make short of sacrificing what I consider the higher interests of the country in order to bring about that result.98
O’Brien’s personal popularity in Cork was in evidence when he visited his constituency to be greeted by one of the largest crowds ever seen in the city. In ominously stark terms, he posed the issue raised by the Dunraven devolution proposals:
This new prospect of a Home Rule settlement will either have to be brought to triumph by the same methods of conciliation as the Land settlement, or it will have to be wrecked by the same system of nagging and petulance by which Ireland has been cheated of half the blessings of the Land Conference settlement… you cannot hope to have the benefits of the Conference policy if you at the same time kill it….99
This reading ignored two crucial differences between the two initiatives. Wyndham, in contrast to his immediate welcome for the Land Conference idea, had been forced to repudiate the current scheme, and Unionist reaction against it was being strongly expressed. A large demonstration in Limerick on 6 November, at which Redmond welcomed O’Brien back to public life, was the first occasion in over a year on which the two shared a platform. It was also, as O’Brien wrote later, ‘the last time Mr Redmond and myself stood on a friendly platform together….’100 At their hotel the day before, Redmond asked what O’Brien intended to do on the following day. In O’Brien’s recollection, the rest of the exchange went as follows:
WO’B: That depends upon you and not upon me
JER: What do you want?
WO’B: Simply that it should be made clear that the national policy of last year is the national policy still, and that you stick to it.
JER: If that is all you want, I will make it clear enough. There is not an atom of difference between us.
WO’B: Make that perfectly clear in action, and I should have no difficulty about rejoining the party in the morning.
The next morning, however, O’Brien noticed a coldness in Redmond’s attitude and got ‘hard looks’ from partisans of the anti-conciliationists, who had crowded into the latter’s room. Redmond’s speech was a classic of vague, rhetorical conciliationism:
Fellow-countrymen, don’t let us underestimate or despise indications of conversion among our Irish opponents… Remember that the Irish nation that we look to in future is not a nation of one class or creed. We don’t want to pull down one ascendancy to erect another… Let us, therefore… encourage men and not repel them (hear, hear). As to the actual proposals put forward by Lord Dunraven’s committee, in my judgment they are not worthy of any very serious consideration… The important thing lies in the glimpse which they give us of the process which has been going on slowly and steadily for years past in the minds of all intelligent men upon this question. I say to Irishmen: ‘Don’t let us do or say anything to arrest the process (cheers).’101
O’Brien’s reply acknowledged the ‘statesmanlike and broad-minded’ address, and later wrote that the opportunities of 1903 could have been salvaged had the spirit of the Limerick meeting been allowed to prevail.102 However, an important resolution on land purchase passed there allowed the Freeman to give that spirit a different meaning. For several years afterwards, it carried daily the text of the ‘Limerick resolution’ reaffirming that ‘Ashbourne prices’ should be the basis of all land purchase deals. Redmond, for his part, continued to portray the controversy as a mere difference of opinion ‘as to details and as to the precise measure of price’ that should not disrupt unity.103
The conciliation wars rumbled on into 1905. In January, O’Brien’s supporters at the National Directory meeting moved that the party hold a conference with the Irish Unionist MPs aimed at securing an improved Labourers Bill. Given the broad agreement on the issue the previous year, it seemed a reasonable proposal, but the meeting rejected it overwhelmingly, instead resolving to pursue Dillon’s call at Tuam on 6 January for ‘unrelenting war on the zones’. The reverse did not prevent O’Brien’s re-election in February to represent West Mayo on the National Directory.104 Redmond continued to criticize the failures of the Land Act in relation to congestion and the evicted tenants, while carefully avoiding endorsement of Dillon’s blanket opposition.105 Similarly, while setting his face against O’Brien’s proposals, he was not ready to abandon the language of conciliation; at the London St Patrick’s Day banquet, he included in his ideal of the Irish nation even those Ulster Unionists who had opposed every measure of reform.106 However, the latter were more likely to take the words of Pope Pius X, with whom Redmond had a private audience in April, as reflecting the authentic nationalist mentality:
I recognize the Irish Parliamentary Party as the defender of the Catholic religion, because that is the National religion, and it is the National Party.107
Redmond had told O’Brien on his election to the leadership in 1900: ‘It would be absurd to suppose that the priests can accept me without some heartburning.’108 Now, whatever whiff of anti-clericalism – a trait that Healy, for one, had never believed was ‘more than skin-deep’109 – had hung about him during the Parnell split was finally dispelled.
In June 1905, the death of J.F.X. O’Brien MP, William O’Brien’s partner in the two-seat Cork City constituency, raised the potential for fresh trouble between O’Brien and the party. O’Brien arrived in Cork on 9 June, and declared that a vote for a candidate opposed to his views would be seen as a vote of censure that would force him to resign. His plea to the electors for a sympathetic colleague implied that such a candidate would not take the party pledge if elected. When Augustine (‘Gussie’) Roche was elected unopposed a few days later, the news that he would refuse to take the pledge came as a shock to Redmond. Letters followed between Redmond and J.J. Howard, a Cork representative on the Directory who made clear the strength of feeling for O’Brien in Cork, and complained of the use of the ‘miserable technicality’ of Roche’s pledge as a weapon against him. 110
A party meeting on 29 June at Westminster, with Redmond in the chair, reaffirmed that no one could be a member of the party who was not prepared to take the pledge.111 O’Brien’s reply came in a long speech delivered on 9 July at a turbulent meeting at Charleville, Co. Cork, in which the issues of the 1903 rift were nakedly on display. He had not been the one to reject party discipline or the pledge, but ‘that pledge was violated and trampled upon by the very men who have now the effrontery to try to disturb the country by their pretended defence of the pledge….’ He also reproached Redmond for allowing himself to be intimidated by the threats of those men: ‘I will not dwell upon the fact that… he has left me absolutely alone to bear the responsibility of a policy, which he believed in as fully as I did….’112 Redmond, in a cathartic response at the UIL London branch on 14 July, rounded on O’Brien:
Up to his retirement, I was in substantial agreement with him… [but] from the moment of Mr O’Brien’s retirement down to this moment, I have profoundly disagreed with almost all that he has done. He retired without consulting me, without giving me an opportunity of considering whether I could influence him from that step.