existing Government departments, including Education, Agriculture and Local Government. The Council would operate through committees deciding by resolution, subject to the veto of the Lord Lieutenant, who would also have discretion to initiate executive action. Control of the police and other important departments was reserved to Dublin Castle.
V
The day before the bill’s introduction, Redmond and the Irish Party entertained the colonial premiers, then visiting Britain, at a banquet at the House of Commons. The occasion was informal, and the great tenor John McCormack evoked ‘extraordinary enthusiasm’ with his singing of ‘The Irish Emigrant’ and ‘My Snowy-Breasted Pearl’. Redmond made a short speech conveying gratitude for the unchanging sympathy of the colonies with the Irish cause.97 Joining the premiers of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Newfoundland was, for the first time, General Louis Botha, the leader of the Transvaal, the newest autonomous state of the Empire, recently granted home rule within five years of the end of a bitterly fought war. Botha had observed, in his first speech as premier, that ‘the people of Great Britain have trusted the people of the Transvaal in a way which is not equalled in history’.98 The theme of trust in the Irish people would feature heavily in the controversies about to begin on the Council Bill. Redmond’s reception of the measure in the House – critical but not dismissive – played for time, and the party voted for the First Reading. Framing his comments as a series of questions, he promised to give a considered judgment at the National Convention to be held shortly in Dublin. Chief among his concerns were the undemocratic nominated element in the Council (a safeguard for the Protestant minority), the practicability of the committee system, the bill’s financial aspects and the powers of veto and initiative of the Lord Lieutenant.99 Above all, would the scheme, if put into effect, hinder or help the ultimate winning of full Home Rule? ‘On the answer to that question our support of this bill must depend.’ They were determined that the Home Rule remedy would be applied:
… but in the meantime we should shrink from the responsibility of rejecting anything which, after that full consideration which the bill will receive, seems to our deliberate judgment calculated to relieve the sufferings of Ireland and hasten the day of her national convalescence.100
Redmond’s circumspection, however, could not prevent a rush to judgment by others. It was reported that the bill was the subject of ‘practically universal criticism’ in the Westminster lobbies. Liberals were criticizing its timidity, while Unionists were as hostile as if the Act of Union had been repealed.101 Following the publication of the text at the weekend, nationalist Ireland began to respond. The North Dublin Executive of the UIL prefigured the language of many branches in denouncing it as a ‘wretched, miserable measure… insultingly hostile to the National aspirations of the Irish race’. The bishops of Limerick and Kildare were among the first to attack, Bishop O’Dwyer seeing its provisions for lay control of the new education department as ‘grotesque’.102 Hostile comment poured in from League and AOH branches and from local bodies all over the country, while most provincial papers echoed the two Dublin nationalist dailies in heavily criticizing it. Everywhere, the term most in use to describe it was ‘insult’.103
As the Convention approached, Redmond and Dillon were in daily contact, but brought few other party members into their confidence. As with the public, so with the party: they had done little to prepare it for a sober assessment of the scheme. Those MPs who voiced their views to the newspapers were mostly opposed; they outnumbered by about two-to-one those who echoed Redmond’s Commons approach or favoured amending the bill.104 Although a party meeting was due before the Convention, Dillon advised against it. On one thing he was clear on 9 May: it would never do to submit any resolution approving of the bill. ‘The Convention will have to be handled very carefully,’ he added.105 Redmond’s intensive parliamentary labours of 1906 had left him somewhat out of touch with Irish opinion; he had spoken only seven times in Ireland in 1906, and only once so far in 1907. Between 1901 and 1905, by comparison, his yearly platform appearances had averaged between eleven and fifteen. The handling of the Convention was uppermost in his mind when he asked Dillon, better attuned to grass-roots sentiment, for news of opinion in Dublin:
It will be very difficult, until I hear more from Ireland, to say what the best course will be at the Convention. I am quite clear, however, that if the Convention decides that we ought not to support the Second Reading, the bill will not be proceeded with at all….106
There had been ‘very little opportunity’ for Dillon, so far, to gauge feeling. In an uncharacteristic bout of wishful thinking, he fancied:
… there is a tendency to [a] reaction in favour of giving the bill fair consideration. The explosion of disappointment and anger in the country will have some very wholesome results… I think, if we make full use of it… we may be able to secure some necessary amendments.107
Equally uncharacteristically, Redmond was tending to pessimism. The same day he sent Dillon draft resolutions for the Convention that assailed the bill as containing ‘no provisions calculated to promote a settlement of the Irish question’, and as ‘marred by an absence of trust in the people’, as well as by unjust and unworkable provisions:
The more I think it over the more I lean towards the view that to carry a motion in any sense accepting the bill would, tho’ possible, only be possible by really driving the Convention and that most serious consequences might follow in the Party and out of it….108
Yet Dillon still held out for the possibility of swinging the Convention. Redmond’s draft would undoubtedly be carried by a sweeping majority, but would cause the bill’s abandonment. Instead, he would try his hand at a milder version that might avert such a ‘tactical misfortune’.109 The following day, Dillon sent word that his wife Elizabeth had been taken seriously ill at their Dublin home; he had been up nearly all night. Later that day, however, he sent his own draft resolution, ‘much more moderate than yours’, advocating that the party abstain on, rather than oppose, the Second Reading if the bill’s many defects were not addressed. Recommending that Redmond show both drafts to Blake, O’Connor and Devlin, he sent his own not as an alternative, but simply as ‘my view of the best tactics, if the Convention were bidable [sic]’. Even if not, they should be willing to risk ‘some unpopularity’ to put ‘the commonsense policy’ before the Convention.110
As a source of information about Irish opinion, Dillon was now useless to Redmond. However, the latter had gleaned enough from the newspaper cuttings sent him by Dillon and from other sources to let him know the trend of events. ‘As far as I am able to gather,’ he wrote to Dillon on 13 May, ‘the feeling against Birrell’s bill is growing rather than diminishing.’111 Worse yet, any prospect of swinging the Convention was about to become even less feasible. Even as Redmond wired his hope for Elizabeth’s recovery, she had already passed away.112 Her death would remove the stricken Dillon from active politics for many months, along with any possibility that the majority of the party and League could be induced to accept an unpopular course. When the party convened in Dublin on 15 May to express sympathy with Dillon, several MPs threatened trouble if the bill were not denounced.113 Three days later, Redmond wrote to Blake that he and Devlin had spoken at length with Dillon, and that they ‘practically came to the conclusion that the best thing for the party and the movement is to reject the bill’.114 Meanwhile, the Daily Mail was already claiming that the bill was ‘practically dead’.115
On the morning of Tuesday 21 May, the doors of Dublin’s Mansion House were besieged by around 3,000 delegates, including many from Australia and the U.S., a throng far greater than could be accommodated in the Round Room. Denis Gwynn’s account describes the electric atmosphere and Redmond’s ‘commanding presence, his magnificent voice, and his natural, impressive gestures [that] made him incomparable as the chairman of public assemblies’, as he moved that the bill be rejected as utterly inadequate in scope and unsatisfactory in details.116 A great ‘roar of approval’ greeted his motion. Speaker after speaker followed in the same vein, and the motion was passed overwhelmingly. Redmond, however, had begun defensively, answering critics of his vote for the First Reading who alleged that he and his colleagues had all along been committed to the bill. He justified it on technical grounds as necessary to ensure that the bill could be printed and placed before the Convention in fulfilment of the pledge made at Grange