Mobilisation: The South Longford By-election and its Impact on Political Mobilisation

Abstract

Advanced nationalism in the shape of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Brotherhood was not strong in County Longford prior to the Easter Rising. The dominant political organisation in the county was the UIL, the local organisation of the Home Rule movement. Yet, by the time of the general election in December 1918, the UIL was almost non-existent and the Sinn Féin candidate in the general election, Joe McGuinness, won a resounding victory, gaining 72 per cent of the votes cast, over the longstanding Home Rule MP, J. P. Farrell.¹ The 1918 election was McGuinness’s second significant election victory in 19 months; in a by-election in the constituency of South Longford in May 1917 he won the seat by a very narrow margin of 37 votes. The South Longford contest was the second in a series of by-election victories for Sinn Féin in 1917. Earlier, in February 1917, George Noble, Count Plunkett, father of executed 1916 rebel Joseph Mary Plunkett, was elected on a Sinn Féin ticket in North Roscommon; and Sinn Féin followed the South Longford win with victories for Eamon de Valera in East Clare in July and for W.T. Cosgrave in Kilkenny City in August. While the South Longford victory was crucial to Sinn Féin’s emergence as an effective political party and its eventual displacement of the IPP, its impact was greatest at local level. This chapter will illustrate the formative effect which the result had on the mobilisation of the organs of advanced nationalism — Sinn Féin, the Irish Volunteers and Cumann na mBan — within County Longford, leading to its emergence as one of the most prominent centres of republican activity during the Irish revolution.