Osprey - Essential Histories 065 - The Anglo-Irish War 1913-1922

Outbreak 41
Unionist, was invited, although in reality
only those 27 Sinn Féin MPs who were
not in prison attended whilst the Unionists
and IPP boycotted it and attended the
Westminster Parliament. The official
constitution of the Dáil was read out along
with the offices of State, although the names
of their incumbents were not made public
until later.
When the Dáil reconvened on 1 April 1919,
De Valera, who had escaped from Lincoln
Gaol on 3 February, was appointed President
of the Dáil and Prime Minister of Ireland. The
2nd Dáil also announced the names of the
Republic's Officers of State: Arthur Griffith -
Home Affairs; Count Plunkett - Foreign
Affairs; Eoin MacNeill - Industry; Cathal
Brugha - Defence; Constance Markievicz -
Labour; William Cosgrave - Local
Government; Michael Collins - Finance. All of
them were either IRB or had had connections
to it, as did Richard Mulcahy, a veteran of the
Ashbourne ambush, who became Chief of
Staff of the Volunteers, or IRA, in March 1918.
Despite winning the majority of the Irish vote
in 1918 Sinn Féin and the Dáil was unable to
gain recognition from the Westminster
Parliament as the legitimate government of
Ireland. The simple fact was that neither party
was willing or able to recognize the other's
authority in Ireland. Redmond's support for
the war damaged the IPP's support in Ireland.
Their failure to win the Roscommon byelection
in February 1917 signaled the
beginning of the end and Redmond's death in
March 1918 further hastened the decline of
the party. The General Election in December
1918 saw the end of constitutional
nationalism as the IPP's 83 seats in
Westminster were slashed to just six. By
1921 the IPP had ceased to contest elections
in the south.
Sinn Féin was not the only
Nationalist/Republican organization to
change its tack after the Rising - the IRA
realized that the age of glorious gestures,
meeting as one rebel song had it,'by the
rising of the moon' to fight pitched battles
against the British Army, had passed forever.
Consequently, 1916 was to be the last time
that British troops and Irish rebels would
fight each other in anything resembling
large-scale conventional military operations.
Ironically, the next time the IRA would meet
government troops in the streets of Dublin
would be the summer of 1922, and then the
troops would be Irish.
Sinn Féin prisoners after being released in 1919.
(Courtesy of National Library of Ireland,
Photographic Archive)