196. An independent Ireland?

The 1918 election was a disaster for the Liberal Party. Although Lloyd George’s faction, inside the coalition government with the Conservatives, took 127 seats, the Liberals independent of the coalition only won 36. Asquith himself, their leader, even lost his seat.

The Conservatives saw a huge surge in their number of MPs and could have formed a government themselves. For the time being, though, they stuck with Lloyd George, seen by many as ‘the man who won the war’.

The biggest defeat was for the traditional nationalist MPs from Ireland, thrashed by Sinn Fein, backers of an independent Irish Republic. The Nationalists were reduced to 7 seats while Sinn Fein won 73. One of these was taken by the first woman to win a seat in the British parliament, the Easter Uprising veteran Constance Markievicz. However, neither she or any of the 72 other Sinn Fein MPs took their seats, instead calling a meeting of the first ever Dáil Eireann in Dublin, the first Irish parliament.

Over the next year and a half or so, there would be some violent incidents in a growing Irish War of Independence. The most threatening development for the British Empire, though, was how Sinn Fein began to build an independent government, increasingly winning allegiance from the population in the south and west. The British sent increased forces, many of them ex-soldiers, but fighting only really took off from the summer of 1920.

A matter we’ll return to in a later episode.

Illustration: Countess Markiewicz, Easter Uprising veteran, first woman elected to the British Parliament, one of the first women to become a cabinet minister in Europe.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.