the American John O’Callaghan and others.
With the final estrangement of O’Brien at the February 1909 ‘Baton’ Convention, followed by his foundation of the All for Ireland League, the Irish Independent, owned by William Martin Murphy, passed from the role of loyal opposition to that of destructive critic and even enemy, a role it would maintain for the rest of Redmond’s life (Chapter 12). The Party thereafter received much censure for its faults and little credit for its achievements. However, the withering attacks coming from the paper, augmented by those of Healy (theoretically still a Party member), could not prevent the veto crisis and Asquith’s declaration on Home Rule at the Albert Hall in late 1909 from elevating Redmond to a pivotal position in both British and Irish politics.
Redmond’s lobbying of Morley in advance of Asquith’s declaration, and the memorandum of his meeting with the Master of Elibank, show a new confidence and resolve. His reports to Dillon in early 1910 show a sure-footed exploitation of his leverage in the game of bluff he had to play with Lloyd George; the election had given the Irish Party the balance of power but both knew that Redmond could hardly use it against the Liberals without putting back the Home Rule cause for many years.
***
Where in these letters does Redmond look weakest? Most obviously, it is in his forced acquiescence in the early Ulster exclusion proposals of the Liberal government in March 1914 (Chapter 10). In the space of five months he had had to abandon the stance taken in his uncompromising speech at Limerick, declaring that nationalists would never assent to the ‘mutilation of the nation’, and to assent to the principle of partition for the first time. His earlier meeting with Asquith on 2 February, when the Prime Minister told him he would have to make an offer to the Ulster unionists, was a seismic moment. We have a record of Redmond’s reaction to the news. ‘My visitor shivered visibly and was a good deal perturbed,’ Asquith confided to his diary. This acquiescence would become an effective weapon of his enemies against him then and later. It would form the first indictment against him (even ahead of his call on Irishmen to take their place in the firing line) from the IRB-controlled Irish Volunteers following their split from the larger Volunteer body in September 1914. The Irish Independent would never let him forget his ‘mutilation’ vow.
Even for a large body of the Party’s moderate supporters, Conor Cruise O’Brien has written, ‘The source of the anguish was not the “loss” of eastern Ulster … [but the] tragic and unexpected flaw that became apparent at the very moment of the seeming triumph of the Home Rule cause.’1 To the Independent leader-writers, Redmond was guilty of weak-minded capitulation to a Cabinet that had itself succumbed to threats of violence from the ‘Orangemen’. They failed, however, to take account of the realities of the power play. The offer of six-year exclusion based on county plebiscites was, of course, insufficient for the Ulster unionists. It seems possible, however, that a similar offer, without the time limit, would have been much more difficult for them to reject, especially in the period before the events at the Curragh and Larne had strengthened their position. (In late July, after the failure of the Buckingham Palace Conference, Redmond would prepare to take this further step, only to be forestalled by the onset of war.) Yet, in March, even the temporary partition offer entailed ‘enormous risks’, as he told Asquith on 2 March, which is why he felt he could endorse it only (i) without a vote, (ii) at the last moment in the debate and (iii) ‘as the price of peace’. In other words, his only chance of winning his followers’ acceptance of the concession was to couch it as an act of magnanimity made in the moment of victory.
***
Every consideration of Redmond’s tragedy must return to the causes of his downfall. Nationalist historians continue to place the blame for the failure of Home Rule solely on Ulster unionism and its Conservative allies. The late Professor Ronan Fanning, writing of Redmond’s compromise proposal in September 1914 to suspend the operation of the Home Rule Act until the Amending Bill became law, correctly criticises the ‘Irish Party’s refusal to come to grips with the Ulster unionists’ right to self-determination’, thus encouraging ‘the nationalist delusion that the partition of Ireland was avoidable’ (pp. 133–4). Yet, a few pages later, he writes of the Unionist ‘stranglehold’ on the Government’s Irish policy (he uses the word several times, expanding on it as ‘tantamount to a power of veto’), as if Unionist policy aimed at denying Home Rule to Ireland in toto.2 This ignores the fact that, since the autumn of 1913, Unionists had abandoned blanket opposition to the Home Rule Bill and sought an agreed settlement in which the two peoples of the island would be granted their respective wishes as far as was possible by excluding Ulster, or a part of it, from the Bill.
Prof. Donal McCartney, reviewing Chris Dooley’s Redmond: A Life Undone in 2015, encourages a related delusion in suggesting that the ‘slippage’ towards partition was a result of the fact that Asquith and Lloyd George lacked Gladstone’s ‘missionary commitment’ to Home Rule and that Redmond lacked Parnell’s charisma.3 It is surely speculative (as well as wishful thinking) to assume that Parnell’s charisma, or his credentials as a southern Protestant landlord, would have carried sufficient weight with the industrial workers of the north-east or the Presbyterian farmers of rural Ulster to disarm their outright opposition to the prospect of rule by a Home Rule Dublin parliament. We will never know how he would have faced that opposition. We do know that Gladstone, in 1886 and again in 1893, not only hinted in Parliament at the possible need for some form of exclusion of Ulster, but, on the second occasion, stated that Parnell had been willing in 1886 to allow the north-east corner of Ireland to be excluded from Home Rule if its people so desired.
The reality is that Parnell never came to close quarters with the problem because his Home Rule efforts did not progress as far as Redmond’s. The non-possumus, the refusal to coerce Ulster to accept Home Rule, with which Asquith confronted Redmond in 1914, and with which Lloyd George would confront him again in 1916 and 1917, was one which neither O’Connell nor Parnell had had to face – simply because they had never advanced to the point where the legislation for a self-governing Ireland was about to be passed into law. It was Redmond’s bad luck to lead Irish nationalism at the first moment when the conflict between its aspirations and those of Irish loyalism demanded resolution in territorial form.
Nor did Parnell have to face the malign narrowing of political options brought about by an armed rebellion in his capital city. Such room for manoeuvre as allowed Redmond and his colleagues to agree, however reluctantly, to pre-war partition schemes had shrunk by October 1916 to the point where T.P. O’Connor had to confine his pro-partition opinions to a private letter: ‘of course you and I know that no settlement is possible in any period which we can see clearly ahead that does not involve the partition of Ulster’. Likewise the evolution of the fiscal autonomy question, from the elasticity of view evident in the correspondence of 1911–12 to its status by 1918 as a ‘red line’ issue that would cause close colleagues to abandon Redmond and bring down the Irish Convention.
Yet it was the same non-possumus, undented by the 1916 rebellion, with which Lloyd George confronted the Sinn Féin negotiators of the Treaty in 1921, and the same which has confronted every government of independent Ireland to this day. It is the same reality that the electorate of the Irish Republic finally voted in 1998 to recognise – by 94 per cent on a turnout of 56 per cent – by removing the territorial imperative of Article 2 of the constitution and accepting the principle of consent.
CHAPTER 1
The Young Wexford MP, 1880–1890
John Edward Redmond entered public life at the age of 23 after the death of his father William Archer Redmond (1825–1880). Redmond senior had been elected MP for Wexford Borough in 1872 on the platform of Isaac Butt’s Home Government Association and, after the general election of 1874, was one of 59 Irish Home Rule MPs in the Westminster Parliament under Butt’s leadership. After leaving Trinity College Dublin in 1876 without
