Irish Parliamentary Party

The general election of 1918 changed the landscape of Ireland completely, and Sinn Féin emerged after sweeping the boards as a separatist Republican Party.

And instead of taking their seats at Westminster as the Irish Parliamentary Party had done previously, they seized the opportunity.

Those elected representatives used that mandate to establish Dáil Éireann in Dublin, you know, the First Dáil, Céad Dáil Éireann, which sat for the first time in 1919.

This changed the argument completely.

You can see it over there.

There was an attempt during the, you know, when the Irish Parliamentary Party were strong and we were going towards Home Rule.

There was a movement of kind of co-opting streets and naming them after revolutionaries once they weren't from here.

So he went off in Cork and wherever he went, and he became the leader of, I don't know.

There was a lot of heart conditions and a lot of things could be traced back to the times on the run and being in the hills and being in those flying columns.

So somebody like Fred Crowley of Kerry He ended up marrying Honor Boland, whose father had been J.P. Boland, one of the members of the Irish Parliamentary Party.

And when we think about the pedigree of some of the people, you so often hear, and I remember hearing it, that every woman who ended up in the Dáil was the wife of some man, or she was the daughter of some politician.

That was the case, even more Geoghegan Quinn or Honor Crowley.

De Valera's Attorney General at the time of the Constitution was a man called Patrick Lynch.

Patrick Lynch stood in East Clare in the 1917 by-election against Eamon De Valera.

He was a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party.

So all the time, we were the Republican Party, and that is our ethos, but it's to bring people with you.

Yeah, it's, it's just the contradictions of reading Irish history backwards.

Like John Redmond would have made his reputation as a Parnellite and as one of the more radical of the Irish Parliamentary Party, being very strongly pro-Boer during the Boer War.

And you can see the centenary of the 1798 rebellion, a lot of these people being very, very pro-1798.

But when you're looking at Irish history backwards from the War of Independence, these are all pro-British.

The couple were at the centre of a scandal that shook Irish and British politics and would end Parnell's career, bringing about his early death.

Parnell was leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, promoting Home Rule, which aimed to give Ireland self-government.

Catherine O'Shea was the wife of another Member of Parliament, Captain William O'Shea.

A long-term affair existed between her and Parnell, remaining private for years.

This was particularly necessary as British parliamentary politics in the early 1910s was balanced on a knife edge.

with the Ulster Unionists and the Irish Parliamentary Party often holding the balance of power between the Liberals and the Conservatives.

One proposal which was floated was that George would agree to the creation of a large number of new Liberal peers who would turn the political balance in the House of Lords in favor of the Liberals and their allies.

George was not entirely favorable to the idea of politicizing the creation of noble titles in this way, and in any event, the conservatives were more inclined to make concessions when they learned of this plan.

While Britain itself avoided conflict in the aftermath of the war, it could not prevent unrest across the Irish Sea in Ireland.

In the decade since George had visited the country, just days after his coronation in England, Ireland's political problems had mounted.

At the outset of the war in 1914, the Irish Parliamentary Party, the country's largest single political party at Westminster, had made an agreement with the government in England.

It would convince Irishmen to sign up to the war effort and head for the trenches of France, and in return, the British government would grant home rule to Ireland, whereby an Irish Parliament would be established in Dublin, one which would rule many aspects of Ireland, albeit still as part of the British Empire.