The Impact of the 1918 Reform Act in Ireland

Ironically, the Representatiion of the People Act of 1918, the penultimate measure in democratising the electoral franchise in the United Kingdom, had the effect not of modernising and consolidating political structures there but rather of paving the way for the kingdom's break-up. The near-threefold increase in the size of the Irish electorate opened the door to radical political forces, permitting the newly-minted republican-nationalist Sinn Fein party to win an overwhelming majority of Irish seats. Since the Sinn Fein members refused to attend parliament in Westminster and instead sought to establish an Irish republic, this effectively ended southern Irish representation in the house of commons. The act also facilitated a tightening of the Unionist grip in the northern part of the island, leading to the partition of Ireland in 1921: Northern Ireland continued as a near-independent component of the United Kingdom, while the rest of Ireland left the United Kingdom in 1922. The essay explores the dynamics of this process, considering five matters in turn: the Irish political context within which the 1918 Reform Act was located; the nature of the act's provisions as they applied to Ireland; the outcome in Ireland of the first general election under the act; the extent to which this outcome was conditioned by the terms of the Reform Act; and the longer-term consequences of the act. It concludes that the significance of the act for Ireland lay more in the domain of ideology than of constitutional law, given its symbolic importance for later generations of Irish nationalist activists.