MARTIN O’DONOGHUE and EMER PURCELL (eds)
UCD Press
€30
ISBN 9781739086305
REVIEWED BY
Dermot Meleady
Dermot Meleady is the author of John Redmond: the national leader (Merrion Press, 2013) and Redmond: the Parnellite (Cork University Press, 2008).
In Redmond’s long campaign for Home Rule, the pivotal moment was November 1909, when the UK Liberal government clashed head-on with the House of Lords over the latter’s budget veto. This, along with the balance of power afforded him by the January 1910 UK general election result, would enable Redmond to trade Irish Parliamentary Party support for the budget in exchange for a Parliament Bill to negate the Lords’ veto, and a Liberal commitment to introduce the first Home Rule bill with a realistic chance of passing—‘a system of full self-government in regard to purely Irish affairs’. Redmond’s cable to T.P. O’Connor MP, on tour in the US, captures the drama:
‘The die is cast. The greatest constitutional struggle in England for upwards of two hundred years has commenced. No such opportunity has been offered Ireland to strike for liberty since Grattan moved the Declaration of Independence.’
Ahead were two years of Herculean effort in and out of parliament to prevent backsliding on the government’s undertakings. Margaret O’Callaghan asserts that Redmond ‘lacked significant agency over the question of Home Rule’. If so, it was certainly not during these years of 1910–12. Yet her view of all this is curiously passive: ‘The Third Home Rule Bill was an unintended consequence of the Parliament Bill … The Home Rule Bill … was more than either of the two British parties had wanted to offer.’
Michael Wheatley identifies the rebellion, executions and other Irish events during the Great War as the agents of Redmond’s demise. These events certainly caused him and his party political difficulties, but why did their hitherto-solid popular support evaporate so quickly? Seven weeks into the war, the Home Rule Act had become law, its operation suspended until the war’s end and for a year at minimum. More ominously, the legislation itself was incomplete owing to the nationalist–unionist deadlock over the extent and duration of partition. These provisions, hived off into a separate Amending Bill, were still unresolved. This bill was to come into force alongside the main act but nobody was sure what it would contain.
An anxiety was thus planted in the nationalist psyche: would the act operate in all or part of the island? When Lloyd George brought all the parties together in June 1916, as the rubble of the rebellion lay on the streets, he proposed to end the suspension and implement Home Rule immediately, along with the exclusion of six counties for a provisional period. But when the government confirmed in late July that the partition clauses would be permanent, nationalist opinion awoke as if from a dream and erupted in anger; a furious Redmond withdrew from the talks. In sharing his hopes for a union of Irishmen in the war effort, he had, in Ronan Fanning’s words, encouraged ‘the nationalist delusion that the partition of Ireland was avoidable’. From that point on, for large swathes of opinion, Home Rule truncated was Home Rule withheld; the Party’s 42-year-old project was judged a failure, its leader at best a dupe.
Colin Reid and Pauric Travers place Redmond in the context of two mentors and role models, respectively Isaac Butt and C.S. Parnell, while Alvin Jackson sets him against his nemesis, fellow-Dubliner and leader of Irish unionism, Sir Edward Carson. Travers quotes his speech at the outset of the Parnell split affirming his loyalty to the beleaguered leader as resting on the ‘double tie of private friendship and political allegiance’.
Margaret Ward describes the failure of women’s suffrage lobbyists to win Redmond’s and his colleagues’ support before and during the passage of the Home Rule bill. In a fair-minded account, she relates their refusals or unfulfilled promises to back British suffrage bills and, later, to insert women’s suffrage clauses into the Irish bill.
As if in challenge, Claire McGing presents the Dáil career of Bridget Redmond (née Mallick) TD, the young widow of Redmond’s son, Capt. William Redmond DSO, MP, TD, who won the Waterford seat held by her husband, and previously by his father, for Cumann na nGaedheal in 1932. Bridget maintained a ‘Redmond dynasty’ of sorts by winning the seat in seven consecutive general elections from 1933 until her death in 1952.
The editors of this volume, Martin O’Donoghue and Emer Purcell, provide an interesting essay on the various ‘successor’ individuals and organisations that lived on in the two very different post-1922 states of Ireland, each owing something to the Irish Parliamentary Party’s legacy, each in its own way embodying a kind of ‘home rule’.
Finally, Paul Bew’s contribution, ‘The Contradictions of Redmondism’, spans the 125 years from Parnell’s death to Brexit to assert Redmond’s continuing relevance. In the Trimble–Bruton–Ahern interactions that brought the Good Friday Agreement, Redmond would have been at home. And in recent years his intuitive avoidance of Anglophobia would have been a useful corrective to the renewed north–south acrimony occasioned by the Brexit debates (how times have moved on already!).