Dermot Meleady

John Redmond


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kind, in the future, to the party of which he is now the leader….

      – Arthur Griffith in United Irishman, 10 Feb. 1900.

      I

      Redmond, now in his forty-fifth year, was taking exercise before travelling the short distance to the House of Commons, having left the small apartment he shared with his wife Ada – known within the Redmond family as ‘Amy’, as he was known as ‘Jack’ – at Wynnstay Gardens, off Kensington High Street, which became his permanent home in London during parliamentary sessions. They had married in December 1899, exactly ten years after the death of Johanna, Redmond’s first wife and the mother of his three children, and less than two months before his election to the leadership that sealed the reunification of the party, which had been divided for the nine years following the fall of Parnell. Differences in age – she thirteen years younger than he– and in religion – she from a Protestant Leamington Spa family, he a devout Irish Catholic, albeit with a capacity, as Parnellite leader in the fraught years of the split, to resist clerical interference in politics – did not prevent the marriage being a happy one.