political parties

political parties first appeared in Ireland with the conflict between Whig and Tory, which spread into Ireland from around 1704 and reached a peak of bitterness in the threatened succession crisis of 1714 (see Revolution of 1688). After 1714, with the Tories permanently excluded from office, party allegiances, even more completely than in contemporary England, lost their relevance. Instead factions or connections based on ties of kinship, region, or personal attachment, of the kind led by Alan Brodrick, William Conolly, the Ponsonbys and the Boyles, competed with one another for the spoils of office.

Between the 1760s and the 1830s British politics gradually moved towards a new party division between moderately reformist Whigs and Tory defenders of the status quo. In Ireland, despite the creation of an Irish Whig Party in 1789, the shift to party‐based politics was considerably slower. Even after the Act of Union most Irish MPs at Westminster were distinguished by their mercenary readiness to support whatever government held office, committing themselves to a clear party affiliation only when the crisis surrounding parliamentary reform in 1830–2 made such identification inescapable.

From the 1830s until the success of the home rule party in 1874, most Irish MPs defined themselves as supporters of one of the two main British parties, Conservative or Liberal. There were attempts, by O'Connell in the 1830s and 1840s, and by supporters of independent opposition in the 1850s, to create a distinctively Irish political grouping. However, the distinction between repealers, independent oppositionists, and Liberals was often conveniently vague. A similar enlistment of former Liberals under a temporarily popular banner was evident in the early stages of the home rule party.

The turning point in the history of Irish political parties came in the 1880s. The widening of the electoral franchise made necessary the development of new forms of constituency organization to secure and retain the support of a much larger electorate. Legislation for the elimination of corrupt practices at elections (1883), by limiting expenditure by individual candidates, provided a further impetus for the development of party structures. Meanwhile the home rule crisis of 1885–6 polarized politics along religious lines. The Nationalist and Unionist parties that emerged from this combination of influences were at the same time tightly disciplined parliamentary parties and effective popular movements whose appeal was based on their claim to represent entire communities rather than pragmatic coalitions of sectional interests. Sinn Féin, which displaced the Irish parliamentary party after 1918, presented itself in similar terms.

Politics in Northern Ireland after 1920 continued the pattern established in the 1880s. Electoral contests were dominated by the opposition between a dominant Unionist Party, representing most shades of Protestant opinion, and what is generally referred to as a Nationalist Party, though in fact this had few of the organizational features of a modern political party (see Nationalist Party (of northern ireland)). Challenges to these green and orange establishments by independent unionist and republican candidates met with little success, particularly after the abolition in 1929 of proportional representation. Nor did the Northern Ireland Labour Party enjoy more than marginal success in its attempts to substitute the politics of class for those of ethnicity and religion.

The party system of independent Ireland, by contrast, broke sharply with its predecessor. Its core stemmed from Sinn Féin, which controlled all except four of the seats in the House of Commons of Southern Ireland elected (under the Government of Ireland Act) in 1921. Following the Anglo‐Irish treaty, the pro‐ and anti‐treaty factions of Sinn Féin consolidated into parties that have since constituted the poles of electoral competition in Ireland. The pro‐treaty wing, initially the party of government, organized itself as Cumann na nGaedheal in 1923 and, following its loss of office in 1932, it amalgamated with two smaller groups a year later to form Fine Gael. Its anti‐treaty opponents retained the name Sinn Féin, the most vibrant faction of which broke away in 1926 to form Fianna Fáil and proceeded in the 1930s to establish an unchallengeable position as the dominant party.

While the initial basis of the cleavage between these two parties was the treaty and they continued to be divided by the national question, they were also to some extent differentiated by other ideological and social factors. Cumann na nGaedheal tended to be conservative on social and economic matters, and this heritage was taken over by Fine Gael. Fianna Fáil was a radical, populist party in its early days, though it later adopted a more pragmatic or even conservative position. These differences were reflected in the parties' support bases, with Fianna Fáil showing a much greater capacity to appeal to small farmers and industrial workers than its rival, especially in its earlier years. The form taken by the two party organizations was compatible with these differences, with Fianna Fáil always maintaining a much higher level of organization in terms of numbers of members and of branches. These two parties have collectively dominated Irish party political life since 1922, their combined share of the vote normally ranging between 60 and 80 per cent.

Next in electoral importance has been the Labour Party, which since 1922 has normally ranked third in the party system. Its linkage to the trade union movement and working‐class support base predisposed it favourably towards Fianna Fáil until the late 1940s, but from 1948 until the 1980s it more often found itself aligned with Fine Gael. In contrast to its European sister parties, the Labour Party has been extremely weak; like them, it has also had a left‐wing rival in the shape of a tiny communist movement that has appeared under various names since the 1920s but which has attracted virtually no electoral support since then. The only serious challenge was the National Labour Party, a faction that broke with the Labour Party in 1944 as part of a dispute within the trade union movement but which rejoined the party in 1950.

Rather surprisingly, the two parties that had dominated political life since the 1880s, the Nationalists and the Unionists, made little impact in the south after 1922. This was particularly surprising in the case of the Nationalist Party, which had almost completely controlled southern Irish parliamentary representation from 1885 to 1918. The party organization, the United Irish League, collapsed completely in the south, and after 1922 this tradition was represented only by a handful of independent deputies. An effort to revive it in 1926 (as the National League, led by William Redmond, son of the nationalist leader John Redmond) prospered briefly in the June 1927 election but faded shortly afterwards. The unionist tradition was also represented after 1922 by independent deputies, especially in the border counties.

Other sectional interests have been represented only occasionally in the party system. In the 1920s the most significant were the Farmers' Party (which attracted the support especially of larger, commercial farmers) and the less significant Business Men's Party, both of which also appealed to ex‐Unionist and ex‐Nationalist support. Farming interests resurfaced briefly in the early 1930s in the form of the National Centre Party. The agrarian tradition reasserted itself again in the 1940s, in the shape of Clann na Talmhan, whose support was particularly pronounced among the small farmers of the western counties.

One of the most significant challenges to the three‐party dominance of Irish politics came from the anti‐treaty tradition. This was represented continuously by the Sinn Féin party, which survived the split in 1926 that led to the creation of Fianna Fáil, and later splits in 1970, 1974, 1986, and 1992. The consequences were the appearance respectively of ‘Provisional’ Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Socialist Party, Republican Sinn Féin, and Democratic Left; the parent party is now known as the Workers' Party. Other minor parties generated at least in part by the national question have been Clann na Poblachta in the 1940s and the 1950s, Aontacht Éireann in the 1970s, and the Progressive Democrats after 1985.

Bibliography

Gallagher, Michael , Political Parties in the Republic of Ireland (1985)
Hoppen, K. T. , Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland 1832–85 (1984)
Mair, Peter , The Changing Irish Party System (1987)
Sinnott, Richard , Irish Voters Decide (1995)

SC/ and S. J. Connolly