15(c)Winston Churchill MP. Courtesy National Library of Ireland.
15(d)David Lloyd George MP. Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London.
16(a)Andrew Bonar Law MP (left) and Sir Edward Carson MP. Courtesy National Library of Ireland.
16(b)Augustine Birrell MP. Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London.
16(c)Herbert Asquith MP. Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank Dr Mary Green, London, great-granddaughter of John Redmond, for providing me with access to her private collection of Redmond family correspondence, photographs and newspaper cuttings, and for her kind permission to reproduce several of these photographs in this book. I am also grateful to her brother John Redmond Green for giving generously of his time in providing me with copies of photographs, letters and newspaper cartoons from the private family collection, as well as for making me aware of the account in Rudyard Kipling’s history of the Irish Guards of the action in which Redmond’s son, William Archer Redmond, won the Distinguished Service Order.
I am also indebted to Peter Leppard for drawing my attention to the Aughavanagh Visitors Book, in the possession of Dr Mary Green, and for his generosity in providing me with a copy of his transcription of the entries.
I am grateful to Charles Lysaght for drawing my attention to the speech of John Redmond at the Oxford Union on 6 June 1907 and to his own commemorative article ‘Our political debt to John Redmond is largely unpaid’ in The Irish Times of 1 September 2006, the 150th anniversary of Redmond’s birth.
It was a pleasure to meet Helen McIlwain of New York, the youngest child of Dr William T. Power, whose first wife was Esther Redmond, John Redmond’s eldest daughter. I thank her for giving me a full account of Redmond’s American descendants through Esther, and of the families and Irish antecedents of her own father and mother.
I wish to thank James and Sylvia O’Connor, of M.J. O’Connor Solicitors, formerly of George’s St., Wexford, for giving me access to the correspondence regarding the sale of the Redmond estate held in their office, and Tom Menton, formerly of O’Keeffe and Lynch, Solicitors (now O’Keeffe, Moore and Woodcock, Solicitors) for giving me access to his collection of Redmond’s correspondence relating to Freeman’s Journal affairs.
As with the preparation of the first volume of this biography, Redmond: the Parnellite (2008), I remain in debt to Mary and Jamie Ryan, Ballytrent House, Co. Wexford and to Jarlath Glynn, Wexford Library, for helping me to understand the Wexford roots of the Redmond family. My thanks are also due to the directors, librarians, keepers and staffs of the National Library of Ireland, the National Archives, the manuscript library of Trinity College Dublin, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the Parliamentary Archives, Westminster, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the Dublin Diocesan Archives for their patience and courtesy.
Dermot Meleady, August 2013
ABBREVIATIONS
RPJohn Redmond Papers, National Library of Ireland, Dublin
DPJohn Dillon Papers, Trinity College Library, Dublin
OBPWilliam O’Brien Papers, National Library of Ireland, Dublin
APHerbert Henry Asquith Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford
BLPAndrew Bonar Law Papers, Parliamentary Archives, Westminster
LGPDavid Lloyd George Papers, Parliamentary Archives, Westminster
WPArchbishop William Walsh Papers, Dublin Diocesan Archives
NAINational Archives of Ireland
CBSCrime Branch Special
I.D.I.Irish Daily Independent and Daily Nation until 31 Dec. 1904 (abbreviated in the text to ‘the Independent’)
I.I.Irish Independent from 2 Jan. 1905 (abbreviated in the text to ‘the Independent’)
F.J.Freeman’s Journal (abbreviated in the text to ‘the Freeman’)
I.T. The Irish Times
N.W. Northern Whig
B.N. Belfast Newsletter
INTRODUCTION
Redmond… possessed elements of statesmanship of a high order. The fact that he was given no chance to apply his qualities in the rebuilding of his native land is one of the myriad tragedies of Irish history.
– David Lloyd George, War Memoirs: Volume 1 (London, 1938), p.420.
In October 1908, the Irish Parliamentary Party held a banquet at the Gresham Hotel, Dublin for its leader John Redmond and three colleagues on their return from a mission to the United States. His deputy, John Dillon, paying tribute to Redmond, said that he had effected ‘one of the greatest works of conciliation ever wrought for Ireland… a task that, I must confess, many of us doubted whether it was within the power of mankind to achieve.’1 The reference was to one of Redmond’s foremost achievements since assuming the chairmanship in 1900: his binding up of the wounds of the party after the decade-long Parnell split and his refashioning of it as an effective political instrument for nationalist Irish purposes in the UK Parliament. The party’s reunification was a fragile affair: a fresh division had been patched up at the start of 1908, and would erupt again during the following year. Nevertheless, despite his having led the minority Parnellite faction for nine years after Parnell’s death, Redmond had been able to win the loyalty and affection of the former anti-Parnellite majority, chief among them Dillon. His success owed much to a rigorous application to work and to magnificently persuasive oratorical powers, but was due above all to what Dillon called ‘… the tact, the kindness, and infinite conciliatory power of Mr Redmond’ – a personal style very different from the imperiousness of Parnell that had incubated enmities even as it ensured party discipline.
Some former adversaries were sure that had he, the only prominent Parnellite MP, reconciled himself with the majority soon after Parnell’s death in 1891, the split would have had a shorter life. Two obstacles, however, had made that impossible. The first was the scabrous invective heaped on him and other Parnellites by Tim Healy. The other was Redmond’s loyalty to the memory of Parnell as a friend and to Parnellite political principles that he saw, rightly or wrongly, as being abandoned by the majority. Now, haunted by the nightmare memory of that decade, he was so averse to the merest hint of party disunity as to be willing, in the eyes of some critics, to buy conciliation at the cost of submerging his own political principles. What to Dillon was tact and conciliatory power seemed, to others, to be submission to Dillon’s own power.
The Dublin banquet was also a celebration of a particularly fertile parliamentary session for constitutional Irish nationalism. The major achievement of 1908 had been the landmark act to set up the National University of Ireland. Accompanying this was legislation for working-class housing, and for the restoration of the last of the tenants evicted during the Land War. Previous sessions had seen, among other measures, the Tories’ 1903 Land Purchase Act, which had ushered in one of the twentieth century’s great bloodless revolutions: the transfer of Irish land ownership from landlords to tenants, fulfilling Parnell’s dream of creating a peasant proprietary; a Labourers Act to enable the building of tens of thousands of cottages for the rural poor and legislation to safeguard the rights of town tenants.
Not all British reforming legislation enacted for Ireland during Redmond’s tenure was the direct outcome of his or the party’s efforts. The 1908 Old Age Pensions and 1911 National Insurance Acts, of which the party was critical, were primarily parts