Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

December 1918 was a time of great change in Ireland and across the world. The Great War had just ended. A total of 19 million were dead and many more were injured. There had never before been warfare on that scale, or with such brutality. The price paid in blood accelerated the already legitimate claim by working people for political equality, and as others have said, they secured the vote for the first time in the momentous election of 1918. The choice before the people was to vote for a party, nationalist or unionist, which would take its seats in London, or for the new pro-independence party, led by Eamon de Valera, which would not. As a UK-wide general election, it was conducted using the single-seat, first-past-the-post voting system, not our multi-seat, single-transferable vote. As such, where three or four candidates were in serious contention, there was a possibility of the vote being split, which would give the seat to the leading candidate, even with a minority of votes. That was the context. The result of the 1918 election could not be known in advance, but it could be anticipated.

In the December 1910 general election, Labour had taken 42 seats. Unfortunately, they were almost all in England, with a few in Scotland and Wales. It was still a debate as to whether the cause of working people would be better served by the nascent British Labour Party or by the establishment of a separate Irish party. In 1912, in Clonmel, that question was answered decisively with the foundation of my party, the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress, a single political body designed to further the interests of working people. James Connolly had taken part in the 1916 Rising. Connolly's immortal words were that: "The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour." 1916, and later 1922, split the Labour movement, especially in the North where many workers were also unionists. In 1918, the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress stood aside from the election. That avoided any situation where the nationalist vote would be split. As one test of that, Labour had taken 43% of the vote in Dublin College Green in the 1915 by-election. It was a probability that Labour would have taken a number of seats all around Ireland, but instead, the people were given a clear choice on the national question.

The Irish Parliamentary Party, the legacy of Parnell and Redmond, only retained six of out its 73 seats from the previous election. The independence movement gained 73 MPs, while Irish Unionists had 26 MPs, five more than in 1910, including three Labour Unionist MPs who won seats in Belfast. In this decade of centenaries, there is a need for deeper reflection on the complex and nuanced set of political preferences that prevailed in Ireland 100 years ago.

Had Labour stood candidates in that important 1918 election, there could have been a split in the independence vote and the overturning of the Irish Parliamentary Party would probably have been significantly less total. To have had more Labour MPs and fewer of de Valera's elected then might have been a good thing for Ireland, as things worked out, given partition, civil war and a repressive clerical State, the legacy of which we are still unwinding. However, none of these things was visible at the time.

In Connolly's words, the cause of Ireland was to be resolved, and that was the central focus. Labour stood aside to allow people to choose whether or not they wanted to back the national drive for independence. However, Labour was not entirely absent from the First Dáil. The leader of the Labour Party, Tom Johnson, was asked to write the democratic programme of the First Dáil, which we will commemorate next year. It was read into the record of the Dáil on 17 January 1919, pledging Labour's values of "Liberty, Equality and Justice for all".

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