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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.
The most immediate catastrophe occurred off County Cork. On 7 May the German submarine U-20 torpedoed the Cunard liner RMS Lusitania south of the Old Head of Kinsale. The ship had sailed from New York for Liverpool and sank rapidly. About 1,198 passengers and crew died, although totals in contemporary and later accounts vary slightly as the identities of victims and survivors were established. The disaster made the Irish coast a place of international consequence: rescue work, the recovery of bodies and hurried burials centred on Queenstown, now Cobh. Local people encountered the human wreckage of a global naval war directly, rather than merely reading battlefield reports in newspapers.
