The Irish suffrage movement: how Irish women won the vote

Published 3 November 2026

The campaign for votes for women in Ireland ran from the 1870s to the 1920s. It produced moderate petitioners and militant window-smashers, and it overlapped, sometimes uneasily, with the struggles over Home Rule, unionism and independence.

The first societies

In 1872 Isabella Tod founded the North of Ireland Women's Suffrage Society in Belfast. In Dublin, the Quaker couple Anna and Thomas Haslam founded the Dublin Women's Suffrage Association in 1876. It later became the Irish Women's Suffrage and Local Government Association (IWSLGA). These early groups worked by petition, public meetings and lobbying of MPs, and campaigned on women's education and property rights as well as the vote.

Local government: the first breakthrough

The first concrete gains came in local government. The Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 allowed women who met the property qualifications to vote in local elections and to serve on rural and urban district councils and boards of guardians. A further Act in 1911 allowed women to sit on county and borough councils. A number of women were elected as poor law guardians and district councillors in the years that followed.

The Irish Women's Franchise League

A more militant phase began in November 1908 with the founding of the Irish Women's Franchise League (IWFL) by Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Margaret Cousins, with their husbands Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and James Cousins. The IWFL was explicitly Irish and independent of British suffrage organisations, and it argued that women should have the vote in any future Home Rule parliament. From 1912 it published a weekly paper, The Irish Citizen.

Other groups followed: the Irish Women's Suffrage Federation (1911), founded by Louie Bennett and Helen Chenevix to link societies across the country, and the Munster Women's Franchise League (1911). Suffrage societies also formed in towns across the country.

1912: Home Rule and militancy

The third Home Rule Bill, introduced in 1912, made no provision for votes for women, and the Irish Parliamentary Party under John Redmond opposed attempts to amend it. On 13 June 1912 members of the IWFL, including Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, broke windows at government buildings in Dublin, including Dublin Castle and the GPO, and were imprisoned. Several went on hunger strike.

In July 1912, during a visit by the Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, two English members of the Women's Social and Political Union, Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans, attempted to set fire to the Theatre Royal in Dublin, and a hatchet was thrown at the carriage in which Asquith and Redmond were travelling. The incidents provoked hostility towards suffragists in Dublin, and the IWFL, while defending the right to militancy, had not organised them.

Suffrage, nationalism and unionism

Irish suffragists disagreed about priorities. Some nationalist women, particularly in Inghinidhe na hÉireann and later Cumann na mBan, argued that independence should come first. Suffragists replied that a free Ireland that excluded women would not be free. In Ulster, suffrage campaigners faced a unionist leadership that was itself divided on the question, and the Women's Social and Political Union carried out a campaign of attacks on property there in 1913–14.

The First World War split the movement again, between those who supported the war effort and pacifists such as Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and Louie Bennett.

The vote at last: 1918 and 1922

The Representation of the People Act 1918 gave the parliamentary vote to women aged 30 and over who met property qualifications (or whose husbands did), while men could vote from 21. In the general election of December 1918, Constance Markievicz became the first woman elected to Westminster. Winifred Carney also stood, in Belfast, but was not elected.

Full equality came first in the south. The Constitution of the Irish Free State (1922) gave the vote to all citizens aged 21 and over, without distinction of sex. In Britain and Northern Ireland, women gained the parliamentary vote on equal terms with men in 1928.

Eva Gore-Booth

Eva Gore-Booth, Constance Markievicz's younger sister, was a poet and a leading figure in the suffrage and labour movements in Manchester, where she worked from 1897 with women textile workers and campaigned for working women's votes. She was a pacifist during the First World War and campaigned for clemency for her sister after 1916. Her work showed the links between the suffrage cause, trade unionism and Irish politics across the Irish Sea.

Key dates

Sources and further reading

• Rosemary Cullen Owens, Smashing Times: A History of the Irish Women's Suffrage Movement 1889–1922 (Attic Press, 1984).
• Louise Ryan and Margaret Ward (eds), Irish Women and the Vote: Becoming Citizens (Irish Academic Press, 2007).
• Dictionary of Irish Biography (Royal Irish Academy): entries on Anna Haslam, Isabella Tod, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Eva Gore-Booth.
• National Library of Ireland: Sheehy-Skeffington papers and suffrage collections.

More on Irish women's history

• Cumann na mBan: the Irish women's council, 1914–1923
• Women in the 1916 Rising
• Constance Markievicz (1868–1927)
• Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington (1877–1946)
• The marriage bar in Ireland
• Elizabeth O'Farrell and the surrender of 1916