As the implementation of Home Rule continued to be postponed due to the ongoing war, and the British threatened to impose conscription in Ireland to aid the war effort, nationalist support rapidly came to be channeled into the revolutionary Sinn Féin movement.

Sinn Féin won 73 out of 105 seats in Ireland at the general election held in December 1918, and in January 1919 organised themselves as the First Dáil, which then declared an independent Irish Republic.

They soon gained a reputation for brutality, as the RIC campaign against the IRA and Sinn Féin members was stepped up and police reprisals for IRA attacks were condoned by the government.

Evidence given by Martin McGuinness, a senior member of Sinn Féin and now the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, to the inquiry stated that he was second-in-command of the Derry City brigade of the Provisional IRA and was present at the march.

In response McGuinness rejected the claims as " fantasy ", while Gerry O ' Hara, a Sinn Féin councillor in Derry stated that he and not Ward was the Fianna leader at the time.

With the Official IRA and Official Sinn Féin having moved away from mainstream Irish republicanism towards Marxism, the Provisional IRA began to win the support of newly radicalised, disaffected young people.

The Irish Republican political party, Sinn Féin is also known to have close political links to the Cuban government.

Maguire had also been contacted by supporters of Gerry Adams, then and now President of Sinn Féin, and a supporter of the change in the Provisional IRA constitution.

In a 1986 statement, he rejected " the legitimacy of an Army Council styling itself the Council of the Irish Republican Army which lends support to any person or organisation styling itself as Sinn Féin and prepared to enter the partition parliament of Leinster House.

These changes within the military wing of the Republican Movement were accompanied by changes in the political wing and at the 1986 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis ( party conference ), which followed the IRA Convention, the party's policy of abstentionism, which forbade Sinn Féin elected representatives from taking seats in the Oireachtas, the parliament of Ireland, was dropped.

The traditionalists, having lost at both conventions, walked out of the Mansion House, met that evening at the West County Hotel, and reformed as Republican Sinn Féin ( RSF ).

A senior source from Republican Sinn Féin said: " We would see them purported new leadership as just another splinter group that has broken away.

The left wing republican party Sinn Féin is a party which opposes the current structure of the European Union and the direction it is moving in.

Sinn Féin objects to the limitations and restrictions European Union membership has placed on the Republic of Ireland, as well as the European depletion of Irish sovereignty.

It shares some common views on Europe with Sinn Féin.

Sinn Féin vice-president Gerry Adams said of Mountbatten's death:

In December 1918, republicans ( then represented by the Sinn Féin party ) won 73 Irish seats out of 105 in the 1918 General Election to the British Parliament, on a policy of abstentionism and Irish independence.

In January 1919, the elected members of Sinn Féin who were not still in prison at the time, including survivors of the Rising, convened the First Dáil and established the Irish Republic.

The Gaelic Athletic Association, the Gaelic League and the cultural revival under W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, together with the new political thinking of Arthur Griffith expressed in his newspaper Sinn Féin and the organisations the National Council and the Sinn Féin League led to the identification of Irish people with the concept of a Gaelic nation and culture, completely independent of Britain.

A victory for the Unionist candidate in 1918 by 9, 621 votes to Sinn Féin's 2, 673 votes demonstrated the strength of the unionist support in the area.

A victory for the Unionist candidate in 1918 by 15, 206 votes to Sinn Féin's 861 votes demonstrated the virtual unanimity of the unionist support.

Through The United Irishman and Sinn Féin Griffith demonstrated the need to arrogate legislature from the hands of the British by transferring Irish Parliament back to Dublin.

We must take the offensive and beat Sinn Fein at its own tactics ... If a police barracks is burned or if the barracks already occupied is not suitable, then the best house in the locality is to be commandeered, the occupants thrown into the gutter.

While the Rising and its leaders continued to be venerated by Irish republicans — including members and supporters of the Provisional IRA and the modern Sinn Féin — with murals in republican areas of Belfast and other towns celebrating the actions of Pearse and his comrades, and a number of parades held annually in remembrance of the Rising, the Irish government discontinued its annual parade in Dublin in the early 1970s, and in 1976 it took the unprecedented step of proscribing ( under the Offences against the State Act ) a 1916 commemoration ceremony at the GPO organised by Sinn Féin and the Republican commemoration Committee.

A small Irish nationalist party, Sinn Féin, was widely, but wrongly, credited with orchestrating the Easter Rising even though its leader Arthur Griffith advocated only Irish self-government under a dual monarchy.

* 1994 – The Irish Government announces the end of a 15-year broadcasting ban on the IRA and its political arm Sinn Féin.

Sinn Féin has a policy of abstentionism and so its MPs refuse to take their seats in Parliament.

Under Adams, Sinn Féin changed its traditional policy of abstentionism towards Oireachtas Éireann, the parliament of the Republic of Ireland, in 1986 and later took seats in the power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly.

At its 1986 Ard Fheis, Sinn Féin delegates passed a resolution to amend the rules and constitution that would allow its members to sit in the Dublin parliament ( Leinster House / Dáil Éireann ).

Over time, Adams and others pointed to Republican electoral successes in the early and mid-1980s, when hunger strikers Bobby Sands and Kieran Doherty were elected to the British House of Commons and Dáil Éireann respectively, and they advocated that Sinn Féin become increasingly political and base its influence on electoral politics rather than paramilitarism.

Sinn Féin continued its policy of refusing to sit in the Westminster Parliament even after Adams won the Belfast West constituency.

As part of their deal, Sinn Féin agreed to abandon its abstentionist policy regarding a " six-county parliament ", as a result taking seats in the new Stormont-based Assembly and running the education and health and social services ministries in the power-sharing government.

When Sinn Féin came to nominate its two ministers to the Northern Ireland Executive, for tactical reasons the party, like the SDLP and the Democratic Unionist Party ( DUP ), chose not to include its leader among its ministers.

He had initially indicated a willingness to contest the June 1927 general election as a Sinn Féin candidate but withdrew after the Irish Republican Army threatened to court-martial any member under IRA General Army Order 28, which forbade its members from standing in elections.

The latter developed along socialist lines mirroring the political developments in Official Sinn Féin, and eventually in the late 1970s was renamed the Irish Democratic Youth Movement ( IDYM ), ending its semi-paramilitary training.

The party withdrew in protest when Sinn Féin was allowed to participate after its ceasefire.

He publicly supported Sinn Féin and the unification of Ireland, although in 2005 he suggested to Sinn Féin leaders that it abandon its long-standing policy of not taking seats at Westminster.

Sinn Féin argue that to do so would recognise Britain's claim over Northern Ireland, and the Sinn Féin constitution prevented its elected members from taking their seats in any British-created institution.

The particular object of their discontent was Sinn Féin's ending of its policy of abstentionism in the Republic of Ireland.

In April 1923 the Pro-Treaty Sinn Féin members organised a new political party called Cumann na nGaedheal with Cosgrave as leader.

In the October 2006 St Andrews Agreement, Paisley and the DUP agreed to new elections, and support for a new executive including Sinn Féin subject to Sinn Féin acceptance of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

The first general election to the House of Commons of Southern Ireland in 1921 was used by Sinn Féin to produce a new Dáil: the Second Dáil.

Sinn Féin nationalists participated in these elections but refused to recognise the new home rule parliaments.

In 1926 when de Valera left Sinn Féin to found Fianna Fáil, O ' Kelly returned to Ireland and was appointed a vice-president of the new republican party.

The execution of close friends such as Conor Clune of Quin in November 1920 and the subsequent devastating raids on his farm resulted in his playing a far more active role in Sinn Féin as a loyal supporter of the new TD for Clare, Éamon de Valera.

The Sinn Féin triumph in the general election of 1918 ( the coupon election ), winning 73 out of the 105 Irish seats, was followed by the Sinn Féin members ' decision to convene themselves as the First Dáil, a new parliament.

Sinn Féin's elected candidates refused to attend the UK Parliament at Westminster and instead assembled in Dublin as a new revolutionary parliament called " Dáil Éireann ".

However by 1918, under its new leader Éamon de Valera, Sinn Féin had come to favour achieving separation from Britain by means of an armed uprising if necessary and the establishment of an independent republic.

* On the other hand, Sinn Féin represented change and a radical new policy for achieving Irish self-government outside of the UK, and many of its Volunteer wing were ready to enforce a republic through physical force.

There was no dissension in 1977 when Official Sinn Féin ratified the parties new name: Sinn Féin The Workers ' Party.

This " dual policy " was extremely unpopular, opposed both by the Irish Parliamentary Party under its new leader John Dillon, the All-for-Ireland Party as well as Sinn Féin and other national bodies.

The tide then changed after it lost three by-elections in 1917 to the more physical-force republican Sinn Féin movement, which in the mean time had built up 1, 500 organised clubs around Ireland and exceeded the strength of the old UIL, most of the latter members now joining the new movement.

In most constituencies the new young local Sinn Féin organisation controlled the electoral scene well in advance of the election.

Doherty served as Vice President of Sinn Féin from 1988 to 2009, when Mary Lou McDonald became the party's new Vice-President.