A report on Partition of Ireland, Irish nationalism and 1918 Irish general election

In the December 1918 election, republican party Sinn Féin won a landslide victory in Ireland.

In May 1921, Ireland was partitioned under British law by the Government of Ireland Act, which created Northern Ireland.

Since the 1870s, Irish nationalists in the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) had been demanding Home Rule, or self-government, from Britain.

In 1917 the Sinn Féin party stated as its aim the "securing the international recognition of Ireland as an independent Irish Republic", and in the general election of 1918 Sinn Féin won 73 of the 105 Irish seats in the British House of Commons.

During the late 1980s the British Government became increasingly willing to give concessions to Irish Nationalism, such as the Anglo-Irish Agreement and extending to, the Northern Ireland Security, Peter Brooke's declaration of "no selfish, strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland.", causing uproar amongst strands of Unionism.

A variant of this is Irish republican legitimism, which also rejects the Republic of Ireland because of its tacit acceptance of partition and continuing British rule in Northern Ireland.

This, and the subsequent Irish War of Independence, led to the partition of Ireland.

Most Irish nationalists object to the use of Ulster in this context.

In the aftermath of World War I, the political party Sinn Féin ("Ourselves") won the majority of votes in the 1918 Irish general election, this political party pursued a policy of complete independent self-determination for the island of Ireland as outlined in the Sinn Féin campaign Manifesto of 1918, a great deal more than the devolved government/Home Rule advocated by the (I.P.P) Irish Parliamentary Party.

After a short spell in South Africa, Griffith founded and edited the Irish nationalist newspaper The United Irishman in 1899.

Griffith was elected as an MP for East Cavan in a by-election in June 1918, and re-elected in the 1918 general election, when Sinn Féin won a huge electoral victory over the Irish Parliamentary Party and, refusing to take their seats at Westminster, set up their own constituent assembly, Dáil Éireann.

However, this idea was never really embraced by later separatist leaders, especially Michael Collins, and never came to anything, although Kevin O'Higgins toyed with the idea as a means of ending partition, shortly before his assassination in 1927.

On 10 July 1917, he was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for East Clare (the constituency which he represented until 1959) in a by-election caused by the death of the previous incumbent Willie Redmond, brother of the Irish Party leader John Redmond, who had died fighting in World War I. In the 1918 general election he was elected both for that seat and Mayo East.

Nationalists expected its report to recommend that largely nationalist areas become part of the Free State, and many hoped this would make Northern Ireland so small it would not be economically viable.

Hence neither the pro- nor anti-Treaty sides made many complaints about partition in the Treaty Debates.

It was the dominant political movement of Irish nationalism from 1870 to the end of World War I.

In the 1918 General Election the Irish Parliamentary Party suffered a crushing defeat with only a handful of MPs surviving, effectively dealing a death blow to the Home Rule movement.

1920: Fourth Irish Home Rule Act (replaced Third Act, passed and implemented as the Government of Ireland Act 1920) which established Northern Ireland as a Home Rule entity within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and attempted to establish Southern Ireland as another but instead resulted in the partition of Ireland and Irish independence through the Irish Free State Constitution Act 1922.

Later that year, Irish nationalists formed a rival militia, the Irish Volunteers, to safeguard Home Rule.

After the war, the British Government decided to partition Ireland into two self-governing regions: Northern Ireland (which overall had a Protestant/unionist majority) and Southern Ireland.

In the December 1918 general election, Sinn Féin—an Irish republican party who sought full independence for Ireland—won an overwhelming majority of the seats in Ireland.