Assessing early elections in new democratic states, Gary Reich has argued that such contests are not ‘anomalous’, as often thought, and that support for minor parties can often be quite durable. Instead, the more common pattern is that the victor in the first election loses support at following elections therefore ‘suggesting the need to pay greater attention to those forces that shape the initial configuration of party blocs’. Despite the IPP’s collapse in 1918, the remnants of its support was one of those building blocks of the Free State party system. Building on Reich's suggestion, the party groupings which emerged (and re-emerged) in the early years of independence comprised not just the pro- and anti-Treaty camps, but labour, farming and other sectional groups, as well as residual former Irish Party and unionist support, particularly strong in certain constituencies. The influence of the IPP helped to sustain and bolster parties as the primacy of agrarian representation developed under the Irish Party persisted in the Farmers’ Party; the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) built on the Irish Land and Labour Association in Munster, and Cumann na nGaedheal began to assimilate local (if not prominent national) home rule activists in the early 1920s. While the proportional representation by single transferable vote (PR-STV) system aided party fragmentation, the building blocks of the Irish Party structure were more than just a model for revolutionary Sinn Féin; they aided all parties in the Free State.

Former home rulers remained an important element of fragmentation which would be seen most clearly with the foundation of the National League party in 1926, discussed in Chapter 3. To understand that party’s emergence, however, we must look first to the foundation of the Free State. Captain William Archer Redmond's prominence in the Dáil offered evidence of persistent fascination with the old parliamentary tradition.