the Corporation (which had sent the President an invitation – albeit unanswered – to visit the city on the way to Paris), in his new guise he had no chance. But in any case Wilson was already in retreat from his commitment to general self-determination. When the Irish-American delegation met him shortly after a US Senate resolution on 6 June that the Irish delegates should be heard by the conference, he explained that the Big Four had agreed that no delegations would be accepted without their unanimous consent. Beyond polite expressions of sympathy, representatives of other states would not take any action without the direct intervention of a great power. Clemenceau did go as far as considering a commission of inquiry into the Irish case, but this fell far short of the republican call for recognition of the already expressed will of the Irish people. Though efforts continued to secure recognition in Europe after the Peace Conference was wound up in July, they led to nothing, as did the attempt to secure membership of the new League of Nations.
These hopes have been dismissed as illusory, perhaps rightly, but the dashing of them was felt as a definite setback. ‘So ended in failure all the careful plans that had been made during two years. So fell the brave structure of hopes …’212 Though some
Gaelic revivalists wanted to close Ireland off from the corrupting world, mainstream Sinn Féin, certainly as articulated by Griffith, was internationally minded. One of Griffith’s favourite pastimes in the early years of the century had been to plan out networks of Irish representatives abroad. He had urged people to study not only the Hungarian model, but also the way that Norway, partly by securing its own consular service to support its expanding overseas trade, had freed itself from Sweden. ‘A country’s consuls are its most valuable civil servants.’ A consular service would enlarge Irish commerce as well as enlarging foreign understanding of Ireland, teaching the world that it was distinct from Britain. (It was Europeans, as he had lamented in 1905, who addressed communications to him ‘at Dublin, Angleterre’.)213 The size of the Irish diaspora offered a unique prospect of global impact. But in any case, to counter unionist arguments about the advantages of attachment to the British Empire, Griffith had long held that small countries like Ireland – especially Belgium, Denmark and Switzerland – were fully viable in the modern world. Indeed, ‘the day of the little nations has returned’, and greatness would be measured not by a people’s size but by its spirit.
Now Griffith was free to appoint consuls, and indeed envoys or quasi-ambassadors – at least within the constraints of the Dáil’s finances. (One part-time consul, Leopold Kerney, remembered Griffith advancing him the first quarter of his annual salary ‘in a back parlour of a shop in Parliament Street’. Along with Kerney’s credentials as trade representative of the Elected Government of the Irish Republic to France, Griffith ‘produced from one of his pockets £50 … in £1 notes, the dirty appearance of which struck me very much’.)214 Griffith seems to have used his position as vice-president to act as foreign minister, although Count Plunkett was formally given the portfolio.
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 10