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
