The people’s voice was ignored and the result was a conflict ending in brutal civil war

THE column by Steven King headlined “Republicans’ original mandate can be consigned to dustbin of history” (December 3) left me perplexed, to say the least.

Mr King seems determined to “partitionise” what was an all-Ireland election.

In 1918, Ireland was one entity, not the partitioned island it is now. So, it is anybody’s guess why your columnist tried to discredit Sinn Féin’s emphatic victory by saying the party only won 25% of the seats in nine-county Ulster, thereby implying it was not an all-Ireland victory.

If John Kerry had won the state of Ohio in the 2004 US presidential election, he would have entered the White House without having taken a single southern state.

Would there have been any arguments from political commentators that he was not the US president but merely the president of the northern states? It would be a preposterous argument and the same applies to Ireland in 1918.

In the context of the whole country, Sinn Féin won 73 of a possible 105 seats, which in anybody’s book is an emphatic victory.

Also when you include the seats taken by the pro-Home Rule Irish Parliamentary Party you have a nationalist/republican combined total of 79 seats from a possible 105 over the whole country.

It must surely be asked what mandate did the British have to stay in Ireland?

The people had spoken and given roughly 70% of their vote to Irish nationalist/republican candidates. The 1918 election was a travesty on the Irish people in that their voice was ignored thus inflicting a conflict on them which culminated in two years of war with Britain, ending in a brutal civil war.

If the democratic will of the Irish people was respected by the British government there would have been no need for Irish republicans to even consider the armed campaign that commenced in 1919.

This point is lost on Mr King who, in true revisionist unionist style, tries to distort the issue and cherrypick comments by Fr Michael O’Flanaghan made after the 1918 election to imply that not wanting the “coercion” of Orangemen into a united Ireland was some kind of anti-armed struggle message.

It was nothing of the sort. It was not the “coercion” of the Orangemen that was needed but that of the British government. Unfortunately, when the political will of the Irish people was ignored by Bonar Law’s administration, then, as is done by governments the world over, they used force to achieve their political aims.

It was not immoral for them to do so for as Pádraig Pearse said: “War is a terrible thing, but war is not an evil thing — it is the things that make war necessary that are evil.”

It is sad still to see the revisionist unionist agenda being spouted in the Irish press.

Indeed it is the kind of revisionism that would make Ruth Dudley Edwards go weak at the knees.

Pádraig Donohoe

34 Camphill Road

Glasgow G41 3AZ

Scotland