100 years ago, in April 1926, Fianna Fáil, which went on to become the dominant political party of independent Ireland, was founded.

It was established shortly after Éamon de Valera’s motion at an extraordinary ard-fheis of Sinn Féin was defeated, calling for the party to take its seats in Dáil Éireann if the oath to the British monarch was removed.

He left the party and founded Fianna Fáil weeks later.

De Valera’s move away from abstentionism was in many ways cemented by the ineffectiveness of that policy during the Boundary Commission saga in late 1925 that could have led to the fall of the Cumann na nGaedheal government.

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Anti-Treaty Sinn Féin had performed surprisingly well in the August 1923 general election, winning 44 seats and 27.4 per cent of the vote, just months after the ending of the Civil War hostilities.

De Valera and others saw a clear political path but felt hamstrung by Sinn Féin’s abstentionist policy.

Seán Lemass remarked that there was “a feeling that we were up in the air – we hadn’t our feet on the ground at all”.

The spectacular collapse of the Irish Boundary Commission in late 1925, which retained the border in Ireland as it was, as it still is, demonstrated to many Sinn Féin members the impotence of its abstentionist position.

The London Agreement that brought the Boundary Commission saga to an end needed to be approved by the Dáil but could have failed and brought down WT Cosgrave’s government had the 48 Sinn Féin TDs taken their seats and voted against it.

Thomas Johnson and his Labour Party TDs met with the absentee Sinn Féin TDs led by de Valera in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin on December 8 1925 to protest the London Agreement that was signed by the British, Irish Free State and Northern Ireland governments five days earlier.

Sinn Féin had held a public meeting condemning the agreement on O’Connell Street in Dublin two days previously.

Independent and Farmers’ Party TDs also attended the meeting, as did a deputation from the north, which included former nationalist MPs Cahir Healy and TJ Harbison.

Some Cumann na nGaedheal TDs were also opposed to the London Agreement.

At the meeting, de Valera was urged to enter the Dáil to vote against its ratification, but he refused to do so.

The Irish Independent reported that “the question of entering the Dáil had been exercising the minds of the Republicans” for some time. Instead, de Valera appealed for a referendum to be held on the boundary question, an appeal naturally ignored by the Free State government.

In private, de Valera “commented that while Sinn Féin could not, he felt, renege on its mandate from the last election to absent itself from the Free State institutions, at the next election it should offer the electorate a policy of taking its seats if the requirement of the oath was removed”.

Without the Sinn Féin TDs present, the government Bill to ratify the London Agreement was passed easily.

Speaking to Dermot Ryan shortly after his retirement as taoiseach in the late 1960s, as recalled in the just-published book Seán Lemass: The Lost Memoir, edited by Ronan McGreevy, Lemass stated that enormous pressure was put on Sinn Féin TDs to enter the Dáil and vote against the London Agreement.

He said that at “that time, it looked like being a wrong decision, but we decided to stay out even if by going in we could defeat what appeared to be a national disaster”.

What it did do for many Sinn Féin members, though, according to Lemass, was to “mark the point of time at which the necessity to take a new political position began to be fully realised”.

That “new political position” crystalised into the founding of Fianna Fáil months later, which grew spectacularly in its first year, winning 44 seats in the June 1927 general election.

What remained of Sinn Féin won just five seats.

As the oath still had to be taken, Fianna Fáil TDs refused to take their seats in the Dáil.

The issue of the oath came to a head weeks later following the assassination in July of Kevin O’Higgins, Minister for Justice and vice-president of the Executive Council of the Free State.

His death led to a change in the electoral laws, forcing TDs to either take their seats in the Dáil or forfeit them.

Despite it being a dilemma given de Valera’s stance on the topic since the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, it was a relatively straightforward decision for the party to take the oath and enter the Dáil.

While it was humiliating, the alternative was political oblivion.

Demonstrating a pragmatism that has been a key feature of Fianna Fáil since its foundation, its TDs entered the Dáil for the first time on August 11 1927.

It does pose the question of what Sinn Féin, in its current iteration, would do if faced with a similar dilemma to that of Sinn Féin in December 1925 or Fianna Fáil in August 1927.

While Sinn Féin abandoned its Dáil abstentionist policy with Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin in 1997 being the first Sinn Féin representative to take a seat in Dáil since the foundation of the Irish state, its MPs still abstain from taking their seats at Westminster.

Plausibly, in the not-too-distant future, there could be a hung parliament deciding on issues relating to Irish unity such as the holding of a border poll, with the abstentionist Sinn Féin MPs having the numbers to swing the vote.

Would Sinn Féin temporarily abandon abstentionism at Westminster over an issue so fundamental to its members?

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