1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

In December 1918, Ireland took part in the United Kingdom general election for the last time. There were 105 seats in Ireland, elected from 103 constituencies. Sinn Féin won a landslide, taking 73 of the 105 seats (69 individual MPs, because four Sinn Féin candidates were elected in two constituencies). The Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) won 6 seats, and the Irish Unionist Party won 22 seats. Labour did not win any seats in Ireland.

Sinn Féin MPs refused to sit in the British Parliament at Westminster. Instead, they formed a parliament in Dublin, called Dáil Éireann, and declared Ireland independent. This helped start the Irish War of Independence.

Key context:
- The election followed World War I, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Conscription Crisis.
- The Representation of the People Act 1918 expanded voting rights: women over 30 and all men over 21 could vote, nearly doubling Ireland’s electorate from about 700,000 to around 2 million.
- The voting system was first past the post in most places, with a few university seats. There were some uncontested Sinn Féin wins.

Regional outcomes:
- In Ulster, Unionists performed best, winning about 23 of 38 seats; Sinn Féin won around 10; the IPP won about 5.
- In the 26 counties that would become the Irish Free State, Sinn Féin won the vast majority of contested seats, while the IPP was nearly wiped out and Unionists held only a small number of seats there.

After the election, the Dáil first met on 21 January 1919. Many Sinn Féin MPs who were elected were imprisoned, and some could not attend. The Dáil declared itself the government of an independent Ireland and supported the volunteers who would become the Irish Republican Army. These events set in motion the struggle that eventually led to the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the later independent Republic of Ireland. Sinn Féin leaders, including Éamon de Valera, Michael Collins, and W. T. Cosgrave, would dominate Irish politics for decades.