The 1918 election in Westmeath – 100 years on

One hundred years ago today (Friday), voters in Westmeath went to the polls and gave democratic sanction to a programme for Ireland’s complete independence from Britain.

This was an historic election in more ways than one. The Irish question aside, the passage of the Representation of the People Act meant that for the first time, women over the age of 30 and all men over 21 could vote (previously, poor men and all women had been excluded). It was the first British general election to take place since December 1910, occurring just over a month after the end of World War I, during a time of sweeping social and political change in Europe.

The election result, which saw John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party wiped out at the polls and 73 Sinn Féin MPs returned, amounted to what DCU historian William Murphy called “a political earthquake”. The Sinn Féin contingent refused to take their seats at Westminster, and instead used their mandate to establish a republican parliament, the Dáil, which first sat in Dublin’s Mansion House on 21 January 1919.

These 73 MPs became teachtaí dála (TDs) overnight, and among them was the first TD for Westmeath, Laurence Ginnell.

Ginnell, born in Delvin in 1852, was 66 years of age and at the tail end of a long career in politics. That career began at the heart of constitutional nationalism, when in 1885, he became a functionary in the Parnellite Irish National League, registering branch members in Ulster.

Countering the notion that one gets more conservative or centrist with age, in the ensuing thirty years, Ginnell moved steadily away from the constitutional tradition. After his first election to Westminster in 1906, he led the Ranch War – the last major campaign of agrarian agitation in Ireland before independence. Occasionally flirting with the old Sinn Féin founded by Arthur Griffith, he was accused by (among others)) his fellow Irish Party MP and Westmeath Examiner proprietor, John P Hayden, of stirring up divisions in the Party and its organisation, the United Irish League. Ginnell, in his 1908 book Land and liberty, countered that the UIL had become corrupt, and the Irish Party, under John Redmond, swayed by a “West British cult”, becoming “indistinguishable from British members” and caught up in a “pagan idolatry of institutions and rules that are foreign”.

In the January 1910 general election – the first of two elections that year, which made the Irish Party the kingmakers in Westminster – Hayden marshalled the Examiner and the local UIL organisation in an effort to politically destroy Ginnell, who had been expelled from the Party in February 1909. Ginnell stuck to his guns, and funded in large part by local supporters, his father-in-law and his brother (a wealthy engineer based in China), he successfully defended his seat against the party machine, and was unchallenged in the December 1910 poll.

For the next six and a half years, Ginnell sat in Westminster as an independent nationalist. He vigorously opposed Irish involvement in World War I, ridiculed and tested the rituals and rules of the House of Commons, and after Easter 1916, became the primary public relations conduit for imprisoned rebels, contributing in no small part to the turning tide in public opinion. When separatists started winning seats in a series of by-elections in 1917, Ginnell played a prominent role in their campaigns, culminating in his own decision to leave Westminster that July. When Sinn Féin was reconstituted as a republican movement in October, Ginnell eased into its ranks.

With ‘Larry’ on board in Westmeath and seats secured in North Roscommon, South Longford, East Clare and Kilkenny, Sinn Féin’s rise seemed irresistible. It was stymied, however, by by-election defeats in Waterford and South Armagh in early 1918. However, two developments buoyed the movement. First was an effort by the British administration to introduce conscription in Ireland as a means to counter the German Spring Offensive. This move brought about cross-factional opposition from Irish nationalists, as well as from trade unions and the Catholic Church. Secondly, based on spurious reports of Sinn Féin’s involvement in a treasonous plot with Germany, the British had moved to arrest the Sinn Féin leadership, provoking more sympathy for the movement in Ireland after its initial success seemed to have abated.

Prior to the “German plot” arrests, Laurence Ginnell was already in prison in Mountjoy for encouraging cattle driving and land seizures. On his release, he was deported and interned in Reading Gaol in Berkshire, meaning that for the rest of the year – including the 1918 election campaign – he was behind bars.

In prison, Ginnell maintained an active interest in the campaign, to the extent that prison censors were kept busy intercepting his incoming and outgoing mail, until finally on 6 December, a notice appeared on the wall in Reading announcing that prisoners contesting the election would be permitted by the Censor to send out election addresses.

In a newly unified Westmeath constituency – a union of North and South Westmeath, brought about by boundary adjustments on foot of franchise extension – the 1918 campaign pitted Ginnell against Patrick J Weymes, a Mullingar wool merchant and Irish Party candidate, and the incumbent MP for South Westmeath, the independent nationalist Sir Walter Nugent. Weymes was Ginnell’s main contender; Nugent, the ranking Irish Party MP in the county, was a baronet and empire loyalist, whose hostility to cooperation with Sinn Féin during the Conscription Crisis had, according to historian John Burke, “alienated all but a tiny minority” in the constitutional nationalist ranks. As a result, Nugent’s bid for re-election was not endorsed by the Irish Party in 1918, forcing him to run on an independent ticket.

The Westmeath Examiner led the Party charge against Ginnell, accusing him of being everything from a “eulogist” for Russian Bolshevism to an opportunist. Elsewhere in Mullingar, the Midland Reporter and Westmeath Nationalist, owned by Jasper Tully, championed Ginnell’s cause – though the two had briefly fallen out over Ginnell’s failure to support Tully’s bid for a seat in the North Roscommon by-election.

From his cell, by post, Ginnell kept contact with his election team who, despite the trust placed in them by their candidate, often struggled to move as one man. Among his chief campaigners were the Mullingar county councillor and cap manufacturer Patrick Brett, Peadar Malynn (Athlone), IRA man and future Fianna Fáil TD, M J ‘Joe’ Kennedy (Castlepollard) and, in Delvin, his brother Michael (a member of Mullingar District Council), and his eponymous nephew Laurence (a Midland Reporter correspondent).

However, Ginnell’s campaign struggled to get off the ground in the south of the county, and aside from dealing with state repression – his election HQ on Mullingar’s Dominick Street had been ransacked by soldiers in late November – his team often found themselves beset by organisational confusion. By early December, Sinn Féin headquarters became concerned about a lack of momentum in the constituency, and the party’s director of elections, James O’Mara, stepped in and appointed Ginnell’s wife, Alice, as his election agent – making her the first woman in the history of what was then the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland to act in such a role. Alice – seconded by her father, the vastly experienced county councillor James King – was, according to Patrick Brett, “a living power, cool and clear headed”, acting as a last-minute unifying force for the Sinn Féin organisation in Westmeath in the weeks before the election.

The Irish Party was confident of success, though when polling day arrived on 14 December 1918, their optimism was rocked by the sudden death of a sister of P J Weymes, removing their candidate from the campaign trail due to his attendance at her funeral. However, the Party could hardly rely on this as an explanation, as the emphatic nature of its demise in Westmeath very quickly became clear. The Longford Leader reported that Alice Ginnell was “accorded a wonderful reception at Kilbeggan, where her husband is stated to have a 15 to 1 majority”.

As the Irish Party’s initial optimism turned to despair, there were some bitter complaints. For example, a Ginnellite sub-agent in Kilbeggan was compelled to publicly repudiate a Westmeath Examiner allegation that some of Weymes’ campaign drivers had been “waylaid at Derrygolan [south of Kilbeggan] by Sinn Feiners”, while the Examiner also bemoaned “some cases of strong intimidation of voters by Sinn Fein advocates... armed with hurleys in their hands”.

However, the final result – Ginnell 12,435 (over 75 percent of the votes cast), Weymes 3,458 and Nugent 603 – spoke volumes, and not even the most acerbic of John P Hayden’s missives could mask the death of the Irish Party on a local and national level.

- Dr Paul Hughes holds a PhD in History from Queen’s University, Belfast. His doctoral thesis, small excerpts of which are included above, focuses on the later career of Laurence Ginnell (1852-1923).