how do the political parties lay claim to the 1916 legacy?

Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin sees itself as the only true inheritor of the 1916 tradition. At the party's recent ard fheis the party president, Gerry Adams, rejected the claim that the party was attempting to hijack the forthcoming 1916 commemoration. "The truth is that Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour and all the rest of them abandoned 1916," he said. The modern Sinn Féin last year celebrated the 100th anniversary of the party's founding but in fact the original Sinn Féin was a very different party. It is arguable that there have been five distinct manifestations of Sinn Féin since 1905. Nonetheless, modern Sinn Féin claims to derive its inspiration from the Proclamation and to have adhered to the tactics and analysis of the 1916 leaders.

That analysis involved a mandate from history, rather than from people as expressed in a general election. Sinn Féin argued for most of the 20th century that it was the only party to remain loyal to the vision of a republic laid down by the 1916 leaders. Just as the signatories of the Proclamation felt no requirement to obtain a democratic mandate neither did Sinn Féin. The Sinn Féin that emerged in 1917 from the aftermath of the Rising was a very different party to the one founded by Griffith. It turned into a mass movement and was victorious in the 1918 general election and in the election of 1921 to what became known as the Second Dail.

The party suffered a setback in its third phase when it fought the election of June, 1922, in opposition to the Treaty. Standing on an abstentionist ticket the party won just 20% of the vote. Its military wing, the IRA, was defeated in the Civil War that followed. Sinn Féin made a comeback in the election of 1923, winning 28 per cent of the vote and 44 seats, but it suffered a fatal blow in 1926 when almost all of its leading members left to found Fianna Fail. A year earlier the IRA had rejected the authority of the Sinn Féin "shadow" Government. Sticking to its abstentionist policy the party won just five seats in the June election of 1927. It did not contest the September election of that year because a law passed after the murder of Kevin O'Higgins would have required its candidates to recognise the State. Refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the Dail, Sinn Féin made only occasional forays into electoral politics in the decades after 1927. In 1957 the party won four Dáil seats but its TDs refused to take their seats.

Sinn Féin claimed that its mandate came from the pre-Treaty Second Dáil which was still committed to the Republic proclaimed in 1916, rather than from the electorate. In 1938 the surviving Sinn Féin members of the Second Dáil formally handed over their mandate to the Army Council of the IRA which became its ruling body.

Over the past two decades Sinn Féin has changed tactics and moved into the political arena. In 1985 the party dropped abstenionism. In 1994 the first IRA ceasefire was called. Last year the IRA announced it was ceasing operations and decommissioning its weapons. The adoption of the political strategy has not diminished Sinn Féin's claim on 1916 and the party aspires to hold power, North and South, by the time of the 100th anniversary in a decade's time.