[3] In November 1908, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Margaret Cousins, along with their husbands Francis and James, founded the Irish Women's Franchise League.

Frank Sheehy-Skeffington managed to gain entrance and demanded votes for women before being thrown out, while Asquith's carriage was attacked by British suffragists Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans.

In March 1913 a bust of John Redmond in the Royal Hibernian Academy was defaced by a suffragist protesting against the failure of the Irish Parliamentary Party to support a Women's Franchise Bill in the House of Commons.

Refusing Christabel Pankhurst's directive in August 1914, disband and cease agitation for the duration of the war, militant members of the Women Social and Political Union in Belfast, Elizabeth McCracken and Margaret McCoubrey had looked to the League.

[8] But McCoubrey's efforts to established a branch of the League in Belfast were bedevilled by sectarian-political differences and, with "dreams of united womanhood", were abandoned in the spring of 1915.