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INTRODUCTION

Redmond… possessed elements of statesmanship of a high order. The fact that he was given no chance to apply his qualities in the rebuilding of his native land is one of the myriad tragedies of Irish history.

– David Lloyd George, War Memoirs: Volume 1 (London, 1938), p.420.

In October 1908, the Irish Parliamentary Party held a banquet at the Gresham Hotel, Dublin for its leader John Redmond and three colleagues on their return from a mission to the United States. His deputy, John Dillon, paying tribute to Redmond, said that he had effected ‘one of the greatest works of conciliation ever wrought for Ireland… a task that, I must confess, many of us doubted whether it was within the power of mankind to achieve.’1 The reference was to one of Redmond’s foremost achievements since assuming the chairmanship in 1900: his binding up of the wounds of the party after the decade-long Parnell split and his refashioning of it as an effective political instrument for nationalist Irish purposes in the UK Parliament. The party’s reunification was a fragile affair: a fresh division had been patched up at the start of 1908, and would erupt again during the following year. Nevertheless, despite his having led the minority Parnellite faction for nine years after Parnell’s death, Redmond had been able to win the loyalty and affection of the former anti-Parnellite majority, chief among them Dillon. His success owed much to a rigorous application to work and to magnificently persuasive oratorical powers, but was due above all to what Dillon called ‘… the tact, the kindness, and infinite conciliatory power of Mr Redmond’ – a personal style very different from the imperiousness of Parnell that had incubated enmities even as it ensured party discipline.

Some former adversaries were sure that had he, the only prominent Parnellite MP, reconciled himself with the majority soon after Parnell’s death in 1891, the split would have had a shorter life. Two obstacles, however, had made that impossible. The first was the scabrous invective heaped on him and other Parnellites by Tim Healy. The other was Redmond’s loyalty to the memory of Parnell as a friend and to Parnellite political principles that he saw, rightly or wrongly, as being abandoned by the majority. Now, haunted by the nightmare memory of that decade, he was so averse to the merest hint of party disunity as to be willing, in the eyes of some critics, to buy conciliation at the cost of submerging his own political principles. What to Dillon was tact and conciliatory power seemed, to others, to be submission to Dillon’s own power.

The Dublin banquet was also a celebration of a particularly fertile parliamentary session for constitutional Irish nationalism. The major achievement of 1908 had been the landmark act to set up the National University of Ireland. Accompanying this was legislation for working-class housing, and for the restoration of the last of the tenants evicted during the Land War. Previous sessions had seen, among other measures, the Tories’ 1903 Land Purchase Act, which had ushered in one of the twentieth century’s great bloodless revolutions: the transfer of Irish land ownership from landlords to tenants, fulfilling Parnell’s dream of creating a peasant proprietary; a Labourers Act to enable the building of tens of thousands of cottages for the rural poor and legislation to safeguard the rights of town tenants.

Not all British reforming legislation enacted for Ireland during Redmond’s tenure was the direct outcome of his or the party’s efforts. The 1908 Old Age Pensions and 1911 National Insurance Acts, of which the party was critical, were primarily parts of the welfare revolution introduced by David Lloyd George for the UK as a whole. Nevertheless, after a decade as leader, Redmond could claim at least the partial parentage of an impressive list of legislative achievements. None had happened simply because British Governments favoured them. The role of the Irish Party was crucial in lobbying for them, piloting them through Parliament, winning priority and adequate parliamentary time and fighting for constructive, and against destructive, amendments. The task required diligent attendance at the House of Commons, enormous patience and perseverance, consummate knowledge of parliamentary procedure and constant vigilance against snap votes that might defeat a friendly Government. That work, which left nationalist Ireland, in his own words of late 1916, with its feet ‘firmly planted in the groundwork and foundation of a free nation’, must be reckoned as Redmond’s second contribution to the welfare of his country.2

Reforming legislation was not, of course, the primary aim of the Irish Party; it was incidental to its presence at Westminster in the pursuit of the overriding goal of winning self-government for Ireland. For Tory–Unionist Governments up to 1905, reforms were an attempt to buy off Home Rule sentiment. Under the Liberal Government of 1906–10, they were a useful means for the party to maintain nationalist morale while it lobbied and bargained for a practical commitment to legislate for Home Rule. During these years, outside Parliament, Redmond and his colleagues campaigned tirelessly up and down the industrial centres of Great Britain to deliver the Home Rule case to the ‘British democracy’, the new electorate with little knowledge of and few preconceptions about Ireland. His carrying of a motion in favour of Home Rule at the Oxford Union in 1907 (before a largely young Tory audience) prompted a newspaper to remark: ‘It is doubtful if the Union has ever heard or will ever hear again a speech that will have such influence on its hearers.’ By the end of his life, the case for Irish self-government had essentially been won in the arena of British opinion, whatever obstacles lay in the path of its implementation. Arguably, the Irish negotiators of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty were pushing at an open door when they went to London; Redmond’s prior conversion of British attitudes, although he received no thanks for it in Ireland, facilitated the negotiations. His success in this role, as ambassador of the Irish nation in Britain, constitutes his third significant achievement as Irish Party leader.3

Redmond’s role in the political life of Britain went beyond this. Along with the advocatory ambassadorial role, he was both an effective power broker and lobbyist behind the scenes and a forceful wielder of pressure on the public platform, as Asquith and his colleagues discovered in the constitutional crisis of 1910 and during the passage of the Home Rule Bill. British parliamentarians had seen impressive Irish leaders in their midst. They had been bemused and irritated in the 1820s and ’30s by O’Connell’s extravagant oratory as he campaigned for the abolition of slavery, Catholic and Jewish emancipation and repeal of the Union. They had regarded Parnell with wary respect as he cleverly exploited the balance of power between the British parties in the mid-1880s. Redmond, however, was the only Irish leader whose political programme accorded so well with important strands in British political life, and who was simultaneously so imposing in performance and so well attuned to the ‘style’ of the House of Commons (as O’Connell’s latest biographer tells us his subject was not) that at least one of those parties could imagine him as its own leader.4 In 1901 he was spoken of as the real leader of the Opposition. In 1910, to Liberals spoiling for a fight with the House of Lords, he was a hero; to Tories, the dollar-funded ‘dictator’. The attention lavished on him between 1910 and 1914 by the cartoonists of Punch and other periodicals testifies to his centrality in British political life during those years.5 Had he wished it, there is little doubt that he could have made a career at the top of the Liberal Party. An unbending sense of duty, however, forbade any such departure; his commitment to the winning of his own nation’s self-government remained rock-solid. In 1910, as Redmond’s reputation approached its zenith, a former member of the party’s youth branch, Francis Cruise O’Brien, wrote:

It is as a statesman that one comes more and more to regard Mr Redmond. He has that breadth of view, that serenity of judgment and outlook, that spaciousness of purpose and idea, which marks off the real man of the State from the man of a party, or from the leader of a crowd.6

There were mistakes and failures too. Having rebuilt the party, he failed, with a few exceptions, to rejuvenate its leadership; the Home Rule project was led to the last by ageing men anxious to complete what they had begun in their youths. Of the decision-making quadrumvirate of Redmond, Dillon, T.P. O’Connor and Joe Devlin, only the last had been too young to serve under Parnell. Educated young nationalist men and women with a talent for politics drifted instead into separatist or cultural organizations. Another failure was his mishandling of the Liberals’ offer of a devolution scheme in 1907, bringing on his leadership a crisis from which it took all his energies to escape.

Redmond never articulated a comprehensive social vision of his desired Home Rule Ireland along the lines of de Valera’s ‘frugal comfort and cosy homesteads’ dream, though much can be inferred from his speeches. Blaming emigration on direct British rule, he hoped to see it end, though he may have underestimated the role of structural factors in its perpetuation. It is certain that he would have wanted to continue the economic development of the 1900s decade, with a vigorous urban slum-clearance programme and further improvements in housing provision for the rural poor. We gather that he favoured the creation of non-elitist technical universities. However, if there is no doctrinaire ruralism in his thinking, neither does he show much enthusiasm for the mass industrialization he saw in Britain and the culture it generated. And from his interventions in the 1909 Budget debates, it is clear that he was wary of raising expectations excessively and believed that the new state must cut its coat according to its limited cloth. It is probable that the early years of Home Rule Ireland would have resembled the 1920s Free State in the sobriety of its finances, with the exception that, had Redmond been able to ensure the strong representation and participation of unionists he desired in the life of the state, the flight of capital would have been reduced and funds for investment more readily available. The most difficult question to answer is whether Home Rule Ireland would have been as theocratic a state as the Free State and Republic. It is likely that the stronger British connection and a less marginalized southern Protestant community would have acted as a brake on the ambitions of Catholic clerics. Redmond himself, though a devout Catholic, had the will and confidence to stand up to them when they encroached on the temporal sphere. On the other hand, the Church was deeply embedded at all levels of the national movement and had the pervasive power to influence the workings of democracy in many indirect ways.

The defining event of Redmond’s career encompasses at once his greatest achievement and greatest failure. Here was the success that had evaded O’Connell, Butt and Parnell: the attainment of the forty-year-old goal of having a Home Rule Act signed into law, only to see its scope restricted by the refusal of unionist Ulster to accept it, its implementation delayed by a World War and then subverted by an armed rebellion by extreme separatists. The precise interplay of these factors in the collapse of the constitutional strategy for Irish self-government, the political destruction of Redmond and the eclipse of his reputation is still controversial a century later.

Two views of Redmond’s fall have predominated in nationalist discourse. The harsher blames him for, or at least attributes his fall to, his being the first Irish political leader to concede a partition that would leave part of the province of Ulster outside the remit of an Irish Parliament, for his calls for Irish nationalist support for the British side in the Great War, for the waste of tens of thousands of young Irish lives in the British armed forces and for his condemnation of the Easter 1916 insurrection. Shared by Irish republicans in general, this attitude found an extreme expression in the caricature by the Irish-American Fenian John Devoy, who excoriated the ‘spineless policy and vitiating doctrines of Redmond and his followers’.7

After the appearance of two biographies in 1919, the year after Redmond’s death – a short work by Warre B. Wells and an affectionately critical account of the later years by Stephen Gwynn – the publication of Denis Gwynn’s major biography of Redmond in 1932 went some way to rehabilitate his reputation in newly independent Ireland. Its documenting of his robust exchanges with British leaders, his refusal to yield more than the initial offer of temporary Home Rule exclusion to Ulster or to make any concessions over Tyrone and Fermanagh at the Buckingham Palace Conference, his concern to save the lives of and win amnesty for the 1916 prisoners, together with its recall of Catholic nationalist outrage at the news of German war crimes in Belgium in 1914, all helped to generate a second, kinder perspective on Redmond as a well-intentioned patriot who had tried according to his lights to advance the cause of his country.

From this view was born the paradigm that Redmond had trusted too much in parliamentary methods and had been ‘let down by everyone’ – by British politicians as well as by his own side. It was a view first encouraged by Redmond himself during the war when he blamed his political reverses on British muddle, recalcitrance and broken promises. The author Terence de Vere White echoed the judgment of Denis Gwynn in a 1973 assessment of Redmond.8 For the historian Brendan Ó Cathaoir, commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Redmond’s death, ‘his dream of a self-governing Ireland within the British Empire was sacrificed on the altar of unionist intransigence’, and he was a victim of Lloyd George’s ‘blandishment and deceit’.9 This perspective in its own way served to vindicate those who had rejected Redmond’s constitutionalism and believed that violence was the only path to freedom: if his methods had failed, physical force remained the only useful response to British deceptions and foot-dragging.

In placing the blame for the demise of the Home Rule project solely on external agents, both prevailing nationalist views of Redmond engaged in a certain amount of scapegoating, thus avoiding looking within the political culture of Irish nationalism itself. The attitude reflects, in particular, a failure over many years to take Ulster unionism seriously, to understand its origins or genuinely to engage with its sentiments. Redmond shared in these failures: the statesmanship he manifested in his treatment of the Anglo-Irish relationship as a whole deserted him in his approach to Ulster, although, in fairness, he was anxious to do everything possible to conciliate it. The nationalist press, almost to the end of the Home Rule crisis, dismissed and ridiculed the unionist threats to resist the imposition of Home Rule. When it became clear that unionist Ulster had armed itself sufficiently to do so, it ascribed the resistance solely to the machinations of British reactionary politicians or complained of British reluctance to repress it.

This biography proposes a view of Redmond’s tragedy as due primarily neither to his own shortcomings as nationalist leader nor to the muddles or stratagems of British politicians – though these factors undoubtedly increased his difficulties – but rather to structural factors beyond his control rooted in the existence of two distinct national communities in Ireland. Far from betraying Redmond, the Asquith Government held to its undertaking to legislate for all-Ireland Home Rule and, in the face of Ulster’s well-signalled opposition, stood by it well beyond the point at which it might have been expected to make some concession to the pressure. Redmond’s lack of an Ulster policy in 1912 perfectly complemented the procrastinatory ‘wait and see’ approach for which Asquith was famous. Only when the threat of civil war had grown in early 1914 did the Government, with Redmond following reluctantly in tow, concede a time-limited exclusion by plebiscite of Ulster counties from Home Rule. From that point on, all realistic proposals to bring self-government schemes into effect had to include partition in some form. The advent of the Coalition Government in 1915, seen as another betrayal of Home Rule, was a necessary response to war exigencies. Tory members of that cabinet supported Lloyd George’s attempt to bring Home Rule into immediate operation in the summer of 1916, subject to the exclusion of Ulster. What ‘betrayed’ Redmond was not British leaders, but inescapable realities.

From a moderate unionist standpoint, a different set of questions has been raised about Redmond’s failure. The historian Paul Bew, echoing Stephen Gwynn, friend and biographer of Redmond’s last years, has suggested that he should boldly have conceded the right of Ulster counties to opt individually for indefinite rather than temporary exclusion from Home Rule in March 1914 in return for an agreed implementation of Home Rule for the rest of Ireland. Already compromised in the eyes of significant sections of nationalist opinion even for his temporary partition offer, the argument goes, he would thereby have gained ‘compensating credit’ from the significant numbers of unionists who wished to avoid conflict. The move would also have shifted the focus to the territorial issue, where the democratic case for Carson’s ‘clean cut’ – the demand for six-county exclusion en bloc – was weaker, since two of those counties had (slender) nationalist majorities.10 On this view, partition – the unwanted child of warring parents – might at least have had a more amicable beginning, with nationalists later seeking to win Ulster’s consent by making Home Rule attractive to the separated counties.

Redmond would have responded that such a move by him at that moment would spell instant death for his leadership. Nationalist opinion knew and thought little about the Ulster Protestant community, and had simply not been prepared for the possibility that a territorial division of the island might be necessary. Four months later, however, Redmond was preparing to make just such a concession, in a speech for a Commons debate that would anticipate the imminent placing of the Home Rule Act on the statute book. Events had undoubtedly changed his mind since the initial concession of March: the impracticability of British military coercion of Ulster as made clear by the Curragh ‘mutiny’, the qualitative enhancement of unionist Ulster’s capacity for military self-defence by the Larne gunrunning and the mushrooming growth of the nationalist Volunteer movement in response made civil war on the island a looming and horrifying probability. Resisting the demand for en bloc exclusion, and holding fast to the principle of individual county option, he was yet ready to drop the six-year time limit on exclusion, so that there would be ‘no coercion of any Ulster county’ either into or out of Home Rule. Aside from the likely responses from within Ulster unionism to his new concession, his chief concern must have been whether he could keep the bulk of his supporters with him. He would gamble on the resonances of the moment of victory as providing the appropriate setting for a display of magnanimity to Ulster, an effort at ensuring a peaceful birth for Home Rule. Unfortunately, his mistake was to have left it until too late. The scheduled debate never took place, having been overtaken by the onset of the Great War on 3 August.

The unionist diagnosis of Redmond’s chief mistake of 1914 is balanced by a nationalist one: that he was wrong to pledge Irish support for the British war effort on its very first day (or at all), when the Home Rule Act was not yet on the statute book. It is held that he should have used this support as a bargaining chip to win an early establishment of the Irish Parliament and his other demand for the enrolment of the Volunteers as a home defence force, which was the view of Dillon. It is true that he gambled, and lost, on the assumption of the short war that would have made all this unnecessary. The reasons validly offered in his defence are that he saw Ireland as owing a debt of honour to Britain for keeping its word on Home Rule, and an opportunity for Volunteer Irishmen of both traditions to develop new bonds in opposing a common enemy. But the speech-that-was-never-delivered casts an additional light on his motivation. He knew that, although the Home Rule Act would soon be law, the amending bill to provide for Ulster would probably remain to be settled when the war ended, within a year or so as he thought. He could visualize himself back in the House of Commons, delivering that speech at that point. If he could speak for a nationalist Ireland that had remained loyal from the outset of the war, his unmatched feel for the ways of the House told him that he could make a powerful appeal to what he had once described as its sense of ‘rough fair play’, persuading it against the Ulster case for en bloc six-county exclusion, and in the process winning a ‘good’ Amending Act.11 Any suggestion of bargaining with loyalty would have destroyed such a prospect from the start.

Bad luck, or more particularly the interposition of the war and the Easter 1916 insurrection, is often said to be responsible for Redmond’s downfall. Luck, however, played both for and against him. With no agreement on the exact terms of Ulster’s exclusion in late July 1914, the onset of war and the placing of a suspended Home Rule Act on the statute book postponed the question and bought him time, enabling him to envisage new opportunities for conciliation on the Western Front. The contrary turns of fortune in the prolongation of the war and the insurrection undoubtedly multiplied his difficulties, and might well have been catastrophic for him, and for Home Rule, even without the partition issue. In this context, his refusal of Asquith’s offer of a Cabinet seat in the wartime coalition Government in May 1915 seems in retrospect a serious mistake.

Ultimately, however, the question of whether his support for the British war effort was a ‘gamble’ or an unavoidable imperative is beside the point: either way, Ulster would be waiting in the wings whenever the war ended. As matters played out, it was that impasse, and not the war or the Rising, that proved decisive. For Redmond, there was to be no forgiveness for his mortal sin in trifling with the imagined territorial integrity of the island nation. His refusal after 1916 to consider any new schemes involving a division of Ireland did him no good; excommunication from the nationalist pantheon was his lot. Casting him as the scapegoat for partition made it possible down the years for his Sinn Féin successors, who had no better ideas for averting or undoing it, to quietly sideline it as a practical issue and consign it to the realm of rhetorical pieties. A newly published book documents the utter lack of any coherent policy on partition over five decades on the part of either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael, the two political parties, descended from Sinn Féin, that dominated the political life of the independent southern state, despite the fact that each party placed a commitment to achieving a united Ireland at the very core of its identity.12

A century later, it is clear that, from the summer of 1914 onwards, self-government for the nationalist part of Ireland was there for the taking, if only nationalists could accept the principle of the demand of Ulster unionism to opt out. By the summer of 1916, though, with the failure of the Lloyd George proposals to enact immediate Home Rule with six counties excluded, the nationalist body politic had became thoroughly sensitized to the partition issue: a quasi-religious taboo came to surround the very word, bringing down overwhelming anger on the head of any politician foolish enough to contemplate it. Redmond became the victim of his own willingness to entertain, in however tentative a form, what he himself in 1913 had called the ‘mutilation’ of the nation. It was not only nationalists who viewed partition as a hateful expedient: it had initially appalled unionists too, particularly those outside Ulster, and Carson’s and Craig’s reluctant embrace of the idea was accompanied by an anguished searching of hearts over the ‘abandonment’ of the scattered unionist brethren of the south and west. For nationalists, however, the British refusal after 1916 to legislate for all-Ireland Home Rule was seen as a wilful denial of Ireland’s right to freedom per se rather than a recognition of the impossibility of reconciling the mutually exclusive demands of two national communities, an impossibility expressed with sincere feeling by Lloyd George in a March 1917 letter to Willie Redmond.13 As Stephen Gwynn wrote to a fellow-Redmondite in 1918 after their leader’s death, ‘We have repeatedly been offered Home Rule on the spot on terms of leaving out the six counties. Freedom in Ireland has come to mean freedom to coerce Ulster….’14

The pillars of Redmond’s enduring legacy – his development of the constitutional tradition of nationalism as the heir of O’Connell, Butt and Parnell, his self-sacrificing dedication to his nation’s independence and his great achievements in laying the foundations of a self-governing, democratic Irish state – were all submerged in the ignominy of his final defeats. Having fought against difficulties arguably greater than any faced by them, he suffered the additional ill luck of being the last in the line, thus being denied the public remembrance and the monuments that had honoured the others in turn. Politics is a merciless business that does not reward prudence, vision or far-sightedness unless accompanied by short-term success. History can afford to take a kinder view.

Notes and References

1F.J., 22 Oct. 1908.

2Speech at Waterford, I.I., 7 Oct. 1916.

3Charles Lysaght, ‘Our political debt to John Redmond is largely unpaid’, I.T., 1 Sep. 2006.

4Patrick M. Geoghegan, Liberator: The Life and Death of Daniel O’Connell 1830–1847 (Dublin, 2010), p. 19.

5Joseph P. Finnan, ‘Punch’s portrayal of Redmond, Carson and the Irish question’, 1910–18, I.H.S., xxxiii, no. 132 (Nov. 2003), pp. 424–51.

6The Leader, 26 Feb. 1910.

7John Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel (New York, 1929), p. 480.

8Denis Gwynn, The Life of John Redmond (London, 1932), p. 17; Terence de Vere White, ‘The Tragedy of John Redmond’, I.T., 1 Mar. 1973.

9Brendan O Cathaoir, Irishman’s Diary, I.T., 15 Mar. 1993.

10Paul Bew, Ideology and the Irish Question: Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism 1912–1916 (Oxford, 1994), p. 104; Paul Bew, John Redmond (Dundalk, 1996), pp. 35–6.

11On a tour of the US in 1896, Redmond had described the House of Commons as resembling ‘in some respects a great public school. There is the rough fair play. Schoolboys are sometimes bigoted and cruel and so are the members of the House of Commons at times, but there is something like rough fair play among them, It is a place where true grit and perseverance like that of Parnell will succeed.’ Dermot Meleady, Redmond: the Parnellite (Cork, 2008), p. 269.

12Stephen Kelly, Fianna Fáil, Partition and Northern Ireland, 1926–1971 (Dublin, 2013).

13Lloyd George to Willie Redmond, 6 Mar. 1917, private Redmond collection, Dr Mary Green. See Chapter 12.

14S. Gwynn to John J. Horgan, 20 Aug. 1918, quoted in Colin Reid, The lost Ireland of Stephen Gwynn: Irish constitutional nationalism and cultural politics, 1864–1950 (Manchester, 2011), p. 162.