The people of Roscommon have often shown a contrarian streak in elections. Ministers have been deposed, mavericks elected and constitutional amendments rejected, but no election was more significant than the one held this week 100 years ago.
The North Roscommon byelection has some claim to be the most important byelection in Irish history. It was not, as has often been assumed, the first byelection after the Easter Rising. A byelection was held in West Cork in November 1916 in which a candidate aligned to the Irish Party was elected. It led Irish Party leader John Redmond to conclude prematurely that the country was returning to normal after the tumult of the Easter Rising.
The North Roscommon by-election held on February 3rd, 1917, was known as the election of the snows. Ireland had been blanketed in up to three metres of snow a week previously. In the run-up to the byelection the three candidates fretted as to how this would affect the final outcome.
The first was Thomas Devine, a well-regarded county councillor and Irish Party candidate who the subject of a book published last year, Thomas J. Devine and the Election of the Snows.
The second was Jasper Tully, a former MP for South Leitrim and the owner of the Roscommon Herald, a querulous character who was described as being consumed by a "welter of animosities, hatreds and personal obsessions".
The third candidate was George Plunkett, a papal count, a leading expert on the Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli and a patrician figure.
Executed
Plunkett had little in common with the voters of North Roscommon other than a burning indignation to avenge the events that followed Easter Week. Plunkett’s son Joseph Mary, a signatory of the Proclamation, had been executed.
Two other sons, George jnr and Jack, were sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment.
In the aftermath of the rebellion, Plunkett was sacked as the director of the National Museum of Ireland and expelled from the Royal Dublin Society. These actions only served to help his cause.
He was not, as the present Sinn Féin erroneously claims, the first elected Sinn Féin MP. Plunkett stood as an Independent. His election agent was the Independent MP Laurence Ginnell. You will search in vain in his extensive election literature for any mention of Sinn Féin.
As his daughter Geraldine, in her posthumously published memoir, remembered: “He was not a member of Sinn Féin, but a separatist supported by a combination of separatists and almost all advanced Nationalist opinion.”
Indeed, one of Plunkett’s first acts on being elected was to set up a rival organisation, the Liberty Clubs, based on the republican ideals in the Proclamation. He and Sinn Féin leader Arthur Griffiths detested each other and had a bitter falling out before Plunkett became a member of the party later in the year.
The election was held following the death of the sitting MP JJ O’Kelly, one of the most extraordinary characters in Irish history. An old Fenian, O’Kelly had been in the French Foreign Legion. As a journalist he witnessed the Cuban revolution of the 1870s, the revolt by the Madhi against the British in Sudan in 1880s and reported on the fate of Sitting Bull during the American Indian wars of the 1890s.
He first represented North Roscommon for the Irish Party in 1880, lost his seat and then regained it in 1895, holding it unopposed until his death in 1916. Sorbonne-educated O’Kelly, a cosmopolitan figure, hardly visited his constituency. As historian Michael Laffan put it: “He didn’t like North Roscommon very much, he preferred Paris.”
An absentee MP was succeeded by an absentee candidate. Plunkett was incarcerated in England and only arrived in the constituency two days before the election. At his first meeting in Carrick-on-Shannon, he was introduced by his great champion, the rebel priest Fr Michael O’Flanagan. Plunkett, O’Flanagan opined, was no less than “the leader of the Irish race” and the “royal face of Cathleen Ní Houlihan”.
O’Flanagan saw divine intervention at work in Plunkett’s candidature. It was thought impossible to move around the constituency given the depth of snow, but O’Flanagan had galvanised an army of volunteers to clear the path for the old count. Children improvised their support spelling out the words “Up Plunkett” on the snow-covered fields of the constituency.
Still, Plunkett’s supporters feared that the weather would deter their mostly rural supporters from attending the polls. Devine’s supporters feared that the party machine would be thwarted in getting the vote out. Tully felt he would be the beneficiary as the snows would deter the out-of-towners descending on the constituency on behalf of both candidates.
The Irish Party fully expected to win and was stunned when it did not. Plunkett won in a landslide. He polled 3,022 votes, Devine 1,708 and Tully 687.
The Irish Party's mouthpiece, the Freeman's Journal, prophetically called the result "ruinous" for the party. It brought an end to its hegemony in nationalist Ireland and presaged the wipeout of the party at the December 1918 election.
Plunkett announced immediately he would adopt an abstentionist policy, something he never mentioned during the election to his supporters. “I recognise no parliament in existence as having the right over the people of Ireland,” he declared in Boyle. All subsequently elected Sinn Féin MPs followed suit.
The North Roscommon byelection was the first opportunity the Irish people had to pronounce directly on the Easter Rising. Plunkett put himself forward as the living embodiment of the spirit of the Rising and sought retrospective democratic validation for the actions of the rebels of the Easter Rising. In that he succeeded. Things would never be the same again.