critical account of the later years by Stephen Gwynn – the publication of Denis Gwynn’s major biography of Redmond in 1932 went some way to rehabilitate his reputation in newly independent Ireland. Its documenting of his robust exchanges with British leaders, his refusal to yield more than the initial offer of temporary Home Rule exclusion to Ulster or to make any concessions over Tyrone and Fermanagh at the Buckingham Palace Conference, his concern to save the lives of and win amnesty for the 1916 prisoners, together with its recall of Catholic nationalist outrage at the news of German war crimes in Belgium in 1914, all helped to generate a second, kinder perspective on Redmond as a well-intentioned patriot who had tried according to his lights to advance the cause of his country.
From this view was born the paradigm that Redmond had trusted too much in parliamentary methods and had been ‘let down by everyone’ – by British politicians as well as by his own side. It was a view first encouraged by Redmond himself during the war when he blamed his political reverses on British muddle, recalcitrance and broken promises. The author Terence de Vere White echoed the judgment of Denis Gwynn in a 1973 assessment of Redmond.8 For the historian Brendan Ó Cathaoir, commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Redmond’s death, ‘his dream of a self-governing Ireland within the British Empire was sacrificed on the altar of unionist intransigence’, and he was a victim of Lloyd George’s ‘blandishment and deceit’.9 This perspective in its own way served to vindicate those who had rejected Redmond’s constitutionalism and believed that violence was the only path to freedom: if his methods had failed, physical force remained the only useful response to British deceptions and foot-dragging.
In placing the blame for the demise of the Home Rule project solely on external agents, both prevailing nationalist views of Redmond engaged in a certain amount of scapegoating, thus avoiding looking within the political culture of Irish nationalism itself. The attitude reflects, in particular, a failure over many years to take Ulster unionism seriously, to understand its origins or genuinely to engage with its sentiments. Redmond shared in these failures: the statesmanship he manifested in his treatment of the Anglo-Irish relationship as a whole deserted him in his approach to Ulster, although, in fairness, he was anxious to do everything possible to conciliate it. The nationalist press, almost to the end of the Home Rule crisis, dismissed and ridiculed the unionist threats to resist the imposition of Home Rule. When it became clear that unionist Ulster had armed itself sufficiently to do so, it ascribed the resistance solely to the machinations of British reactionary politicians or complained of British reluctance to repress it.
This biography proposes a view of Redmond’s tragedy as due primarily neither to his own shortcomings as nationalist leader nor to the muddles or stratagems of British politicians – though these factors undoubtedly increased his difficulties – but rather to structural factors beyond his control rooted in the existence of two distinct national communities in Ireland. Far from betraying Redmond, the Asquith Government held to its undertaking to legislate for all-Ireland Home Rule and, in the face of Ulster’s well-signalled opposition, stood by it well beyond the point at which it might have been expected to make some concession to the pressure. Redmond’s lack of an Ulster policy in 1912 perfectly complemented the procrastinatory ‘wait and see’ approach for which Asquith was famous. Only when the threat of civil war had grown in early 1914 did the Government, with Redmond following reluctantly in tow, concede a time-limited exclusion by plebiscite of Ulster counties from Home Rule. From that point on, all realistic proposals to bring self-government schemes into effect had to include partition in some form. The advent of the Coalition Government in 1915, seen as another betrayal of Home Rule, was a necessary response to war exigencies. Tory members of that cabinet supported Lloyd George’s attempt to bring Home Rule into immediate operation in the summer of 1916, subject to the exclusion of Ulster. What ‘betrayed’ Redmond was not British leaders, but inescapable realities.
From a moderate unionist standpoint, a different set of questions has been raised about Redmond’s failure. The historian Paul Bew, echoing Stephen Gwynn, friend and biographer of Redmond’s last years, has suggested that he should boldly have conceded the right of Ulster counties to opt individually for indefinite rather than temporary exclusion from Home Rule in March 1914 in return for an agreed implementation of Home Rule for the rest of Ireland. Already compromised in the eyes of significant sections of nationalist opinion even for his temporary partition offer, the argument goes, he would thereby have gained ‘compensating credit’ from the significant numbers of unionists who wished to avoid conflict. The move would also have shifted the focus to the territorial issue, where the democratic case for Carson’s ‘clean cut’ – the demand for six-county exclusion en bloc – was weaker, since two of those counties had (slender) nationalist majorities.10 On this view, partition – the unwanted child of warring parents – might at least have had a more amicable beginning, with nationalists later seeking to win Ulster’s consent by making Home Rule attractive to the separated counties.
Redmond would have responded that such a move by him at that moment would spell instant death for his leadership. Nationalist opinion knew and thought little about the Ulster Protestant community, and had simply not been prepared for the possibility that a territorial division of the island might be necessary. Four months later, however, Redmond was preparing to make just such a concession, in a speech for a Commons debate that would anticipate the imminent placing of the Home Rule Act on the statute book. Events had undoubtedly changed his mind since the initial concession of March: the impracticability of British military coercion of Ulster as made clear by the Curragh ‘mutiny’, the qualitative enhancement of unionist Ulster’s capacity for military self-defence by the Larne gunrunning and the mushrooming growth of the nationalist Volunteer movement in response made civil war on the island a looming and horrifying probability. Resisting the demand for en bloc exclusion, and holding fast to the principle of individual county option, he was yet ready to drop the six-year time limit on exclusion, so that there would be ‘no coercion of any Ulster county’ either into or out of Home Rule. Aside from the likely responses from within Ulster unionism to his new concession, his chief concern must have been whether he could keep the bulk of his supporters with him. He would gamble on the resonances of the moment of victory as providing the appropriate setting for a display of magnanimity to Ulster, an effort at ensuring a peaceful birth for Home Rule. Unfortunately, his mistake was to have left it until too late. The scheduled debate never took place, having been overtaken by the onset of the Great War on 3 August.
The unionist diagnosis of Redmond’s chief mistake of 1914 is balanced by a nationalist one: that he was wrong to pledge Irish support for the British war effort on its very first day (or at all), when the Home Rule Act was not yet on the statute book. It is held that he should have used this support as a bargaining chip to win an early establishment of the Irish Parliament and his other demand for the enrolment of the Volunteers as a home defence force, which was the view of Dillon. It is true that he gambled, and lost, on the assumption of the short war that would have made all this unnecessary. The reasons validly offered in his defence are that he saw Ireland as owing a debt of honour to Britain for keeping its word on Home Rule, and an opportunity for Volunteer Irishmen of both traditions to develop new bonds in opposing a common enemy. But the speech-that-was-never-delivered casts an additional light on his motivation. He knew that, although the Home Rule Act would soon be law, the amending bill to provide for Ulster would probably remain to be settled when the war ended, within a year or so as he thought. He could visualize himself back in the House of Commons, delivering that speech at that point. If he could speak for a nationalist Ireland that had remained loyal from the outset of the war, his unmatched feel for the ways of the House told him that he could make a powerful appeal to what he had once described as its sense of ‘rough fair play’, persuading it against the Ulster case for en bloc six-county exclusion, and in the process winning a ‘good’ Amending Act.11 Any suggestion of bargaining with loyalty would have destroyed such a prospect from the start.
Bad luck, or more particularly the interposition of the war and the Easter 1916 insurrection, is often said