Joseph MacBride
Irish politician

Joseph MacBride (1860 – 1 January 1938) was an Irish Sinn Féin and later Cumann na nGaedheal politician. He was a member of the Irish Volunteers. His brother Major John MacBride fought in the 1916 Easter Rising and was executed by the British authorities. Joseph was arrested after the Rising and interned in prison in England and Wales.
He was elected as a Sinn Féin MP for the Mayo West constituency at the 1918 general election. In January 1919, Sinn Féin MPs refused to recognise the Parliament of the United Kingdom and instead assembled at the Mansion House in Dublin as a revolutionary parliament called Dáil Éireann, though MacBride did not attend as he was in prison.
He was re-elected unopposed at the 1921 elections for the Mayo North and West constituency. He supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty and voted for it. He was again re-elected unopposed at the 1922 general election as a member of Pro-Treaty Sinn Féin. He joined Cumann na nGaedheal along with other pro-Treaty Sinn Féin TDs in 1923, and was elected at the 1923 general election for Mayo South.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Joseph MacBride” is irish politician. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Joseph, MacBride and Irish, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15616964. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1860, 1938, 1916 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joseph MacBride” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.