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1918 general election
Within a few weeks of this speech, Waterford City was convulsed by the 1918 general election. Again, Richard and John Hearne played prominent roles in the campaign. William Archer Redmond’s selection as its candidate by the local United Ireland League was seconded by the former100 and he also seconded his formal nomination papers.101 John Hearne addressed meetings in the city; he spoke at Grace Dieu on 10 December102 and at a rally in Broad Street on 12 December.103 An indication of his increasing stature in political circles was an invitation to speak at a meeting in the county in support of the candidacy of James John O’Shee, the Home Rule candidate. In its account, the Freeman’s Journal listed the speakers, but made a particular reference to Hearne, commenting that ‘he delivered a powerful speech’.104 Unfortunately, no details were given of this or, indeed, of any of his speeches during the election.
Unsurprisingly, it was a bitter contest marked by incidents of disorder and violence on both sides. Volunteers were again drafted into Waterford to protect Sinn Féin canvassers who were outnumbered by their opponents. One volunteer recorded his impressions of the campaign thus: ‘I was in Waterford city for the most exciting election contest in the 1918 general election … I have never met anything since to equal the fanaticism of the Redmond supporters in that contest, who at times went berserk.’105 On the eve of polling, there were street brawls106 and disorder on polling day itself.107
Redmond retained his seat with 4,915 votes to White’s 4,431. For the Irish Parliamentary Party the election was a disaster nationally: it won six seats as against Sinn Féin’s seventy-three. Though Sinn Féin secured 48 per cent of the total votes cast and the Irish Parliamentary Party 23 per cent, the first-past-the-post system ensured the spoils to the victor. Constitutional nationalism was not dead but it had lost its voice for the moment. As Meleady has written: ‘Thus died, within months of his own death, all of the projects that had absorbed Redmond’s energies – home rule within the empire and the party fashioned to bring it into being.’108 John Hearne and his father also saw their political dreams, beliefs and commitment pushed aside as the country embarked on a new course.
Nearly forty years later, while serving as Irish Ambassador to the United States, John Hearne summed up his experiences of 1918 in an address to American lawyers: ‘I supported a political party which not only lost control of the country the year I joined its political hopefuls, but at the same time passed out of existence.’ He also shared with his audience the assessment of T.M. Healy of his venture into politics: ‘Young man, your political career was short, brilliant and disastrous.’109 While brutal in their directness, Healy’s words were accurate.
John Hearne’s political views: a summary description
At this point it may be useful to review and attempt a summary description of Hearne’s political ideas and views. This presents some real difficulties: ‘The reconstruction of mentalities is notoriously difficult, particularly when few records of intimate thoughts and aspirations, as those which sometimes appear in diaries and personal letters, are available.’110 However, his two election speeches and his address to the Young Ireland branch give a reasonable, if necessarily limited, insight into Hearne’s mentality. Clearly, he was an ardent and uncompromising supporter of Home Rule for Ireland. He spoke of it as giving the country a ‘self-developing status among free peoples’. Perhaps here he was subscribing to an idea, albeit inchoately, that it would not be in itself a final settlement – Ireland in time would achieve all the attributes of freedom associated with a sovereign state. Whatever about reading too much into that comment, he was, undoubtedly, committed to constitutionalism and parliamentarianism as the means of winning self-government. Given this view, his admiration for John Redmond and his achievements was real and understandable, an admiration reinforced by the fact that he had been the MP for Waterford City.
A corollary of this dedication to Home Rule was Hearne’s rejection of Sinn Féin and its policies. He regarded them as impractical and unattainable – the advocacy of a republic, in particular, a delusion – when considered against the practicality and attainability of Home Rule which was on the statute book. Believing Sinn Féin’s revolutionary proposals and methods to be damaging to Irish national interests, he promoted the primacy of the constitutional agenda. However, he had no illusions about, and was very critical of, English policy towards Ireland and condemned the attitude of the government. He articulated the language that was already fully developed within the Home Rule movement and used during the crises of 1914 and 1916–18 against what was regarded as a succession of English betrayals. Like many advocates of Home Rule, he was steeped in the bellicosity of language, sense of victimhood, glorification of struggle, identification of the movement’s enemies and antipathy to England which suffused provincial nationalist orthodoxy.111 John Hearne thus revealed himself as a typically robust nationalist in the constitutional, Redmondite tradition.
His engagement in politics affords us also some insight into his personality. He showed himself to be more than able to involve himself in the rough and tumble of a very tempestuous election campaign. The particularly embittered nature of the electioneering did not seem to bother him. Indeed, he himself contributed to the heat engendered by the contest by excoriating, even eviscerating, the Sinn Féin opposition. What emerges from a consideration of his political involvement is a man of determined views, convinced of their integrity, trenchant in their expression and lucid in their enunciation.
It is interesting to remember that Hearne was campaigning for Home Rule and Captain William Redmond while Éamon de Valera was on the opposite side, supporting Sinn Féin and an Irish republic. Hearne attacked with deliberate vitriol the party led by the man with whom he was to work so closely in the 1930s. To one of his antagonists in the crucial election in Waterford in 1918, de Valera later entrusted one of his most important concerns – a new constitution. This is a fascinating and dramatic illustration of how political circumstances change with the passage of time.
John Hearne and the revolutionary generation
Scholars have studied the revolutionary generation, the men and women who participated in the 1916 Easter Rising and those inspired by it, who rejected Home Rule and constitutional politics. Roy Foster surveyed the lives and beliefs of some of this generation, born roughly between the 1870s and the 1890s.112 In an earlier study, Tom Garvin considered the revolutionary elite who constructed the independent Irish state and their political formation in the years 1890–1914.113 There is an overlap in both studies in terms of personnel and time frame. What emerges from both is a fascinating political portrait of some of Hearne’s contemporaries. ‘The fact remains that during this era enough people – especially young people – changed their minds about political possibilities to bring about a revolution against the old order, which included not only government by Britain but the constitutionalism of the previous generation.’114 In considering these studies and the generation they examine, light can be shed on the political formation of Hearne and why he, in contrast with others, continued to espouse the cause of Home Rule.
A central tenet of this generation of revolution was their alienation from British rule and rejection of Home Rule. Constitutional nationalism was spurned and self-government, as promoted by John Redmond, regarded as ‘a corrupt and exhausted compromise’115 which would impose on Ireland ‘a grubby, materialist, collaborationist, Anglicised identity’.116 As the person most associated with it, Redmond was utterly scorned, as was his party. Patrick Maume has commented that ‘it is a shock to rediscover the ferocity and extent of contemporary separatist invective denouncing Redmond as a conscious traitor who was deliberately selling Ireland and sending her to destruction’.117 When Seán T. O’Kelly spoke of the need to rid the country of the Irish Parliamentary Party ‘incubus’,118 he was articulating a common view of those disposed to revolutionary means.
The previous generation was often perceived as the enemy, every bit as much as the British government and the Irish Parliamentary Party were. Patrick Pearse declared that ‘there has been nothing more terrible in Irish history
