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.

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.

Neither won a decisive victory ; however, the Conscription Crisis tipped the balance in favour of Sinn Féin.

Prime Minister David Lloyd George failed to introduce Home Rule in 1918 and in the December 1918 General Election Sinn Féin won a majority of Irish seats.

As a result of this non-recognition, Sinn Féin had abstained from taking any of the seats they won in the British or Irish parliaments.

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

In the December 1918 general election, a large majority of Irish seats in the Westminster parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland were won by Sinn Féin, with 73 of 105 constituencies returning Sinn Féin members.

While in prison Cosgrave won a seat for Sinn Féin in the 1917 Kilkenny by-election.

Sinn Féin, standing for ' an independent sovereign Ireland ', had won seventy-three of the one hundred and five parliamentary seats on the island in the 1918 General Election and established its own unilateral declaration of independence ( UDI ) state, the Irish Republic with its own parliament, Dáil Éireann.

Sinn Féin won 124 of the 128 seats, all without contest.

Of 52 seats, forty were won by Unionists, six by moderate nationalists and six by Sinn Féin.

Of these 128, 124 were won by Sinn Féin, and four by independent Unionists representing the University of Dublin ( Trinity College ).

Sinn Féin won 73 out of the 105 Irish seats in the House of Commons, their votes 476, 087 ( or 46. 9 %) for 48 seats, plus 25 uncontested without a ballot.

Éamon de Valera's Sinn Féin fought as Republicans but won only two seats.

The crisis boosted Sinn Féin so that in the December general election it won the vast majority of seats, leaving the Nationalist Party with only six seats for the 220, 837 votes cast ( 21. 7 %) ( down from 84 seats out of 105 in 1910 ).

Unionists, on the other hand, won 26 seats for 287, 618 ( 28. 3 %) of votes, whereas Sinn Féin votes were 476, 087 ( or 46. 9 %) for 48 seats, plus 25 uncontested, totalling an impressive 73 seats.

The seat of Waterford city was one of the few outside Ulster not to be won by Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election.

In the Irish general election, 1918, Sinn Féin won the vast majority of seats, many of which were uncontested.

The first was the election of June 18, 1922, which the pro-Treaty Sinn Féin party won, giving the Free State a popular mandate.

Ryan was later imprisoned again during the subsequent Civil War, however, while interned he won back his Dáil seat as an abstentionist Sinn Féin TD at the 1923 general election.

Most of the remaining seats were won by parties that only contest elections in one part of the UK such as the Scottish National Party ( Scotland only ), Plaid Cymru ( Wales only ), and the Democratic Unionist Party, Social Democratic and Labour Party, Ulster Unionist Party, and Sinn Féin ( Northern Ireland ).

Éamon de Valera of Sinn Fein had recently won the East Clare by-election ( caused by the death of Willie Redmond ) and on a visit to Currygrane ( his first in eight years ) everyone Wilson spoke to – judges, landowners, police officers, a Redmondite local politician and “ some natives ” agreed on the need for conscription.

The constituencies in which Sinn Féin won uncontested seats were those which subsequently showed high levels of support for republican candidates.

The proportion of votes cast for Sinn Féin, namely 46. 9 % of votes for 48 " first past the post " seats won in the 76 constituencies it contested, is understated by the fact that 25 candidates in some of its strongest support bases were unopposed, reducing its real support level in these constituencies from a possible level of 80pc.

The party went on to win a clear majority of seats in the 1918 general election: of the 73 seats in which Sinn Féin were elected, 25 were uncontested.

Sinn Féin proved to be the big winner of the election in Ireland, capturing 73 Irish seats, 25 uncontested.

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.

For whatever reason, in the 73 constituencies in which Sinn Féin candidates were elected 25 were returned unopposed ( 17 were in Munster ).

Sinn Féin candidates were elected in 73 constituencies but four party candidates ( Arthur Griffith, Éamon de Valera, Eoin MacNeill and Liam Mellows ) were elected for two constituencies and so the total number of individual Sinn Féin MPs elected was 69.

In May at the height of the crisis 73 prominent Sinn Féiners were falsely arrested on the grounds of an alleged German Plot.

In the General election of 1918, Sinn Féin won 73 seats, 25 of these unopposed, or statistically nearly 70 % of Irish representation, under the British " First past the post " voting-system, but had a minority representation in Ulster.

According to this view, the last time that an all Ireland election happened was in the December 1918 election, when a majority of seats ( 73 out of 105 seats ) with 46. 9 % of votes in Ireland went to Sinn Féin and for Irish independence.

Sinn Féin votes were 476, 087 ( or 46. 9 %) for 48 seats, plus 25 uncontested totalling an impressive 73 seats.

At the 1918 general election, Markievicz was elected for the constituency of Dublin St Patrick's, beating her opponent William Field with 66 % of the vote, as one of 73 Sinn Féin MPs.

The Dáil was first formed by 73 Sinn Féin MPs elected in the 1918 United Kingdom general election.

In the 1918 general election a large majority of 73 out of 105 representatives returned in Ireland were members of the Sinn Féin party.

In 1917 the Sinn Féin party stated as its aim the " securing the international recognition of Ireland as an independent Irish Republic ", and in the general election of 1918 Sinn Féin took 73 of the 105 Irish seats in the British House of Commons.

In the December 1918 general election, Sinn Féin won 73 out of 105 seats, 25 of which were uncontested.