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2

THE LIMITS OF CONCILIATION

That policy of conciliation… meant that the people should enter into negotiations for the working of this [Land] Act… in a spirit of conciliation, and friendliness and compromise – in a word, having been whole-hearted in fighting, they should be equally whole-hearted in making peace.

– Redmond at Limerick, 15 Nov. 1903.

… the circumstances and actualities of the time in which Mr Redmond lives are so different from Parnell’s, as to afford no basis for any comparison at all… perhaps the greatest difference of all is to be found in the fact, that all Mr Redmond’s personal critics overlook, that Parnell’s party had not gone through the horrors of a split….

– Francis Cruise O’Brien in The Leader, 26 February, 1910.

I

While the Land Bill was in Parliament, Dillon, Davitt and the Freeman had restrained their opposition for fear of being held responsible for its defeat. In May, Dillon had shared his mixed feelings with his Mayo constituents:

Then in God’s name, I say, if they accept the conditions laid down by the Convention in Dublin, let us give them the twelve millions, and I won’t say our blessing (laughter) and let them go… One thing is quite certain: that Ireland can get along very well without them (applause)… the hereditary enemies and exterminators of our race.

The present juncture was merely a truce, and if it broke down the landlords would suffer more than the tenants: ‘Our arms are stacked and ready for use tomorrow, and the League is stronger today than ever it has been in its history….’1 It was an empty threat, given Dillon’s past refusals to join O’Brien in building the UIL and his recent concern to restrain its agitation in the face of Government coercion. Now, with the Land Act on the statute book, though not yet in operation, he returned to the theme. Choosing another town in his constituency on 25 August to launch what O’Brien would call ‘the Swinford Revolt’, he gave it a lukewarm welcome while criticizing Redmond and O’Brien by implication:

We… are asked to believe it is due to what the Methodists describe as a new birth or infusion of grace into the landlord party (laughter). I don’t believe a word of it… And while, for my part, I am in favour of giving the new Land Act a fair trial and seeing what can be got out of it, I am so far sceptical that I have no faith in the doctrine of conciliation. I am willing to accept conciliation when the Irish landlords cease to be landlords… When the landlords talk of conciliation what do they want? They want 25 years’ purchase for their land….2

He would base his criterion for the Act’s success on its weakest feature: ‘if [it] does not produce substantial results in a year or two in the way of resettlement of the west of Ireland, then I say [it] is a failure, and we must raise the banner again in the west (cheers).’3

As Philip Bull has argued, the rebellion was intended, not to help the tenants to negotiate more effectively, but to discredit the basis on which the Act had been won and to preserve the relevance of the methods of the past. To one convinced that agrarian discontent was indispensable to maintaining mass support for the Home Rule movement, the prospect of actually abolishing landlordism was deeply threatening.4 In the more affluent areas, it was already evident that some tenants, in their eagerness to purchase, would not be deflected by speeches or newspaper criticism. In September, the Duke of Leinster’s tenants in Kildare agreed on twenty-five years’ purchase of their (second-term) rents, an ‘improvident’ bargain in the Freeman’s eyes. Davitt was less restrained in calling them ‘buddochs’ – Gaelic for ‘louts’ – who had done lasting damage to the poorer tenants of the West.5

Redmond interrupted family life at Aughavanagh to preside at the UIL Directory meeting in Dublin on 8 September. It adopted resolutions drafted by O’Brien that welcomed the Land Act and the conciliatory spirit that underpinned it, thanked the Ulster tenants, the landlord leaders and Wyndham for their efforts and advanced practical advice to the tenants. Pressed by O’Brien to respond to the Swinford démarche, Redmond chose the Wicklow village of Aughrim as his venue on 13 September. Warning tenants against the two extremes of disbanding their organization or showing a ‘narrow, unreasonable or irreconcilable spirit’, he did not mention Dillon directly, but reminded them of Parnell’s dictum: ‘You must either fight for the land or pay for it’. The bonus had been denounced as a bribe: ‘Well, frankly it is a bribe; and for my part I am only sorry this bribe is not larger….’ Addressing the Freeman’s criticism that compared the new prices unfavourably to the accepted standard of ‘Ashbourne prices’, he asked why more tenants had not purchased in the past. The answer was that the landlords would not sell. If the old Acts had worked, there would be no need for this one. The tenants should act together without haste, take good legal advice, act ‘in a friendly and conciliatory spirit’ and not be deterred by the fact that the next generation would have to bear part of the costs. He had been profoundly impressed by the spirit displayed by Lord Dunraven’s friends during the Committee stage of the bill, in the spirit of ‘joining hands with the tenants’, which seemed to open up ‘infinite possibilities’:

I value this Land Bill not merely for itself… I value it because it opens the way to those other reforms I have spoken of, but, above all, because it opens the way to the obtaining of an Irish Parliament. The policy underlying this Land Bill is the reconciliation of classes in Ireland.6

O’Brien spoke in similar terms at Cork. The two speeches goaded Davitt into further censures. Writing in the Freeman, he deprecated ‘all the eloquence that has recently flowed from Aughrim to Cork’ and ‘the ridiculous over-praise’ of the Act. The landlords’ motives were purely mercenary, and he feared their taking advantage of unwisely generous advances made to them by former opponents without making any concessions of a national nature.7 The controversy between O’Brien and the Freeman over the Land Act erupted onto the paper’s editorial page in October, with letters and leading articles arguing the question of what reductions under the new Act would give the tenants the ‘fair equivalent’ of Ashbourne prices.8 The critics of the Act gained two new recruits in Bishop O’Donnell of Raphoe and the leader of the Belfast UIL organization, Joseph Devlin. The cleric lambasted the landlords as ‘blinded by gold-dust… intoxicated with greed’, while for Devlin the Directory resolutions were ‘a complete reversal of the policy of the past twenty years’ that threatened to split the League in Ulster.9

Dillon, as he had done at previous critical moments, absented himself from the 8 September meeting. He explained his action to Redmond on 23 September:

Having had no communication from you… I think I was justified in concluding that the resolutions to be proposed were felt by you and Mr O’Brien to be such as I couldn’t support. Under these circumstances I felt that the best thing I could do would be to remain away from the meeting. Now that I have had an opportunity of reading the resolutions I feel that I ought to let you know that some of them appear to me to be highly objectionable. I am sorry we had no opportunity of talking over the situation before the meeting was held.10

Redmond’s reply was defensive:

… these resolutions fully embodied my views of the necessities of the moment. I did not send them to you because I gathered a clear impression from your speech in Mayo that you would find it impossible to accept them and it seemed to me you would prefer to be clear of responsibility for them in any shape or form. If you still think I ought to have sent them to you I am very sorry I did not do so. I have done my best in more ways than one to prevent any open disagreement which would I think be fatal to the party and I hope the danger of this is past.11

Dillon was quick to exploit the admission on 2 October:

… in view of what has occurred and the reason given in your letter for not letting me see the resolutions, I must explain to you that the same political relations cannot exist between us in the future as those which existed up to December last… While I shall of course so long as I remain a member of the party abide by party discipline and accept the decision of the majority, I cannot now accept the same share of responsibility for the policy of the party....12

Alarmed at the reappearance of the spectre of disunity, Redmond felt:

… very much pained and very uneasy about the future after what you have written to me. My hope, however, is that no new causes of difference may arise so that by the time we have to face a General Election we may be pulling together as heartily as ever.13

Dillon, however, drove home his attack on 20 October with a second speech at Swinford, in which he stated his agreement with ‘nearly every word’ that had appeared in the Freeman editorial columns and alleged that landlords were looking for about ten years’ purchase more than they had previously sought. In another broadside at ‘conciliation’ landlords, including a personal slight on Talbot-Crosbie, he called for a return to ‘the old fighting policy’.14 ‘Dillon’s speech yesterday was terribly dull and long,’ wrote Redmond to O’Brien the next day. ‘It is his parting shot.’15

The breach between Dillon and O’Brien that had been maturing for several years was now complete. The latter was convinced that a full-scale revolt was under way against the new policy embodied in UIL and party decisions. For him, that policy had come to mean more than the transfer of land ownership in a friendly spirit; it involved a whole new approach to solving Ireland’s problems by seeking prior agreement between Irish interest groups before asking for British legislative intervention – what he would later term the policy of ‘Conference plus Business’. Already, Capt. Shawe-Taylor had come forward with a proposal for a new conference, this time with a view to reaching an agreement on the provision of a university acceptable to Catholics. On 24 September, invitations were sent to Archbishop Walsh and other Catholic bishops, Dillon, Lords Dunraven and Mayo and others to an October conference.16 Dillon had signalled to Redmond that such a course was anathema to him:

I, as you know, have all along been opposed to the policy of allowing the initiative on, and the direction of, large Irish questions to be taken out of the hands of the Irish Party and handed over to conferences summoned by outsiders….17

Throughout October, O’Brien tried to prevail upon Redmond to act quickly to face down the disrupters:

We are attacked and the only way of preventing further and more dangerous attack is to show that we will hit back. The Freeman’s pretext of dispute about a percentage is the merest sham. The question at stake is whether the whole policy of conciliation unanimously adopted by the Directory and by the country is to be assailed by a paper purporting to represent the party….18

Dread of a renewed split, however, remained uppermost in Redmond’s counter-argument; moreover, he felt that the campaign of Dillon, Davitt and the Freeman would have little effect on the working of the Act:

If the present difference as to the best price were to degenerate into an open and undisguised split with Dillon on the other side, the party would instantly be rent asunder and the movement in the country would once more be divided into two camps… The tenants are taking our advice and not theirs and I feel pretty sure sales will proceed as rapidly as the machinery will allow at moderately fair terms… if I come out and declare to the country that there is a conspiracy on foot to divide the country and disrupt the party, I have not a shadow of a doubt I would precipitate the very thing I wish to avoid.19

Buttressed by O’Brien alone among senior party colleagues, and facing the opposition of all the others, Redmond, as Paul Bew has noted, ‘refused all the options that would have brought on a critical test of strength’.20 Had he chosen to follow O’Brien’s advice, his position, already weakened by the clash with Dillon, would have been further undermined by a new development in his personal affairs. In March 1902, he had inherited a small estate in south Co. Wexford on the death of his uncle, former British Army Lieutenant-General John Patrick Redmond. The sale of this encumbered estate to the tenants was negotiated between September and December 1903. Redmond was naturally keen to avoid publicity until agreement on the terms; in the event of ‘a real difficulty’, as he told M.J. O’Connor, the solicitor acting for the tenants, he would sell directly to the estates commissioners.21 The terms of sale agreed for part of the estate – 23 years’ purchase of first-term rents and 24.5 of second-term rents – were published without comment in the Freeman on 19 October. Redmond explained to O’Brien that the terms were far better for the tenants than the bald figures indicated, the rents of the majority having been well below the average.22 In addition, arrears of almost £4,000 (more than two years’ net rental) were due on the estate at the time of Lieutenant-General Redmond’s death, which, to prevent the tenants being sued, Redmond had agreed to buy. ‘These arrears he has forgiven altogether now,’ M.J. O’Connor told the press, ‘and this is a very big item. It takes a heavy burden off the tenants, who are very grateful to Mr Redmond for his kindness in this matter.’ It was certain that no sale would have been possible under the old Land Acts: Ashbourne prices would not have paid off the debts as well as the other demands on the estate.23 Later negotiations resulted in even more favourable terms for the judicial tenants, and Redmond applied the revised terms to all the tenants. The final agreement showed forty-seven (non-judicial) tenants buying at 18.5 years’ purchase, thirty-nine first-term at 22.5 years’ purchase, and thirteen second-term at 23.75 years’ purchase.24

O’Brien would afterwards reproach Redmond for not having taken him into his confidence on the sale, though the two were ‘on the closest terms’. If consulted, he would have ‘implored him’ to defer the negotiations and newspaper publicity for some months until a more moderate price standard had been established.25 Redmond’s normally sound political judgment did not always extend, though, to financial matters, as his cavalier optimism in the face of the Independent’s difficulties in the 1890s had shown. There is no evidence that he anticipated negative political consequences from the sale. Yet, the price issue aside, the sudden appearance of the leader of nationalists and representative of the tenants at the Land Conference in the garb of what many perceived as the ‘hereditary enemy’ could not fail to harm his authority. Before the nuances of the sale could be explained, much damage had been done.

The unionist press used the published figures as justification for the prices being asked by the landlords. Redmond told O’Brien on 28 October: ‘I see that the landlords in some places are making capital out of the agreement to sell on the Wexford property, and I am thinking of publishing a short statement on the matter.’26 The Independent, which had kept a measured approach to the Land Act, now agreed with the Freeman that the net result of the ‘Dunraven treaty’ had been to inflate the price of land, and blamed the Redmond sale for setting the worst possible example. The paper that, less than two years previously, had extolled Redmond as having ‘the precise qualities that are required in a parliamentary leader’ now applied a derisive editorial wit that suggested the hand of Healy, imputing self-interest to his promotion of the Land Act:

… an estated man who keeps a firm grip on his rental, as his Wexford tenants know, and will not even set a good example to his fellow landlords by selling to them at ‘Ashbourne prices’… it is hardly wonderful that the delighted recipient should describe the Chief Secretary’s measure as the greatest ever passed for Ireland.27

The Freeman finally commented on 31 October, weakly defending the ‘very generous price’ as a ‘tribute for Mr Redmond’s protracted political service’.28 This was too much for Davitt, who, with righteous contempt for the laws of the market, took the paper to task:

This is turning the whole thing into a farce… I object to no testimonial to Mr Redmond as an Irish leader. I most emphatically do in his character as an Irish landlord in a form which would put just £20,000,000 of Irish taxpayers’ and tenants’ money into the pockets of the landlord class over and above what they are justly entitled to… No Wexford tenants, no Irish Leader’s agents, no National Directory resolutions, have authority or right or commission, from any source, to artificially raise the market price of Irish land…29

If, as O’Brien claimed, Redmond had difficulty in getting a hearing when he went to Killarney on 25 October to reply to Dillon’s second Swinford speech, the publicity generated by the sale was the reason. He referred again to the slowness of the Ashbourne Act, and defended the conciliation policy:

I favoured a fighting policy because I believed it was the best way of gaining our ends. When a fighting policy has succeeded, to say that we should go on fighting, instead of grounding – not throwing away, but grounding – our arms, in order to reap the benefit of our victory, seems to me an incomprehensible policy (cheers)... but by what is now derided as a policy of conciliation we can, under the Land Act, transform the whole face of Ireland….30

It was not enough for O’Brien, who told him that he had ‘lost a great opportunity’ in not condemning explicitly the spreading revolt:

But, of course, the mass of the people don’t understand the danger, and you alone, who represents as no other man can do the unity of the country, can give the people the necessary warning before it is too late….31

By 2 November, O’Brien had accepted that he could not persuade Redmond into battle. He warned him that he was ‘deliberating anxiously what to do’. Two days later, he dropped his bombshell. The situation had become untenable for him. Unable to take action against the ‘wreckers’ without Redmond’s lead, he would announce his withdrawal from public life and the cessation of his paper, the Irish People. He expected his disappearance to ‘silence all the evil elements’.32 In a public letter that mystified the nation on 6 November, he justified his withdrawal as allowing the critics to put their alternative policy before the country, avoiding a return to the horrors of conflict with old colleagues. However, his accompanying indictment of the critics’ disloyalty to party policy, had Redmond endorsed it at this point, would have left a weakened leader to defend the conciliation policy alone, bereft of newspaper support and facing a likely challenge to his leadership.33

Redmond’s reply to O’Brien on 9 November registered his shock. He was ‘disheartened and depressed’, and could not see his way clearly at all, but hoped that O’Brien would listen to the ‘unanimous voice of the country’.34 Writing to Dillon, he pointed already in the only direction he could move. Fearing that O’Brien’s resignation would have ‘very serious consequences in the country’, and urging that meetings of the party and the Directory be held to appeal to him to reconsider, he had yet:

… no belief that such a resolution would have any influence with O’Brien. I am not thinking of that, but of the steadying effect upon the mind of the country of such a meeting and the proof it would afford of our continued solidarity.35

Dillon was against any meetings until they could be sure that no general discussion, and no resolution denouncing the Freeman, would be raised.36 These assurances Redmond was ready to give. By the time he spoke at a Limerick UIL public meeting on 15 November, he had recovered his nerve somewhat and was ready to adjust his rhetoric to the new realities. O’Brien’s contribution had been indispensable; the Land Act was ‘the outcome of his genius and his labours’. No man living deplored his retirement more than he, Redmond, did. He fully adhered to the conciliation policy, both in its narrow application to the land question and in its broader meaning as ‘the union of all classes in Ireland that Thomas Davis once dreamt of… as would make Home Rule inevitable’. However, he affected to see:

… no indication whatever that there is any rejection or repudiation of such a policy by the people as would render necessary or desirable the resignation of Mr O’Brien… [but] indications in many parts of Ireland that the irreconcilable section of Irish landlords have once more got the upper hand.

They must ‘steady their ranks’, he said, and allow nothing, not even the great blow of O’Brien’s departure, to disrupt the movement. He begged all representatives of the people ‘to abstain from any bitter language of attack or denunciation’. In O’Brien’s view, this meeting, which had threatened to end Redmond’s career, turned out to be its salvation.37

Thus was public debate on O’Brien’s resignation stifled in the interests of unity. The dissidents could not prevent tenants striking bargains with landlords, but were left free to ensure that the Land Act yielded no nation-building political dividend. If O’Brien thought that his withdrawal would galvanize public opinion against the dissidents, he was wrong.38 While resolutions poured in expressing regret (and puzzlement) at the move, they were couched in personal rather than ideological terms. Behind closed doors, acrimony raged. Laurence Ginnell, a Dillonite official at the UIL head office, complained to Redmond that ‘people who come to the office to seek grave advice are edified by hearing the “Gen. Sec.” [John O’Donnell MP, an O’Brien protégé] swear by God if he had a hold of Tom Sexton the Bastard he would wring the said Bastard’s head off.’39

Ginnell claimed that most branches did not support the Directory’s ‘long and degrading set of resolutions’ of 8 September, and also alleged that it was doing nothing at all to advise tenants. ‘The organization is being strangled,’ he wrote, ‘and it is entitled to expect that you will not lead it to extinction knowingly.’40 From the other side, Lord Dunraven was ‘much distressed and perturbed’ at O’Brien’s resignation. The great majority of the people were in favour of the general conciliation policy based on ‘a fair and businesslike settlement’ of the land question:

It is cruel to Ireland and heart-breaking to me to think that all the infinite possibilities of expansion in every direction, social, industrial, political, should be thus recklessly chucked away. If discord is to prevail[,] never again need Ireland appeal to Parliament for anything and Mr Wyndham’s hands will be paralysed in dealing with the evicted tenants, the congested districts and the labourers [that is, the promised follow-on legislation after the Land Act].41

Redmond had made his choice, but was left temporarily disoriented. T.P. O’Connor, who had urged his friend Dillon to avoid a split with Redmond, painted a picture of demoralization in December: ‘In the House we are practically left to Redmond and myself; Redmond short-sighted and living from hand to mouth politically….’42

II

The charge of political cowardice in his handling of the conciliation dispute has been levelled at Redmond down the years by contemporaries and others, beginning with O’Brien himself, who wrote in 1910:

He developed now for the first time a perverse habit, which was to be his invariable rule of conduct in the five following years. It was to exploit the wholesome popular horror of a split in order not to disarm those who were violating every law of discipline and party loyalty to create a split, but in order to… purchase a nominal unity, at the expense of all that made unity worth having.43

For Healy, Redmond was now the cat’s-paw of Dillon rather than of O’Brien, and had sacrificed all independence of judgment. He wrote to his brother Maurice in 1905: ‘Redmond is a poor creature; Dillon an ass….’ At an election meeting, he charged that Redmond ‘could not call his soul his own’.44 Philip Bull has written that Redmond, in opting for Dillon over O’Brien, ‘followed where he should have led, and demonstrated a fatal predisposition to be over-dependent on others’. Other scholars have been kinder. For Lyons, O’Brien’s attitude reflected an intolerant disposition of mind, and Redmond’s refusal to comply with his wishes was rooted in a rational calculation of the powerful weight of opinion represented by Dillon, Davitt and Sexton. Maume points out the real potential for a new nationwide split, given Dillon’s financial independence as well as his support-base in Devlin’s Belfast machine and in O’Connor’s UIL British organization.45 In short, Redmond followed where he could not lead; any other course meant political suicide.

That still leaves the question of whether Redmond should not have resigned on principle, having found the majority of his colleagues to be out of sympathy with his views. The answer is that Redmond’s decision was grounded, not only in a realistic assessment of the dangers of a new split, but also on a different understanding of the conciliation policy than that of O’Brien. In his previous excursions into co-operation with Irish unionists, on the 1895 Recess Committee and in the 1898–99 period, he had cast it pragmatically as one of several alternative paths, albeit his ideal one, to Home Rule.46 He was aware, however, of its minority appeal among both nationalist and unionist electors. As Maume points out, the Dunravenite landlords were ‘untypical of their caste’ in seeking to come to terms with nationalism.47 Despite the tenants’ eagerness to purchase, nationalist Ireland as a whole was not yet ready to embrace the landlords with affection. Above all, conciliationism never presented itself to Redmond as displacing the vital role of the party in winning self-government. O’Brien, on the other hand, whose disgust at the Parnell split had prompted him to found a new agrarian movement to bypass existing party politicians, now proposed to bypass the party once again, this time emotionally embracing, with all the zeal of the convert, the panacea of conciliation for all Irish problems. Underlying such contrasting views was a radical difference in personalities. Redmond’s cool-headed realism instinctively resisted being swept along by a temperament he had called in 1894 ‘hysterical and treacherous’, and in 1901 ‘one of those highly strung natures who find it difficult to go through the rough and tumble of political work’.48

At a London banquet in honour of Blake in July 1904, Redmond made it clear that if the party majority view did not conform to his own, then, to preserve the party intact as the instrument of reaching the ultimate goal, he was willing to conform to it:

I laid before me two ideals when I took the position of Chairman of the party. The first… was to do what one man could do to obliterate the marks of the struggle that had passed, and to show that at any rate I did not harbour in my mind one bitter thought of that struggle. The other ideal… [was] to make sure that in everything I said and did I represented the genuine sentiments of the majority of this party (hear, hear)….49

What, though, of the wider implications of the swift abandonment of the conciliation policy? For Lyons, it seemed an ungracious and grudging response to ten years of constructive unionism that had changed the face of Ireland; ‘the hand of friendship was not grasped’ and the party made to appear insatiable and untrustworthy. Yet, although conciliation was a ‘noble conception’ that sprang from O’Brien’s imagination, it risked slowing down the movement for self-government ‘by co-operation with those who, by definition, were pledged to the maintenance of the Union’.50 Bull has argued that the party’s turnabout marked its failure to adjust to the new realities created by the Land Act, notably the need to broaden its support-base beyond the interests of Catholic tenant farmers. He pushes the argument further in lamenting the historic opportunity thus lost: the closing of the door on dialogue with Protestants and unionists led to a ‘dichotomy of Home Rule and Union’ that was fatal to the party’s chances of establishing ‘a national consensus’ beyond ‘class and sectional interests’. He even blames this dichotomy for the ultimate refusal by Ulster unionists to accept Home Rule, and the consequent demise of the party.51 In a scrupulous effort to be fair to all sides, Alvin Jackson concedes the grounds for Dillon’s scepticism of conciliation in the intransigence of majority landlord opinion, the massive debt burden saddled on the tenants by the Land Act and the impossibility of making a conciliation policy acceptable to Irish-American opinion, yet concludes that Dillon’s ‘highly conspiratorial, not to say paranoid, disposition’ blinded him to the potential of conciliation to divide landlord and southern unionist opinion to the advantage of nationalism.52

Dillon’s assumption (apparently shared by Bull) was that land purchase would take the impetus out of the Home Rule movement, but neither the nationalist desire for self-government nor unionist resistance to it were about to be conciliated out of existence by co-operation to bring about agreed reforms in land and housing. This applies above all to Ulster. If ‘evolving political and social realities’ encouraged thinly scattered southern unionists to consider how to come to terms with the nationalist majority in a self-governing Ireland, they had the opposite effect on the self-confident northern Protestant community, making it ever more determined not to be brought under nationalist rule. The abandonment of conciliation was a result, not the cause, of the Home Rule–Union dichotomy.

Redmond would never jettison conciliationist sentiments from his rhetoric. These were accepted among a plurality of views in a party united on the essentials. Dillon’s response, however, was often to treat him as a political innocent in constant danger of backsliding. Lyons described the ‘peculiar fascination and flavour’ of the frank yet stiffly formal letters between them, but did not capture the tone of their exchanges of 1904, 1905 and 1907 about possible reconciliations with O’Brien: an emollient Redmond always ready for another meeting to patch things up, a suspicious Dillon chivvying him about another O’Brien subterfuge potentially fatal to the party.53 Only after 1910, when Home Rule became a real prospect and Redmond could concentrate on the issue most congenial to him, did Dillon trust him enough to address him as an equal on all matters. Even then, conciliationism would lie submerged as the bedrock of Redmond’s thinking, to reveal itself again at times of crisis and guide some of the key decisions of his later career.

III

The parliamentary consequences of Redmond’s opting for Dillon over O’Brien meant the abandonment of co-operation with a sympathetic Chief Secretary in legislating for Ireland according to ideas of Irish origin, and a return to the pre-1903 confrontational mode. From the start of the 1904 session, it was obvious that ‘Conference’ was out and wearisome oppositionism back. The anti-conciliationists rewarded Redmond’s capitulation. Just before he left in January for five months in Sicily on medical orders, Dillon told him that it was a consolation to know that the party entered the session thoroughly united.54 Davitt was quoted as telling O’Callaghan in New York that the party was being ‘very capably led by John Redmond’, that Dillon and Redmond were ‘in accord on everything’ and that ‘Redmond has no stauncher friends than John Dillon and Michael Davitt’.55

A new combativeness in a speech delivered by Redmond in Co. Sligo just before Christmas 1903 had set the tone. His target was the Dublin Castle law officers, whom he blamed for their restricted interpretation of the powers of the estates commissioners to acquire land in the congested districts, ‘a shameless and criminal violation’ of pledges given by Wyndham. If this prevailed, he argued, then there must be an immediate Amending Act, and tenants in those areas should refuse all negotiation with landlords.56 The National Directory’s resolutions of 4 January 1904 reflected the new power balance: one condemned the majority of landlords for asking far in excess of just prices, an action that had ‘obstructed the smooth and peaceful working of the Land Act and created a situation of the greatest gravity’.

To his Waterford constituents in January, and in his speech on the Address the following month, Redmond set out his party’s conditions for future support of the Government. As well as the measures outlined in the King’s Speech promising a Labourers Bill and a bill for the Housing of the Working Classes, he wanted action on the university question and a fulfilment of Wyndham’s promise to amend the Land Act. There was no allusion to Shawe-Taylor’s proposal to settle the university issue by conference, but a demand to know the reason for the delay in legislating on it, since the Prime Minister, Chief Secretary, Lord Lieutenant and most of the Cabinet were known to favour it. Acknowledging the Land Act as ‘a great measure’, he left it to other party MPs to demand that landlords be prevented from asking ‘unreasonable’ prices – something Dillon had told him was an ‘absolute necessity’. One such amendment echoed the Freeman’s unrelenting campaign for the abolition of the ‘zones’ as the prime cause of land price inflation. With all this said, his overall message for British politicians of all parties was that no mere reforms could sap the desire for self-government:

If your Government in Ireland were as good as it is notoriously and admittedly bad, we would still be Home Rulers… we say without the slightest hesitation that Ireland would prefer to be governed even badly by her own Parliament than to be governed well by the Parliament of any other nation in the world.57

Wyndham introduced his bill to amend the Land Act on 9 March. Falling far short of what was necessary, it focused solely on the bonus and was soon christened ‘the Landlords’ Bonus Bill’ by the Freeman. Redmond gave notice in May that it was unacceptable if it left the other defects in place.58 Wyndham, however, refused all such changes, and the bill passed all stages in July against Irish party opposition. Redmond’s speech on the Second Reading on 8 July notably failed to mention the zones, despite the daily controversy on the issue raging in the Freeman between Sexton’s editorials and Lord Dunraven. Instead, his focus was on the west: the absence of compulsory acquisition powers for the Congested Districts Board to break up the grass ranches and the failure to provide for re-settling the evicted tenants.59 The National Directory, which only a year previously had hailed the coming Land Act, now branded it a failure due to the ‘effect of the zone system in setting up a false standard of prices in the minds of the Irish landlords’.60 This was despite figures released in August for recent deals in eight counties that showed prices averaging about 20 years’ purchase (and reaching as low as 14.75) of first-term rents, proving, on the Freeman’s own admission, that tenants were making bargains outside the zones as the Act allowed. The paper’s campaign, as Redmond had predicted, was clearly failing to obstruct the Act’s working.61

Throughout the 1904 session, the fall of the Government was widely predicted. The report of the Royal Commission on the South African war had damaged its prestige, while Joseph Chamberlain and others had left the Cabinet over the issue of tariff reform in September 1903. Redmond, having forced Wyndham to admit the abandonment of a University Bill, watched for an opportunity to defeat the Government.62 On 15 March, Irish MPs helped to defeat it by eleven votes in a snap division on a motion on the National Board of Education. At the St Patrick’s Day banquet in London, Redmond spoke of the Government majority of 150 melting away. Over succeeding days, he set out priorities for the next election. They had no obligation to help the Liberals to power in place of the present ‘shattered and discredited’ Unionist Government; a Rosebery-type Liberal administration, wedded to the ‘predominant partner’ idea, would never get Irish votes. His party’s terms for supporting a Liberal administration were firstly that its policy for Ireland must be for Home Rule with no shelving of the question, and secondly that the religious interests of the Irish Catholic people in Great Britain must be safeguarded.63

A revolt by Ulster Unionist MPs further weakened the Government. Ostensibly centred on local issues, behind it lay distrust of the Government, especially of Wyndham and his Catholic Under-Secretary, who had played such an important role in drawing up the terms of the Land Act, regarding their presumed intention to legislate for a Catholic university and suspected general lack of sympathy for Protestant interests. The annual meeting of the Irish Unionist Alliance held on 14 April favoured the reduction of the Irish representation at Westminster. On 12 May, in the first sign that Unionists of that province were seeking a separate political voice, the Ulster Unionist MPs held a meeting at the House of Commons and registered their dissatisfaction with the Government.64

The Labourers Bill, also introduced on 9 March, was a disappointment to all the Irish representatives, who criticized it severely for its insufficient provision of finance to allow for the building of the required cottages. During its Second Reading on 24 June, Redmond and the Unionist leader, Col. Saunderson, united in condemnation of Wyndham’s breaking of pledges.65 The latter was intensely embarrassed but helpless; the inadequacies of the bill signalled, as Gailey notes, the Cabinet’s response to the end of the conciliation policy.66 The Irish Party MP for mid-Cork, D.D. Sheehan, whose Land and Labour Association had campaigned on behalf of the labourers since 1894, and had over 100 branches in the Munster area that would later form a political base for O’Brien, in a survey of the question both comprehensive and impassioned, complained of the red tape that slowed the building process.67 Hoping to salvage something from the bill, Wyndham sent it to Grand Committee. He could not, however, accept a proposal to extend finance on Land Act lines for the building of cottages, and proposed a scheme of his own, which was described by Redmond as being ‘of a most ridiculous and trifling character’. Although Nationalists and Unionists supported an attempt to amend it, Wyndham withdrew the bill on 27 July, to vigorous protest from Redmond and others.68

The session ended, Redmond cut short the pleasures of Aughavanagh in August to cross the Atlantic for the second Convention of the UIL of America, this time held in New York City, and to speak in other eastern and mid-western cities. The stated purpose was to raise $50,000 (£10,000) to fight the coming General Election. Accompanying him were three MPs including Pat O’Brien, along with Amy, twenty-year-old Esther and seventeen-year-old Johanna. Interviewed on arrival, he could speak freely about the Land Act, which was ‘working splendidly’, and prophesized that within fifteen years, ‘the whole of the land of Ireland will have become the property of the people.’69 A Chicago reporter’s pen-picture caught the changes in his physical appearance since the 1890s, wrought by the sedentary life of the House of Commons:

He went late to bed and he arose early, and his program was one of work, work, work, every waking minute… a determined man… from the tips of his square-toed boots to the top of his rapidly thinning iron-grey hair. He is heavy, double-chinned and stocky, but moves with the activity and sprightliness of a girl of sixteen. He is a man in whom well-developed and excellently preserved physical conditions are evident.

As had become his habit in North America, he tailored his oratory to suit local audiences. To his Convention audience, from whom he received pledges of the required sum, he held out for Ireland an ‘absolutely separate existence as a nation’ – an objective as feasible ‘as for Switzerland or any other nation of small dimensions’. A Toronto audience, on the other hand, ‘saw no turbulent Hibernian ranting of his country’s wrongs, but a somewhat fat man in evening dress, who talked of great things accomplished, who brought a message of hope and who took away $1,200.’ At the farewell meeting at Philadelphia on 3 October, by which time a possible initiative on devolution was in the air in Ireland, Redmond seemed to position himself for a pragmatic response:

I do not tell you that we will get everything that we, in our youth, dreamed of as an ideal of a free Ireland… Do not be guilty of the folly of saying that if we can’t get what we want we will take nothing. Keep the flag high, let our ideal of Irish freedom be that ideal we learned at our mothers’ knees; our ideal of patriotism that of the Emmets and the Tones… But let us be practical men, and take and hold every inch that we advance toward the citadel. My policy is: take what you can get, and then we will use it to get more….70

He had gone to America reluctantly, partly because of the arduous work involved and partly because he felt that ‘Irish politics for the moment have got into a position of delicacy and some danger’.71 The revival of O’Brien’s campaign was no doubt in his mind, but further delicacy was added when, on 31 August, a manifesto was published by the group of progressive landlords who had been active in the Land Conference. Led by Lord Dunraven, and with Col. Hutcheson-Poë as its secretary, the group styled itself the Irish Reform Association. Its manifesto declared that:

… while firmly maintaining that the parliamentary union between Great Britain and Ireland is essential to the political stability of the Empire and to the prosperity of the two islands, we believe that such union is compatible with the devolution to Ireland of a larger measure of local government than she now possesses.72

In New York, Redmond had had harsh words for his old colleague on the Recess Committee, Sir Horace Plunkett, whose views were close to the devolutionist unionism of the Dunraven group. Plunkett’s book, Ireland in the New Century, published in March, had been the target of fierce criticism in the nationalist press for its assertion that ‘defects of character’ and excessive deference to the Catholic clergy were underlying causes of Irish backwardness in agriculture and industry. Until Home Rule existed, said Redmond, Plunkett’s proposals for industrial revival were ‘simply quackery’ and were, in fact, ‘being worked against us very cleverly… This is nothing more or less than an insidious effort to undermine the Home Rule movement….’ When asked in the US for his views of the Reform Association manifesto, however, his reflex conciliationism was instantly in play:

The announcement is of the utmost importance. It is simply a declaration for Home Rule and is quite a wonderful thing. With these men with us, Home Rule may come at any moment.73

By the time he spoke in Montreal a month later, the Reform Association had produced a detailed statement of their devolution scheme, and his response was more measured:

And the first plank in the platform of this association is the concession of a large measure of self-government for Ireland. I am free to confess that their ideas of a large measure of self-government are very meagre and unsatisfactory. But… that marks an enormous advance for our cause.

The devolution plan embraced four main proposals. A financial council would be established to take over control of purely Irish expenditure, though not of revenue-raising. The council would consist of twelve elected and twelve nominated members, presided over by the Lord Lieutenant; its function would be to submit the annual Irish estimates to Parliament, and its decisions would be reversible by the House of Commons by a three-quarters majority. Various ways to give the council the necessary revenue were proposed. Lastly, a second council comprising all Irish MPs, representative peers and members of the financial council was to be set up with the power to promote bills for purely Irish purposes.74 The Freeman responded sceptically, claiming that the prices asked by the Reform Association leaders for their lands threw doubt on the genuineness of their professions. Davitt called the plan a ‘wooden-horse stratagem’ to divide Nationalist ranks, and declared that ‘no party or leader can consent to accept the Dunraven substitute without betraying a national trust’. Dillon similarly dismissed it at Sligo on 2 October.75

IV

The Reform Association suggestions were the outcome of discussions between Lord Dunraven and Under-Secretary Sir Antony MacDonnell, in which Wyndham had also at times been involved, on ways to improve the management of Irish affairs and relieve the logjam in parliamentary business. On 10 September, Sir Antony had written to Wyndham, who was on holiday recovering from exhaustion, informing him of this co-operation. Receiving no reply, he assumed Wyndham’s approval. Two weeks later, he helped Dunraven to draft the detailed second statement, issued on 26 September. It emerged afterwards, however, that although Wyndham had received the first letter, he had failed to grasp its significance, and had not only mislaid it but had forgotten ever having received it. Immediately on publication of the second statement, Wyndham, just returned from holiday, wrote to the London Times unreservedly repudiating the scheme as contrary to Unionist principles. The paper published this letter with an editorial denouncing the scheme as the outcome of machinations of ‘an influential clique in Dublin Castle of which Sir Antony MacDonnell is regarded by numbers of Irish Unionists as the head’. Aware for the first time of his superior’s disapproval, MacDonnell wrote to Dunraven telling him that he could no longer work with the Reform Association. Simultaneously, a storm of protest erupted from the Irish Unionists, all too ready to detect a plot to introduce Home Rule by stealth.76

Wyndham declared at Dover in November, in reference to the Dunraven plan, ‘I have blown out that candle, so that no encouraging ray from it would ever be shed upon the prospects of Home Rule.’ The facts of MacDonnell’s involvement in the scheme did not become publicly known until the following February, but unionists, especially the Ulster members, were already suspicious, and began in October to demand his removal from office. Two Ulster MPs, William Moore and Charles Craig, set about galvanizing opinion in the province for political action. For the first time, a separate Ulster strand was seeking representation within the broader Unionist coalition, a process that would result in the formation of the Ulster Unionist Council in March 1905. The first item on the agenda of the new movement was to get to the root of the suspected links between the devolution plan and the Irish administration.77

In December 1904, the Cabinet passed a ‘measured censure’ on Sir Antony MacDonnell, expressing disapproval of his involvement in the devolution scheme while stopping short of accusing him of disloyalty. In February, MacDonnell and Wyndham privately discussed how the episode should be defended in Parliament. MacDonnell insisted that he should not have to resign, saying that he had concealed nothing and, under the terms of his appointment, had felt justified in helping Lord Dunraven. Wyndham conceded these points.78 At the debate on the Address at the opening of the 1905 session in February, Charles Craig put a list of searching questions to the Chief Secretary covering all aspects of his and MacDonnell’s involvement in the devolution plan. Wyndham replied that MacDonnell had acted erroneously but honestly, that he himself had first learned of the proposals in The Times on 26 September and, knowing nothing of MacDonnell’s involvement, had written immediately to condemn them. In the House of Lords on 17 February, Lord Dunraven gave an account of his role in the affair, stressing that the ideas had been long in gestation and that MacDonnell’s aid had come only in September, after the first manifesto. However, Lord Lansdowne disclosed that the terms of MacDonnell’s appointment in October 1902 were understood to mean that he would have ‘greater opportunities for initiative than he would have expected had he been a candidate in the ordinary course’. This revelation increased Ulster Unionist anger, seeming to them to widen the scope of the plot and to cast suspicion on Wyndham.79

Redmond moved his amendment to the Address on 20 February stating, as in the previous year, that ‘the present system of government in Ireland is in opposition to the will of the Irish people’.80 The Ulster Unionist members, from their opposite standpoint, spoke in support of the amendment. Wyndham repeated his defence of his actions, but could only account for the clash between his own and MacDonnell’s versions of events by explaining that:

Sir Antony MacDonnell who, as I now know, was taking a great interest in the Irish Reform Association and was intent upon this matter, which was not present to my mind, wrote me a letter saying that he was helping Lord Dunraven in respect of Irish finance. I wish I had that letter. If I had that letter the last cloud of suspicion would be dispersed; but I do not remember getting that letter.81

The Government won the vote, but with the support of only six Irish Unionists.82 For the Nationalists, the opportunity to inflict further damage on the Government was irresistible. The principal issue had now become the terms of MacDonnell’s appointment. During the debate, Dillon and Campbell Bannerman demanded the release of all the correspondence related to this. On 22 February, Redmond moved a motion for adjournment in which he exploited the contradictions in the statements of the Government spokesmen. When the correspondence was read, it confirmed Lansdowne’s revelation. He had written to Wyndham that he was ‘an Irishman, a Roman Catholic, and a Liberal in politics’ with ‘strong Irish sympathies’. Apart from control of law and order, land and university reform and the co-ordination of boards, he had made it a condition of his appointment that, subject to Wyndham’s control, he should have ‘freedom of action in executive matters’. Asked by Redmond why, if the two men had agreed on these terms, he had called Sir Antony’s conduct ‘indefensible’, Wyndham replied that the words ‘co-ordination of boards’ had never suggested to him either an elective financial council or a board with legislative powers. As to why he had not acted a month earlier to correct MacDonnell’s honest mistake, he answered that the first document, the manifesto of 31 August, had made no impression on his mind. To explain that, he could only come back to the missing letter.83

The Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, endorsed Wyndham’s interpretation of the terms and justified the censure passed on MacDonnell.84 The damage done to the Government, however, made the hapless Wyndham’s position untenable. Dillon counselled Redmond to ‘sit tight’ and leave all the fighting to the ‘Orangemen’: the more they embarrassed the Government, the better.85 On 6 March 1905, Balfour announced the Chief Secretary’s resignation. In his statement of explanation, delayed for two months because of ill-health, Wyndham admitted that it was inevitable that the misunderstanding should give rise to misconceptions about his aims, ending his power to do useful work in Ireland.86

Redmond propagated the nationalist view of Wyndham as a closet devolutionist brought down by die-hard Ascendancy reactionaries and Orangemen, the real governors of Ireland. While personally sorry for Wyndham’s fate, he viewed the real offence, for which he had properly had to resign, as his failure of nerve in capitulating to ‘that little, intolerant faction of anti-Irishmen’ and joining unworthily in the censure of Sir Antony for pursuing a line of policy of which he fundamentally approved.87 This betrayal of the Under-Secretary, together with the broken promises on the university question and the Labourers Bill, and the issuing of the secret regulations on the operation of the Land Act, were more than adequate reasons for the party’s present policy of driving the Government from office, he told a banquet in his honour in Dublin later that year.88 As for the devolution advocates, he told a Liverpool audience:

… the chief fault I have with Lord Dunraven as a tactician is that from his point of view he tried to go a trifle too fast; but there is no cause for disappointment to us in all that has happened. On the contrary, [it] is, to my mind, an enormous gain and advantage for the cause (hear, hear)… those [Devolution] proposals mean a frank and public confession of the absolute breakdown of Castle government in Ireland (applause)….89

Irish Unionists, on the other hand, were incensed by MacDonnell’s continued presence at Dublin Castle. The new Chief Secretary, Walter Long, was surprised at the bitterness of feeling he encountered among Dublin loyalists. A Dublin Orangemen’s meeting in May, called to demand MacDonnell’s dismissal, ejected Capt. Shawe-Taylor amid ‘stormy scenes’. Meanwhile, the Ulster Unionist MPs withheld support from the Government as long as MacDonnell continued in office, reducing its already fragile majorities. Long, however, defused their anger on 6 April 1905 when he announced that MacDonnell now held his office in the same way as other heads of departments.90

Already weakened by these developments, the Government suffered its worst defeat yet at the polls in April, when the Liberals overturned a huge Tory majority at Brighton.91 In late June, Balfour’s introduction of a drastic ‘redistribution’ motion, to reduce the Irish representation at Westminster (by a quarter) for the first time since the Act of Union, caused Redmond to put the Irish Party on guard. His mastery of the rules of procedure won him a ruling from the Speaker that forced Balfour to abandon his motion.92 Similarly, sustained alertness to possibilities of defeating the Government bore fruit on 20 July in a vote on the Land Act. Balfour went to the King, but told him that ministers still had sufficient ‘dignity’ to carry on the Government. It was not yet the end of the ten-year Tory–Liberal Unionist coalition, but the Freeman’s London correspondent wrote of the ‘tremendous triumph’ for the Nationalists:

To have destroyed the Redistribution proposals and defeated the Government in the same week is a record of which Mr Redmond and the party have the best reason to be proud.93

Hard work and parliamentary sureness of touch had rescued Redmond’s leadership from the damage of late 1903. Secure in the unloving embrace of the Dillonite majority, he received the Freeman’s seal of approval when, on medical advice, he took advantage of the Easter recess to spend almost a month in Italy with Amy.

Mr Redmond affords a high example… by the assiduity and devotion with which he attends to his parliamentary and general public duties. While the House of Commons is sitting, he is never absent an hour from its precincts, and no one in the whole assembly has a more perfect command of the entire run of its business.94

V

In July 1904, O’Brien had returned to public life with a series of five long letters to the Freeman assailing the anti-conciliationist ‘cabal’ under the heading ‘The Land Conference and its Critics’, which, together with the paper’s replies, stretched over a month.95 He had followed this with a drive to recover his former Cork seat, bringing renewed anxiety to the Irish Party. Dillon, home from Sicily, badgered Redmond during July about O’Brien’s intentions, mirroring the urgency of the latter’s missives of the previous year. ‘A fierce controversy is unavoidable unless you intervene’, he wrote on 7 July. He was sure that O’Brien’s attack on the party’s conduct was ‘a very wicked and dangerous cry… when raised by a man of O’Brien’s literary power and great political record, it is bound to do great mischief’.96 In response, Redmond had a resolution passed unanimously by the party on 4 August appealing to the Cork UIL for unity. Before sailing for the US, he expressed his hope for the re-election of O’Brien, who was duly returned unopposed on 19 August.97 On his return in mid-October, he ‘heartily rejoiced’ at the outcome, but hoped that O’Brien would:

… recognize the great and vital issues at stake and the disasters of disunion, and will accede to the unanimous wish of Nationalists and… once more take his place side by side with his colleagues in Parliament and out of it… There is no sacrifice I would not make short of sacrificing what I consider the higher interests of the country in order to bring about that result.98

O’Brien’s personal popularity in Cork was in evidence when he visited his constituency to be greeted by one of the largest crowds ever seen in the city. In ominously stark terms, he posed the issue raised by the Dunraven devolution proposals:

This new prospect of a Home Rule settlement will either have to be brought to triumph by the same methods of conciliation as the Land settlement, or it will have to be wrecked by the same system of nagging and petulance by which Ireland has been cheated of half the blessings of the Land Conference settlement… you cannot hope to have the benefits of the Conference policy if you at the same time kill it….99

This reading ignored two crucial differences between the two initiatives. Wyndham, in contrast to his immediate welcome for the Land Conference idea, had been forced to repudiate the current scheme, and Unionist reaction against it was being strongly expressed. A large demonstration in Limerick on 6 November, at which Redmond welcomed O’Brien back to public life, was the first occasion in over a year on which the two shared a platform. It was also, as O’Brien wrote later, ‘the last time Mr Redmond and myself stood on a friendly platform together….’100 At their hotel the day before, Redmond asked what O’Brien intended to do on the following day. In O’Brien’s recollection, the rest of the exchange went as follows:

WO’B: That depends upon you and not upon me

JER: What do you want?

WO’B: Simply that it should be made clear that the national policy of last year is the national policy still, and that you stick to it.

JER: If that is all you want, I will make it clear enough. There is not an atom of difference between us.

WO’B: Make that perfectly clear in action, and I should have no difficulty about rejoining the party in the morning.

The next morning, however, O’Brien noticed a coldness in Redmond’s attitude and got ‘hard looks’ from partisans of the anti-conciliationists, who had crowded into the latter’s room. Redmond’s speech was a classic of vague, rhetorical conciliationism:

Fellow-countrymen, don’t let us underestimate or despise indications of conversion among our Irish opponents… Remember that the Irish nation that we look to in future is not a nation of one class or creed. We don’t want to pull down one ascendancy to erect another… Let us, therefore… encourage men and not repel them (hear, hear). As to the actual proposals put forward by Lord Dunraven’s committee, in my judgment they are not worthy of any very serious consideration… The important thing lies in the glimpse which they give us of the process which has been going on slowly and steadily for years past in the minds of all intelligent men upon this question. I say to Irishmen: ‘Don’t let us do or say anything to arrest the process (cheers).’101

O’Brien’s reply acknowledged the ‘statesmanlike and broad-minded’ address, and later wrote that the opportunities of 1903 could have been salvaged had the spirit of the Limerick meeting been allowed to prevail.102 However, an important resolution on land purchase passed there allowed the Freeman to give that spirit a different meaning. For several years afterwards, it carried daily the text of the ‘Limerick resolution’ reaffirming that ‘Ashbourne prices’ should be the basis of all land purchase deals. Redmond, for his part, continued to portray the controversy as a mere difference of opinion ‘as to details and as to the precise measure of price’ that should not disrupt unity.103

The conciliation wars rumbled on into 1905. In January, O’Brien’s supporters at the National Directory meeting moved that the party hold a conference with the Irish Unionist MPs aimed at securing an improved Labourers Bill. Given the broad agreement on the issue the previous year, it seemed a reasonable proposal, but the meeting rejected it overwhelmingly, instead resolving to pursue Dillon’s call at Tuam on 6 January for ‘unrelenting war on the zones’. The reverse did not prevent O’Brien’s re-election in February to represent West Mayo on the National Directory.104 Redmond continued to criticize the failures of the Land Act in relation to congestion and the evicted tenants, while carefully avoiding endorsement of Dillon’s blanket opposition.105 Similarly, while setting his face against O’Brien’s proposals, he was not ready to abandon the language of conciliation; at the London St Patrick’s Day banquet, he included in his ideal of the Irish nation even those Ulster Unionists who had opposed every measure of reform.106 However, the latter were more likely to take the words of Pope Pius X, with whom Redmond had a private audience in April, as reflecting the authentic nationalist mentality:

I recognize the Irish Parliamentary Party as the defender of the Catholic religion, because that is the National religion, and it is the National Party.107

Redmond had told O’Brien on his election to the leadership in 1900: ‘It would be absurd to suppose that the priests can accept me without some heartburning.’108 Now, whatever whiff of anti-clericalism – a trait that Healy, for one, had never believed was ‘more than skin-deep’109 – had hung about him during the Parnell split was finally dispelled.

In June 1905, the death of J.F.X. O’Brien MP, William O’Brien’s partner in the two-seat Cork City constituency, raised the potential for fresh trouble between O’Brien and the party. O’Brien arrived in Cork on 9 June, and declared that a vote for a candidate opposed to his views would be seen as a vote of censure that would force him to resign. His plea to the electors for a sympathetic colleague implied that such a candidate would not take the party pledge if elected. When Augustine (‘Gussie’) Roche was elected unopposed a few days later, the news that he would refuse to take the pledge came as a shock to Redmond. Letters followed between Redmond and J.J. Howard, a Cork representative on the Directory who made clear the strength of feeling for O’Brien in Cork, and complained of the use of the ‘miserable technicality’ of Roche’s pledge as a weapon against him. 110

A party meeting on 29 June at Westminster, with Redmond in the chair, reaffirmed that no one could be a member of the party who was not prepared to take the pledge.111 O’Brien’s reply came in a long speech delivered on 9 July at a turbulent meeting at Charleville, Co. Cork, in which the issues of the 1903 rift were nakedly on display. He had not been the one to reject party discipline or the pledge, but ‘that pledge was violated and trampled upon by the very men who have now the effrontery to try to disturb the country by their pretended defence of the pledge….’ He also reproached Redmond for allowing himself to be intimidated by the threats of those men: ‘I will not dwell upon the fact that… he has left me absolutely alone to bear the responsibility of a policy, which he believed in as fully as I did….’112 Redmond, in a cathartic response at the UIL London branch on 14 July, rounded on O’Brien:

Up to his retirement, I was in substantial agreement with him… [but] from the moment of Mr O’Brien’s retirement down to this moment, I have profoundly disagreed with almost all that he has done. He retired without consulting me, without giving me an opportunity of considering whether I could influence him from that step. He has remained outside the party ever since in spite of my earnest remonstrances….

O’Brien’s charge of ‘cowardice and hypocrisy or worse’ brought forth a defiant assertion: ‘… here tonight I avow myself personally responsible for every single act of policy of that party for the last two years (applause).’ To the accusation of having joined with the ‘Orangemen’ to drive Wyndham from office, he retorted that they had not raised a finger against Wyndham:

… until we discovered that he was engaged in a deliberate plot to destroy the Irish Party, to create… a centre party in its place and to do so by means which some day or other, probably, will be made public, and which are not creditable either to him or to his Government….113

This previously unheard charge was echoed at Derry on 15 August by Dillon, who hinted darkly at ‘the intrigue of the autumn of 1904’.114 Redmond’s willingness to place such a conspiratorial spin on the devolution proposals welcomed (guardedly) by him as recently as March, marks possibly the low point of his political self-abasement for the sake of party unity. In an exchange of published letters in mid-July, Redmond hastened to assure O’Brien that he did not accuse him or any party members of involvement in the ‘plot’. Pressed by O’Brien for evidence of a plot, he declined further comment, prompting O’Brien to ridicule the whole allegation as ‘wholly imaginary… a cock and bull story’.115

Dillon continued to seek to prod a reluctant Redmond into confronting O’Brien. On 23 August, he wrote that he would ‘give a good deal of trouble during the autumn and winter… unless it is strongly dealt with pretty soon… I can assure you it would be a very great mistake to suppose that the O’Brien campaign can be treated as of no account.’ A week later, he urged: ‘If this campaign is… met and dealt with at the Directory and by you at a couple of big meetings soon after the Directory, it will collapse….’116

An attempt to heal the rift followed when the secretary of the Limerick Executive invited Redmond, Dillon, Davitt and O’Brien to meet together before the next National Convention. Redmond replied from Aughavanagh that he would ‘rejoice most heartily’ if such a conference were held.117 Dillon and Davitt were dismissive, the former urging Redmond to snuff out O’Brien’s movement in two forthcoming speeches by putting the issue of dissension clearly before the country and making no mention of a peace conference.118 Meanwhile, Captain Donelan, the party’s Chief Whip and MP for East Cork, told Redmond that his reply to the Limerick letter had been ‘highly praised’.119

O’Brien had suggested a new initiative in a speech at Watergrasshill on 30 July, an updated version of his call for a great national conference of all Irish groups agreed on ending landlordism, over-taxation and misgovernment. There was no reason, he said, why it should not include ‘Mr Sloan and the Orange democracy of the North, who have recently declared themselves to be Irishmen first of all’, the Irish Reform Association and ‘Mr T.W. Russell and his Presbyterian farmers, who represent a population of half a million’. But the rest of his invitation list – apart from the Gaelic League, the Town Tenants’ Association and the Land and Labour Association, there would be ‘Mr Redmond and his friends, and Mr Dillon and his friends, and Mr Healy and his friends’ – suggested that he had written off the Irish Party as a functioning unit.120

Redmond, at Doon, Co. Limerick, on 8 October, and Dillon, at Swinford a few days later, highlighted the issue of the party’s centrality in almost identical language. Reminding the people that every anti-nationalist newspaper in Britain was eagerly predicting the breakup of their movement due to internal dissension, Redmond asked them, in their assemblies and at the coming General Election, to answer one crucial question: ‘Have we, or have we not, the confidence of the Irish people behind us?’121 He would not say one harsh word about Lord Dunraven or Thomas Sloan and his Independent Orange Order:

… but I say, in God’s name, let them alone (hear, hear). Do not embarrass these men… by falling upon their necks and attempting to join hands with them….122

As attempts continued to follow up the Limerick initiative, still eliciting positive responses from Redmond and dismissals from Dillon, Redmond further dissected the O’Brien conference policy at Wexford on 3 November. Under it, he said, the Irish Party would be ‘… absolutely annihilated of all power and efficiency’. Could such a conference, he asked, discuss Home Rule?

We know… that a Convention [sic] such as that suggested could never be put together except upon the clear understanding that the question of Home Rule was to be excluded altogether from its consideration….123

Redmond’s navigation of the O’Brien difficulty had been rewarded by the party on two evenings following the mid-September National Directory meeting, when he was entertained at a complimentary banquet at the Gresham Hotel, followed the next day at the Mansion House by the presentation to him and Amy of a ‘beautiful and artistic solid silver centrepiece of purely Celtic design throughout’. Dillon, in proposing the toast, praised his success in leading the Irish Party to its present position in Parliament and looked back to 1900:

I was strongly opposed to the election of Mr Redmond; but seeing that I was in a minority, I did my best to make his election a unanimous one… I confess that what I most admire in Mr Redmond’s career is… the perseverance with which he has addressed himself to the task of thoroughly uniting the party and removing all the traces of the bitterness which had existed… [this is] largely due to Mr Redmond’s tact and perseverance and to his uniform and unvarying courtesy to every member of the party….124

Redmond, in reply, continued to hold out a hand to the ‘distinguished Irishman’ [O’Brien] who advocated a policy of his own outside their ranks and who alleged that they had none. Their first policy was to maintain the unity of the party, and this had been his ‘guiding star’ since the beginning of his chairmanship; it could not endure if they allowed themselves to be dragged back to the discussion of differences on ‘non-essentials’. Driving the message home in what O’Brien would call ‘words of immortal unwisdom’, he added:

I hold in the strongest possible way that it would be better for the cause of freedom for Ireland for the National Party to be united in an unwise or short-sighted policy rather than be divided with one section taking a far wiser course.125

Exhausted by the division of his energies between this issue, concerns over the intentions of the Liberal leaders at the coming election and a speaking tour in Ireland and Scotland, Redmond was recovering from a bout of illness when he answered further overtures from Donelan that if the National Convention voted confidence in the leadership:

… there are no limits I would not go to to induce O’Brien to return to the party short of consideration of anything which would hopelessly divide the party itself.126

VI

The early years of Redmond’s leadership coincided with the full flowering of the Irish cultural revival begun in the previous decade. The Gaelic League expanded at an impressive rate, from 120 branches in March 1900 to 860 branches with more than 20,000 members by late 1905. Its organ, An Claidheamh Soluis (‘The Sword of Light’), reached a peak circulation of over 3,000 in 1904.127 In April 1905, published data showed an enormous increase in the numbers of students learning Gaelic: the total of those studying the language in Christian Brothers’ schools and at Gaelic League branches approached 200,000.128 Reflecting this popularity, the nationalist press gave huge publicity to the League’s activities, in particular to its campaign against Treasury reluctance to pay grants for the teaching of the language in schools.129 The League’s annual ‘Irish Language Day’ processions, held on St Patrick’s Day, could raise as much as £1,000 in funds in a single day, something far beyond the capacity of the Irish Party.130 The tour of the US in late 1905 by its founder, Douglas Hyde, in which he collected $64,000 (£13,000) for the movement, received the kind of Freeman coverage previously reserved for Irish Party rallies of Parnell’s day, his send-off alone meriting a full page.131

At its best, the League’s hope of uniting diverse elements in a common Irish nationhood founded on a revived Gaelic language and literature, albeit illusory, embodied a real generosity of spirit. Modern Irish nationalism, however, had been born with English on its tongue. It was ironic that the heights of the Gaelic movement were reached at the very moment when the nationalist community had irreversibly adopted and uniquely adapted English to its own uses, and Irish artists were beginning to create a new and fertile space within the canon of literature written in the English language.132

Officially, the League’s relations with the party were harmonious; Redmond had been personally supportive since its inception in 1893. In 1901, he confessed to a ‘deep sense of humiliation’ when he found that he could not reply in the same tongue to an address presented to him in Gaelic, and revealed that he was having his children taught the language.133 In March 1904, declaring the party’s ‘complete sympathy with the Gaelic movement’, he rejoiced that the first parliamentary defeat of the Government should have come on the question of teaching Gaelic in the schools; a defeat that signalled the downfall of ‘a system of primary education which for the best part of a century has well nigh crushed the life out of Ireland, which has banished the Irish language, which has hidden away Irish history, which has suppressed Irish song, Irish poetry and Irish art….’ His attempt to persuade Hyde to stand for Parliament suggests that he may have had the aim of turning the League into an ancillary organization of the party.134 There was sound politics as well as idealism behind such a desire, as he had confided to O’Brien in 1901:

He is no doubt a crank, but is a good fellow and his election [in a Galway by-election] might neutralize any dangerous tendencies of the Gaelic movement.135

Redmond’s own education, which had immersed him in Shakespeare and Dickens, as is evident in much of his oratory – his first biographer wrote that ‘from the first he contemplated the spectacle of Anglo-Saxon civilization with a sentiment akin to awe’136 – did not clash with his conviction that a self-governing Ireland must nurture the indigenous language and culture and reject the tawdrier aspects of imported culture.137 The League’s more Anglophobic activists, however, conceived of language revival as a shield for the purity of a Gaelic and Catholic nation against foreign influences. For the politicized among them, the parliamentary movement was not merely politically ineffective, but abetted the Anglicization of the country by its very attendance at Westminster. It was no surprise that the League’s membership overlapped with that of separatist groups. In particular, the Dublin Keating Branch of the League, a hothouse of cultural exclusivity, became a centre of clericalist ‘faith and fatherland’ nationalism that grew increasingly separatist.138 Redmond, embarking on his 1901 US tour, warned that certain Gaelic League members were ‘trying to sow the seeds of ill-will’ between the UIL and the League, each of which must have an interest in the goals of the other. This was ‘the most base and mischievous conduct’, and he asked those engaged in it to pause and consider the damage it would do to Ireland.139 The RIC Inspector General wrote to the Under-Secretary in early 1902 that, while theoretically there was nothing illegal in the League:

… in some places it is gradually slipping away from the control of those who initiated it, with bona fide intentions, and is becoming each day tainted with the views of extremists.140

At this time, the Gaelic Athletic Association rigidly enforced the rule that banned policemen, soldiers and sailors from participation in its games (and its own members from participation in the ‘foreign’ games of rugby, soccer and cricket), thereby importing the boycott weapon into sport and ensuring the exclusion of almost all Protestants (and much of the Catholic urban working class). Members of the IRB within the GAA did their best to advance their policies and recruit members, but made limited headway against the control of most branches by the Catholic clergy.141 While the Gaelic League and GAA were theoretically open to non-Catholics, other elements of the ‘Irish Ireland’ movement were less hesitant in identifying Irish nationalism with Catholicism. Most representative of this tendency was The Leader, an incisively written weekly, edited by the Dublin journalist D.P. Moran, which began life in September 1900. Moran is described by Maume as a ‘cultural chauvinist, encourager of political debate and spokesman for economic nationalism’; his journal was, according to Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘broadly, though never uncritically or sycophantically, supportive of the reunited parliamentary party, and… militantly Catholic.’142 Its targets were English influence in Irish life, anti-Catholic job discrimination and Protestant predominance in the business and cultural fields. Its lexicon of abuse included the terms ‘shoneen’ and ‘Castle Catholic’ to refer to Catholics seen as insufficiently attached to Irish Ireland, and the new term ‘sourface’ to refer to Protestants. Protestant nationalists, such as Yeats, were fair game if they did not show sufficient deference to Catholic hegemony within the movement. Protestant bigotry was condemned, but no Catholic equivalent was admitted to exist. As the leading Irish Ireland publication, The Leader achieved a widespread popularity for its willingness to say things that the Freeman, constrained by its closeness to the party, could not say.143 Yet, as Owen McGee has pointed out, the sheer force of its populist rhetoric influenced the journalism of other nationalist newspapers in a manner comparable to the influence of United Ireland on its contemporaries in the early 1880s.144

One of the unsayables articulated by The Leader was the undercurrent of anti-Semitism in Irish life (not confined to nationalists), its middle-class form a backwash of the French ferment over the Dreyfus case and the Action Française campaign against secularism in the Third Republic; its plebeian version a prejudice against immigrant Jews as traders. Griffith’s mild form of the disease has been mentioned, but Moran could write of his physical repulsion at Jews, while several party MPs and the Fenian Devoy were openly anti-Semitic.145 Redmond and Davitt, however, divided by other matters, were at one in their attitude to anti-Semitism, both condemning the attacks on, and boycott of, Jews in the Limerick area in 1904. Redmond authorized the Limerick rabbi, E.B. Levin, to publish a letter from him declaring ‘no sympathy whatever with the attacks on the Hebrew community’ and looking to ‘the good sense and spirit of toleration of the Irish people’ to protect them.146 Davitt took public issue with Fr John Creagh, the Limerick Redemptorist priest whose sermons had sparked the initial assaults, whom he condemned for introducing a ‘spirit of barbarous malignity’ against Jews previously unknown in Ireland.147 Redmond offered a parliamentary nomination to Jacob Elyan, honorary secretary to the Dublin Jewish community. However, asked in 1907 by S. Spiro, president of the Cork Jewish community, to use his influence against the further publication of anti-Jewish articles in the Cork Trade and Labour Journal, he replied, though sympathetically, that he could not interfere.148 These were the years of the first publication of the notorious anti-Jewish forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a time when horrifying massacres of Jews occurred in the Russian empire. Redmond joined with British Jewish Liberals in 1906 in condemning the Russian pogroms.149 Davitt visited the site of and wrote a book on the 1903 massacre of Jews at Kishinev.150

The organization that most unselfconsciously mirrored the sectarianism of The Leader was the Ancient Order of Hibernians. In 1905, it was predominantly an Ulster organization, a fast-growing Catholic counterweight to the Orange Order; as the chief power base of Devlin, most of its branches worked in harmony with the UIL.151 Its Dublin convention in July 1905 resolved that part of its mission must be to ‘instruct in nationality’ the young men of the country, using lectures, history readings, songs and other means.152 By 1908, it was making inroads into Leinster and Munster, where it competed with local UIL branches for members. Internal disagreement from 1906 onward over support for parliamentarianism led to a split, with the majority of Irish branches following Devlin in the AOH (Board of Erin) and a minority allying themselves with the separatist ‘Scottish section’, itself part of the AOH ‘American Alliance’ under the control of Clan-na-Gael.153 The later spectacular growth of the larger faction in the south led it gradually to supplant the UIL as the active grass roots Irish Party organization.154

By 1905, the Irish political arena also contained a number of smaller actors not present when Redmond had assumed the leadership. At the suggestion of Arthur Griffith in 1900, several of the smaller cultural nationalist groups hostile to the Irish Party were joined in a loose federation to be known as Cumann na nGaedheal (‘Association of Gaels’). Containing many physical-force separatists, the new body soon became a front for the Irish Republican Brotherhood, although its declared objective was the vague ‘sovereign independence’ rather than a republic.155 The ‘Battle of the Rotunda’ in May 1903 led the separatists to form the National Council, a body dedicated to opposing ‘toadyism and flunkeyism’ (welcoming royal visitors) and to embracing all who believed in ‘the absolute independence of the country’.156 The new organization became the main vehicle of Griffith’s influence for the next four years, an outlet for his many propaganda pamphlets. It attracted a cross-section of nationalists, with Griffith resisting Gonne’s attempts to commit it to overt republicanism. In the autumn of 1904, the National Council published in booklet form The Resurrection of Hungary, published earlier by Griffith as a series of articles in the United Irishman. The booklet, which achieved a circulation of around 30,000, sought to answer the argument that no alternative to the Irish Party existed apart from hopeless insurrectionism. It advocated as a model for Ireland the relations between Austria and Hungary embodied in the Ausgleich dual monarchy of 1867. Nationalist MPs should follow the example of the Hungarian leader Déak, who had withdrawn from the Austrian Imperial Parliament and set up a de facto Government at home, by abandoning Westminster and reconvening as a parliament in Ireland to administer the country through local authorities. A prototype had already been attempted in 1899 when John Sweetman, a former anti-Parnellite MP turned Redmondite and vice-chairman of Meath county council, and Sir Thomas Grattan Esmonde, of the Wexford council, co-operated in setting up a ‘general council of county councils’, comprising three delegates from each of the new Tory-legislated councils, to act as a de facto Irish parliament; that initiative was stillborn following the reunion of the Irish Party. The final part of the book focused on the Irish constitution of 1782, which Griffith maintained was still the de jure constitution of Ireland, the Union having been enacted illegally. A self-governing Ireland would be a separate kingdom linked to Britain with a shared monarch.157

Despite the preference of some National Council members to build a new national organization to combat parliamentarianism, Griffith’s hope was rather to win adherents from the Irish Party.158 The spread of the new ideas, increasingly referred to as the Sinn Féin [‘Ourselves’] policy, was evident in June 1905 when the National Council had thirteen of its twenty candidates elected to the Dublin Poor Law boards.159 The National Council held its first convention on 28 November 1905, at which it resolved to organize itself country-wide as a political party. Griffith proposed a comprehensive programme embracing abstention from the Westminster Parliament, economic self-sufficiency, industrial development and Gaelic language revival, subsequently published as The Sinn Féin Policy. Reference to the 1782 constitution was dropped, and emphasis shifted to the potential of the general council of county councils, Sweetman moving that this body was ‘the nucleus of a national authority’.

Alongside Cumann na nGaedheal and the National Council, a third anti-party grouping had sprung into being during 1905. Known as the ‘Dungannon clubs’, this was another loose federation taking its lead from the original club founded in Belfast by two young Ulster activists, the Quaker Bulmer Hobson and the Catholic Denis McCullough, which set exacting standards of sobriety and activism. Similar in its initial policy to the National Council, it argued for passive resistance to British authority based on a de facto Irish parliament. By late 1905, Hobson, a very effective orator, had spoken all over Ireland, and four such clubs had been founded; the following year there were ten clubs in Ireland and two in Britain.160

These smaller groups were a latent threat to the position of the Irish Party, but the Castle authorities were relaxed in their assessment. The RIC Inspector General told the Chief Secretary in March 1905:

During two-and-a-half years of careful observation I have not seen a particle of substantial evidence to show that there is in Ireland any secret political activity of which the Government need have the smallest apprehension.161

Notes and References

1F.J., 29 May 1903.

2F.J., 26 Aug. 1903; Lyons, Dillon, p. 236.

3F.J., 26 Aug. 1903; I.D.I., 2 Sep., 10 Oct. 1901.

4Bull, ‘The nationalist response’, pp. 292–4.

5F.J., 18, 22, 23 Sep. 1903. The price was the equivalent of 21 years’ purchase of first-term rents, for land that in 1886 had been offered for 18 years’ purchase. Adding on the bonus, the paper reckoned that the landlord would receive 28 years’ purchase, a sum which, invested at 4 per cent, would give him an increase of 40 per cent on his net rental income.

6F.J., 14 Sep. 1903. ‘Ashbourne prices’ were the 17–18 years’ purchase of first-term rents set as a guideline purchase price by the 1885 Land Act.

7Ibid., 26 Sep. 1903.

8Ibid., 8, 10, 24 Oct. 1903.

9Ibid., 30 Sep., 22 Oct. 1903; Devlin to Dillon, 14, 17 Sep. 1903, DP Ms. 6729/95, 96; Bull, ‘The nationalist response’, pp. 295–6.

10Dillon to Redmond, 23 Sep. 1903, RP Ms. 15,182 (4).

11Redmond to Dillon, 25 Sep. 1903, RP Ms. 15,182 (4).

12Dillon to Redmond, 2 Oct. 1903, RP Ms. 15,182 (5).

13Redmond to Dillon, 7 Oct. 1903, RP Ms. 15,182 (5).

14F.J., 21 Oct. 1903.

15Redmond to O’Brien, 21 Oct. 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (9).

16Shawe-Taylor to Archbishop William Walsh, 1, 10 Sep. 1903, WP Ms. 365/3; F.J., 11, 25 Sep. 1903.

17Dillon to Redmond, 2 Oct. 1903, RP Ms. 15,182 (5).

18O’Brien to Redmond, 16 Oct. 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (12).

19Redmond to O’Brien, 31 Oct. 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (9).

20Paul Bew, Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland 1890–1910 (Oxford, 1987), p. 113.

21Redmond to M.J. O’Connor, 12, 30 Sep. 1903; M.J. O’Connor to Fr Bolger, 25 Sep. 1903; I am grateful to James and Sylvia O’Connor, of M.J. O’Connor Solicitors, formerly of George’s St., Wexford, for giving me access to the correspondence regarding the sale of the Redmond estate held in their office.

22‘The second-term tenants get 20 per cent [reduction] but there are only about twelve of them. The great bulk of the tenants are non-judicial – men who never went into court because their rents were so low on an average about 30 per cent below the [Griffith] valuation. These men quite recently got a temporary abatement of 15 per cent and now this will be increased by 25 per cent making in all 40 per cent....’ Redmond to O’Brien, 21 Oct. 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (9).

23M.J. O’Connor to Redmond enclosing communique, 17 Oct. 1903, RP Ms. 15,214 (4).

24Wexford Independent, 2 Jan. 1904. On his arrival in New York in August 1904 for the UIL of America Convention, Redmond said ‘laughingly’ in reply to questions from The American: ‘Why, my tenants came to me and said I would have to sell out to them. I told them all right, and then they asked the price. I said: “Go home and fix on the price yourselves”, and they did so, and I accepted their offers. We were always on the friendliest terms ever since I was a boy.’ RP Ms. 7435.

25O’Brien, Olive Branch, p. 282.

26Redmond to O’Brien, 28 Oct. 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (9).

27I.I., 3, 20 Oct. 1903. The sympathetic Harrington had written to Redmond in January of that paper: ‘I wish we could get some means of buying the Independent and taking it out of the present hands. We want some security against the treachery of the Freeman. The Independent has gone so far off the track now that the FJ no longer regards it as a rival and hence they have grown both stiff and impertinent.’ Harrington to Redmond, 25 Jan. 1903, RP Ms. 15,194.

28F.J., 31 Oct. 1903.

29Ibid., 4 Nov. 1903. There was an air of coup d’etat about the Freeman of 22 October, which ignored the party leader and carried a supportive message from Sexton to a West Belfast by-election candidate, ‘Mr Davitt’s Powerful Appeal’ censuring the Leinster tenants, and, as if the Land Act had never happened, an item headlined ‘The Land War in mid-Tipperary’ which turned out to be a report on the seizure of four milch cows.

30Ibid., 26 Oct. 1903.

31O’Brien to Redmond, 29 Oct. 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (12).

32O’Brien to Redmond, 2, 4 Nov. 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (12).

33F.J., 6 Nov. 1903.

34Redmond to O’Brien, 9 Nov. 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (9).

35Redmond to Dillon, 6 Nov. 1903, RP Ms. 15,182 (5).

36Dillon to Redmond, 7, 9 Nov. 1903, RP Ms. 15,182 (5).

37F.J., 16 Nov. 1903; O’Brien, Olive Branch, p. 296. At Limerick he defended his estate sale from ‘malicious representation’, asserting that a ‘majority’ of the tenants [actually 47 of 99], who had never gone into the Land Courts, would probably buy at 18.5 years’ purchase, which was really 16.5 when the wiping out of 2 years’ arrears was taken into account, and that on a rental that was 25 per cent below Griffith’s Valuation.

38Bull, ‘The nationalist response’, pp. 300–1; Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness, pp. 219–20.

39Ginnell to Redmond, 29 Nov. 1903, RP Ms. 15,191 (2). O’Donnell had earlier complained to Redmond of Ginnell’s behaviour at the office they shared: ‘I think my position ought to be protected from a man who is only one step removed from lunacy….’ O’Donnell MP to Redmond, 18 Aug. 1903, RP Ms. 15,218 (2). Henry O’Shea, a Limerick Guardian and League official, told a senior MP of having been assaulted by local Directory member John McInerney when he told him he would not be allowed to use the Limerick meeting to ‘get up an outcry’ against Redmond relating to the sale of the Wexford estate. O’Shea to J.F.X. O’Brien, 11 Nov. 1903, J.F.X. O’Brien Papers Ms. 13,452.

40Ginnell to Redmond, 29 Nov. 1903, RP Ms. 15,191 (2). Redmond asked Dillon if he could do anything to restrain Ginnell, as ‘… he insults and abuses O’Donnell in the office on the slightest provocation… I have spoken strongly to O’Donnell and he has promised me not to give Ginnell any provocation, but he is also a man of strong temper and things may easily come to a crisis.’ Redmond to Dillon, 16 Dec. 1903, DP Ms. 6747/65.

41Dunraven to Redmond, 10 Nov. 1903, RP Ms. 15,187 (1).

42O’Connor to Dillon, 4 Oct., 11 Nov., 19 Dec. 1903, DP Ms. 6740/127, 128,129.

43O’Brien, Olive Branch, pp. 266, 288.

44Callanan, Healy, p. 453; F.J., 3 Jan. 1906.

45Bull, ‘The nationalist response’, p. 302; Lyons, Dillon, pp. 238–40; Maume, Long Gestation, p. 69.

46Meleady, Redmond, pp. 259, 297.

47Maume, Long Gestation, pp. 66g–8.

4823 Oct. 1901, Newscuttings of 1901, RP Ms. 7429.

4927 Jul. 1904, Newscuttings of 1904, RP Ms. 7434.

50Lyons, Parliamentary Party, pp. 242–3; Lyons, Dillon, pp. 238–41.

51Bull, ‘The nationalist response’, pp. 302–3; Bull, Land, pp. 170–5.

52Alvin Jackson, Home Rule: An Irish History, 1800–2000 (London, 2003), pp. 91–4.

53Lyons likened the Redmond–Dillon relationship to that of Spenlow and Jorkins in Dickens’ David Copperfield, Spenlow the sunny lawyer always ready to agree were it not for the reservations of his pessimistic partner. Lyons, Dillon, p. 223.

54Dillon to Redmond, 24 Jan. 1904, RP Ms. 15,182 (6); F.J., 28 Jan. 1904.

55F.J., 7 Mar. 1904.

56F.J., 20 Dec. 1903.

57Ibid., 4, 5 Jan. 1904; Hansard, 129, 199–220, 3 Feb. 1904; Dillon to Redmond, 24 Jan. 1904, RP Ms. 15,182 (6); F.J., 6, 19 Feb. 1904.

58F.J., 19 May 1904. A hint as to reasons for nationalist hostility to the bonus is offered by the Countess of Fingall in her recollections of the £12 million as ‘a jolly bonus for the broken-down landlords, and for the spendthrifts, who were relieved of their mortgaged estates and made a free gift as well... George Wyndham was taking a holiday at Monte Carlo. Wandering into the gaming rooms, he saw the Marquis of ----, hitherto an impoverished Irish peer, the centre of a group of gamers. Lord ---- had had a big estate in Ireland, but never a penny in his pocket. As George Wyndham passed by, Lord ----, pointing to the pile of notes and counters before him, called out gaily: “George! George! The Bonus!”’ Countess of Fingall, Seventy Years Young, p. 282.

59Hansard, 137, 1105–1112, 8 Jul. 1904. Significantly, T.W. Russell, late of the Land Conference, voted with the Government, stating that he was satisfied with the working of the Act in view of the rate at which tenants were applying for advances to purchase. F.J., 9 Jul. 1904.

60F.J., 11 Aug. 1904.

61Ibid., 30 Aug. 1904.

62Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness, pp. 200, 202.

63F.J., 19, 21 Mar. 1904. Lord Rosebery, who had briefly been Liberal Prime Minister from the resignation of Gladstone in 1894 to his Government’s defeat in 1895, had stated that before Irish Home Rule could be conceded, it would need the approval of a majority of MPs, not simply of the UK, but of England as ‘… the predominant member of the partnership between the Three Kingdoms’. Meleady, Redmond, p. 235.

64F.J., 26 Mar., 8, 15 Apr., 13 May 1904.

65Ibid., 25 Jun. 1904. The Ulster Unionist leader was unrestrained in his praise of the Irish labourer, who was ‘… infinitely more intelligent, and quite as hard-working as the English labourer… He did not confine his thoughts simply to local matters. On the contrary, he was generally an intelligent politician. Imperial matters occupied his thoughts.’ Hansard, 136, 1149–1151, 24 Jun. 1904.

66Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness, pp. 201–2.

67Hansard, 136, 1133–1140, 24 Jun. 1904. According to Sheehan, to have a single cottage built required nineteen different stages, taking up to six years, to be gone through. Sheehan was later expelled from the party and joined O’Brien as a founding member of the All-for-Ireland League in 1909, being re-elected for mid-Cork in both 1910 elections.

68Ibid., 28 Jul.,14 Nov. 1904. Sheehan pointed out that, although Labourers Acts had been in operation for over 20 years, only 17,411 cottages had been built in that time, leaving over 200,000 labourers still living in hovels.

69All quotes are from Newscuttings of the 1904 American visit, RP Ms. 7435.

70Ibid.

71F.J., 6 Aug. 1904.

72Ibid., 31 Aug. 1904.

73Gwynn, Life, p. 106. The statement is not among the newscuttings of the US visit in the Redmond Papers, and the Freeman did not print it.

74For a full account of the Irish Reform Association proposals, see F.S.L. Lyons, ‘The Irish unionist party and the devolution crisis of 1904–5’, I.H.S., vi, 21 (Mar. 1948), pp. 1–22.

75F.J., 31 Aug., 5 Sep., 3 Oct. 1904.

76Lyons, ‘The Irish unionist party’, pp. 7–10.

77Ibid., pp. 10–13; F.J., 18 Nov. 1904.

78Lyons, ‘The Irish unionist party’, pp. 14–15.

79Ibid., pp. 15–17; Hansard, 141, 324–6, 16 Feb. 1905.

80Hansard, 141, 622–632, 20 Feb. 1905.

81Hansard, 141, 646–663, 20 Feb.1905.

82F.J., 22 Feb. 1905. The Government’s majority on Redmond’s amendment was fifty.

83The letter was found seven years later by Wyndham’s private secretary. Lyons, ‘The Irish unionist party’, p. 9.

84Hansard, 141, 964–985, 991–6, 22 Feb. 1905.

85Dillon to Redmond, 5 Mar. 1905, RP Ms. 15,182 (7).

86Hansard, 145, 1352–5, 9 May 1905.

87F.J., 20 Mar. 1905.

88Ibid., 15 Sep. 1905.

89Ibid., 20 Mar. 1905.

90Ibid., 6, 7 Apr., 19 May 1905.

91Ibid., 6 Apr. 1905.

92Ibid., 1, 14, 18 Jul. 1905; Hansard, 149, 893–9, 17 Jul. 1905.

93F.J., 22 Jul. 1905. There was near-success on 13 July, when the Government’s majority was twenty-six: only poor Nationalist and Liberal attendance (twenty-three of the Irish Party were unaccounted for in spite of an urgent whip) prevented its defeat. A week later, success came when the Government lost a vote on the administration of the Land Act by three votes.

94F.J., 14 Apr. 1905.

95Ibid., 23 Jul. 1904. Davitt, replying to O’Brien, estimated that the latter had lapsed into a ‘silence’ of some 50,000 words of ‘bitter and personal criticism’ of former friends and colleagues since his supposed ‘self-effacement’ nine months previously.

96Dillon to Redmond, 7, 14 Jul. 1904, RP Ms. 15,182 (6).

97F.J., 5, 19, 20 Aug. 1904.

98Ibid., 14 Oct. 1904.

99O’Brien, Olive Branch, p. 333; F.J., 17 Oct. 1904.

100O’Brien, Olive Branch, pp. 341–5.

101F.J., 7 Nov. 1904.

102O’Brien, Olive Branch, pp. 341–5.

103F.J., 12 Dec. 1904.

104Ibid., 7, 17, 21, 25 Jan., 3 Feb. 1905.

105The Freeman on 10 May wrote: ‘The most urgent question in Ireland at the present moment is the unsettlement of this so-called settlement.’

106F.J., 17 Mar. 1905.

107Ibid., 28 Apr. 1905.

108Redmond to O’Brien, 19 Apr. 1900, OBP Ms. 10,496 (2).

109Healy to Moreton Frewen, 10 May 1899, RP Ms. 15,188 (1).

110F.J., 13, 14, 15, 16 Jun. 1905.

111Ibid., 30 Jun. 1905.

112Ibid., 10 Jul. 1905.

113Ibid., 15 Jul. 1905.

114Ibid., 16 Aug. 1905. Nothing in Dillon’s speech, or in Davitt’s letter to the Freeman, 5 Aug. 1905, or in the Freeman editorial, 9 Oct. 1905, suggests that the ‘plot’ was anything more than the hopeful attempt by the Irish Reform Association, through its manifesto of 31 August 1904, to attract members of the Irish Party, among others, to join with them in promoting a devolution scheme. Davitt, who claimed the plot was ‘hatched in Dublin Castle’, had warned at Clonmacnoise a year earlier that the Reform Association were ‘… trying to divide the National ranks’, F.J., 5 Sep. 1904.

115O’Brien to Redmond, 15, 18, 19 Jul. 1905, Redmond to O’Brien, 17, 18 Jul. 1905, Newscuttings of 1905, RP Ms. 7437. Maume writes of ‘intrigues’ by Wyndham during the 1903 passage of the Land Bill in offering rewards to nationalists to encourage adoption of the conciliation policy, but does not mention it in the context of the autumn of 1904. Maume, Long Gestation, p. 68.

116Dillon to Redmond, 23, 30 Aug. 1905, RP Ms. 15,182 (7).

117F.J., 25, 27, 29 Sep. 1905.

118Dillon to Redmond, 3, 5 Oct. 1905, RP Ms. 15,182 (8).

119Donelan to Redmond, 4 Oct. 1905, RP Ms. 15,184.

120Cork Examiner, 31 Jul. 1905.

121F.J., 9 Oct. 1905.

122Ibid., 9, 12 Oct. 1905.

123Donelan to Redmond (with reply), 13 Oct. 1905, encl. O’Brien to Donelan, 14 Oct. 1905, RP Ms. 15,184; Dillon to Redmond, 15, 27 Oct. 1905, RP Ms. 15,182 (8); F.J., 4 Nov. 1905.

124F.J., 15 Sep. 1905. The piece was described as oblong, mounted on a silver base, surmounted by a second tier on which rested a central pillar, on either side of which were two round towers. There were also two figures of Erin, two Irish wolfhounds and the Redmond crest and arms, together with four silver shields with the arms of the four provinces, and the inscription in Gaelic and English: ‘Presented to Mr John Redmond MP and Mrs Redmond with the best wishes of the members of the Irish Parliamentary Party, 20th July 1905’, the entire work designed and executed by Edmond Johnson Ltd., Grafton St.

125O’Brien, Olive Branch, p. 288.

126Donelan to Redmond, 23 Nov. 1905, Redmond to Donelan, 25, 29 Nov. 1905, RP Ms. 15,184.

127Pádraig Ó Fearaíl, The Story of Conradh na Gaeilge: a History of the Gaelic League (Dublin, 1975), p.24

128Between 1898 and 1903, the numbers studying Gaelic in national schools had risen from 1,012 to 92,612, those in the intermediate schools from 504 to 1,804. F.J., 1 Apr. 1905.

129Ibid., 27 Feb., 22 Sep. 1905.

130Owen McGee, The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Féin (Dublin, 2005), p. 276.

131Ó Fearaíl, Story of Conradh, p. 29; F.J., 3, 7, 8, 17 Nov. 1905.

132Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht were immensely popular – in English translation. Yeats’ early poetry had drawn Gaelic myths and folklore into the English language. J.M. Synge’s plays The Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea were both completed in 1902, and brought Hiberno-English to the stage in the following two years. 1905 was the year when James Joyce both abandoned Stephen Hero, the prototype of the later Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and embarked on his nine-year search for a publisher for his completed Dubliners.

133I.D.I., 24 Oct. 1901. This education was seen to bear fruit when, during the 1902 US visit, young William replied to the greeting of a Gaelic-speaking South Boston lady with ‘Táim óg ach táim tír-grádhach’ (‘I am young but I am patriotic’). Newscuttings of 1902 US visit, RP Ms. 7432.

134F.J., 18 Mar. 1904; Bew, Enigma, p. 210.

135Redmond to O’Brien, 4 Oct. 1901, RP Ms. 10,496 (5).

136Warre B. Wells, John Redmond (London, 1919), p. 40.

137At Bermondsey in June 1901, he had spoken of the ‘incalculable good’ done by the Gaelic revival, before which ‘… nothing was thought fashionable except English modes of thought and English customs. And mind you… it was not the highest and best modes of English thought….’ Newscuttings of 1901, RP Ms. 7429.

138Maume, Long Gestation, p. 27.

139Newscuttings of 1901, RP Ms. 7429.

140NAI CBS 3/716, 26215/S. An example was the prosecution of a prominent Mayo Gaelic Leaguer for distributing seditious (anti-recruiting) literature. F.J., 13 Oct. 1905.

141Reports of Crime Special Sergeants for Feb. 1903, NAI CBS 3/716, 28288/S.

142Maume, Long Gestation, pp. 59–63, 236; Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices (Dublin, 1994), p.36.

143See Patrick Maume, D.P. Moran (Dundalk, 1995); Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices, pp. 33–88.

144McGee, IRB, p. 276.

145Maume, Long Gestation, p. 52. John Devoy, in his Gaelic American, took a malignantly anti-Semitic line. In October 1905, following the rejection at the Seventh Zionist Congress in Basle of a plan for a temporary home for the Jewish people in Uganda by arrangement with the British Government, Devoy wrote: ‘As to the Zionist desire to have a national home without national responsibility, it does not seem likely to be gratified. The Jews are destined to be the parasites of the human race until, in their insatiable greed, they have absorbed the life blood of all the nations, who must then perish, or to save their existence must turn round and destroy them.’ In December 1905 he wrote of the ‘so-called massacre’ at Kishinev, which, he claimed, the Jews, ‘the most ignoble race that fate has planted on the earth’, were using to involve the US Government in nefarious designs against the Russian Government. Gaelic American, 7 Oct., 30 Dec. 1905.

146F.J., 18 Jan. 1904. Ten years earlier on 9 May 1894, following indiscriminate attacks on Jews in Cork for which three people were imprisoned, Redmond had stated that he had ‘no sympathy with the persecution to which the Jewish community have been subjected in other countries… the great body of Catholics in Ireland, who have in the past known what persecution for religion’s sake meant, will never have any sympathy with the attacks upon the members of any creed’. On the anti-Parnellite side, Justin McCarthy had condemned the attacks in similar terms. Dermot Keogh, Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (Cork, 1998), pp.19, 26–53, 247.

147F.J., 18, 20 Jan. 1904; see also Keogh, Jews, pp. 26–53.

148Maume, Long Gestation, p. 52; S. Spiro to Redmond, 22 Jan. 1907; Redmond to Spiro, 28 Jan.1907, RP Ms. 15,247.

149Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London, 2005), pp. 113–119; Oswald John Simon to Redmond, 1, 5 Jan 1906, RP Ms. 15, 246.

150Now Chisinau, capital of the Republic of Moldova, where, in April 1903, forty-nine Jews were killed, ninety-two severely injured and 700 houses destroyed when the traditional anti-Jewish blood libel was used to incite a pogrom after a Christian boy was found murdered. See Michael Davitt, Within the Pale: the true story of anti-Semitic persecutions in Russia (London, 1903). Massacres on an even worse scale occurred at Odessa and Kiev in 1905 and in Bialystock in 1906.

151Précis of information received from county inspectors for April to June 1905, NAI CBS 54/74.

152Précis for Jul. 1905, NAI CBS 54/74.

153Précis for Aug. 1906, Apr., Nov. 1908, Sep. 1909, NAI CBS 54/74.

154David Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life 1913–1921: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution (Cork, 1977), p. 82. The first Dublin branch of the AOH was formed in 1904; by December 1906, when it moved to new premises at Rutland Square, it had 150 (male) members. By April 1914, this had grown to 3,000 male members and a 1,000-strong Ladies’ Auxiliary Division. The benefit society established nationally by the Order under the National Insurance Act of 1911 had 130,000 members and a staff of 120 by the same date. F.J., 19 Jul. 1911, 10 Jun. 1912, 13, 16 Apr. 1914.

155Laffan, Resurrection, p. 21.

156Davis, Arthur Griffith, p. 20.

157Ibid., pp. 11, 21; Maume, Long Gestation, pp. 56–7.

158Davis, Arthur Griffith, pp. 22–3.

159Laffan, Resurrection, p. 23. Griffith and Redmond make an appearance together in the ‘Circe’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses as a pair of ‘armed heroes’ who ‘spring up from furrows… and fight duels with cavalry sabres’, as do the similar binary opposites from the Irish nationalist pantheon ‘Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith O’Brien against Daniel O’Connell, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt, Justin McCarthy against Parnell….’ James Joyce, Ulysses (Bodley Head edition, Penguin Classics, 1992), p. 695.

160Davis, Arthur Griffith, pp. 26–7.

161Précis of information on secret societies during Feb. 1905, NAI CBS 3/716, 29989/S.