Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

THE IRISH CONVENTION AND CONSCRIPTION 223
dominant issue in Nationalist Ulster. Therefore, the majority of
Ulster Catholics were more disposed to endorse a policy of vigilant
attendance at Westminster than to risk the consequences of Sinn
Fein’s abstensionism. In the case of East Tyrone, the Irish Party
was apprehensive enough to choose T.J.S.Harbison as its
candidate, who had opposed exclusion at the 1916 Belfast
conference; nevertheless, Sean Milroy, an outsider, polled 1,222
votes against Harbison’s 1,802 votes. 69 However, after the
conscription crisis, in May 1918 Sinn Fein had its first electoral
success in Ulster when Arthur Griffith defeated the Irish Party
candidate in the East Cavan by-election. From the conscription
crisis onwards most observers in Ireland and Britain had little
doubt that Sinn Fein now represented the majority of the
nationalist community’s opinion.
The confirmation of this came in the 1918 General Election. With
an Allied victory in France looking increasingly likely, the
Government announced in October 1918 that December would see
the first general election in the United Kingdom since 1910. At a
special Sinn Fein executive meeting, on 19 November 1918, it was
proposed that a plebiscite of voters from the nationalist
community be taken at an early date to decide whether Sinn Fein
or Irish Party candidates should contest the Ulster seats against
the ‘English garrison’, and that the Nationalist candidate whose
party received a minority of votes in each of these constituencies
should give a pledge to stand down. 70 This forced Bishop McHugh
to warn Sinn Fein that only a combined front could secure the
nationalist community’s interests against the ‘Orange
ascendancy’, emphasising that ‘we cannot forget we are
Catholics’. The prospect of the loss of six or eight seats, due to a
triangular Irish Party-Sinn Fein-Unionist contest, led the Roman
Catholic Ulster bishops to call upon Dublin’s Lord Mayor to
convene a de Valera-Dillon conference to divide the Ulster seats
between them. Faced with bleak electoral prospects outside
Devlin’s West Belfast stronghold, Dillon was forced to accept this
advice. At a conference on 2 and 3 December 1918, Dillon and
Eoin MacNeill agreed to an equal division of the eight marginal
seats, with Louge allocating them. 71
The pact proved successful, with the adopted candidates
returned in seven of the eight constituencies. West Belfast, North-
East Tyrone, South Armagh, South Down and East Donegal
returned Irish Party supporters, and Sinn Feiners in South
Fermanagh and North-West Tyrone; only East Down failed to
return an anti-Unionist MP. In the two constituencies where both
Sinn Fein and the Irish Party entered the lists, South Tyrone and