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How to harness the widespread reaction of sympathy and anger to the executions following the 1916 Rising and the imprisonment of large numbers of people, many of whom had nothing to do with the Rising, was the challenge facing Irish advanced-nationalists 100 years ago. One of the most effective methods they chose was to contest parliamentary byelections, and one of the most significant of those elections occurred on May 9th, 1917.
They had already achieved a notable breakthrough in early February 1917 when Count Plunkett, three of whose sons had fought in the rising and one of whom, Joseph, had been executed, won the North Roscommon byelection. He had stood as an Independent rather than as a Sinn Féin candidate but he was supported by Sinn Féin and many other groups as well.
The result came as a shock to the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) that had dominated Irish nationalist politics for nearly 50 years up to that point.
Its leader, John Redmond, was so despondent that he prepared a memorandum, which he intended to release to the press, part of which went: “If, as would perhaps be not unnatural, the people have grown tired of the monotony of being served for 20, 30, 35 or 40 years by the same men in parliament, and desire variety and a change, speaking for myself, I have no complaint to make . . . Let the Irish people replace us, by all means, by other and, I hope, better men, if they so choose.”
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His appalled colleagues in the IPP dissuaded him from publishing the memorandum. While North Roscommon took them by surprise, the result could be regarded as a fluke, which could be put down mainly to the personal circumstances of the winning candidate.
But when the IPP MP, John Phillips, died at the beginning of April, the party faced another byelection, this time in South Longford.
Sinn Féin, to which the British authorities mistakenly ascribed responsibility for the Rising, certainly thrived in the aftermath of the Roscommon byelection. Thousands of nationalists, mainly young men, flocked to join the organisation, so that by mid-1917, the police reported 336 Sinn Féin clubs flourishing across the island.
Joseph McGuinness was the Sinn Féin candidate chosen to fight the byelection. Marie Coleman, author of County Longford and the Irish Revolution 1910-23 (2003), wrote the entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. According to that, he was born in 1875 in Cloonmore, Tramonbarry, Co Roscommon, and after national school became apprenticed to a draper in Castlerea before emigrating to the US in the 1890s, where he was active in the New York Gaelic League.
Back in Ireland in 1902, he helped set up a Gaelic League branch in Longford town. He eventually settled in Dublin and opened drapery shops in Camden Street and Dorset Street. He joined the Irish Volunteers and fought in the Four Courts during the Rising, for which he was sentenced to 10 years of penal servitude (later reduced to three).
McGuinness did not want to contest South Longford as he had no faith in parliamentary agitation but Michael Collins, a rising star in the post-1916 advanced-nationalist movement, overrode his objections and organised his electoral campaign, which ran under the catchy slogan, “Put him in to get him out”.
The IPP threw huge resources into the campaign, with deputy leader John Dillon, veteran Joseph Devlin and many other leading MPs taking part. Sinn Féin won the contest by only 37 votes but, although it was a narrow victory, the Manchester Guardian newspaper declared that the result was "equivalent to a serious defeat of the British Army in the field".
John Dillon’s biographer FSL Lyons wrote of the 37-vote margin that, to the IPP, “the blow was as heavy as if it had been 100 times as much. To some members of the party, this defeat seemed nothing less than a notice to quit and the idea began to circulate that they should resign in a body”.
Joe McGuinness was re-elected in 1918 and 1921 and served for a period as director of trade and commerce during the first Dáil. He supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty and died on May 31st, 1922. He had been married to Katherine Farrell, a member of Cumann mBan who also took part in the Rising. His brother Frank was a TD in the third Dáil and subsequently a Cumann na nGaedheal senator for nine years.
The Sinn Féin victory in the South Longford byelection around this time a century ago was a significant milestone on the road to the independence achieved in December 1921.