The Pact Election
Introduction from Chronology
The Free State Constitution appears in newspapers on morning of
polling day. (Obviously, it does not
live up to the hopes of the anti-Treaty side.).
Results become known on June 24th.
Pro-Treaty Sinn Féin gets 58
seats; Anti-Treaty Sinn Féin gets 36 seats; Labour gets 17 seats; The Farmers
party gets 7 seats and Independents get 6 seats and TCD has 4 seats.
More Detail
Of the 620,283 votes cast (60% of
electorate), 239,193 first preference went to pro-Treaty Sinn Féin candidates
(i.e. 39%); 133,864 went for anti-Treaty Sinn Féin candidates (i.e. 22%) and
247,276 went for the non-Sinn Féin parties (i.e. 40%). [Doyle has
slightly different votes and percentages.] Of the latter, 132,000 first
preferences were for Labour, Independents won 63,000 and Farmers Party won
51,000. All the non-Sinn Féin parties were pro-Treaty.
The pro-Treaty Sinn Féin had 58
of its 66 candidates elected (17 unopposed); anti-Treaty Sinn Féin had 36 of
its 58 candidates elected (17 unopposed); Labour had 17 of its 18 candidates
elected; the Farmers had 7 of their 12 candidates elected; the Independents had
six of their 17 candidates elected and Unionists had four candidates elected
(Trinity).
The pro-Treatyites
beat the anti-Treatyites by a large margin in
Leinster; the three Free State Ulster counties and in Cork city. They
beat them by a smaller margin in rest of Munster and in Connaught.
Anti-Treaty Sinn Féin did particularly badly in Dublin – getting only 14% of
the vote. (Margaret Pearse, Kathleen
Clarke and Constance Markievicz lost their seats.)
Newspapers made the electorate
aware of the Treaty stance of Sinn Féin candidates by stating their attitude to
the Treaty alongside their names.
(There was substantial
intimidation of non-Sinn Féin candidates.
Dan Breen ‘persuaded’ a Farmers Party candidate to stand down by
surrounding his home with armed men and wounding the prospective candidate with
a shotgun. The leader of the Farmers
Party, Denis Gorey from Cuffesgrange in Co. Kilkenny
was also intimidated but did not stand down.)
Comment
Hopkinson argues that the
election "demonstrated a popular … acceptance of realistic compromise in
Anglo-Irish relations. … [and] that social and economic issues and, more
particularly, the desire for settled government were of greater import to [the
electorate] than the endless debate over constitutional symbols and
authority".
Doyle says that the high number of
votes for non-Sinn Féin parties was
“a protest against both wings of Sinn Féin (especially the anti-Treaty) for their arrogance and
intransigence in postponing an election, combined with their obsession with
purely national(ist)/constitutional issues to the
detriment of focusing on the country’s social and economic problems”.
Macardle argues that, if the election is seen as
not on the Treaty but for or against government by a Coalition, then there is a
clear mandate for the Coalition. She goes on to say that “Daily, de
Valera expected a request from Michael Collins to forward the names selected by
his Part for the Coalition Cabinet. No such request came.”
However, Curran disputes this
argument saying that “Whatever they might say later, Republicans in 1922 were
in no doubt about their defeat in the polls. De Valera conceded defeat
before the final returns were counted, blaming it on Britain’s threat of
war”. Liam Mellows argued that support
for the Treaty and the Provisional Government was “not the will of the people,
it is the fear of the people” (Regan (2013), pg 41).
Regan says that “The
uncomfortable reality of 1922 … was the omnipresent threat of renewed British
violence” (Regan (2013), pg 41) and goes onto say
that “The division within revolutionary Sinn Féin was not over whether or not
the people had a right to be sovereign, but whether they had the right to
express their sovereignty freely and between the two there is a significant
qualitative difference” (Regan (2013), pg 42).
Regan also says that to argue
that the outcome of the election was “an endorsement of the Treaty, Provisional
Government, let alone the mandate Collins claimed it to be to wage a civil war
is, to say the least, open to question” (Regan (2013), pg
41). Whatever about the latter two
(where Regan has an argument – see below), the outcome of the Pact election can
be said to be an endorsement of the Treaty given that pro-Treaty Sinn Féin and
the non-Sinn Féin parties and the Independents together got almost 80% of the first
preference votes and all those parties had campaigned on a basis of working the
Treaty. In fact, Regan later says that
“Non-panel candidates almost uniformly endorsed the treaty, although by doing
so, they did not necessarily support a treatyite Provisional
government” (Regan (2013), pg 69). Quoting a 1979 article by the psephologist
Michael Gallagher on the Pact election, Regan points out that “Over 70 per cent
of the anti-treaty transfers went to treatyite panel
candidates when there were no more anti-treatyite
left to vote for” (Regan (2013), pg 70) and goes on
to say that that “From the available evidence, it can be concluded correctly
that a significant, but undeterminable, proportion of the panel votes, and
perhaps even a majority, were cast supporting the pact’s obligation to form a
coalition.” (Regan (2013), pg 71). However, this argument does not negate the
fact that almost 80% of those who cast their ballot voted for parties that who
supported the Treaty and the fact that the only way that pro-Treaty Sinn Féin
could get a peaceful election to take place was to enter a pact with
anti-Treaty Sinn Féin.
Regan’s argument is stronger when
he argues that the Pact election did not endorse the Provisional government or
the subsequent decision of that government to wage civil war. Regan places the argument that the Pact
election gave a democratic mandate to the Provisional Government to the writing
of a number of historians who wrote about this period after 1970 (in response
to the Troubles breaking out in Northern Ireland). He says that “Among others,
Curran, Fanning, Lee, Keogh, Laffen, O’Halpin and Garvin broadly accept a revivified treatyite analysis in their causation of the southern Civil
War’s causation. This is a statist interpretation and services at least three
ideological constructions that have come to prominence in historical writing
since 1970 to reinforce southern nationalist mythologies. First, the [southern]
state emerged primarily from a popular nationalist struggle and not [from] a
settlement imposed by the British. Second, the legal provenance of the new
state from revolutionary institutions and not from British statute. Thirdly,
and arguably most importantly, adherence to constitutional, otherwise
democratic politics remained constant among the treatyite
founders of the state” (Regan (2013), pg 73).
With regard to the Constitution, Ferriter quotes Kissane as saying “Collins’s hope of using the Constitution as a means to sway the anti-Treatyites had been “wishing thinking, based [more] on his intense desire to satisfy his co-ideologists than on any realistic expectation of how an already suspicious British government would react”. It is also possible that Collins was fooling the anti-Treatyites by saying that that he would operate the Pact as he knew that the only way that there could be a relatively peaceful election in the context of June 1922 was to make an agreement with the anti-Treatyites. This could well have being practical politics but it also showed bad faith and led to a large degree of anger and mistrust by the anti-Treatyites