nomination of Douglas Hyde.29 It became evident that matters had not moved beyond the impasse reached with Wyndham two years previously. Bryce had promised Redmond privately to consult the Cabinet on the university question and ‘see how far it was possible to go’ to get agreement with the Irish Party and the Bishops.30 Now he pleaded the Government’s lack of time to make policy on such a difficult subject, and, echoing Wyndham, was against proposing any scheme until sure that it had some chance of being accepted and carried.31 On the issue of general educational reform, Bryce conveyed the impression of understanding what should be done but not knowing how to do it. On 22 March, responding to another Irish Party motion critical of all branches of education provision in Ireland, he surveyed the many defects of an ‘extremely difficult and complicated system’. He avowed his sympathy for the Gaelic revival, and hoped to meet the demand for its wider study in the schools. Yet all paths to reform seemed blocked.32
Redmond and Bryce also clashed in the House in April and May during a row over the latter’s reappointment of twenty-two Tory-appointed officers of the Land Commission whom Redmond accused of conspiring to raise the price of land. Urged by Dillon in Dublin that ‘the country requires a lead’, Redmond moved a critical amendment, only to see it defeated by the Liberal majority.33 On another land-connected matter, relations were just as bad. Despite Bryce’s appointment of six additional inspectors for the work of reinstatement of evicted tenants, data given by him to Redmond in October revealed that the process had not accelerated. In protest, Redmond moved the adjournment of the House on 29 October. The delay, he claimed, boiled down to one factor: the refusal of landlords to sell untenanted land on which either the evicted tenant or the ‘grabber’ of his farm could be resettled. The remedy was simple: ‘the Government must have resort to compulsion.’34 At year’s end, there were still no compulsory powers, but Bryce could report an improved rate of reinstatement, and was about to treble the number of staff, hoping to complete the investigation of all outstanding cases in six months.35
Two bright spots in Nationalist relations with Bryce were the Town Tenants Bill, piloted through the House by J.J. Clancy MP, which passed its Third Reading on 30 November, and the Labourers Bill. When the second was introduced on 28 May, Redmond noted the contrast with Wyndham’s withdrawn measure and acknowledged that the party’s three main demands had been met. The bill proposed to provide up to £4,250,000 in loans to local councils for the building of labourers’ cottages with plots of land. It was estimated that the provisions would allow upwards of 25,000 cottages to be built over five or six years. The bill was passed without division, and became law in August, with Nationalists and Ulster Unionists at one in congratulating the Chief Secretary.36
Of all the issues that occupied Redmond in the 1906 Session, none took up more parliamentary time, or required such sensitive handling, as the Liberals’ Education Bill for England and Wales. The bill originated in the public clamour for the reversal of the effects of the Tories’ 1902 Education Act, which provided for local authority funding for all elementary schools while allowing each religious denomination to manage its own schools and religious teaching. This had led to protests at the use of public money to support particular denominations – ‘putting Rome on the rates’, in one Nonconformist rendition. The Liberal landslide was a mandate to legislate for public control of publicly funded education and to abolish religious tests for teachers.
For most Irish nationalists, it was an issue on which religious beliefs came into potential conflict with the advancement of the Home Rule cause. The backdrop to the controversy was the radical action taken against Catholic interests in France under the anticlerical Governments of the Third Republic, amounting to ‘persecution’ of the Church in the eyes of the nationalist press in Ireland. The bill was likely to have profound effects on the Catholic elementary schools of Britain. With nine-tenths of Catholics there of recent Irish origin, the Irish Party’s dilemma was to represent their educational demands at the risk of antagonizing the Nonconformist and Radical elements who were among the staunchest British supporters of Home Rule. Fortunately, the head of the Catholic Church in England, Francis Bourne, Archbishop of Westminster, with whom Redmond was in constant contact on the matter, took from the outset a pragmatic and conciliatory approach to the legislation. When Redmond and Dillon met him in February, Bourne told them that he considered popular control of schools to be irresistible, and therefore did not favour a ‘frontal attack’ on the bill; rather, his hope was that ‘by finesse’ some advantages might be obtained for Catholics. Where the majority of the parents of children in a school belonged to a particular religion, for example, the local authority might be willing to agree that the teachers should be of the same faith. The Government would allow local authorities to concede that demand, but would it compel them to do so?37 From O’Connor came similar advice:
We shall have to consent to full popular control. I have always regarded that as inevitable and have told the priests so. But I believe that if we assent to that, we may get excellent terms on other points. As you know, there is no real hostility to our schools; it is the ascendancy of the Anglicans that is assailed; and we have no interest in defending that….38
Introduced by Birrell on 9 April and described by the Freeman as ‘epoch-making, if not crisis-making’, the bill proposed an exemption, crucial for Catholics, which allowed a school in an urban district or borough to remain denominational, subject to local authority permission, if four-fifths of the parents demanded it. Having been told by individual Nonconformists of their willingness to see this provision made compulsory on the local authorities rather than have an open breach with the Irish Party, Redmond had reason at first to hope for a compromise that would allow him to support the bill.39 In the Second Reading debate in May, Wyndham announced the Tories’ uncompromising opposition to the bill as a violation of religious equality.40 Redmond and Dillon were keen to distance themselves as far as possible, in tone and content, from Wyndham’s attack. However, when Bryce proposed the Bible reading programme known as the ‘Cowper–Temple’ scheme as the religious education curriculum, their opposition was trenchant. Dillon warned that ‘to us it is hostile… the simple Bible teaching in the schools is to us Catholics worse than no religion’; for Redmond it was ‘abhorrent to our religious convictions’.41 Redmond sought to present the issue as the protection of minority rights rather than an attempt to dictate to the English Protestant majority. Catholics could accept secular control of the teaching of secular subjects, but, regarding religious teaching, must not be forced to violate their consciences. To enable him to support the bill, the Government must make the four-fifths exemption compulsory on local authorities. He appealed to ‘the great Liberal Nonconformist majority’ to remember its glorious history of struggle for civil and religious liberty, to view the Catholic objections in that light and to remember that Catholic Irishmen had trusted them at the election and had helped to deliver their great majority.42
The Second Reading passed by a majority of 206 on 10 May with seventy-five of the Irish Party opposing and the Ulster Unionists abstaining.43 In the six-week battle that followed in Committee, all of Redmond’s and Dillon’s resources were called upon as they fought for the desired changes while simultaneously seeking to appease the Liberal rank-and-file.44 That appeasement was needed was evident from the flood of angry mail Redmond received as soon as the decision to oppose the Second Reading was announced. One anonymous postcard carried the message: ‘Parnell the Protestant, not a tool of the Priests, would not have killed Home Rule by alienating the Protestant majority of the English nation….’45 In response, Redmond expressed the hope:
… that they might be found able…to join with the great body of Nonconformists in passing a measure which, while safeguarding the real interests and religious rights of the minority they represented, would at the same time remove the injustices which had been inflicted upon Nonconformists.46
Writing in June to Devlin, then touring Australia, he was optimistic: ‘The political situation is on the whole satisfactory… I think we will be able to extract ourselves from the difficulties of our position.’47 The Committee debates, however, did not produce the amendments required by the Nationalists, and sixty Irish Party members were present to vote against the Third Reading on 30 July, leaving it with a majority of 192. The party would now have to look to the House of Lords for amendments that would make the bill tolerable to Catholics.48 In December, the Lords’ amendments were considered by a hostile Commons majority. As discussions on a compromise