newer MPs wrote to him in such terms as ‘If my pledge did not forbid it, I would be happy to recommend X’, but Redmond, Dillon and others ‘never approached him in this way’. Maume concludes that Redmond ‘found equivocation stressful and probably rarely intervened’.61 In 1907, Griffith published lists of party supporters, journalists and lawyers close to the Freeman who had received Government jobs. D.P. Moran disagreed about the impropriety of it all. At a time when the upper echelons of the civil service were disproportionately Protestant and unionist, he called it ‘a very green and foolish rule’ to refuse to canvass for nationalist candidates; the impression of the Party as a patronage machine arose from the fact that the rule deterred committed nationalists from applying while lukewarm nationalists and place-hunters got the best jobs.62
Although Redmond has been criticized for failing to groom youthful talent for leadership, his speech at the December 1904 launch of the Young Ireland Branch of the UIL (soon to be known as the ‘YIBs’) suggests that his intentions, at least, were otherwise. Most of the members were students or recent graduates of Dublin’s Royal University. Redmond admitted that the party had suffered in recent years from ‘an absence of young men in our ranks’, due partly to the Parnell split and partly to the springing up of ‘more attractive’ movements, such as the Gaelic League. Although the League was doing ‘a noble, and what I would say almost, a holy work in Ireland’, the two movements were complementary, and his only regret was that those who had joined the language movement had not at the same time gone into the political movement. He hoped that the new branch would revive the spirit of:
… the remarkable episode of the coming together in Parnell’s time in ’80 and ’81 and the years that followed of such a galaxy of young and brilliant Irishmen willing to devote themselves and sacrifice their interests in the political movement.63
The YIBs took seriously Redmond’s advice to become a forum for ‘free discussion on political issues’, and the branch soon became a loyal opposition within the movement, its members taking a spirited part in the many controversies of the coming years. Among its notable members were the journalists Francis Skeffington and Francis Cruise O’Brien, and the poet and academic Thomas Kettle, all three of whom would marry daughters of David Sheehy MP, and Richard Hazleton, who had already distinguished himself in his campaigning in South Dublin. When seat vacancies arose in 1906, Hazleton was returned unopposed for North Galway in March and Kettle by a narrow margin for East Tyrone in July.64 In October, the Freeman boasted of the party’s ‘two latest and brilliant recruits’, and Redmond, at a banquet before their departure on an American mission for the UIL, declared it many years since two young men had entered the party who gave such hope and promise of great careers.65 Given that his only previous youthful recruit with leadership potential was Devlin, his satisfaction was understandable. Kettle, along with the middle-aged Gwynn, would give the party intellectual weight and able defence of its policies in the coming years.66 Kettle, who edited his own weekly paper, The Nationist, had already heavily criticized Griffith’s ‘Hungarian’ policy – a factor that may have caused the Sinn Féin groups to omit mention of Hungary from their policy statements at the end of 1905 – and argued against economic separatism and the ‘little-Irelandism’ of many Gaelic revivalists, and for an Irish nationalism enriched by the European heritage.67 When Davitt fell ill and died in late May 1906 (his funeral in Mayo was attended by Redmond, Dillon and many others of the Irish Party), Kettle, in dealing with land issues, would try to fill his shoes. ‘In these days of conciliation, I am still an impenitent follower of Michael Davitt,’ he said at the February 1909 National Convention.68
It remains a fact, however, that little new blood was brought into the senior levels of the party, and that Kettle and Hazleton were the only two YIBs to become MPs under Redmond’s leadership. The difficulty lay not so much in a desire on his part to keep power in senior hands as in his powerlessness to control local UIL organizations. He received applications from at least three other YIB members to stand for the party. One applicant was the able W.G. Fallon, who won the party’s nomination for the mid-Cork seat in January 1910, only to be defeated by the O’Brienite candidate. In the December election of the same year, Redmond failed to secure the mid-Tyrone nomination for Fallon, finding it impossible to put forward his name after a local dispute.69 In late 1909, Frederick W. Ryan and Frank MacDermot wrote seeking nominations, but no vacancies were available. Ryan stood, and lost, as an independent Nationalist candidate for the King’s County (Birr) seat in December 1910. MacDermot, a twenty-two-year -old Oxford graduate and son of Redmond’s late legal colleague The MacDermot KC, then reading for the English Bar, wrote that he would appreciate an interview even if there were ‘only a slight chance’ of finding a suitable seat. Redmond passed the letter to his private secretary, T.J. Hanna, with a note to say: ‘The writer is a very clever and good fellow [Redmond’s emphasis].’ MacDermot became instead another backroom intellectual, writing memoranda for the party on the fiscal aspects of Home Rule.70 It was all a far cry from May 1890 and Parnell’s parachuting of the twenty-two-year -old Henry Harrison straight from Oxford, unopposed, into the vacant seat of mid-Tipperary.
Other YIBs were too far from the party’s conservative Catholic mainstream to be acceptable as candidates; Redmond’s dislike of those he saw as faddists and cranks was triggered by the pacifist vegetarian feminist Sheehy-Skeffington. The loss to the party was not limited to young men. As Senia Pašeta points out, the exclusion of women from participation in the party, and even effectively from the YIB, and the party’s failure to support female suffrage drove politicized women into the Gaelic League or Sinn Féin.71 Moreover, the early promise of even the two new recruits was not fulfilled. The American tour of Kettle and Hazleton was a failure, bedevilled by personality clashes between the two envoys and the local UIL leadership. O’Callaghan sent Redmond a stream of letters about the arrogance and uncommunicativeness of the Irishmen, who, for their part, alleged that the east-coast-based officers had left them to fend for themselves in the midwest and further west.72
IV
Following Redmond’s meeting with Sir Antony MacDonnell early in 1906, the latter sent Bryce a first draft of a scheme for Irish government reform in February, and the Government’s deliberations went ahead in great secrecy.73 By midsummer, the Irish leaders were still in the dark as to exactly what was entailed in Campbell Bannerman’s ‘instalment of representative control’.74 Redmond and Dillon used their autumn speeches in Ireland to voice their expectations. At Grange, Co. Limerick, on 23 September, Redmond warned that he would take no responsibility for any such ‘makeshift’ as a measure of mere administrative Home Rule. However, any scheme proposed would be carefully examined and submitted to a representative national convention. This was too negative for the Liberal press, and a fortnight later at Athlone he declared himself ‘sincerely anxious’ to be able to support the Government’s scheme. He warned nonetheless that a ‘bold and statesmanlike’ scheme would be easier to pass than ‘something cramped and crooked and not practical’. The proposal would be judged solely by the criterion of the advancement of the Home Rule cause, and if it proved to be an ‘abortion’ would be repudiated by the party and people.75 Dillon was more upbeat, telling a Leitrim audience that he had every reason to believe that the Government was about to grant ‘complete control of the administration of their country through directly elected representatives of the Irish people’; the scheme would be ‘at least as good as the measure they have given to the Boers’.76 Whatever his grounds for such optimism, it was short-lived. In late September, he told Redmond that, from hints dropped by a contact, he expected the scheme to be ‘very unsatisfactory’.77
Redmond met Bryce in Dublin on 8 October, the day after the Athlone speech, to be shown the latest draft of the scheme.78 An administrative council of fifty-five members, two-thirds of it elected from the county councils, one-third nominated by the Lord Lieutenant who would preside, would co-ordinate some Irish boards and departments and their expenditure.79 Redmond forwarded the draft to Dillon with the comment:
I said practically nothing to Bryce except that at first sight it seemed beneath contempt, as it is. He seemed greatly alarmed and said nothing was settled...80
At
