his reluctance to vote against the Third Reading, he held out for his own amendments and professed himself ‘most anxious’ to do all in his power to prevent the loss of the bill.49
Redmond’s eagerness to come back to the Government camp if only he were given the required concessions had its reward, but too late. Birrell announced his acceptance of the concessions, which, Redmond admitted, would cover practically all the Catholic schools.50 On 4 December, Bourne told Redmond confidentially that the bishops had resolved that they too could then withdraw their opposition to the bill.51 On 12 December, following a guarantee from Birrell that the concessions would be part of any compromise, the Irish Party changed sides and voted with the Government to send back en bloc the Lords’ destructive amendments.52 The larger compromise was not, though, to materialize. A week later, the House of Lords refused to accept the Government’s response to its amendments, and the bill was pronounced dead.53 Archbishop Bourne publicly thanked the Irish Party for its rescue of the Catholic schools from jeopardy.54 Redmond told his constituents soon afterwards that the Irish Party had won an admission that the Catholic schools were distinct and exceptional and should retain their Catholic atmosphere and teaching. ‘The concession must and will remain,’ he said. ‘It is, in my judgment, a charter of the Catholic schools of England.’55 There the issue would rest until the Government made a fresh attempt to legislate in 1908.
III
In 1902, Redmond had mocked the declared hope of Lord Rosebery to become Prime Minister by a majority that would be independent of the Irish vote, saying that he would ‘never live to see that day’.56 Rosebery was not Prime Minister, but such a majority had now materialized, and the relatively powerless position of the Irish Party together with the lack of a Home Rule commitment by the new Government were bound to buttress the arguments of those who preached the futility of parliamentarianism. Although the three organizations gathered under the Sinn Féin banner were too paralysed by dissension to take advantage of the situation, and no Sinn Féin candidates were put up in the election, Griffith and others accused the Irish Party of subservience to the Liberals. If the party’s claims of being able to deploy the Irish vote in Britain as it pleased were true, they said, it should have thrown it to the Tories in order to win the balance of power.57
The party also attracted criticism for the consequences of one important Liberal policy. If ‘governing Ireland according to Irish ideas’ meant anything, it was opening positions in the administration and governance of the country to nationalists in preparation for the anticipated day of self-government. Redmond’s complaints regarding Bryce’s Tory reappointments to the Land Commission, for example, could be allayed only by appointing nationalists. Yet this laid the party open to the perennial charge laid against constitutionalist politicians: that of ‘place-hunting’. The Sinn Féin critique echoed similar charges made by Redmondites against anti-Parnellites in the 1890s, when O’Brien had defended the ‘Morley magistrates’ (Catholics appointed by the then Liberal Chief Secretary) as necessary to correct the Tory preponderance in the judiciary. Redmond set the official attitude in refusing all requests to use his influence to win state jobs for nationalists.58 In 1912, he told Harold Spender in an English newspaper: ‘Never in my life have I asked a single Government for a single office for my friends, though I have made many enemies by my refusals.’59 Yet there were indirect ways of achieving the same result. In the ’90s, Redmond had occasionally told Morley that, while he could not name Parnellites for appointments, if candidates’ names were mentioned he could comment on their suitability. Refusing a request in 1906 for help with a reappointment to a legal post, he added that he would regret if a change were made as the work had been most efficiently done, and that he was sure that this fact would be considered. The following day, he received heartfelt thanks from the supplicant.60 For Griffith, the Local Government Board was ‘the fountainhead of corruption’. Its unionist president, Sir Henry Robinson, claimed that many of the newer MPs wrote to him in such terms as ‘If my pledge did not forbid it, I would be happy to recommend X’, but Redmond, Dillon and others ‘never approached him in this way’. Maume concludes that Redmond ‘found equivocation stressful and probably rarely intervened’.61 In 1907, Griffith published lists of party supporters, journalists and lawyers close to the Freeman who had received Government jobs. D.P. Moran disagreed about the impropriety of it all. At a time when the upper echelons of the civil service were disproportionately Protestant and unionist, he called it ‘a very green and foolish rule’ to refuse to canvass for nationalist candidates; the impression of the Party as a patronage machine arose from the fact that the rule deterred committed nationalists from applying while lukewarm nationalists and place-hunters got the best jobs.62
Although Redmond has been criticized for failing to groom youthful talent for leadership, his speech at the December 1904 launch of the Young Ireland Branch of the UIL (soon to be known as the ‘YIBs’) suggests that his intentions, at least, were otherwise. Most of the members were students or recent graduates of Dublin’s Royal University. Redmond admitted that the party had suffered in recent years from ‘an absence of young men in our ranks’, due partly to the Parnell split and partly to the springing up of ‘more attractive’ movements, such as the Gaelic League. Although the League was doing ‘a noble, and what I would say almost, a holy work in Ireland’, the two movements were complementary, and his only regret was that those who had joined the language movement had not at the same time gone into the political movement. He hoped that the new branch would revive the spirit of:
… the remarkable episode of the coming together in Parnell’s time in ’80 and ’81 and the years that followed of such a galaxy of young and brilliant Irishmen willing to devote themselves and sacrifice their interests in the political movement.63
The YIBs took seriously Redmond’s advice to become a forum for ‘free discussion on political issues’, and the branch soon became a loyal opposition within the movement, its members taking a spirited part in the many controversies of the coming years. Among its notable members were the journalists Francis Skeffington and Francis Cruise O’Brien, and the poet and academic Thomas Kettle, all three of whom would marry daughters of David Sheehy MP, and Richard Hazleton, who had already distinguished himself in his campaigning in South Dublin. When seat vacancies arose in 1906, Hazleton was returned unopposed for North Galway in March and Kettle by a narrow margin for East Tyrone in July.64 In October, the Freeman boasted of the party’s ‘two latest and brilliant recruits’, and Redmond, at a banquet before their departure on an American mission for the UIL, declared it many years since two young men had entered the party who gave such hope and promise of great careers.65 Given that his only previous youthful recruit with leadership potential was Devlin, his satisfaction was understandable. Kettle, along with the middle-aged Gwynn, would give the party intellectual weight and able defence of its policies in the coming years.66 Kettle, who edited his own weekly paper, The Nationist, had already heavily criticized Griffith’s ‘Hungarian’ policy – a factor that may have caused the Sinn Féin groups to omit mention of Hungary from their policy statements at the end of 1905 – and argued against economic separatism and the ‘little-Irelandism’ of many Gaelic revivalists, and for an Irish nationalism enriched by the European heritage.67 When Davitt fell ill and died in late May 1906 (his funeral in Mayo was attended by Redmond, Dillon and many others of the Irish Party), Kettle, in dealing with land issues, would try to fill his shoes. ‘In these days of conciliation, I am still an impenitent follower of Michael Davitt,’ he said at the February 1909 National Convention.68
It remains a fact, however, that little new blood was brought into the senior levels of the party, and that Kettle and Hazleton were the only two YIBs to become MPs under Redmond’s leadership. The difficulty lay not so much in a desire on his part to keep power in senior hands as in his powerlessness to control local UIL organizations. He received applications from at least three other YIB members to stand for the party. One applicant was the able W.G. Fallon, who won the party’s nomination for the mid-Cork seat in January 1910, only to be defeated by the O’Brienite candidate. In the December election of the same year, Redmond failed to secure the mid-Tyrone nomination for Fallon, finding it impossible to put forward his name after a local dispute.69 In late 1909, Frederick W. Ryan and Frank MacDermot wrote seeking nominations, but no vacancies were available. Ryan stood, and lost, as an independent Nationalist candidate for the King’s County (Birr) seat in December 1910. MacDermot, a twenty-two-year