P. J. Little, the Sinn Féin candidate, laboured under the handicap of not having been ‘out’ in 1916. He was the editor of New Ireland and had been involved in the Irish National League, one of the more conservative groups that merged with Sinn Féin in its 1918 reincarnation. He was probably considered suitably conservative to be acceptable to the Rathmines electorate.39 His nationalist rival was George Moonan, a businessman and founder-member of the Knights of Saint Columbanus. Little was approached by UIL members to discuss an electoral pact against Dockrell. He immediately denounced Moonan, only to have to apologise when Moonan claimed that the proposal had been made without his knowledge. Moonan in turn embarrassed one of his most important supporters, Mary Kettle, by drawing her into another spat with Little about women’s rights. Dockrell left them to it.
Henry Hanna KC was the Unionist candidate in the St Stephen’s Green ward, where P. J. Brady had narrowly won the seat for the Irish Party in 1910. Hanna had hopes of winning it back. He was a liberal unionist, and he had defended Larkin and other strike leaders in the courts in 1913. He argued that the slum clearance and health reforms Dublin needed could be achieved only through the largesse of the British Treasury, and that meant maintaining the Union.
Alderman Tom Kelly was the Sinn Féin candidate in the constituency. If Kelly had not been ‘out’ in 1916 he had at least been interned and was also widely respected as a long-standing advocate of slum clearance. The Irish Party incumbent, Brady, could reasonably claim to have done what he could in Parliament to secure funds for slum clearance. He had worked with Archbishop Walsh to mobilise support from the business community for a housing programme to be financed by the American loans market but had failed, like many before him, to achieve anything of substance. He was perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a relatively weak and colourless candidate whose main power base lay in the Society of St Vincent de Paul.
The Pembroke division also had a three-cornered contest. Another 1916 man, Desmond Fitzgerald, was the Sinn Féin candidate, and John Good was the Unionist, with Charles O’Neill standing for the Irish Party. O’Neill was chairman of Pembroke Town Commission and was popular; but he had also been a member of the ill-fated Irish Convention and had to defend himself against allegations of being a ‘conscriptionist’. Good was a leading figure in the Dublin Master Builders’ Association and had recently secured the contract to build Collinstown aerodrome (precursor of Dublin Airport) for the Royal Air Force. He had been one of the hard-line supporters of William Martin Murphy in the lock-out. His position was simple and uncompromising: he opposed partition and predicted that the ‘flow of capital’ would cease ‘if the Sinn Feiners got into power.’ Fitzgerald was an IRB London-Irish blow-in but, as well as having served in the GPO garrison, was the beneficiary of a new phenomenon whereby leading figures in the old home rule establishment endorsed Sinn Féin candidates. In his case the blessing came from Michael Davitt Junior. Few expected Good to win, but nationalists were hopeful that O’Neill could see off the Sinn Féin challenge.
Unionists believed they had a good chance of winning South County Dublin, where the seat had often hung in the balance between nationalist and unionist. With the nationalist vote split, Sir Thomas Robinson, a hotelier and popular businessman, might have done better if he had not tried to tar the Irish Party candidate, Thomas Clarke, with the Sinn Féin brush. He said the only difference between the Irish Party and Sinn Féin was that Sinn Féin wanted a Republic ‘at one swoop’ while the Irish Party was willing ‘to take two bites of the cherry.’ In turn, any hope Clarke had of winning unionist votes evaporated when he asked the electorate of South County Dublin if they wanted to be ‘represented by an Orangeman,’ while one of Clarke’s supporters, J. J. Kennedy, chairman of Kingstown Urban District Council, said that Robinson represented ‘Carson, the “King of Ireland” of whom the present Government was afraid.’ By contrast, the Sinn Féin candidate, George Gavan Duffy, who had an impeccable nationalist family background, was moderation itself and sidestepped the sectarian row.
In North County Dublin, J. J. Clancy fought a rearguard action against Frank Lawless, who had been with Thomas Ashe at Ashbourne and was yet another Sinn Féin candidate in prison. The outcome was regarded as a foregone conclusion.
Unlike some parts of Ireland, most notably the Dillon heartland of Co. Roscommon and East Mayo, there was relatively little violence between Volunteers and Irish Party ‘bludgeon men’ in Dublin. But it was by no means absent, particularly in the Harbour division, where Alfie Byrne had a formidable election machine. Thomas Leahy, an Irish Citizen Army veteran of 1916 who worked for Sinn Féin in the area, recalled:
During one of our meetings down … East Wall, we met with a very hostile crowd who were mostly all Scotch people working in the Dockyard, and the followers of Alfie were also strong there. When I rose to open the meeting and to introduce Seán T. O’Kelly and … Phil Shanahan, we were met with a shower of sods and Union Jack Flags waving all around us. But it did not last long, as the precaution was taken … for this and a company of the Second Battalion Volunteers were near at hand and, with batons, cleared the place of the objectors in quick time. We were allowed to hold our meetings without interruption after that.40
The reality was that the remnants of the Irish Party’s strong-arm men were no match for the Volunteers. On polling day Sinn Féin ‘peace patrols’ appeared alongside military pickets, underlining the supremacy of the advanced nationalists over their opponents on the ground. Only in one instance did this innovation threaten to turn ugly and serve as a warning of what the future might hold for their opponents. This was in South County Dublin when Sir Thomas Robinson visited the Shankill polling station with Robert Potterton, an election worker and unionist solicitor in Kingstown. They arrived in their touring car at the top of the lane leading to the polling station to find it blocked by ‘a cordon of young men.’
‘Who are you?’ demanded Potterton.
‘Soldiers of the Irish Republic,’was the reply.
‘You haven’t got a republic yet, so get out of the way,’ said Potterton.
The situation was defused by the appearance of an RIC constable. He explained that the ‘peace patrol’ was assisting him with the direction of traffic, as the lane was too narrow for vehicles to turn in. They had done such a good job that he had left them in charge while he took a break.
The remaining Dublin constituency was that of the University of Dublin. Elections for these seats, as for the National University, would take place over a number of days, hence the delay in counting the ballot papers until 28 December. As Carson had opted to run in Belfast, there were two vacancies to be contested in the university. The Irish Attorney-General, A. W. Samuels, was defending his seat, and Sir Robert Woods, professor of laryngology and otology, was renewing his challenge to the lawyers’ monopoly of representation for the university. The other candidates were William Morgan Jellett KC, another lawyer, and Captain Stephen Gwynn.
Samuels and Jellett were both unionists labouring under the handicap of having to defend government policy on Ireland, while Woods was a unionist in principle but reserved the right to freedom of action in representing the college’s best interests and in seeking a negotiated political settlement for southern unionists with the nationalist majority. Gwynn’s politics were a vaguer version of those espoused by Woods. The one firm assurance he gave the electorate was that he would oppose partition, although the implication was that he would prefer home rule or dominion status if necessary in order to do so. His main assets were his youth and his war service. The fact that his proposers were also junior officers in the armed forces showed that he was a rank outsider. By contrast, Samuels was nominated by the Primate of the Church of Ireland and seconded by the vice-provost of the university, while Woods was proposed by the Archbishop of Dublin and Jellett by the Bishop of Cashel.
Samuels and Woods would be returned, showing that an endorsement by the Unionist Party was not sufficient in itself to guarantee election.
Eoin MacNeill would secure a National University seat for Sinn Féin.
When the votes in the other Dublin constituencies were counted, Sinn Féin failed to secure only one seat, that in Rathmines.
The margin of Sinn Féin victory was comfortable in most of the constituencies. Michael Staines defeated John Dillon Nugent by 7,553 votes to 3,996 in the St Michan’s division. Nugent did surprisingly well, given that he failed to campaign and had a knack of antagonising the electorate when he did. Just as Farren had to appeal to the crowd to allow the victorious Nugent to address them in 1915, so Staines had to repeat the request in 1918 for Nugent in defeat. Staines took the opportunity of his own acceptance speech to respond to the charge by Nugent’s AOH election workers that he only represented poor people. To loud cheers, he said he was proud of the charge and proud of the poor people of St Michan’s who had put him at the head of the poll. Many of the voters in the hall that day were probably men and women who would not have had a vote when Nugent defeated the Labour candidate, Tom Farren, three years earlier.
Joseph McGrath won the most crushing Sinn Féin victory in Dublin, with 8,256 to 1,389 for John Saturninus Kelly in the St James’s division. In College Green, Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh won by 9,662 votes to 2,853 for the former sheriff, Coghlan Briscoe.
Sir Patrick Shortall did better than expected in Clontarf, polling a respectable 3,228 to the 5,974 votes for Richard Mulcahy. Shortall clearly benefited from tactical voting by Protestants in the absence of any unionist candidate in a constituency that regularly returned an alderman and at least two unionist councillors.
In North County Dublin, Frank Lawless won by 9,138 votes to 4,428 for the Irish Party veteran J. J. Clancy. It was the same in the other constituencies where a straight fight took place between Sinn Féin and the Irish Party. In the St Patrick’s division Constance Markievicz secured a comfortable win—despite the fears of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington—with 7,835 votes to 3,752 for William Field. J. J. Kelly, the publican who had run as an unsuccessful ‘Home Rule Labour’ candidate in 1914, ran again as an independent, securing 372 votes.
In the Harbour division Alfie Byrne put up the most redoubtable fight of any Irish Party candidate in Dublin. He won 5,368 votes, but it was not enough to see off the Sinn Féin challenge from his fellow-publican Phil Shanahan, who won with 7,707 votes.
In the three-way contests with unionist candidates, Sinn Féin also outperformed the Irish Party. In St Stephen’s Green, Alderman Tom Kelly topped the poll with 8,461 votes. This was more than double the combined vote of P. J. Brady, with 2,902, and Henry Hanna, with a disappointing 2,775.
In Pembroke and South County Dublin the results were much closer. In Pembroke, Desmond Fitzgerald won by only 6,113 votes to 4,137 for John Good and 2,630 for Charles O’Neill. In South County Dublin, George Gavan Duffy won with 5,133 to 4,354 votes for Sir Thomas Robinson and 3,819 for Thomas Clarke. In both these constituencies the unionist candidates might have won if the nationalist vote had split more evenly, or if significant numbers of conservative middle-class Catholics had opted, as they had in the past, for the unionist candidate. But those days were gone.
In Rathmines, however, Sir Maurice Dockrell secured a convincing victory by polling more votes than the combined total of his opponents. Little won 5,566 votes, Moonan 1,780 and Dockrell 7,400. Rathmines was also the only Dublin constituency where the votes of servicemen played a significant though not a decisive role. More than 1,500 soldiers and sailors were entitled to vote in Rathmines. Of the 539 who bothered to do so, 459 voted for Sir Maurice Dockrell, 50 voted for Moonan and 30 for Little. Given the demographics of Rathmines, the high turn-out by servicemen probably reflected the relatively high proportion of middle-class and Protestant recruits from the constituency, although Dockrell’s championing of the rights of war widows and their families no doubt secured votes from the families of nationalist servicemen as well.
It would be January 1920 before municipal elections would consolidate the power of Sinn Féin on Dublin Corporation—supplemented by a large Labour contingent. But the 1918 general election had served formal notice on the old home rule regime in City Hall.
Nationally, Sinn Féin had won 73 seats to 6 for the Irish Party, of which 4 were in Ulster constituencies, where pan-nationalist electoral pacts had allowed it a clear run against the unionists. The other big losers were Asquith’s anti-coalition Liberals, who won 28 seats. The Irish Times quipped that if the dissident Liberals could fly to London in a Handley-Page aeroplane, an Irish jaunting car could accommodate the remnants of the Irish Party.
Unfortunately, the spectacular Sinn Féin electoral victory of December 1918 made very little difference to the practical lives and problems of Dubliners. One threat that neither Sinn Féin nor the end of the war could remove was that of power cuts. In fact the situation grew more critical in the city during the winter of 1918/19. Reduced heating in hospitals and the temporary closing of public baths were already in force when the corporation’s Electricity Supply Committee produced new proposals on 1 October 1918 for conserving dwindling coal supplies. These included the introduction of lighting restrictions and increased charges to dampen demand. The committee told councillors that consumption would have to be reduced by two-thirds compared with the winter of 1917/18. The only alternative would be to cut power supplies to industry, causing even greater disruption to the economic and social life of the city. The committee proposed, therefore, that offices close by 4:30 p.m. and shops by 5:30 p.m. four days a week. This was rejected in favour of an amendment from an alliance of shopkeepers and ratepayers’ champions that shops would remain open until 7 and keep their lights on until 7:30. It was also agreed that the restrictions would last only until 28 February 1919, instead of the end of March, as proposed by the committee.
While industry was spared power cuts, it would have to bear the brunt of the price increases. Lighting rates for consumers would rise by 1d per unit from 1 October, but rates for machines used in workshops and factories would rise by between 2½d and 5¼d per unit. Vital utilities and large-scale employers, such as the corporation’s pumping station and the National Shell Factory, would be charged at the lower rate of 2½d per unit.41
The restrictions on opening hours were quite acceptable to the banks, which had repeatedly expressed a willingness to close at 2:30 p.m., and to the insurance industry, which had stated that it could close offices by 4:30; but even in their modified form the restrictions provoked a strong reaction from shopkeepers. The Irish Retail Confectioners’ Association complained that the proposed Early Closing Order was unacceptable, ‘as it affects so many small traders and also causes great inconvenience to the general public who are compelled to be in business all day.’
However, the power to determine lighting orders lay ultimately with the British government. On Armistice Day, 11 November, the Lord Lieutenant made orders for all cities in Ireland. Under these, every retail shop in Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Limerick, Derry and Waterford had to close no later than 5:30 p.m. on weekdays, no later than 7 p.m. on Fridays and no later than 9:30 p.m. on Saturdays. Businesses such as hairdressing, temperance bars and fish-and-chip shops could remain open until 9:30 p.m., provided they closed for an equivalent number of hours during the afternoon to make up the difference. Fines of up to £100 could be imposed under the Defence of the Realm Act for breaches of the regulations.42
On the coal supply front, an offer of help came from an unexpected quarter when the Director-General of Transport, H. G. Burgess, who also represented the British Coal Controller’s Department in Dublin, advised Fred Allan that a shipment of 1,000 tons of high-quality coal could be purchased for 42s per ton—admittedly a high price but no more than the market now commanded. Perhaps mindful of the power of the retail lobby, Burgess said it would be available only if it was kept in reserve for emergencies, when all other stocks were exhausted. P. T. Daly immediately proposed that the offer be accepted, with the proviso that it would be used only in extremity to provide fuel at cos
t to families with a weekly income below 8s per capita. This was agreed by the corporation.43 Even the situation of better-off households was now desperate. Since the summer, coal merchants had had their daily ration reduced from 3¾ tons to 1¼.44
The battle for supplies continued into December, with Allan complaining that councillors did not appreciate the gravity of the situation. He had never been able to secure supplies for more than four weeks at a time over the previous six months, and as Christmas approached he reported that there was only a fortnight’s supply left in the city. Consumption was exceeding supply by 30 per cent.
Nevertheless, the retailers continued their lobbying, with some success. Eventually the Under-Secretary, Sir William Byrne, met a corporation delegation on 16 December and agreed to lift lighting restrictions for shopkeepers from 20 December until the 24th, so that they could avail of the pre-Christmas sales bonanza.45 As so often in the past, the old UIL machine had proved its ability to focus on the short-term interests of the ‘shopocracy’ before the common good of Dubliners.
The longer opening hours did at least make the peace seem a little more tangible, and all the newspapers dipped into their reserves of ink and newsprint to carry the largest advertisements for the Christmas and January sales since before the war. It would be March before restrictions on the importation of such luxury items would be relaxed.46
It was April 1919 before coal supplies improved, partly because of industrial unrest in Britain and the chaotic state of the mining industry there.47 Nevertheless, the general situation was improving, and a sense of normality began to prevail from 1 March, when businesses were allowed to light their premises until 9:30 p.m. every evening.
The price of essential items such as coal and food would begin to fall only when controls on production and imports were relaxed. Once more the British government was blamed for the slow relaxation of controls, with nationalists of all hues blaming the coal shortages in particular on the British government’s reluctance to allow cheap American coal into the market. By March coal merchants were warning that the stock for domestic use had fallen to one week’s supply and supplies for industry to four weeks. The Dublin United Tramways Company could maintain its services only with assistance from one of its directors, William Hewat. He was also one of the city’s leading coal merchants and helped ensure a continuity of supply.48
A City in Wartime Page 42
