Irish Parliamentary Party - Crisis and Change

Crisis and Change

Home Rule’s prominent figurehead John Redmond died in March 1918 at the close of the Convention, John Dillon taking over the IPP leadership. In April the German Spring Offensive overran the Allied front causing a severe manpower shortage which resulted in a clumsy cabinet dual policy decision by Lloyd George linking implementing Home Rule with extending conscription to Ireland. The Irish party withdrew in protest from Westminster and returned to Ireland to join forces with other national organisations in massed anti-conscription demonstrations in Dublin. Although conscription was never enforced after America’s late intervention in the war guaranteed a supply of fresh troops, the threat of conscription radicalised Irish politics. Sinn Féin, the political arm of the Volunteer insurgents, had public opinion believe that they alone had prevented conscription.

The Irish party held its own and returned its candidates in by-elections up to the end of 1916, the last in the West-Cork by-election of October 1916. The tide then changed after it lost three by-elections in 1917 to the more physical-force republican Sinn Féin movement, which in the mean time had built up 1,500 organised clubs around Ireland and exceeded the strength of the old UIL, most of the latter members now joining the new movement. At the end of the war in November 1918 when elections were announced for the December general election, the Irish electorate of nearly two million had a threefold increase due to a new Representation of the People Act. Women were granted franchise for the first time (confined to those over thirty) and a vote to every male over twenty-one years of age. This increased the number of voters from 30% to 75% of all adults.