policy had come to mean more than the transfer of land ownership in a friendly spirit; it involved a whole new approach to solving Ireland’s problems by seeking prior agreement between Irish interest groups before asking for British legislative intervention – what he would later term the policy of ‘Conference plus Business’. Already, Capt. Shawe-Taylor had come forward with a proposal for a new conference, this time with a view to reaching an agreement on the provision of a university acceptable to Catholics. On 24 September, invitations were sent to Archbishop Walsh and other Catholic bishops, Dillon, Lords Dunraven and Mayo and others to an October conference.16 Dillon had signalled to Redmond that such a course was anathema to him:
I, as you know, have all along been opposed to the policy of allowing the initiative on, and the direction of, large Irish questions to be taken out of the hands of the Irish Party and handed over to conferences summoned by outsiders….17
Throughout October, O’Brien tried to prevail upon Redmond to act quickly to face down the disrupters:
We are attacked and the only way of preventing further and more dangerous attack is to show that we will hit back. The Freeman’s pretext of dispute about a percentage is the merest sham. The question at stake is whether the whole policy of conciliation unanimously adopted by the Directory and by the country is to be assailed by a paper purporting to represent the party….18
Dread of a renewed split, however, remained uppermost in Redmond’s counter-argument; moreover, he felt that the campaign of Dillon, Davitt and the Freeman would have little effect on the working of the Act:
If the present difference as to the best price were to degenerate into an open and undisguised split with Dillon on the other side, the party would instantly be rent asunder and the movement in the country would once more be divided into two camps… The tenants are taking our advice and not theirs and I feel pretty sure sales will proceed as rapidly as the machinery will allow at moderately fair terms… if I come out and declare to the country that there is a conspiracy on foot to divide the country and disrupt the party, I have not a shadow of a doubt I would precipitate the very thing I wish to avoid.19
Buttressed by O’Brien alone among senior party colleagues, and facing the opposition of all the others, Redmond, as Paul Bew has noted, ‘refused all the options that would have brought on a critical test of strength’.20 Had he chosen to follow O’Brien’s advice, his position, already weakened by the clash with Dillon, would have been further undermined by a new development in his personal affairs. In March 1902, he had inherited a small estate in south Co. Wexford on the death of his uncle, former British Army Lieutenant-General John Patrick Redmond. The sale of this encumbered estate to the tenants was negotiated between September and December 1903. Redmond was naturally keen to avoid publicity until agreement on the terms; in the event of ‘a real difficulty’, as he told M.J. O’Connor, the solicitor acting for the tenants, he would sell directly to the estates commissioners.21 The terms of sale agreed for part of the estate – 23 years’ purchase of first-term rents and 24.5 of second-term rents – were published without comment in the Freeman on 19 October. Redmond explained to O’Brien that the terms were far better for the tenants than the bald figures indicated, the rents of the majority having been well below the average.22 In addition, arrears of almost £4,000 (more than two years’ net rental) were due on the estate at the time of Lieutenant-General Redmond’s death, which, to prevent the tenants being sued, Redmond had agreed to buy. ‘These arrears he has forgiven altogether now,’ M.J. O’Connor told the press, ‘and this is a very big item. It takes a heavy burden off the tenants, who are very grateful to Mr Redmond for his kindness in this matter.’ It was certain that no sale would have been possible under the old Land Acts: Ashbourne prices would not have paid off the debts as well as the other demands on the estate.23 Later negotiations resulted in even more favourable terms for the judicial tenants, and Redmond applied the revised terms to all the tenants. The final agreement showed forty-seven (non-judicial) tenants buying at 18.5 years’ purchase, thirty-nine first-term at 22.5 years’ purchase, and thirteen second-term at 23.75 years’ purchase.24
O’Brien would afterwards reproach Redmond for not having taken him into his confidence on the sale, though the two were ‘on the closest terms’. If consulted, he would have ‘implored him’ to defer the negotiations and newspaper publicity for some months until a more moderate price standard had been established.25 Redmond’s normally sound political judgment did not always extend, though, to financial matters, as his cavalier optimism in the face of the Independent’s difficulties in the 1890s had shown. There is no evidence that he anticipated negative political consequences from the sale. Yet, the price issue aside, the sudden appearance of the leader of nationalists and representative of the tenants at the Land Conference in the garb of what many perceived as the ‘hereditary enemy’ could not fail to harm his authority. Before the nuances of the sale could be explained, much damage had been done.
The unionist press used the published figures as justification for the prices being asked by the landlords. Redmond told O’Brien on 28 October: ‘I see that the landlords in some places are making capital out of the agreement to sell on the Wexford property, and I am thinking of publishing a short statement on the matter.’26 The Independent, which had kept a measured approach to the Land Act, now agreed with the Freeman that the net result of the ‘Dunraven treaty’ had been to inflate the price of land, and blamed the Redmond sale for setting the worst possible example. The paper that, less than two years previously, had extolled Redmond as having ‘the precise qualities that are required in a parliamentary leader’ now applied a derisive editorial wit that suggested the hand of Healy, imputing self-interest to his promotion of the Land Act:
… an estated man who keeps a firm grip on his rental, as his Wexford tenants know, and will not even set a good example to his fellow landlords by selling to them at ‘Ashbourne prices’… it is hardly wonderful that the delighted recipient should describe the Chief Secretary’s measure as the greatest ever passed for Ireland.27
The Freeman finally commented on 31 October, weakly defending the ‘very generous price’ as a ‘tribute for Mr Redmond’s protracted political service’.28 This was too much for Davitt, who, with righteous contempt for the laws of the market, took the paper to task:
This is turning the whole thing into a farce… I object to no testimonial to Mr Redmond as an Irish leader. I most emphatically do in his character as an Irish landlord in a form which would put just £20,000,000 of Irish taxpayers’ and tenants’ money into the pockets of the landlord class over and above what they are justly entitled to… No Wexford tenants, no Irish Leader’s agents, no National Directory resolutions, have authority or right or commission, from any source, to artificially raise the market price of Irish land…29
If, as O’Brien claimed, Redmond had difficulty in getting a hearing when he went to Killarney on 25 October to reply to Dillon’s second Swinford speech, the publicity generated by the sale was the reason. He referred again to the slowness of the Ashbourne Act, and defended the conciliation policy:
I favoured a fighting policy because I believed it