are asked to believe it is due to what the Methodists describe as a new birth or infusion of grace into the landlord party (laughter). I don’t believe a word of it… And while, for my part, I am in favour of giving the new Land Act a fair trial and seeing what can be got out of it, I am so far sceptical that I have no faith in the doctrine of conciliation. I am willing to accept conciliation when the Irish landlords cease to be landlords… When the landlords talk of conciliation what do they want? They want 25 years’ purchase for their land….2
He would base his criterion for the Act’s success on its weakest feature: ‘if [it] does not produce substantial results in a year or two in the way of resettlement of the west of Ireland, then I say [it] is a failure, and we must raise the banner again in the west (cheers).’3
As Philip Bull has argued, the rebellion was intended, not to help the tenants to negotiate more effectively, but to discredit the basis on which the Act had been won and to preserve the relevance of the methods of the past. To one convinced that agrarian discontent was indispensable to maintaining mass support for the Home Rule movement, the prospect of actually abolishing landlordism was deeply threatening.4 In the more affluent areas, it was already evident that some tenants, in their eagerness to purchase, would not be deflected by speeches or newspaper criticism. In September, the Duke of Leinster’s tenants in Kildare agreed on twenty-five years’ purchase of their (second-term) rents, an ‘improvident’ bargain in the Freeman’s eyes. Davitt was less restrained in calling them ‘buddochs’ – Gaelic for ‘louts’ – who had done lasting damage to the poorer tenants of the West.5
Redmond interrupted family life at Aughavanagh to preside at the UIL Directory meeting in Dublin on 8 September. It adopted resolutions drafted by O’Brien that welcomed the Land Act and the conciliatory spirit that underpinned it, thanked the Ulster tenants, the landlord leaders and Wyndham for their efforts and advanced practical advice to the tenants. Pressed by O’Brien to respond to the Swinford démarche, Redmond chose the Wicklow village of Aughrim as his venue on 13 September. Warning tenants against the two extremes of disbanding their organization or showing a ‘narrow, unreasonable or irreconcilable spirit’, he did not mention Dillon directly, but reminded them of Parnell’s dictum: ‘You must either fight for the land or pay for it’. The bonus had been denounced as a bribe: ‘Well, frankly it is a bribe; and for my part I am only sorry this bribe is not larger….’ Addressing the Freeman’s criticism that compared the new prices unfavourably to the accepted standard of ‘Ashbourne prices’, he asked why more tenants had not purchased in the past. The answer was that the landlords would not sell. If the old Acts had worked, there would be no need for this one. The tenants should act together without haste, take good legal advice, act ‘in a friendly and conciliatory spirit’ and not be deterred by the fact that the next generation would have to bear part of the costs. He had been profoundly impressed by the spirit displayed by Lord Dunraven’s friends during the Committee stage of the bill, in the spirit of ‘joining hands with the tenants’, which seemed to open up ‘infinite possibilities’:
I value this Land Bill not merely for itself… I value it because it opens the way to those other reforms I have spoken of, but, above all, because it opens the way to the obtaining of an Irish Parliament. The policy underlying this Land Bill is the reconciliation of classes in Ireland.6
O’Brien spoke in similar terms at Cork. The two speeches goaded Davitt into further censures. Writing in the Freeman, he deprecated ‘all the eloquence that has recently flowed from Aughrim to Cork’ and ‘the ridiculous over-praise’ of the Act. The landlords’ motives were purely mercenary, and he feared their taking advantage of unwisely generous advances made to them by former opponents without making any concessions of a national nature.7 The controversy between O’Brien and the Freeman over the Land Act erupted onto the paper’s editorial page in October, with letters and leading articles arguing the question of what reductions under the new Act would give the tenants the ‘fair equivalent’ of Ashbourne prices.8 The critics of the Act gained two new recruits in Bishop O’Donnell of Raphoe and the leader of the Belfast UIL organization, Joseph Devlin. The cleric lambasted the landlords as ‘blinded by gold-dust… intoxicated with greed’, while for Devlin the Directory resolutions were ‘a complete reversal of the policy of the past twenty years’ that threatened to split the League in Ulster.9
Dillon, as he had done at previous critical moments, absented himself from the 8 September meeting. He explained his action to Redmond on 23 September:
Having had no communication from you… I think I was justified in concluding that the resolutions to be proposed were felt by you and Mr O’Brien to be such as I couldn’t support. Under these circumstances I felt that the best thing I could do would be to remain away from the meeting. Now that I have had an opportunity of reading the resolutions I feel that I ought to let you know that some of them appear to me to be highly objectionable. I am sorry we had no opportunity of talking over the situation before the meeting was held.10
Redmond’s reply was defensive:
… these resolutions fully embodied my views of the necessities of the moment. I did not send them to you because I gathered a clear impression from your speech in Mayo that you would find it impossible to accept them and it seemed to me you would prefer to be clear of responsibility for them in any shape or form. If you still think I ought to have sent them to you I am very sorry I did not do so. I have done my best in more ways than one to prevent any open disagreement which would I think be fatal to the party and I hope the danger of this is past.11
Dillon was quick to exploit the admission on 2 October:
… in view of what has occurred and the reason given in your letter for not letting me see the resolutions, I must explain to you that the same political relations cannot exist between us in the future as those which existed up to December last… While I shall of course so long as I remain a member of the party abide by party discipline and accept the decision of the majority, I cannot now accept the same share of responsibility for the policy of the party....12
Alarmed at the reappearance of the spectre of disunity, Redmond felt:
… very much pained and very uneasy about the future after what you have written to me. My hope, however, is that no new causes of difference may arise so that by the time we have to face a General Election we may be pulling together as heartily as ever.13
Dillon, however, drove home his attack on 20 October with a second speech at Swinford, in which he stated his agreement with ‘nearly every word’ that had appeared in the Freeman editorial columns and alleged that landlords were looking for about ten years’ purchase more than they had previously sought. In another broadside at ‘conciliation’ landlords, including a personal slight on Talbot-Crosbie, he called for a return to ‘the old fighting policy’.14 ‘Dillon’s speech yesterday was terribly dull and long,’ wrote Redmond to O’Brien the next day. ‘It is his parting shot.’15
The breach between Dillon and O’Brien that had been maturing for several years was now complete.