Centenary of Women’s Franchise

This year 2018 is the centenary of the enactment of the Representation of the People Act, which granted the franchise to women over 30 in the United Kingdom the first time who were homeowners, or married to householders, or were graduates, and to men over 21 who were previously excluded by property qualifications (it is said that this was a recognition of the large number of men killed in the First World War). All of Ireland was then part of the United Kingdom (UK). The promise of equal rights in 1916 Proclamation was honoured in the Irish Free State Constitution, when all Irish women over 21 were given the right to vote, which came into effect with independence on December 6, 1922. Women in Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK had to wait until 1928 for the voting age to be reduced to 21. This achievement was the result of a long campaign for female suffrage, which became very radical in England following the establishment of Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903 under the leadership of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and others. The campaign was called off at the start of the First World War in 1914, but it was expected that the issue would be addressed when the war was over. In Ireland, the campaign received no support from members of the Irish Parliamentary Party, but after Francis Sheehy Skeffington and his wife, Hanna, founded the Irish Women’s Franchise League in 1908, it became a major issue. Under the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918, women were also allowed to stand for election to parliament.

A general election was called in the UK for December 1918. It became an election for the political soul of nationalist Ireland, between Sinn Féin on a separatist mission following the 1916 Rising and the Irish Parliamentary Party, which supported Home Rule within the British Empire (the latter won 80 of the 105 Irish seats at Westminster at the 1910 general election). As a result of the Representation of the People Act, the electorate in Ireland had increased from 698,000 to over 1.9 million. The election in Ireland resulted in a landslide victory for Sinn Féin, winning seventy-three seats out of one hundred and five, with the Irish Parliamentary Party reduced to six seats. The newly elected Sinn Féin members of parliament, following their pledge of abstention, refused to take their seats in Westminster, and accepted the result as a mandate for the establishment of an independent Irish state. They arranged to have invitations sent to members elected for all Irish constituencies to attend the first session of the assembly of Ireland in the Mansion House in Dublin on January 21, 1919. Twenty-seven members, all from Sinn Féin, attended and established the first Dáil Éireann as it was called (thirty-four of them were still in prison and eight were unable to attend). One of the Sinn Féin members became the first (and only) woman to be elected to the House of Commons in that election. She was Constance Markievicz (1868-1927), née Gore-Booth from County Sligo, who had taken part in the 1916 Rising. Instead of taking a seat in the Westminster parliament, she was appointed Minister for Labour in the First Dáil. (The main Gaelic Athletic Association Ground in Sligo is named in her honour, the only one in the country to be named after a woman.)

Despite the new dawn, women’s representation in the Irish parliament was low thereafter. As a result, legislation was enacted in 2012 to promote gender quotas, whereby parties would lose half their state funding unless 30 per cent of their candidates in a general election were women and at least 30 per cent men. This requirement led to a record number of 35 women elected in the 2016 general election out of 158 seats, or 22 per cent, compared with 15 per cent in the 2011 general election. In 1990, Mary Robinson was elected as the first woman President of Ireland, and she was succeeded by another woman ,Mary McAleese, from 1997 to 2011. Special events in this centenary year will focus on women’s representation in parliament.

Bernard O’Hara’s most recent book is Exploring Mayo can be obtained by contacting www.mayobooks.ie.

Bernard O'Hara's book entitled Killasser: Heritage of a Mayo Parish is now on sale in the USA and UK as a paperback book at amazon.com, amazon.co.uk or Barnes and Noble

It is also available as an eBook from the Apple iBookstore (for reading on iPad and iPhone), from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (Kindle & Kindle Fire) and from Barnesandnoble.com (Nook tablet and eReader).

An earlier publication, a concise biography of Michael Davitt, entitled Davitt by Bernard O’Hara published in 2006 by Mayo County Council , is now available as Davitt: Irish Patriot and Father of the Land League by Bernard O’Hara, which was published in the USA by Tudor Gate Press (www.tudorgatepress.com) and is available from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. It can be obtained as an eBook from the Apple iBookstore (for reading on iPad and iPhone), from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (Kindle & Kindle Fire) and from Barnesandnoble.com (Nook tablet and eReader).