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
