Amongst the many excellent publications of the Aubane Historical Society is the Quarterly IRISH FOREIGN AFFAIRS.
Its latest issue, now out leads with an article on the 1918 General Election when Sinn Fein won 73 of Ireland’s 105 seats, against the Unionists’ 26 seats and John Dillon’s Nationalist Party 6 seats,
At the dissolution of Parliament Sinn Fein held 6 seats the Unionists 26 and John Dillon’s Party 73 seats.
The 1918 election was the first one where all men aged 21 and over had the vote and the first where women, though not all of them, had a parliamentary vote.
The IRISH FOREIGN AFFAIRS article reproduces a Sinn Fein Election Poster from that seminal moment in European democracy.
The poster addressed specifically to women voters in Wicklow, urged them to vote for the freedom of Ireland. The Sinn Fein candidate, Robert Barton, was a Protestant Landlord, who, as an Officer in the British Army, had fought in the 1916 Rising AGAINST the insurgent republicans.
Barton was elected, as was his first cousin, Erskine Childers, also a Protestant, who had served as a British Officer the second Boer War, and, with distinction, in the Great War. Childers also was elected as a Sinn Fein candidate
on their republican manifesto.
The landlord Barton was appointed by Dail Eireann to establish a National Land Bank to help tenants and farm workers to acquire freehold farms. His cousin Childers, and Lionel Smith Gordon, an old Etonian Protestant and Oxford graduate were Directors of the Bank and worked amicably with their Catholic fellow-citizens.
These facts, if known to Roy Foster, Fintan O’Toole and the monstrous regiments of revisionists, have never been acknowledged by them.
The revisionists would have you believe that republicans are sectarian misogynists covetous of their neighbours’ property and thirsting for innocent blood.
The democratic credentials of John Dillon’s party are never questioned, nor their attitude to the franchise. Both John Dillon and John Redmond separately told C.P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian in 1911 that they were opposed to female suffrage, At the time Unionists and Conservatives were against female suffrage as were the leaders of the Liberal Party. About the same time, Augustine Birrell, popular Liberal Chief Secretary for Ireland, well-liked there and the subject of a sympathetic biography by Leon O’Broin, told C.P.Scott that he was totally opposed to votes for women and that he was also opposed to the extension of the franchise for men,which hadn’t been broadened since about 1867.
Sinn Fein advocated votes for all adults from its inauguration in 1905 and the Irish Labour Party since its founding in 1912. Full adult suffrage and equality of rights for all citizens were guaranteed in the 1916 Declaration and its signatories bore witness to their sincerity with their lives.
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