Dermot Meleady

John Redmond


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to the counties. Local disputes took on a different character, and resolving them would prove challenging. Examples included the leadership’s failed attempts to impose John Muldoon on two constituencies in the 1906 General Election, as well as Redmond’s relaxing his opposition to the candidacy of the flamboyant Arthur Lynch in the 1909 West Clare by-election, fearing a local revolt.28 The same powerlessness allowed him to stand aloof from the grittier realities of Irish politics, such as the violence used against Sinn Féin supporters in Leitrim in 1908 by Joe Devlin’s Belfast enforcers (Padraig Yeates is correct to say that Redmond was incapable of confronting his own party machine in Ulster29), or the underhanded trick played against John Howard Parnell in South Meath in 1900 to deprive him of the seat by a technicality. The Irish Party at local level was, in Patrick Maume’s words, ‘a loose network… centred on nuclei based around the individual leaders, each of whom had an inner core of confidants and an outer ring of followers’, held together by the coolly polite Redmond–Dillon relationship.30 Lyons, in his detailed study of the post-Parnell Irish Party, noted the shift in its social-class composition brought about by the democratization of its selection machinery. The effect was a gradual increase in the number of MPs drawn from the lower-middle classes such as shopkeepers, farmers and salaried workers at the expense of merchants, landowners and professionals, combined with a sharp rise in the proportions of MPs representing their native localities and living in their constituencies when not at Westminster. This shift, wrote Lyons, created a valuable bloc of experienced and reliable members who, though of limited education and not often heard, became the party’s voting backbone in the House of Commons.31 However, the greater powers of the grass roots in the party’s national organization were offset by the fact that few of their representatives were ever admitted to the leadership core, where day-to-day decisions on party policy at Westminster were made. Although the average age of MPs rose only slowly after 1900, such decisions continued to reside with the ageing veterans of the Parnell era, of whom Redmond himself was the youngest. Here was an imbalance that would later loosen the party’s hold on a rising generation.32

      One thing was clear to Redmond in 1901: the party had rid itself of the demoralization that had been the despair of Dillon as anti-Parnellite leader in the later 1890s. His opinion of his troops was high:

      Such was the eighty-one-strong force out of which, as the 1901 session began, Redmond began to forge a political weapon, independent of both British parties, to win Irish self-government. Not only did he need to restore the dissipated credit of constitutional politicians and win back the confidence of an electorate lost to scepticism and apathy during a decade of wrangling; he had also to advance nationalist Irish interests just when the October 1900 General Election had given the Conservative–Liberal Unionist coalition a second term in office, making Home Rule legislation a distant prospect.

      Redmond’s 1895 Cambridge Union speech aroused a particular animosity in Griffith:

      As for the exponents of violent nationalism, Redmond had little to fear from the marginal Irish Republican Brotherhood, or ‘Fenians’, at home, but their American counterpart, John Devoy’s Clan-na-Gael, was potentially a threat to the party’s support organization in the US. A warning came in early 1901 from John O’Callaghan, the Redmondite émigré journalist on the Boston Globe who would become the chief organizer of the UIL of America. The Clan, he wrote, were ‘as bitterly opposed as ever’ to the party’s reunification, were using the Cambridge Union speech against Redmond and alleged that he had personally promised the Queen an enthusiastic reception on her Irish visit. The only way to counteract Clan influence was to step up agitation: ‘things must be made hot in every sense of the word both in Ireland and in the House of Commons’. They needed:

      … a good stand-up fight in the House of Commons… Let the young bloods assert themselves… before the session is a week old some of the party ought to be suspended; if you are inclined yourself so much the better… it will arouse the blood of our people here as nothing else can….