Latest / The History of Ireland: Rebellion, Empire, and Independence — Fexingo History / The Election That Changed Ireland: 1918 and the Birth of the Dáil
Transcript
- Lucas: We've talked a lot about the Easter Rising and its aftermath, but there's a moment just two years later that I think is maybe the single most consequential election in Irish history. Luna: You mean the 1918 general election? Lucas: Exactly. December 1918. It's the first election after the First World War ends, and the first with near-universal adult suffrage in Britain and Ireland. Women over thirty get the vote, men over twenty-one. So the electorate triples overnight. Luna: And Sinn Féin wins a landslide. I've seen the numbers — it's incredible. Lucas: Seventy-three seats out of one hundred and five. The old Irish Parliamentary Party collapses to just six seats. Unionists hold the rest. But here's the thing: a year before the election, Sinn Féin was still a fringe party. What changed? Luna: The conscription crisis? Lucas: That's a huge part of it. In April 1918, the British government tried to extend conscription to Ireland. The backlash was massive. The Catholic bishops, the trade unions, even moderate nationalists united against it. And the party that led that opposition was Sinn Féin, not the IPP. Lucas: The IPP had backed the war effort, and they looked weak. Meanwhile, Arthur Griffith's Sinn Féin, which had been around since 1905 but was tiny, got a huge boost. And then you add the post-Easter Rising sympathy and the internment of republican leaders — it created a perfect storm. Luna: But a lot of the Sinn Féin candidates were in prison during the election, right? Lucas: Exactly. Éamon de Valera, who had become the president of Sinn Féin in 1917, was locked up in Lincoln Prison. Countess Markievicz was in Holloway. They used the slogan 'Put him in to get him out.' And it worked. Markievicz became the first woman ever elected to the British House of Commons, though she never took her seat. Luna: She was a prisoner, and she still won. That says a lot. Lucas: It does. And in one constituency — South Armagh — the Sinn Féin candidate won despite being dead. He died in prison during the campaign, and they still returned him. That's how strong the wave was. Luna: So what did they do with the mandate? Lucas: They refused to go to Westminster. Instead, on 21 January 1919, the elected Sinn Féin MPs convened in Dublin's Mansion House. They called themselves Teachtaí Dála — TDs — and established Dáil Éireann, an independent Irish parliament. They issued a Declaration of Independence and a Democratic Programme. Luna: And that's when the War of Independence really starts, because on that same day there's the Soloheadbeg ambush. Lucas: Indeed. A group of Irish Volunteers, acting on their own initiative, attacked a cart carrying gelignite in County Tipperary, killing two Royal Irish Constabulary men. So the Dáil was declaring a republic, and on the ground, war was already breaking out. The two things were connected, but not coordinated at first. Lucas: One thing that often gets overlooked is that the First Dáil wasn't just a symbolic parliament. They started building a parallel state — setting up their own courts, land banks, and even a foreign department. They tried to run a government in exile. Luna: So the election was the political spark that turned the Rising's martyrdom into a mass movement for independence. Lucas: Exactly. And the fact that we can talk about these stories — in this detail, without interruption — is something we value deeply. You know, Fexingo doesn't run ads because we want these conversations to flow naturally. If that matters to you, there's a small way to keep it going: buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just an option. Luna: Yeah, it's a way to support the kind of deep dives we do. So, back to the Dáil — what was the Democratic Programme all about? Lucas: It was a radical social document, drafted partly by Thomas Johnson and strongly influenced by the labour movement. It called for public ownership of key resources and a commitment to child welfare. It wasn't fully implemented, but it showed the republic wasn't just about nationalism — it had a social vision. Luna: And how did the British respond? Lucas: By September 1919, they declared the Dáil illegal. But that only pushed the organisation further underground. Michael Collins directed intelligence operations, the IRA stepped up attacks, and the war escalated into the conflict that eventually led to the Treaty in 1921. Lucas: That election of 1918 really was the turning point. It gave democratic legitimacy to the republican movement and set the stage for everything that followed.