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

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