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The immediate issue was the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed in London in December 1921. It offered dominion status within the British Commonwealth, required an oath connected with the Crown, accepted the possibility that Northern Ireland would remain separate, and retained important British strategic safeguards. Supporters, including Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, argued that it supplied the institutions and freedom from which fuller national independence could be developed. Opponents believed that accepting it abandoned the republic proclaimed in 1916 and defended during the War of Independence.
In 1921 Ireland passed, within twelve months, from the hardest fighting of the War of Independence to a truce and then to the agreement that remade most of the island’s constitutional future. None of those transitions was neat. The opening half of the year was marked by raids, ambushes, executions, arrests, martial law and the damaging of roads, barracks and administrative buildings. By its close, Irish and British delegates had signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Yet the settlement left partition in place, preserved a constitutional link with the Crown and exposed grave divisions within the movement that had claimed to speak for an all-Ireland republic.
The Irish Convention, convened in 1917 under the chairmanship of Sir Horace Plunkett, ended its deliberations in April 1918. It had attempted to find an agreed form of Irish self-government within the United Kingdom. Its report showed that some delegates, including Southern Unionists and a majority of Irish Parliamentary Party representatives, had moved towards compromise. Yet the essential difficulties remained unresolved: Ulster Unionist opposition to an all-Ireland settlement, the future of customs and finance, and the extent of Irish autonomy. Sinn Féin and the Irish Labour movement had not participated in the Convention, limiting its authority from the outset.
The electoral change began before Sinn Féin had become the mass, disciplined party it would later be. On 3 February, Count George Noble Plunkett won the North Roscommon by-election. Plunkett, father of the executed 1916 leader Joseph Plunkett, stood for an advanced-nationalist cause rather than simply as an old-style Sinn Féin candidate. His victory was nonetheless highly significant. It showed that a candidate associated with the Rising, committed to abstention from Westminster, could defeat the Irish Parliamentary Party in a contest decided by voters rather than by insurrection or imprisonment.
On 26 January, J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World premiered at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. The play’s young protagonist, Christy Mahon, arrives in a Mayo shebeen claiming to have killed his father; instead of receiving the expected condemnation, he becomes an object of fascination. Its language, comic treatment of violence, portrayal of rural life and perceived offence to Irish womanhood provoked protests from part of the audience. Disorder interrupted performances during the first week.
The most consequential firmly dated event came on Tuesday, 28 November. At the Rotunda in Dublin, the first annual convention of the National Council met under the presidency of Edward Martyn. Arthur Griffith presented what was called the “Sinn Féin Policy”. The convention’s importance lay in organisation as much as doctrine: delegates from outside Dublin successfully pressed for a national body with branches, rather than a small metropolitan circle. For that reason, 28 November 1905 is conventionally treated as the founding moment of the movement that became Sinn Féin.
Formal political power still rested outside Ireland. The Conservative government in London was led by Arthur Balfour, while George Wyndham served as Chief Secretary for Ireland. The lord lieutenant, the earl of Dudley, represented the Crown in Dublin. In this framework the Irish Parliamentary Party continued to seek Home Rule: a parliament in Dublin responsible for domestic affairs while remaining within the United Kingdom. Its demand commanded broad nationalist support, but it was not close to enactment in 1904.
