to be paid. When the calculations were done, it was seen that the prices implied were in the range of 18.5 to 24.5 years’ purchase for tenants on first-term rents (who comprised four-fifths of all tenants), and 21.5 to 27.5 years’ purchase for tenants on the lower second-term rents.
It was immediately obvious, however, that the Land Bill fell short of the conference report in several important respects. The average prices involved compared unfavourably with the seventeen or eighteen years’ purchase of first-term rents recommended by the Conference. The zonal system, introduced to speed up sales by removing the need for official inspection, interfered with free bargaining between landlord and tenant. The bonus fund of £12 million, the maximum that Wyndham could extract from the Treasury, was much less than the £20 million suggested in the Conference Report. The once-a-decade reductions in the annuity amounts advocated in the report – with a resultant lengthening of the repayment period – were not provided for. Finally, the clauses dealing with the congested districts, labourers’ housing and evicted tenants were vague and inadequate.
The Freeman immediately attacked the Land Bill as an attempt to inflate land prices; a shameless indulgence of landlords’ rapacity by their friends in the Government. Sexton deployed his renowned financial expertise to show that the comparatively low annuity payments were a smokescreen for a far longer repayment period than under the existing Land Acts.157 These points were unlikely to be of great concern to the farmers, who were attracted above all by the prospect of paying below their current rents, but they ran the risk of souring the political atmosphere. Redmond admitted to a Dublin UIL branch on 8 April that the bill was far from perfect, but reminded his hearers that ‘whatever its defects… [it] is the first bill ever proposed by an English Ministry which has for its avowed object to carry into effect the policy of Parnell and the Land League’.
The real question was: should it be given a fair trial, with efforts being made to improve it, or should it be rejected and a better bill sought, involving ‘further years of struggle and of suffering’? Since Wyndham’s only defence of the huge cost to British taxpayers would be the savings expected from social peace in Ireland, Redmond was concerned lest negative criticism damage the bill’s chances, and warned of the Chief Secretary’s weak position: ‘Criticism… must be that of a friend rather than of an implacable enemy’.158
A national convention was scheduled to consider the bill in Dublin on 16 April, and Redmond confided his worries to O’Brien. He had tried to probe Wyndham as to possible amendments, but found the Chief Secretary ‘in a very shaky condition’, saying that there was no hope of more money and that a demand for more would be ‘fatal’, but anxious and willing to meet them on other points. He wanted to know about ‘the pulse of the country’, fearing dissent both at the convention and surrounding the impending visit in July of the new King, Edward VII, which threatened to revive the previous year’s controversy over the Coronation and to create a dilemma for the party in the new atmosphere of conciliation:
I fear great trouble and great injury to the chances of any bill at all if we have rival motions by leading men debated at the Convention… I fear the effects of the King’s visit. We cannot afford to officially receive him, and refusals to adopt addresses etc. will do harm….159
At the Mansion House on the morning of the convention, Redmond watched Davitt take his seat ‘with a brow of thunder’, and told O’Brien: ‘I am afraid we are going to have a row.’160 In the event, the convention gave unanimous support to a series of resolutions drafted by O’Brien that accepted the broad principles of the bill while demanding ‘serious amendment in various points of vital importance’. Dillon’s absence from the Convention, and careful stage-management by O’Brien, combined to maintain unity, the only dissenting voice being Davitt’s. His amendment, which called for approval to be deferred until the bill could be brought back in amended form after its third reading, seemed at first likely to be carried, but was withdrawn after a plea by Redmond that it would be seen as a vote of censure on the party and its leaders.161
In the House, the second reading was carried on 8 May, following a four-day debate that included a much-acclaimed speech from Healy, who lauded the bill as ‘a great measure of peace’ that brought a new spirit into Anglo-Irish relations.162 Dillon’s speech, a balancing act that, his biographer wrote, ‘must rank among the great achievements of his career’, excoriated landlordism and the bill’s deficiencies, yet stated that it should be passed.163
The Land Bill’s progress was unscathed by a rumpus in mid-May at Dublin’s Rotunda, where Redmond inaugurated the Dublin collection for the parliamentary fund. Harrington, now in his third consecutive term as Lord Mayor of Dublin, was in the chair. His speech was interrupted by Maud Gonne (now Mrs John MacBride, fresh from her incarnation as a blood-sacrifice-demanding Ireland in the title role of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the nationalist play written for her by W.B. Yeats), the Galway landowner, playwright and recent convert from unionism Edward Martyn and three others, who took seats on the platform. Gonne demanded to know whether Harrington would oppose a loyal address to the King. The indignant MP jumped to his feet, and a fierce verbal altercation ensued between him and Gonne, the meeting dissolving into shouting, cheers and hisses. Chairs were thrown at the stage and thrown back, fighting erupted among the audience, blood flowed and more than forty people were hospitalized. After some time, the disrupters were ousted and Redmond spoke, regretting the scenes and the injury done to the image of Ireland. A second group, who interrupted his speech on the party finances by singing ‘A Nation Once Again’, were quickly ejected. The disturbers, he told O’Brien later, received ‘an unmerciful drubbing’.164
The bill went into committee on 15 June, when the parliamentary battle to win the convention amendments began in earnest. Wyndham rejected Redmond’s motion to have the ‘minimum price’ (or maximum reduction in annuity) dropped; the Government’s majority was a mere forty-one. Support for Redmond came from all but three of the 103 Irish MPs, reflecting the agreement of Ulster unionist tenants with their nationalist counterparts. Dillon, returned from the Nile, wanted Redmond to move the adjournment of the debate to the following day. Redmond told him, in O’Brien’s recollection, that if he wanted to follow that course and lose the bill, he must do it on his own responsibility.165 Other amendments to ensure greater reductions for the purchasers were equally unsuccessful.166 As a crisis loomed, Redmond wrote on 17 June to Blunt, who acted as his intermediary with Wyndham, that amendment of the zones clause was ‘the least required to avert disaster’. ‘Obstinate insistence on the zone limits’ would lead to ‘angry debates’, he wrote; the opposition to the bill was ‘intense, and is rapidly growing uncontrollable’, and Wyndham would make a fatal mistake if he thought that Irish hostility to the clause was a game of bluff. A week later, compromise was reached with the help of Dunraven and his friends, with an amendment to allow tenants and landlords to make purchase agreements outside the zones under certain conditions.167
Government concessions followed on other points, although none increased the bonus or restored the decadal reductions. In July, in line with the national convention resolutions, Redmond put another set of amendments on the congested-districts issue. Here he sought compulsory powers for the Congested Districts Board, a shortening of the time it took to acquire land and the inclusion of county council chairmen in its membership. Most importantly of all, he demanded an end to ‘fraudulent tenures’ entered into by the Board with graziers for large tracts of land in areas of congested holdings.