1923 – Farmers’ representation

Proportional representation affords infinite scope for looking at election results from varying points of view. But whatever advantages it may have as a fair system of election – and we think this election has proved its value beyond doubt – it cannot explain to use why the farmers’ candidates, who according to themselves represent eighty per cent of the people of Ireland, failed so miserably to secure a tithe of that representation.

A very frank and engaging correspondent who has written to us at length on the subject has no such difficulty. Although we do not find ourselves in agreement with all he says, his criticism has a freshness, originality and vigour about it which makes it worth reproducing at least in part.

“The Framers’ Party failed in County Galway,” he says, “because paradoxically, it was not a farmers’ party and did not put up farmers’ candidates: because the people recognised it was better that they should fight on a straight political issue than vote for farmers who put up one candidate at the eleventh hour to flirt with the Irregulars. Mr James Haverty flirted with them because the action of a party that purported to back the Treaty in putting up Mr. P. D. Conroy, a Connemara shopkeeper, knowing full well the result would be that Mr. Conroy would draw votes from the staunchest of the Treaty supporters, shattered the last remaining remnant of sympathy for the farmers.”

Pictured: Some of the attendance at the opening of the Leitir Móir GAA Club’s new pitch at Maumeen on March 31, 1974.