Late return of the man Irish history forgot
John Redmond has been airbrushed out of Irish history, but that is finally changing, writes Dermot Meleady
FOR most of the century after his death in March 1918, John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster from 1900 to 1918, was the forgotten man of Irish history.
The prevailing republican ethos of the Irish State ensured that, when he was remembered at all, it was as “England’s recruiting sergeant”, a man who had sold out his country by aligning it with Great Britain in the Great War and sending thousands of young Irishmen to die in a cause not their own. An additional charge was that he had capitulated to Ulster unionist threats and thus paved the way for partition.
The decade of centenaries, a number of recent biographies and an increased public interest in the Irish experience of the Great War have brought new understandings of Redmond and his legacy.
Some of the old cliches have been dispelled. As knowledge of the decades before 1916 has grown, Redmond and his party are receiving credit for some solid legislative achievements that changed the face of Ireland. These include the Land Purchase Acts of 1903 and 1909 that transferred ownership of the land from landlords to tenants, the Labourers Acts of 1906 and 1911 which provided for the addition of almost 40,000 cottages to the housing stock for agricultural labourers and the Act of 1908 setting up the National University of Ireland, along with many smaller measures.
However, with greater knowledge have come new distortions. Redmond’s Wexford gentry forebears and Clongowes education, along with his failure to intervene in the labour strife in Dublin in 1913, have been used to depict him as a dyed-in-the-wool social conservative. His defence of denominational education in Ireland and Britain has allowed him to be cast as a clericalist in politics.
His loss of political influence during the Great War, epitomised and reinforced by his refusal of a Cabinet post in Asquith’s wartime Coalition government in 1915, has been exaggerated to make him seem a virtual recluse in his home at Aughavannagh in the Wicklow mountains.
The publication, on the centenary of his death, of the first edition of Redmond’s correspondence should help to correct some of these misunderstandings.
Letters to and from British Labour leader James Keir Hardie in 1906 show the Irish Party’s close co-ordination with the Labour movement in its management of the Irish vote in Great Britain. This built on a long tradition in which Irish Home Rulers had supported legislation on working hours, factory safety inspections and other labour measures.
A 1908 letter from a Wexford priest praises his efforts on behalf of the Labourers Act: “God knows you worked hard enough for this Act. I remember quite well you spoke every night for three weeks when [the Bill] was in Committee [and] the result is it is the most complete Act for the working man in any country I know.”
Although he defended the Catholic schools of Britain’s Irish communities against the secularising provisions of the Liberals’ Education Bill, his correspondence with Archbishop of Dublin William Walsh in the 1890s and his reaction to a 1911 papal decree show an insistence that religious and political matters belonged in separate spheres.
As for reclusiveness during the Great War, despite his (arguably mistaken) refusal of office in Asquith’s wartime Cabinet, he remained as busy as ever, making 16 impassioned addresses (14 of them in Ireland) in 20 months from recruiting platforms while lobbying the prime minister, the British war office and army chiefs in long memoranda with his views on what was necessary to maintain and raise Irish enlistment figures.
Right up to the week of the Easter 1916 rebellion (as much a blow struck against Home Rule as against British rule) he was fighting with the British Treasury against cuts to Irish grants and moves to increase Irish war taxation.
Above all, he was warning all sides incessantly that any move to impose conscription on Ireland would have disastrous consequences.
Misrepresentations of Redmond aside, there still exist many misconceptions about the passage of the Third Home Rule Act.
In some of these, historians who should know better have ascribed its ultimate failure to the duplicity of British political leaders who had no intention of implementing it; Redmond is made to appear their willing dupe.
The facts that the Bill took three years to pass through the House of Commons and, when finally made law seven weeks into the war, had its operation suspended for a year or until the end of the war, are used to suggest foot-dragging and bad faith on the part of the British government. Yet the three-year passage was part of the ground rules understood by all from the beginning; the suspension was suggested by Redmond himself.
The fact that the Home Rule Act was never implemented is used to denigrate the legislation itself and the efforts of those who had struggled for many years to bring it to the statute book.
It is true that, although the act offered a national parliament elected by the people with an executive responsible to it, the Westminster parliament would remain supreme — a measure of independence that would be judged inadequate today. But there was no significant demand in the country then for anything beyond this, and in election after election Irish voters had given the Irish Parliamentary Party the great majority of the Irish seats in the Commons.
The Home Rule Bill, however, did have a major flaw. It related not to its provisions for Irish self-government as such but to the fact that it was supposed to extend to the whole island — including a group of north-eastern counties whose population was determined to continue in its citizenship of the United Kingdom and to resist all attempts to be subjected to what it saw as an alien Dublin parliament.
The underestimated and unresolved Ulster question would turn out to be the flaw that ultimately sank the Home Rule project and, with it, Redmond’s political career.
The longest letters and memos in this book, written to the prime minister, the war minister Lloyd George and chief secretary Birrell, document the slow dawning of awareness on his part that Ulster unionist resistance could not be conciliated except by the exclusion of the unionist heartlands from the Bill.
In four months between November 1913 and March 1914, Redmond moved from outright denunciation of exclusion as the ‘mutilation’ of the nation to a very reluctant acceptance of a temporary exclusion scheme based on plebiscites in Ulster counties and a six-year time limit.
Yet, as the breakdown of the Buckingham Palace Conference showed, his maximum concession was less than the minimum acceptable to the unionists. By the summer of 1914, Ireland was on the brink of a civil war.
Further letters trace Redmond’s participation in a UK attempt, following the 1916 rebellion, to bring the Home Rule Act into operation, subject to a provisional exclusion of a six-county bloc.
In the post-rebellion atmosphere, however, conceding partition had become far more difficult. The collapse of the deal led to an impasse unforeseen: Redmond and his followers were now rejecting repeated offers of Home Rule on the only terms available. And many of those followers were abandoning the IPP for a resurgent Sinn Fein. Dermot Meleady is the editor of John Redmond: Selected Letters and Memoranda, 1880-1918, and of John Redmond: The National Leader (both published by Merrion Press)
‘By summer 1914, Ireland was on the brink of a civil war’