The Irish Parliamentary Party and its successors: lessons for parties in times of transformative change

27 Feb 2024

Happening On 29/02/2024

Dr Martin O'Donoghue, Max Planck Institute, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

School of History, UCC

Dr Martin O'Donoghue, Max Planck Institute, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Thursday 29 February 2024, 16:00 (4 PM), MS Teams

The paper will be delivered through MS Teams. Teams links can be obtained from Dr Jérôme aan de Wiel, School of History: j.aandewiel@ucc.ie

Paper Interviewed by the Irish Times in 1940, ex-Irish Party MP John Lalor-Fitzpatrick recalled that his colleagues retired to private life after Sinn Féin’s 1918 victory and ‘not one of them has raised a voice in opposition to the elected governments’. He was wrong on both counts. However, the fact that many criticised and opposed governments are arguably signs of healthy democracy. Parties followed in the IPP’s footsteps in different ways. This paper focuses on this question of succession – examining the persistence of Irish Party organisation in the Free State and Northern Ireland as well as drawing comparison with other parties overseas. The Irish Party provided models of organisation and tactics for achieving political aims, but successors which utilised them had to do so in very different contexts. It is in considering these contexts, this paper argues that the IPP’s successes, failures, and collapse provide lessons for any party negotiating periods of transformative change.

Dr Martin O’Donoghue is Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt where his research examines parliament and legal thought before and after independence in Ireland and India. He was awarded his PhD from the University of Galway in 2017 and has subsequently taught history at the University of Sheffield, Northumbria University and the University of Limerick. He was the National Library of Ireland Studentship holder in 2017/18 and has also been a visiting fellow at the Arts and Humanities Institute, Maynooth University. His first book, The Legacy of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Independent Ireland, 1922-1949, was awarded the NUI Publication Prize in Irish History and was highly commended for the British Association of Irish Studies Book Prize.