ONE hundred years ago, on May 16 1926, the inaugural public meeting of Fianna Fáil was held.

Its formation came about when Éamon de Valera resigned as president of Sinn Féin after losing a vote in March that year for the party to take seats in Dáil Éireann if the oath to the British monarch was removed.

Afterwards, de Valera purportedly told his colleague Seán Lemass: “Now, Seán. I have done my best, but I have been beaten. Now is the end for me. I am leaving public life.”

Spurred on by Lemass, de Valera did not leave public life and instead founded a new political movement that has gone on to dominate politics in the Irish state over the last century.

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Anti-Treaty Sinn Féin had performed surprisingly well in the August 1923 general election, winning 44 seats and 27.4% 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. Lemass remarked 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 abstentionism.

The matter came to a head in March 1926 when de Valera’s motion at an extraordinary ard fheis was defeated by 223 votes to 218, precipitating many resignations from the........

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