Esmonde was determined not to submit his ideas to the people of Wexford, who were unanimously opposed to them, just as Dolan had ‘run away from the poll’.133 He told an Esmonde constituent that the situation seemed ‘absolutely intolerable… no one wants to put any indignity on Sir Thomas Esmonde at all, but it is quite impossible for us to recognize a “conditional” member of the party….’134
In the midst of these defections, Redmond came under fire from his former ally, now advocate of the Sinn Féin abstention policy, John Sweetman, who republished his letter of 1894 to Justin McCarthy indicating his dissatisfaction with the anti-Parnellite Liberal alliance of that time. Sweetman unfairly advanced egotistical motives for Redmond’s clinging to a bankrupt policy:
The applause which his elocutionary powers receive in that House is the very breath of his life. To take John Redmond from the House of Commons would be as cruel as to take a great actor from the stage….135
To counter further Sinn Féin advances in Dublin, Redmond asked Harrington in August to organize a public meeting at the Mansion House to revive party support there. He suggested that, following the National League precedent, a UIL central branch should be formed in Dublin with fortnightly meetings: ‘I am convinced that a reaction is setting in in Dublin against these Sinn Féin people and that a reorganization of the National forces is possible.’136 Harrington assured him hopefully that ‘Dublin is really as sound as ever’. Sinn Féin, he claimed, were composed of people who had always been hostile, but were no more influential than they had ever been; it was only that ‘owing to mistakes on our own part they have been allowed to become a little more prominent’.137 In September, Harrington reported that the spirit had been much improved by the Mansion House meeting.138 The new central branch was inaugurated on 23 October as a forum for the discussion of current political topics.
The May debacle also galvanized Birrell into action to assuage nationalist feelings. By the end of June he was ready with an Evicted Tenants Bill that embodied the compulsion principle for the first time. The Freeman reckoned that it had kept faith with the tenants, and would finally settle the problem if allowed to do so by the Lords.139 Its passage through Committee was made tortuous, however, by intensive debating of hostile Unionist amendments. The sharpest controversy turned on the issue of the power to dispossess ‘planters’ – the new tenants who had long ago taken evicted farms – in order to restore the evicted, the limits on the numbers to be restored and the amount of land to be acquired for the purpose. Urged on by Redmond, the Government on 22 July applied the closure to the debate, causing uproar in the House.140 Passing the Commons by 228 votes to 49 on 2 August, the bill went to the Lords, who proceeded to undo much of Birrell’s work. Birrell’s willingness to compromise led to agreement by the end of August on compensation and other safeguards for planters, and a limit of 2,000 on the number of evicted tenants to be restored.141 The Evicted Tenants (Ireland) Bill received the royal assent on 28 August, fulfilling the promise made by the Tories in 1903 to bring closure to this chapter of the land war saga. As we shall see, however, land agitation would continue. The June statements of Redmond and the Directory had unanimously called upon UIL members to devote themselves to ‘a really vigorous and sustained agitation’ throughout Ireland during the coming autumn and winter.
Parliamentary activity aside, Redmond’s chief response to the debacle was to launch himself into a nationwide speaking tour. This was preceded by a speech at the Oxford Union on 6 June at the invitation of the president-elect William C. Gladstone, grandson of the great statesman, to debate the motion that: ‘In the opinion of the House, Ireland should have the right to manage her own affairs’ (see page 2). The occasion was a triumph for Redmond, whose oration reached back to medieval times for the origins of the Irish parliament. Pitching his argument towards his young Tory audience, he contrasted the Council Bill, which had ‘distrust of the people’ written all over it, with the Tories’ Local Government Act of 1898, which showed that ‘they trusted the people as fully as they did here in England….’142
At New Ross on 23 June, he returned to the scene of his first election to Parliament to unveil the 1798 monument, remembering ‘the day when I came here a young boy with fear and trembling to ask this great honour from the people’. Admitting that he had made many mistakes, he professed himself to be ‘full of fight’. The arguments of those who imagined that the policies of the last twenty-five years must be abandoned were ‘the words and reasons of political children’.143 At the Battersea UIL branch on 7 July, he rounded on ‘all the cranks, all the soreheads, all the political outcasts [who] have been much in evidence for the last few weeks…There is not one of them who has ever given inside or outside the House of Commons one useful day’s work for Ireland (cheers)….’144
When Parliament rose in late August, his tour became a gruelling itinerary that, in just over three months, would take him to twenty centres, fourteen of them in Ireland.145 With almost penitential rigour, he applied himself to the task of reconnecting himself with nationalist audiences after two years’ intensive focus on parliamentary work. There was little relaxation at Aughavanagh that autumn; not until just before Christmas would he manage one uninterrupted week there.146 The bereaved Dillon could offer only encouragement:
You will have a tough fight both with Sinn Féin and O’Brien and Co. But the country is overwhelmingly with you and the Party, and all that is necessary is to rouse up the people as you are doing and put a fighting policy before them which they can understand….147
With the twofold aim of rescuing the constitutional movement from danger and, as he explained at Drumkeeran in October, addressing ‘the great public outside through the newspapers in Ireland, and especially in England, in putting the cause of Ireland plainly before the world’, he expounded his party’s policies on all the issues disquieting nationalists, devoting each speech to a different theme.148 At Ballybofey on 29 August, he dealt with the party’s relationship with the Government, emphasizing that there could be no alliance with the Liberals except on the condition that they committed themselves, not only to bringing a Home Rule Bill into Parliament, but to making it the first item in their programme.149 The visit to Donegal provided an opportunity to visit the grave of Isaac Butt at Stranorlar: the latter’s fate must have been called to mind by recent events.150 At the Mansion House a week later, he called the Council Bill debacle a blessing in disguise, having shown the Government the impossibility of satisfying Ireland with anything less than real Home Rule.151
Elsewhere, his subject was the position of the Protestant minority in nationalist Ireland. Redmond denied that they were, or would be, persecuted by the Catholic majority, and regretted the ‘infinite mischief’ such stories did.152 At Portumna in October, he tried to outflank the local Sinn Féin organization by identifying the party with the agrarian agitation still simmering in East Galway, in part the result of the slow reinstatement of evicted tenants on the local Clanricarde estate.153 At Wexford on 21 October, at the ceremony to confer him with the Freedom of the Borough, he had news of imminent reinstatement for the evicted tenants of the nearby Coolroe estate. When he referred to some of the more personalized criticism to which he had been subjected that year, he let slip his customary mask of sanguine impassivity:
… a man who occupies the position which, all too unworthily, I fill (No, no) is open to many attacks, and from many quarters – the open attacks of open enemies. For my part I have never shrunk from such attacks, or complained of them… [but] the half-veiled sneer of false friends [is] harder to bear, the cowardly malice of the repeater of false and lying gossip, and the cynical imputer of base, unworthy motives. No one is too cynical or too mean, apparently, to level attacks on a man who has on his shoulders the weight of responsibility which has been placed on me. 154
At other venues, his themes ranged from financial relations and the cost of government to the university question and his concerns regarding industrial stagnation and the town slums problem. The marathon campaign ended with a whirlwind tour of Welsh, Scottish and English centres, where he noted among other things the rising tension between the Liberal Commons majority and the House of Lords. At Liverpool, his final venue, he concluded:
I have done my best. No man can do more. I have honestly striven all my life to forward the cause of Ireland. I commenced this work very young… From that day to this I have certainly not spared myself. I have devoted every