Dermot Meleady

John Redmond


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be consistent with and would lead up to the other’.6 The promised public statement came when the Prime Minister-designate spoke at Stirling on 23 November. He wished to see ‘the effective management of Irish affairs in the hands of a representative Irish authority’. Moreover,

      … if he were an Irish Nationalist he would take it in any way that he could get it. If an instalment of representative control were offered to Ireland… he would advise the Nationalists to thankfully accept it, provided it was consistent [with] and led up to their larger policy….7

      Lord Rosebery responded to this speech by stating that, since the Home Rule flag had now been raised, he could not ‘serve under that banner’. Dillon worried that any reply from the Liberal leader would drive others in the same direction, but Campbell Bannerman held his peace. Within a week, Sir Edward Grey and Richard Haldane had rallied to their leader and Rosebery seemed isolated.8 There is no reason to doubt the judgment of Lyons that the readiness of Redmond and Dillon to accept, in principle, Campbell Bannerman’s interim proposal came both from their trust in him as a true Gladstonian Home Ruler and from their realistic assessment that they could not at that point demand more.9

      Balfour’s resignation came on 4 December, and King Edward called on Campbell Bannerman to form a new Ministry. Asquith became Chancellor of the Exchequer; two other appointments of Irish relevance were James Bryce as Chief Secretary and Augustine Birrell as Education Secretary, while the popular Lord Aberdeen, who had been Lord Lieutenant briefly until Gladstone’s defeat in 1886, returned to that post.10 The National Convention met in Dublin on 6 December, and unanimously resolved that the Irish Party would not enter into alliance or give permanent support to any English party or Government that did not make the question of Irish self-government a cardinal point in its programme. The manifesto of the UIL of Great Britain on 1 January called on Irish voters there to support Labour candidates sound on Home Rule, except where doing so would damage the chances of a similarly sound Liberal against a Unionist.11

      Voting took place over the two weeks following the dissolution on 8 January 1906. Balfour’s resistance to Chamberlain’s demand for full-blooded protection from the rising economic and military threat of Germany encapsulated the great issue of the General Election in Great Britain.12 Home Rule featured only in the negative sense that Unionists warned electors that a vote for the Liberals was inseparable from Home Rule, even as Liberals were enabled by their leader’s ‘instalment’ pledge to deny it at the hustings. The scale of the Liberal landslide was such that a Tory–Liberal Unionist majority of seventy-two seats was turned into a Liberal majority of 130 over all other parties (the Labour Party winning twenty-nine), and Balfour lost his Manchester seat.

      In Ireland, the incipient split with O’Brien was papered over by an informal arrangement under which the sitting O’Brienite MPs – five in Cork City and county and one in South Mayo – were unopposed.13 The Irish Party was thus able to claim an unchanged strength of eighty-one seats after the election. Healy was another matter. Dillon wrote to Redmond after the Convention that it was vital to put him out, as he and O’Brien together would be ‘extremely formidable… our difficulties with the Liberals will I think be immeasurably increased if we are to have Healy and O’Brien on each flank.’14 An appeal from Cardinal Logue, however, persuaded Redmond not to contest the North Louth seat, and Healy was returned as an independent Nationalist. A particular cause for Irish Party celebration was Devlin’s recapture, by a majority of sixteen, of the West Belfast seat lost by Sexton in 1892. Unionists could celebrate their victory in South County Dublin, where the outgoing Chief Secretary, Walter Long, won the seat from the Nationalist with a crushing majority of 1,343 votes.15 Two independent Unionists who had expressed willingness to work with nationalists for reform, and whom O’Brien had in mind for his national conference, Sloan in South Belfast and T.W. Russell in South Tyrone, held their seats against orthodox Unionist opposition. Apart from the return of the O’Brienites, however, there was no electoral advance for conciliationism in the south. The following November, Captain Shawe-Taylor contested the Galway City seat as an Independent Nationalist (devolutionist), but was defeated by the Irish Party candidate, the Protestant journalist, Gaelic Leaguer and biographer of Redmond’s later years, Stephen Gwynn.16 In Belfast, foreshadowing the themes that would galvanize him in the following decade, Redmond, flanked by Devlin and O’Connor, had appeared at the Ulster Hall in December 1905 to declare that there were no safeguards of the religious liberty of Protestants that his party would not willingly give, even though they knew them to be unnecessary.17

      II

      At the opening of the 1906 Session, Redmond pitched his speech on the Address towards the new and massive Liberal rank-and-file. While a Parliament with a responsible executive was the only possible final settlement, the Government would ‘find the Nationalists reasonable and practical men – men who have spent twenty-five years of their lives in endeavouring to win this right for their country, men who do not want to die until they see some great advance made along the road.’18 At the Hotel Cecil St Patrick’s Day banquet, where he presided for the seventh year in succession, he would reach out again to this new majority:

      … men who have… no selfish motives for the oppression of Ireland, but, on the contrary, are full of sympathy and goodwill for our country (applause), but who… cannot be expected to understand all the facts and circumstances of this Irish problem.19

      Nationalists were not the only ones seeking the ear of the Liberal ranks. Ulster Unionist members supported Col. Saunderson’s amendment voicing the alarm of loyal subjects in Ireland at proposals to change the system of Irish government, and tried to induce Bryce to reveal details. Charles Craig, MP for Antrim South, alleged that the policy was one of stealth, the object being to hoodwink the electors.20

      Bryce remained tight-lipped about the Government’s plans, although the hints he dropped – mention of the Irish Reform Association scheme, and even of Chamberlain’s 1885 Central Board scheme – pointed to devolution.21 It is likely that Redmond had already been given an outline of the new Government’s plans. He had met Sir Antony MacDonnell at the end of December, and warned him that the Irish Party could not accept a rehash of the Dunraven scheme.22 He recorded MacDonnell’s assurance that:

      Bryce agreed to practically all points in my memo of 30 December. He [Sir Antony] was then engaged in making a first draft for a great scheme of reform of Irish Government which they hoped to introduce in the Session of 1907. His scheme would place every department of Irish Government and Finance under the control of an Irish Body in which the Elective Element would be supreme (probably three fourths). They proposed to consult us fully in drafting details and hoped to have it ready by next autumn.23

      Consultation, or the lack of it, would be a major theme running through Redmond’s relationship with the sixty-eight-year-old Bryce.24 Although the latter had committed himself to the theory of ‘governing Ireland according to Irish ideas’, his practice fell short. Later that year, Redmond unburdened himself to W.T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, on his dissatisfaction with Bryce:

      … he is a splendid old fellow, but he is a pedant, and as pig-headed as he can be, and obstinate to the last degree… you will scarcely believe it, but he has never asked for my opinion since he has been in office… I haunt him, morning , noon, and night – which is the only way I can get anything done, and it takes two hours’ talk to make him see reason….25

      For one thing, there was the Coercion Act, still on the Statute Book, though Lord Aberdeen had withdrawn all proclamations under the Act as ‘not now necessary’.26 Redmond applied pressure on Bryce throughout 1906 to have the twenty-four-year -old Act repealed, pressure that bore fruit only in December.27 Equally frustrating were the party’s attempts to make headway on the university issue. A royal commission had been appointed in 1901 to gather expert evidence on the higher education needs of Catholics, but Trinity College was excluded from its scope. The party moved that the revenues of Trinity College be so administered as to make them available ‘for the use of the general body of the nation’. In response, Bryce announced a new commission of inquiry into the College, to be chaired by Sir Edward Fry. Redmond sensed an excuse for further delay, but withdrew his objection on Bryce’s assurance of fast action by the commission.28 Wrangling