Clan-na-Gael, was potentially a threat to the party’s support organization in the US. A warning came in early 1901 from John O’Callaghan, the Redmondite émigré journalist on the Boston Globe who would become the chief organizer of the UIL of America. The Clan, he wrote, were ‘as bitterly opposed as ever’ to the party’s reunification, were using the Cambridge Union speech against Redmond and alleged that he had personally promised the Queen an enthusiastic reception on her Irish visit. The only way to counteract Clan influence was to step up agitation: ‘things must be made hot in every sense of the word both in Ireland and in the House of Commons’. They needed:
… a good stand-up fight in the House of Commons… Let the young bloods assert themselves… before the session is a week old some of the party ought to be suspended; if you are inclined yourself so much the better… it will arouse the blood of our people here as nothing else can….
If he could have the entire party suspended again near the end of the session, hold the National Convention in Dublin and come over to the US at once, he would ‘sweep America from one end to the other, as Parnell did’. This would ‘make it impossible for anybody any longer to misrepresent or misunderstand what it is you stand for in Ireland’.39
Advice of a more sober kind came from Edward Blake, the sixty-eight-year-old MP for Longford South, former Canadian Liberal Government Minister, former anti-Parnellite and Dillon confidant, who had helped to bring about the reunion and was eager to move quickly to constructive work.40 Blake suggested how the parliamentary situation might be used to maximum Irish advantage. The new rules of debate made obstruction on the old Parnell lines impossible, but the Government’s difficulties in finding time for its ever-increasing volume of business could be exploited. What was needed was a system by which party members would insist on discussing every item of Government business, Imperial, British and Irish. Since speeches could not be long, they would need a considerable number of speakers; since they must be relevant, the speakers must have mastered their subjects; since arguments must not be tediously repeated, different speakers must take different lines.
The whole business, though in a sense guerrilla, must be conducted with some knowledge of the art of parliamentary warfare as now developed… Never too much on any question, but always something on every question, should be the aim.41
Acting on Blake’s advice, Redmond established eleven different committees covering the main issues of concern: land, Home Rule, local government, education, Anglo– Irish financial relations, British affairs and foreign affairs, involving as many members as possible. Party discipline was tightened: pairing was forbidden, and absences were to be notified to the whips.42
III
With progress on Home Rule blocked for the time being, the party’s 1901 parliamentary campaign began with amendments by Redmond and Dillon on the land question and the war respectively, presented in the debate on the Address. The UIL had resolved to reinvigorate the policy of land purchase and the creation of a peasant proprietary first adopted by the Land League under Parnell’s leadership twenty years earlier. As the latter had found, this was a policy more congenial to Conservative than to Liberal Governments. The first Tory legislation to facilitate land purchase was that of Lord Ashbourne in 1885. This was followed by less effective measures under Arthur Balfour in 1891 and his brother Gerald in 1896. As the historian Philip Bull has remarked, ‘the cumulative effects of purchase under these acts confirmed it as the way forward in the minds both of landlords and tenants’.43 Government and League were thus agreed on the objective; where they differed, crucially, was on the means to attain it. The Tories favoured the use of voluntary financial incentives, but had so far failed to create a sufficiently effective scheme to encourage the majority of landlords and tenants to bargain. The UIL campaigned for compulsory sale by landlords, and a parallel campaign among the Presbyterian tenants of Ulster raised the same demand.44
Redmond advanced the UIL policy as the Irish national demand when he presented his amendment to the Address on 21 February. He first criticized Gladstone’s great reforming Land Act of 1881, under which tenants could apply for judicial revision of rents every fifteen years, arguing that the dual-ownership system it set up should now be abolished.45 Downward rent revisions and associated legal expenses in the land courts would soon squeeze the majority of smaller landlords out of existence, while failing to protect tenants against the fall in agricultural prices. The fault in the Tory purchase acts, on the other hand, was that their operation was so slow – about 50,000 sales, less than one tenth of the total of farms, had been effected in fifteen years – that it would take another 150 years to settle the land question. The financial terms had been inadequate, but no voluntary system, he argued, could provide adequate incentives to both sides. The only solution was:
… a great, bold, and statesmanlike scheme… for the general compulsory sale of the land by the landlords to the tenants upon terms which will not only be just to the tenants, but which, so far as we are concerned, will be absolutely just to the Irish landlords.
Redmond, like Parnell before him, differed from almost all of his party colleagues in his vision of what lay beyond land purchase. While the abolition of landlordism meant for the majority, at least rhetorically, the disappearance of a hated British ‘garrison’, Parnell had hoped that a generous scheme of compensation would encourage landlords as individuals to take up leading roles in national life and even in the Home Rule movement. A united ‘patriotic union of classes’ under such a stabilizing influence would present an unanswerable case for self-government.46 Redmond had voiced similar sentiments as Parnellite leader; now, striking a note at variance with the ingrained anti-landlord sentiments of many of his party colleagues, he returned to his own conciliationist rhetoric of the 1890s:
We do not desire to exterminate any class of our countrymen, no matter what the history of their forefathers may have been… my own belief and hope [is] that, if a great scheme… is carried into effect, a very large proportion indeed of the Irish landlords who have been expropriated will be glad to retain their houses and homes and continue to live in the country and bear their share in promoting its prosperity in the future.47
He hailed the Ulster tenants’ campaign for compulsory purchase led by the Liberal Unionist MP, T.W. Russell, who had braved taunts from fellow unionists of ‘trafficking with traitors’ to second his amendment, as:
… that great movement which has sprung up in the province of Ulster, and which is led with such courage and ability by the honourable Member for South Tyrone… We present [our demand] to you here tonight with the authority of a united Ireland….48
Redmond’s presentation of his case was hailed on all sides as a tour de force, but the defeat of the land amendment was a foregone conclusion. There would be no legislation on the land issue in the 1901 session.49 However, a high level of participation by Irish Party members, who made eighty-four speeches in the first three weeks of the session, ensured that Irish affairs dominated debate on the other amendments also.50
By 1 March, The Times was complaining that ‘the multiplication of questions to Ministers which is part of the harassing tactics the Irish Nationalists have revived’ had become a great nuisance.
