he would appreciate an interview even if there were ‘only a slight chance’ of finding a suitable seat. Redmond passed the letter to his private secretary, T.J. Hanna, with a note to say: ‘The writer is a very clever and good fellow [Redmond’s emphasis].’ MacDermot became instead another backroom intellectual, writing memoranda for the party on the fiscal aspects of Home Rule.70 It was all a far cry from May 1890 and Parnell’s parachuting of the twenty-two-year -old Henry Harrison straight from Oxford, unopposed, into the vacant seat of mid-Tipperary.
Other YIBs were too far from the party’s conservative Catholic mainstream to be acceptable as candidates; Redmond’s dislike of those he saw as faddists and cranks was triggered by the pacifist vegetarian feminist Sheehy-Skeffington. The loss to the party was not limited to young men. As Senia Pašeta points out, the exclusion of women from participation in the party, and even effectively from the YIB, and the party’s failure to support female suffrage drove politicized women into the Gaelic League or Sinn Féin.71 Moreover, the early promise of even the two new recruits was not fulfilled. The American tour of Kettle and Hazleton was a failure, bedevilled by personality clashes between the two envoys and the local UIL leadership. O’Callaghan sent Redmond a stream of letters about the arrogance and uncommunicativeness of the Irishmen, who, for their part, alleged that the east-coast-based officers had left them to fend for themselves in the midwest and further west.72
IV
Following Redmond’s meeting with Sir Antony MacDonnell early in 1906, the latter sent Bryce a first draft of a scheme for Irish government reform in February, and the Government’s deliberations went ahead in great secrecy.73 By midsummer, the Irish leaders were still in the dark as to exactly what was entailed in Campbell Bannerman’s ‘instalment of representative control’.74 Redmond and Dillon used their autumn speeches in Ireland to voice their expectations. At Grange, Co. Limerick, on 23 September, Redmond warned that he would take no responsibility for any such ‘makeshift’ as a measure of mere administrative Home Rule. However, any scheme proposed would be carefully examined and submitted to a representative national convention. This was too negative for the Liberal press, and a fortnight later at Athlone he declared himself ‘sincerely anxious’ to be able to support the Government’s scheme. He warned nonetheless that a ‘bold and statesmanlike’ scheme would be easier to pass than ‘something cramped and crooked and not practical’. The proposal would be judged solely by the criterion of the advancement of the Home Rule cause, and if it proved to be an ‘abortion’ would be repudiated by the party and people.75 Dillon was more upbeat, telling a Leitrim audience that he had every reason to believe that the Government was about to grant ‘complete control of the administration of their country through directly elected representatives of the Irish people’; the scheme would be ‘at least as good as the measure they have given to the Boers’.76 Whatever his grounds for such optimism, it was short-lived. In late September, he told Redmond that, from hints dropped by a contact, he expected the scheme to be ‘very unsatisfactory’.77
Redmond met Bryce in Dublin on 8 October, the day after the Athlone speech, to be shown the latest draft of the scheme.78 An administrative council of fifty-five members, two-thirds of it elected from the county councils, one-third nominated by the Lord Lieutenant who would preside, would co-ordinate some Irish boards and departments and their expenditure.79 Redmond forwarded the draft to Dillon with the comment:
I said practically nothing to Bryce except that at first sight it seemed beneath contempt, as it is. He seemed greatly alarmed and said nothing was settled...80
At a further meeting, with Sir Antony present, Redmond and Dillon proposed to Bryce that the Irish MPs should sit as the Irish council. Bryce objected that this would make the council too large to be effective, but conceded the principle of direct election by the parliamentary electorate.81 Soon afterwards, Campbell Bannerman asked the rising Liberal star David Lloyd George to meet Redmond to suggest a postponement of the legislation for a year. Lloyd George’s quid pro quo was an early dissolution if the House of Lords rejected the Government’s planned English bills, followed by an election to seek a mandate to curtail the power of the Lords. Redmond ‘expressed no opinion’. Subsequent history might have been very different had this scenario been played out: the Lords’ veto might have been removed in 1908 or 1909 and a Home Rule Bill become law in 1911 or 1912, well before the onset of the Great War.82
In December, the Chief Secretaryship changed hands. Bryce, whom Lloyd George had told Redmond was ‘in despair’ over the council scheme, had seen a way out of his Irish woes in taking up the British ambassadorship in Washington. His replacement was Birrell, Redmond’s second preference for the job, whom, despite the Education Bill controversies, he found genial and open to persuasion, and who was far less likely than Bryce to allow himself to be overborne by MacDonnell.83 ‘Birrell is a strong man and will keep Antony MacD in order’ was the observation of Campbell Bannerman reported by O’Connor to Redmond.84 Birrell arrived in Dublin on 28 January 1907, by which time Redmond and Dillon had rejected further talk of postponement of the scheme.85
Birrell was determined to try again, and in the Cabinet committee dealing with the scheme, he had a strong ally in Morley. The committee met on 22 February, and radically revised the scheme in the face of protests from Sir Antony. Birrell reported to Redmond that the meeting had produced, he thought, ‘satisfactory results’.86 Sir Antony, however, threatening resignation, sent a counter-proposal to the Cabinet, which met on 9 March to decide between the two opposing memoranda. MacDonnell thought that his ‘weak’ scheme would pass the House of Lords, but Birrell was certain that no scheme, however moderate, had any chance of doing so in the present Parliament. Since any scheme would be rejected, it was better to keep the confidence of Nationalists with a full-blooded one.87 However, more conservative ministers were persuaded to favour a restricted scheme. The outcome was a shift away from the committee’s proposal.88 MacDonnell was sufficiently satisfied not to resign, though Redmond told Dillon that, from a long talk with Birrell, he ‘gathered things are going fairly well’.89 After another wrangle over the constituencies to elect council members, the Cabinet on 1 and 3 May made final decisions on the scheme.90
Redmond’s public references to the impending legislation from the start of 1907 maintained the tone of anxious expectancy of his autumn speeches. Yet, in failing to spell out the fact that no legislative powers were about to be granted, he laid a trap for himself.91 He might have presented the scheme as similar to Chamberlain’s ‘central board’ scheme of 1885, which Parnell had welcomed on its merits, or as an attempt to build on the local government legislation of 1898 that would not abate in the slightest the demand for Home Rule; he might have described it in the terms used by Campbell Bannerman at Manchester as a ‘little, modest, shy, humble effort to give administrative powers to the Irish people’.92 Instead, an uncharacteristic ambiguity did little to educate public opinion. At the Hotel Cecil banquet on 18 March, having paid tribute to the memory of the deceased veteran Fenian John O’Leary, he equivocated:
… but while that hope [of full Home Rule] is not likely to be realized, at least we can confidently say that a great proposal in the direction of Home Rule will immediately be made. Let me say for myself I have no belief in half-way houses (cheers)….93
It was small wonder that, at the London UIL reception held to welcome back Devlin from his year-long fund-raising mission in Australia and the U.S., he should confess to an anxiety ‘so deep and intense that I am almost afraid to express myself as sanguine….’94 Birrell too was full of foreboding as he prepared the Prime Minister for the possible scenarios on the bill’s introduction: ‘My own opinion is that if we introduce the bill as drawn, R. and D. will on Tuesday week express an adverse opinion to it, but… will keep it sufficiently alive to force us to run the odious risk in Ireland of dropping it ourselves or the risk of seeing it altered against our will… It makes a grave situation.’95 Just after the 3 May Cabinet meeting, Dillon wrote to his wife:
Redmond and I have just come down from our interview with B. We have won three-fourths of our battle… The bill as it now stands is so much improved that it bears no resemblance to the original scheme. Nonetheless, it will not be easy for us to decide our attitude towards it.96
The long-awaited bill, introduced on 7 May 1907, proposed a Council of 107 members, including eighty-two to be elected