John Redmond. Dermot Meleady

45 In short, Redmond followed where he could not lead; any other course meant political suicide.

That still leaves the question of whether Redmond should not have resigned on principle, having found the majority of his colleagues to be out of sympathy with his views. The answer is that Redmond’s decision was grounded, not only in a realistic assessment of the dangers of a new split, but also on a different understanding of the conciliation policy than that of O’Brien. In his previous excursions into co-operation with Irish unionists, on the 1895 Recess Committee and in the 1898–99 period, he had cast it pragmatically as one of several alternative paths, albeit his ideal one, to Home Rule.46 He was aware, however, of its minority appeal among both nationalist and unionist electors. As Maume points out, the Dunravenite landlords were ‘untypical of their caste’ in seeking to come to terms with nationalism.47 Despite the tenants’ eagerness to purchase, nationalist Ireland as a whole was not yet ready to embrace the landlords with affection. Above all, conciliationism never presented itself to Redmond as displacing the vital role of the party in winning self-government. O’Brien, on the other hand, whose disgust at the Parnell split had prompted him to found a new agrarian movement to bypass existing party politicians, now proposed to bypass the party once again, this time emotionally embracing, with all the zeal of the convert, the panacea of conciliation for all Irish problems. Underlying such contrasting views was a radical difference in personalities. Redmond’s cool-headed realism instinctively resisted being swept along by a temperament he had called in 1894 ‘hysterical and treacherous’, and in 1901 ‘one of those highly strung natures who find it difficult to go through the rough and tumble of political work’.48

      At a London banquet in honour of Blake in July 1904, Redmond made it clear that if the party majority view did not conform to his own, then, to preserve the party intact as the instrument of reaching the ultimate goal, he was willing to conform to it:

I laid before me two ideals when I took the position of Chairman of the party. The first… was to do what one man could do to obliterate the marks of the struggle that had passed, and to show that at any rate I did not harbour in my mind one bitter thought of that struggle. The other ideal… [was] to make sure that in everything I said and did I represented the genuine sentiments of the majority of this party (hear, hear)….49

What, though, of the wider implications of the swift abandonment of the conciliation policy? For Lyons, it seemed an ungracious and grudging response to ten years of constructive unionism that had changed the face of Ireland; ‘the hand of friendship was not grasped’ and the party made to appear insatiable and untrustworthy. Yet, although conciliation was a ‘noble conception’ that sprang from O’Brien’s imagination, it risked slowing down the movement for self-government ‘by co-operation with those who, by definition, were pledged to the maintenance of the Union’.50 Bull has argued that the party’s turnabout marked its failure to adjust to the new realities created by the Land Act, notably the need to broaden its support-base beyond the interests of Catholic tenant farmers. He pushes the argument further in lamenting the historic opportunity thus lost: the closing of the door on dialogue with Protestants and unionists led to a ‘dichotomy of Home Rule and Union’ that was fatal to the party’s chances of establishing ‘a national consensus’ beyond ‘class and sectional interests’. He even blames this dichotomy for the ultimate refusal by Ulster unionists to accept Home Rule, and the consequent demise of the party.51 In a scrupulous effort to be fair to all sides, Alvin Jackson concedes the grounds for Dillon’s scepticism of conciliation in the intransigence of majority landlord opinion, the massive debt burden saddled on the tenants by the Land Act and the impossibility of making a conciliation policy acceptable to Irish-American opinion, yet concludes that Dillon’s ‘highly conspiratorial, not to say paranoid, disposition’ blinded him to the potential of conciliation to divide landlord and southern unionist opinion to the advantage of nationalism.52

      Dillon’s assumption (apparently shared by Bull) was that land purchase would take the impetus out of the Home Rule movement, but neither the nationalist desire for self-government nor unionist resistance to it were about to be conciliated out of existence by co-operation to bring about agreed reforms in land and housing. This applies above all to Ulster. If ‘evolving political and social realities’ encouraged thinly scattered southern unionists to consider how to come to terms with the nationalist majority in a self-governing Ireland, they had the opposite effect on the self-confident northern Protestant community, making it ever more determined not to be brought under nationalist rule. The abandonment of conciliation was a result, not the cause, of the Home Rule–Union dichotomy.

Redmond would never jettison conciliationist sentiments from his rhetoric. These were accepted among a plurality of views in a party united on the essentials. Dillon’s response, however, was often to treat him as a political innocent in constant danger of backsliding. Lyons described the ‘peculiar fascination and flavour’ of the frank yet stiffly formal letters between them, but did not capture the tone of their exchanges of 1904, 1905 and 1907 about possible reconciliations with O’Brien: an emollient Redmond always ready for another meeting to patch things up, a suspicious Dillon chivvying him about another O’Brien subterfuge potentially fatal to the party.53 Only after 1910, when Home Rule became a real prospect and Redmond could concentrate on the issue most congenial to him, did Dillon trust him enough to address him as an equal on all matters. Even then, conciliationism would lie submerged as the bedrock of Redmond’s thinking, to reveal itself again at times of crisis and guide some of the key decisions of his later career.

      III

The parliamentary consequences of Redmond’s opting for Dillon over O’Brien meant the abandonment of co-operation with a sympathetic Chief Secretary in legislating for Ireland according to ideas of Irish origin, and a return to the pre-1903 confrontational mode. From the start of the 1904 session, it was obvious that ‘Conference’ was out and wearisome oppositionism back. The anti-conciliationists rewarded Redmond’s capitulation. Just before he left in January for five months in Sicily on medical orders, Dillon told him that it was a consolation to know that the party entered the session thoroughly united.54 Davitt was quoted as telling O’Callaghan in New York that the party was being ‘very capably led by John Redmond’, that Dillon and Redmond were ‘in accord on everything’ and that ‘Redmond has no stauncher friends than John Dillon and Michael Davitt’.55

A new combativeness in a speech delivered by Redmond in Co. Sligo just before Christmas 1903 had set the tone. His target was the Dublin Castle law officers, whom he blamed for their restricted interpretation of the powers of the estates commissioners to acquire land in the congested districts, ‘a shameless and criminal violation’ of pledges given by Wyndham. If this prevailed, he argued, then there must be an immediate Amending Act, and tenants in those areas should refuse all negotiation with landlords.56 The National Directory’s resolutions of 4 January 1904 reflected the new power balance: one condemned the majority of landlords for asking far in excess of just prices, an action that had ‘obstructed the smooth and peaceful working of the Land Act and created a situation of the greatest gravity’.

      To his Waterford constituents in January, and in his speech on the Address the following month, Redmond set out his party’s conditions for future support of the Government. As well as the measures outlined in the King’s Speech promising a Labourers Bill and a bill for the Housing of the Working Classes, he wanted action