Candidate 06681 The rogue result? ...

Candidate 06681

The rogue result? How free and fair was the 1918 election in Ireland?

There have been many allegations of deliberate electoral malpractice in the 1918 election in Ireland. The purpose of this study is to sift the evidence and evaluate these allegations. One will then be able to determine how accurate the declared results were. The protagonists in this epoch-making general election were Sinn Fein; the Irish Parliamentary Party (sometimes called the Home Rule party of The Irish Party); the Unionists; Labour; the All-for-Ireland League and finally the United Kingdom government. As we shall see the Irish Volunteers/Irish Republican Army also played a role. As this organization was known by both names at the time we shall use them interchangeably.

The distinction between the Irish Volunteers and Sinn Fein was blurred almost to the point of non-existence even in the minds of members of these bodies. Indeed the Inspector General of the Royal Irish Constabulary “assumed that all young members of Sinn Fein clubs belong to it.”

Sinn Fein won seventy-three seats with some sixty-nine successful candidates because de Valera, Mellows and Griffith stood in more than one seat. But Sinn Fein’s success was not universally anticipated.

Garvin summarized the reservations that many harbor about the 1918 election, “The election of 1918 had been in many ways non-competitive and there had been considerable intimidation by what was becoming the IRA. There was also a considerable amount of personation and stuffing of ballot boxes. Separatist leaders openly admitted subsequently that the elections of 1918, 1921 and 1922 were a doubtful expression of popular will.”

One of the more difficult types of malpractice to gauge is bogus voting.