Tom Kettle of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) countered that Bohemia had remained in the Austrian half of the post-1867 empire, and its delegates abandoned abstentionism in 1879.
[3] The Irish Confederation, which withdrew from the Repeal Association in 1847, resolved in favour of immediate abstention; however, its founder William Smith O'Brien continued to speak at Westminster.
[7] In 1869, G. H. Moore suggested nominating imprisoned republicans for election, knowing they were precluded as convicted felons from taking seats.
A motion to that effect was proposed by Charles Guilfoyle Doran and passed at the convention of the Home Rule League (HRL).
[10] In the 1874 election, 59 HRL MPs were returned, including John O'Connor Power in Mayo, who was a member of the IRB Supreme Council.
Arthur Griffith's "Sinn Féin Policy", formulated between 1905 and 1907, called for Irish MPs to abstain from Westminster and sit in a parallel parliament in Dublin.
[16] Abstentionism was opposed by most nationalists, especially after the January 1910 general election when the IPP held the balance of power at Westminster and secured passage of the Third Home Rule Bill from the Liberal government.
[17] The nationalist mood changed after the 1916 Rising, and the IPP itself withdrew from Westminster in April 1918, to protest against the extension of conscription to Ireland.
[22] Sinn Féin MPs elected to Westminster in November 1918 refused to take their seats there and instead constituted themselves in Dublin in January 1919 as the TDs (Teachtaí Dála) of the first Dáil, which was claimed to be the legitimate parliament of the Irish Republic.
[25] It decided to contest the Northern election for tactical reasons and the Southern one for consistency, with its returned MPs becoming the TDs of the Second Dáil.
[29] From 1955, Sinn Féin contested local elections in the Republic of Ireland and took its seats, arguing this did not amount to recognising the state.
[30] In 1970, at its Ard Fheis (annual conference), Sinn Féin split again on the issue of whether or not to reverse its long-standing policy of refusing to take seats in Dáil Éireann.
[31] Abstentionism at local elections was effectively prohibited by a 1934 law requiring candidates to take an oath to attend council sessions.
It originally intended to boycott the election to the 1982 Assembly, but adopted abstentionism to avoid giving a free run to Sinn Féin.
[38] Brian Feeney suggests that Sinn Féin's "active abstention", where those elected acted as local spokespeople in the media, was more effective than the SDLP's policy of sending its representatives instead to the New Ireland Forum in Dublin.
Since the establishment of the Northern Ireland Assembly under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, both the SDLP and Sinn Féin have taken their seats in that body.
[41] Fianna Fáil's sole Stormont election came in 1933, when its leader Éamon de Valera agreed to stand as an abstentionist for South Down, where he had been a Sinn Féin MP in the 1920s.
When Saoradh, a dissident republican party, was established in 2016, it had not decided whether to contest elections, but said it would in any case abstain from taking up any seats won in Stormont, Westminster or Leinster House.
[46] Defunct Some British political activists were themselves inspired by Sinn Féin's policy of abstentionism, one of which was the Glaswegian anarcho-communist Guy Aldred, who advised the Scottish socialist politician John Maclean to adopt the "Sinn Féin tactic" during the 1918 United Kingdom general election, citing a passage from The Civil War in France in which Karl Marx charged that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes".
[56] Aldred's election run was criticised by Pankhurst herself who, despite by this point having moved to a policy of electoral boycott, supported the candidacy of John MacLean's Scottish Workers' Republican Party.
[57] After World War II, Aldred once again ran for election on an abstentionist platform, this time for the seat of Glasgow Central as a member of the United Socialist Movement, netting only 300 votes.