The year 2024 saw the local and general elections held and, of course, voting was by secret ballot. The polling centres of 2024 were remarkably quiet as if one were attending confession in a quiet corner of a church. Long gone were the days when a glass of Birr or Banagher or Bernie Daly’s Tullamore whiskey would be proffered by candidates or their agents to thirsty voters. The right of secret ballot extends back to 1872 and the Ballot Act. Before that time voting was in public and held in the towns in Offaly of Tullamore, Birr and Philipstown (Daingean).The Birr-based Chronicle newspaper had thought to describe the polling booth as the voter having to go ‘behind a screen, a la Punch and Judy mode, and there make the sign of the cross with a pencil on the voting paper opposite the names of the favourite men’. This was 50 years before the STV (single transferable vote was used in parliamentary elections in 1922 (see note 5 below) The Chronicle had noted in 1872 the emergence of the polling districts and the practice before 1872 in parliamentary elections:
Formerly, [before 1800] the county sent six members to the Irish Parliament, two for the county at large, and two for each of the boroughs, Philipstown and Banagher; but since the Union its representation has been limited to the two members for the county, and in 1836 the number of registered votes amounted to 1700. The election under the new Ballot Act will, of necessity, assume a different form, and will not be confined to Tullamore, Parsonstown and Philipstown.
[The Offaly electorate in the 2024 parliamentary was 62,931 with just short of 60 per cent voting. Adults over 18 in the 1830s might have been c. 80,000 of a 130,000 population, and only one in forty having a vote. Estimates only]
Voting was held solely in Daingean up to 1835 when Tullamore was elevated by an 1832 act of parliament to the holding of the assizes with the county town rubrics of a county jail and a county courthouse. The jail was completed in 1830 in Tullamore and the courthouse in mid-1835. Municipal authorities were set up in Birr in 1852 and Tullamore in 1860. Voting in the local and parliamentary elections was very much on a restricted franchise with no more than 3,000 by 1815, 1139 by 1831, 3500 by 1880 and about 10,500 by 1891. The fall in the population of the county would have reduced this number to 9,000 by 1911 when the entire population was 56,000. So only one in nine were entitled to vote prior to the sweeping changes of 1918 and 1923. This would have been as low as 1 to 25 in 1881 when the county population was 72,001 and the electorate 3,211.[1] The electorate at township level in 1872 was also very restricted with only 250 entitled to vote in Birr from a total population of 4,939 – perhaps as low as 1:12 of people over 21. These limitations did not concern the editor of the King’s County Chronicle when reporting on the first vote by secret ballot in the town in October 1872. Public halls were scarce at the time with no Oxmantown (1889) and the hotels with bars attached would be deemed unsuitable. Voting took place in the Printing house building behind Cumberland House and still in use for offices The Chronicle reported:
Frome nine to four o’clock yesterday the booth was open in Printing House Building [Birr], to allow the municipal electors to exercise their right to vote for seven candidates for the position of Town Commissioners in the room of an equal number who had retired by rotation. Six of the out-going men were in the field for re-election, the seventh, who has left the town, was supposed to be substituted by Mr. William Kingston [father of the county secretary from 1900 to 1921]; and beside these there were an independent footing as men who considered that it would be of advantage to the town if others had a voice in its management, on the turn-about principle. The candidates supposed to come up to these necessary requirements were – Messrs, Mark Quigley. Painter and decorator, Mr. Thomas Sheedy, Bakery Establishment and Mr. Richard Kelly, Hair Dresser and Performer [Kelly was a noted Fenian]. And it should be stated that their nominators have no cause to complain of them on the score of earnestness; as it was evident that when these three found themselves in the position of candidate they were sincerely active in showing that they were not insensible of the honour sought to be conferred upon them. There are altogether some 250 odd voters on the list, but as is the case in every place, a considerable proportion could not possibly give effect to their franchise. It was, however, matter for surprise that as many as 197 polled; especially as it was found on examining the remaining fifty names that it would have been like finding the Philosopher’s Stone to have found an unpolled competent voter at four o’clock.
As this was the first election, not only under the Ballot Act, but under the Town’s Improvement Act, it may be interesting to note that the first gentleman who voted yesterday was John Hackett, Esq, of Riverstown, and the last was Henry G. Curran, Esq., R.M. [the resident magistrate]. We are unable to state the place in the voting occupied by the Earl of Rosse [the fourth earl d. 1908]; but the fact that the noble Lord came to exercise his electoral rights demonstrates the deep interest which he feels for the town and its welfare. Sir Patrick O’Brien, M.P. [1823–95], one of the Parliamentary Representatives of the County, dropped in to look at the experiment, and seemed to look upon operation with no little interest; not that there was much to be seen deserving of any special remark.[2] Sitting on a dais was William O’Meara, Esq., J.P., Chairman of the Town Commissioners, the Registrar, with stamp in hand, impressing the printed voted papers. On his right was Mr. James Barlow, the Town Clerk, between them being a varnished box, which might be taken for an overgrown tea canister. Into a slit in this receptacle the voter dropped his voting paper folded, but ere he did so he had first to go behind a screen, a la Punch and Judy mode, and there make the sign of the cross with a pencil on the voting paper opposite the names of the favourite men, each voter having the right to vote for any number not exceeding seven.
There was not the shadow of excitement; but on the contrary the proceedings looked as tame as a tenant’s reception at a land agency office on rent day. Only one voter was permitted admission at a time, and if he dallied be ran the danger, no matter who he was, of being made aware that he was a trespasser. The Chairman was, to a great extent, spared the exercise of this unpleasant duty; but some of the candidates, who it seems were nettled themselves because some of their friends were asked to withdraw, made reprisals by giving the same sauce to the goose that was supposed to have been administered to their gander, and with the exception of some little episodes of this character all passed smoothly from beginning to end, and the Chairman at the close of the poll had the ballot box locked, and then affixed his seal to it om the presence of some of “the people’s candidates.”
At ten o’clock this morning, Mr. Sheedy, Mr. Quigley, Mr. R. Kelly, and Mr. Mathews and some others, met at the Town Hall premises [was this behind John’s Hall?] to witness the commencement of the scrutiny. Mr. Sheedy objected that some unqualified parties had voted yesterday, and he instanced Mr. R. Biggs, of the College, on the ground that Chesterfield School was outside the town [see our earlier blog on Biggs and Chesterfield School]. He also objected to the Rev. Mr. Tibbs on the ground that he paid no rates.
Mr. O’Meara produced Griffith’s map, which showed Mr. Biggs’s property as within the town boundary; and the Chairman said that the Rev. Mr. Tibbs paid the rates in the rent, and that the landlord paid the rates.
Mr. Dooly, rate collector, said that if Mr. Tibbs was disqualified on these grounds there were thirty others similarly circumstanced. Mr. Sheedy ultimately withdrew his objections.
The security occupied two hours under the superintendence of the Chairman, who announced the state of the poll at half-past twelve o’clock this afternoon as follows:-W. Kingston, 136; S. Mathews, 183; A. Kelly 123; W. Goodbody, 122; Dr Goldon, 119; M. Keane, 118; W. Boyne, 114; (all re-elected except the first, who is elected for the first time); T. Sheedy, 79; R. Kelly, 70, and M. Quigley, 62.
On the motion of Mr. Quigley, seconded by Mr. Sheedy, a vote of thanks was passed to Mr. O’Meara for his dignified and impartial conduct. The proceedings then terminated. We understand that ninety Protestant electors voted.
Captain T.A. Peirce, J.P.,[grandson of Thomas Acres of Acres Hall] presided as returning officer at the first election of Town Commissioners in Tullamore under the Ballot Act. The dignified conduct of this gallant by all interested in the issue. We have pleasure in stating that the differences between the master bakers and their men in this town [Birr] have been most satisfactorily arranged by the whole of the masters; and the men feel cordially grateful for the liberal concessions advanced to them by Mr. Goodbody, Mr. Haslam, and the other employers.[3]
In parliamentary elections in 1880 the Chronicle complained of the dullness of the elections since the Ballot Act. Shorn of the exciting days of treating the voters with largesse including whiskey and beer. This was particularly so in municipal elections but we need to study the sources for local evidence in Tullamore and Birr prior to 1872. The retrospective claim by C.S. Parnell as to the importance of the secret ballot in the development of the nationalist cause was convincingly knocked on the head by Michael Hurst in his 1965 article on the Ballot Act.[4]
[1] B.M Walker, Parliamentary election results in Ireland, 1801–1922, pp 222 and 288. See also K. Theodore Hoppen, Elections, politics and society in Ireland, 1832–1885 (Oxford, 1984), p. 73 citing Under-Secretary Bourke.
[2] Sir Patrick O’Brien held the seat for the Liberals and later Home Rule from 1852 to 1885.
[3] Kings County Chronicle, 23.10.1872.
[4] Michael Hurst, The Historical Journal, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1965), pp. 326-352 (27 pages) https://www.jstor.org/stable/3020430.
5 STV would be first used at the local level in Ireland during the 1919 Sligo by-election. The outcome of the election was celebrated and Irish Times wrote that it was “a thoroughly workable system” and it provided the “Magna Carta of political and municipal minorities”.
In 1920, it was used for local elections and enshrined in the Government of Ireland Act, although the House of Commons of Southern Ireland the act created was soon superseded by events in the War of Independence. STV was becoming an intrinsic part of Irish politics though.
Following independence, STV was adopted for Irish Free State elections in 1922 and its use was entrenched in the Irish Constitution, ratified by the people in a referendum on 1 July 1937. (See Peter Lake in a blog from the Electoral Reform Society in the UK.)
Supported by the Department of Culture Communications and Sport as part of the Commemorations Series.
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