During the 20th century, Sinn Féin officially split three times and from these splits emerged some of the most central parties in Irish politics. In this second blog of a two-blog series, our Public Engagement Assistant, Kirsty O’Rourke, discusses the reasons behind the party splits.
As discussed in an earlier blog, Sinn Féin (translated as we ourselves) garnered popularity following the 1916 Easter Rising and became the biggest party in Ireland at the 1918 general election. Its popularity grew during a time of unrest and revolution that included the War of Independence (1919-1921) and the Irish Civil War (1922-23). This impacted its ability to develop a cohesive and detailed party policy; between 1917 and 1921 it was only able to hold one Ard Fheis (party conference).
The core policy that attracted and unified a broad range of voters for Sinn Féin was establishing a republic. This group included Gaelic revivalists, suffragettes, socialists, economic nationalists, and agrarian radicals. While they agreed on the goal of a republic, their ideas on what this republic should look like were drastically different. The Declaration of Independence was reasonably detailed and had ‘left-wing’ policies including state intervention but there were key disagreements in the party itself.
One of these disagreements was on the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. When the War of Independence was stopped by a truce in the summer of 1921, negotiations began to take place between the British government and the Irish delegation led by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins. The Anglo-Irish Treaty which detailed the terms for ending the War of Independence was signed in December the same year, but this treaty did not include Sinn Féin’s core demand: an Irish Republic. Sinn Féin members voted in favour of the treaty by 64 votes to 57, but the anti-treaty members refused to accept it. They disagreed with the separation of Ireland into Northern Ireland and Ireland and did not want to accept dominion status. This disagreement led to the Irish Civil War and Sinn Féin split into two groups. Pro-treaty members formed Cumann na nGaedheal (translated as Society of the Gaels) which in 1933 merged with smaller groups to form the Fine Gael party (translated as Family of the Irish), while anti-treaty members remained as Sinn Féin.
The civil war was won by the pro-treaty National Army which received support from the British government and the Catholic Church. Following the ceasefire, the Irish Free State government enacted two Public Safety (Emergency Powers) Acts in August 1923 to permit continued internment of anti-treaty prisoners. This enabled the arrest of thousands of Anti-Treaty IRA members including Éamon de Valera during his election campaign for County Clare on 15 August 1923. On 27 August 1923, a general election was held and Cumann na NGaedheal (the pro-Treaty Free State party) won with about 40% of the first-preference vote and Sinn Féin won about 27% of the first-preference vote. Elections in Ireland use proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote, which means that voters have the option to rank candidates, and their vote may be transferred according to alternate preferences if their preferred candidate is eliminated. It is difficult to say that the 1923 election represented the consensus within Ireland when many Sinn Féin and anti-Treaty supporters had been imprisoned.
De Valera returned to political methods after the Irish Civil War and served as the political leader for Sinn Féin until 1926. He began to believe that abstentionism, the policy of abstaining from attendance at both Westminster and Dáil Eireann, did not work and that the best way to create an Irish Republic was involvement in the Irish Free State government. When he put forward a motion for Sinn Féin to stop abstaining from the Dáil, it was narrowly defeated. In response, de Valera resigned from Sinn Féin and considered leaving politics; he instead created a new party called Fianna Fáil (translated as Soldiers of Destiny or Warriors of Fál) who could then take their seats in the Dáil. Key Sinn Féin MPs joined de Valera in this new party including Seán Lemass and Constance Markievicz. In the years following this split, Fianna Fáil became a central party in Irish politics, whereas Sinn Féin became viewed as more of a protest party than a political party; they were now a minority. During the 1930s Sinn Féin did not contest any elections.
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Throughout the mid-20th century, Sinn Féin continued under different leaders. After World War II Sinn Féin moved towards more right-wing policies; the party opposed parliamentary democracy and proposed the creation of a Catholic state. However, in 1962 Tomás Mac Giolla was elected president of Sinn Féin, signifying a change in political ideology as Sinn Féin began to attract more left-wing thinkers. While each leader led a drastically different Sinn Féin, there was not another formal split until 1970. Mac Giolla not only felt that Sinn Féin should have left-wing policies, but also that the policy of abstentionism should be abandoned. Abstentionism was once again voted on at the 1970 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis. While there was a majority who voted in favour of ending abstentionism, by 153 votes to 104, the majority was not large enough to pass the policy.
This, along with differing opinions on nationalist and left-wing politics, led to another split. Two Sinn Féin parties emerged, Sinn Féin (Gardiner Place), which was a Marxist-Leninist political party, now the Workers’ Party, and Sinn Féin (Kevin Street), which is the modern-day Sinn Féin. During the Troubles, Sinn Féin (Kevin Street) had a change of leadership in 1983 with Gerry Adams, and in 1986 Sinn Féin ended its abstentionism from the Dáil, however, it continued, and still continues, to abstain from the House of Commons.
In 2022, Sinn Féin secured the most votes and seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly and in 2023, Sinn Féin became the largest party in Northern Ireland’s local government. In the Irish general election of 2020, Sinn Féin won 24.5% of the first-preference vote and 37 seats; Fine Gael, who emerged in 1933 from the pro-Treaty Free State Party, won 20.9% of the votes and 35 seats; and Fianna Fáil, founded by de Valera in 1926, won 22.2% of the votes and 38 seats.
KOR
Further Reading:
Terrence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-2002 (2004)
Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict (2007)
Eoin Ó Broin, Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism (2009)
R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (1988)
