page_title: All-for-Ireland League
section_title: League launched
hierarchical_section_title: All-for-Ireland League / League launched
caption_attribution_description: English: Announcement of the All-for-Ireland League Inaugural Meeting at the Cork City Hall on 31 March 1910.
context_page_description: The All-for-Ireland League was an Irish, Munster-based political party. Founded by William O'Brien MP, it generated a new national movement to achieve agreement between the different parties concerned on the historically difficult aim of Home Rule for the whole of Ireland. The AFIL established itself as a separate non-sectarian party in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, binding a group of independent nationalists MPs to pursue a broader concept of Irish nationalism, a consensus of political brotherhood and reconciliation among all Irishmen, primarily to win Unionist consent to an All-Ireland parliamentary settlement.
context_section_description: Regarding himself as having been driven from the party by Hibernian hooligans, O’Brien’s subsequent move was to officially constitute his new movement, the "All-for-Ireland League", its embryonic origins – the successful Land Conference of 1902, which he launched at a public rally in Kanturk in March 1909. It was immediately openly denounced by Redmond, and at an Irish party meeting held on 23 March, the party voted fifty to one that membership in the League was incompatible with party membership. O'Brien suffered a health breakdown in April, and retired from politics to Italy to recuperate. Control of the fledgling AFIL passed to a Provisional Committee led by D. D. Sheehan (MP) as Honorary Secretary, its foremost task to promote the League's principles and to hold O'Brien's seat in Cork at the inevitable by-election until his return.
  From Italy O'Brien looked to an alliance with Arthur Griffith's moderate Sinn Féin movement through emissaries James Brady (a Dublin solicitor), John Shawe-Taylor and Tim Healy. O'Brien offered funds for Sinn Féin candidates to run in Dublin and funds to run its paper Sinn Féin, in return for Sinn Féin support of his candidates in the south. A special Sinn Feín executive council meeting called 20 December 1909 seriously considered these overtures, many present in favour of co-operation. Sinn Féin's William Sears reported the end result: "Regret cannot cooperate because the Constitution will not allow us. Mr. Griffith was in favour of cooperation if possible". Nevertheless, in the following years O’Brien and his party continued to associate itself with Griffith's movement both in and out of Parliament. In June 1918, Griffith asked O’Brien to have the writ moved for his candidacy in the East Cavan by-election (moved by AFIL MP Eugene Crean) when Griffith was elected with a sizeable majority.
  O’Brien returned from Italy for the January 1910 elections, which was marked by considerable turbulences in the county Cork constituencies. His electoral success must have exceeded his expectations. Eleven Nationalists independent of the official party returned, seven of them his League's followers who won all their contests. It rejuvenated his project of the All-for-Ireland League, as well as a new newspaper The Cork Accent, alluding to events at the Baton Convention.
  He next framed the League’s programme containing several unique points:
  1) extension of the conciliatory spirit of the Land Conference to the larger problem of Irish self-government;
  2) distrust of the Irish Party’s alliance with the Liberals and specific opposition to Lloyd George's budget and Birrel's revision of the land settlement; and
  3) hostility to the Ancient Order of Hibernians.
  The League held its inaugural public meeting on 31 March 1910 in the City Hall, Cork. Its rules and constitution were formulated and endorsed at a public meeting on 12 April, where it announced its Home Rule manifesto and political policies to be:
  "the union and active co-operation in every department of our national life of all Irish men and women of all classes and creeds who believe in the principles of domestic self-government for Ireland.
  For the accomplishment of this object the surest means were to be a combination of all the elements of the Irish population in a spirit of mutual tolerance and patriotic goodwill, such as shall guarantee to the Protestant minority of our fellow-countrymen inviolable security for their rights and liberties, and win the friendship of the people of Great Britain without distinction of party."
caption: Announcement of the League's 
  Inaugural Meeting 31 March 1910
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