Michael O'Flanagan States in April 1925 to help Sinn Féin contest a number of by-elections. That summer he was suspended from clerical duties and forbidden to say mass because of his nationalist activities and anti-clerical speeches he had made in America. In March 1926, the Sinn Féin ard fheis narrowly defeated de Valera's proposal to enter the Free State Oireachtas if the Oath of Allegiance were removed. O'Flanagan sided with the majority. De Valera left to found Fianna Fáil, which eclipsed Sinn Féin at the June 1927 election. O'Flanagan remained with the reduced Sinn Féin. Bishop Coyne died in July 1926, but
Sinn Féin (newspaper) Sinn Féin (newspaper) Sinn Féin was a weekly Irish nationalist newspaper edited by the Dublin typesetter, journalist and political thinker Arthur Griffith. It was published by the Sinn Féin Printing & Publishing Company Ltd. (SFPP) between 1906 and 1914, and replaced an earlier newspaper called the "United Irishman" which was liquidated after a libel suit. The SFPP brought out the "Sinn Féin Daily" in 1909 but had to abandon it when it plunged the company into enormous debt. The "Sinn Féin" weekly and the SFPP both came to an end when they were suppressed by the British Government in 1914.