Ashe, Clare and Convention
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.