Lesson 8 - Political PArties in Northern Ireland
The Irish political party, Sinn Fein was founded by Arthur Griffith in 1905.
“In Arthur Griffith there is a mighty force in Ireland. He has none of the wildness of some I could name. Instead there is an abundance of wisdom and an awareness of things which are Ireland.” – Michael Collins.
Sinn Fein has since become a focus of Irish nationalism and republicanism and following splits during the Rising and the Troubles in Northern Ireland it remains as a Republican and Left Wing secular party. The DUP and the UUP represent the voice of Unionists.
Task: Research Sinn Fein, DUP and the other major political parties in Northern Ireland. Consider their relationship to religion, their view on being part of Britain and their political ideologies.
Task: Research Sinn Fein, DUP and the other major political parties in Northern Ireland. Consider their relationship to religion, their view on being part of Britain and their political ideologies. 
Sinn Fein
ReplyDeleteSinn Fein was founded in 1905 by the writer, editor and politician Arthur Griffith. It became a focus for various forms of Irish Nationalism, especially Irish Republicanism. The party split in 1922 during the Irish Civil War and again at the beginning of the Troubles in 1969. These splits had a dramatic effect on politics in Ireland. In the modern times, Sinn Fein is a republican, left wing and secular (Not associating with any particular religion or spiritual matters) party. The party was of little importance until 1917 after the Easter Rising. Sinn Fein’s leader Eamon de Valera, who was for a united and independent Ireland, won 73 of the 105 Irish seats in the British Parliament in the 1918 election. In January 1919 Sinn Fein declared themselves the Parliament of an Irish Republic, they set up a provisional government to rival Ireland’s British administration. The Irish War of Independence was ended by the Anglo-Irish treaty which was negotiated by mainly Michael Collins (Ireland) and David Lloyd George (Britain). However, this treaty did not grand full Irish independence. 26/32 counties in southern Ireland became the Irish free state, the remaining 6 however would stay part of the United Kingdom. This therefore split the party, it was Michael Collins vs Eamon de Valera, the 2 sides fought in the Irish Civil War. The Sinn Fein party was banned in the UK until 1974 as many of its leaders were thought to be members of the IRA. Only in the 1980s Sinn Fein began to emphasize political and parliamentary tactics. In 1997 after the IRA had reinstated a cease fire which was originally declared in 1994, Sinn Fein was permitted to join multiparty peace talks, these talks led to the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998. As the political component of the Republican movement became more important, the party developed positions on a number of issues, including women’s rights, the environment, the economy, agriculture, and prisons.
DUP (Democratic Unionist Party)
Founded in 1971 by a hard-line faction of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the DUP contested its first election in 1973, winning approximately 4 percent of the vote in local council elections and 11 percent in elections for the new Northern Ireland Assembly. The party strongly condemned the proposal to form a power-sharing executive body. The party also rejected the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement, which proposed the creation of a cross border “Council of Ireland” to oversee a limited range of economic and cultural affairs in NI and Irish Republic. The DUP operated independently until 1986, when it began cooperating with the UUP to oppose the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Northern Ireland’s major parties and the British and Irish governments. The UUP and DUP took increasingly divergent stances in multiparty talks in the mid-1990s, and the DUP boycotted the talks when Sinn Fein entered in 1997. The talks ended in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, this was rejected by the DUP, which denounced the new Northern Ireland assembly as a dilution of British sovereignty and objected to the inclusion of Sinn Fein in the assembly and to the release of paramilitary prisoners. As opposition to the Good Friday Agreement among Protestants increased at the end of the 1990s, the DUP challenged the UUP for dominance among Northern Ireland’s unionist voters, winning more than 22 percent of the vote in Northern Ireland in elections to the House of Commons in 2001. The DUP staunchly supports union with Britain. Citing the territorial claims in the Irish constitution, which the party viewed as illegal and a threat to the security and religious freedom of Protestants in Northern Ireland, the DUP traditionally avoided all contact with the Irish government. In the early 21st century, however, the party moderated its stance on a number of issues, most notably its long time opposition to Sinn Fein’s participation in any power-sharing institution.