Free The Irish Revolution, 1916-1923 by Marie Coleman

IPP's political life for three further years. Only a general election would measure the extent to which nationalist political sentiment had swung between the IPP and Sinn Féin and this was not to take place until the war was over. However, the prolongation of the 1910 Parliament alsomeant that some elderly members of the Irish Party, who would most likely have retired in 1915, passed away before the next election, occasioning an unusually high number of by-elections in Ireland during 1917 and 1918. These electoral contests provided the arena for the emergent Sinn Féin to challenge the hegemony of the IPP in the crucial two-and-a-half-year period between the Rising and the 1918 general election.
    The first of these vacancies arose in February 1917 in the western constituency of Roscommon North following the death of the old Fenian, J. J. O’Kelly, who had been first elected to Parliament for Roscommon as a Land League candidate in 1880. George Noble, Count Plunkett, father of the executed 1916 rebel, Joseph Plunkett, was put forward to contest the by-election and he enjoyed a comfortable victory over the IPP's T. J. Devine, polling 3,022 votes to the latter's 1,708. The extent of Plunkett's victory owed much to his status as the father of an executed rebel and the particular circumstances of County Roscommon, where there had been a large number of arrests after the Rising and a strong Sinn Féin organisation had been put in place there by Father Michael O’Flanagan. By contrast, the home rule organisation was weak and riven by internal conflict; the cantankerous editor of the Roscommon Herald newspaper, Jasper Tully, contested the by-election as an independent nationalist but only polled 600 votes. Plunkett's winning margin was still greater than the combined nationalist and independent nationalist vote (Laffan, 1999: 77–85).
    Internal divisions in the home rule movement also contributed significantly to the IPP's defeat in the next by-election, which took place three months later in May 1917 in the neighbouring constituency of Longford South, where the contest arose from the death of another elderly nationalist MP, John Phillips. John Redmond was forced to intervene and select the party's candidate after three nationalists initially contested the nomination, and many of the supporters of the two unsuccessful candidates refused to back Redmond's choice, Patrick McKenna. Buoyed by their success in Roscommon, Sinn Féin supporters approached Joseph McGuinness, who had lived in the county previously, and was at the time serving a three-year prison sentence in Lewes Prison for his involvement in the Rising. Opinion was divided among McGuinness's fellow prisoners about whether or not he should allow his name to go forward, but his candidacy proceeded eventually and he won the seat by a slim margin of 37 votes after a tense recount. The intervention of the Roman Catholic archbishop of Dublin, William Walsh, in support of him on the eve of the poll was the decisive factor in his success (Coleman, 2003: 45–67).
    The death of John Redmond's brother, Willie, from wounds suffered while fighting with the army in Belgium in June 1917 soon led to another parliamentary vacancy in Clare East. The contest which took place in Julywas significantly different from the two previous ones because it took place after the release of the remaining 1916 prisoners in June and the most prominent of these, Eamon de Valera, won the election for Sinn Féin, gaining over 70 per cent of the votes cast. The loss of the seat, which had been held by John Redmond's brother since 1892, to the new leader of nationalist Ireland was a significant symbolic defeat for the IPP. Sinn Féin completed its successful electoral sweep in 1917 when W. T. Cosgrave won the Kilkenny City by-election in August. In line with stated Sinn Féin policy, all of the MPs elected in 1917 abstained from the Westminster Parliament (Laffan, 1999: 106–13).
    By the end of 1917 it was