‘Rarely is the life’s work of a public person so comprehensively erased by history.” This bleak judgment ends the penultimate chapter of Dermot Meleady’s powerful biography. John Redmond died in March 1918 amid the wreckage of the Irish Convention, which had brought a proposal for dominion Home Rule for most of Ireland agonisingly near endorsement. (Southern Unionists and the British government were behind it, Catholic bishops and Ulster Unionists opposed).
Sinn Féin swept the country in a general election towards the end of that year, confirming the sea change in Irish opinion since the 1916 Rising, and withdrew from Westminster, the site of all the important battles Redmond had fought since assuming control of the reunited Irish Parliamentary Party in 1900. The rhetoric of irredentist nationalism wiped out the compromising language of Home Rule within the empire.
Yet the successor regime, constituted of people who had spent their lives excoriating Redmond and his kind, came no nearer to solving the central problem of Ulster intransigence that had blocked Home Rule. Indeed, they accepted a cruder and more total form of partition than the versions argued between Lloyd George and Redmond in the last months of his life. This is one of the many judicious points made by Meleady in his book, the second volume of what must be the definitive biography. He also illuminates the hard battles fought by the Irish leader over education, housing, land and all the unglamorous minutiae that make up the business of government. And he provides a strong contextual argument for the strategy that looks, with hindsight, to have been such a fatal mistake: Redmond’s wholehearted support for the war effort in 1914.
The other major failure, less attended to here, was his implacable opposition to women’s suffrage, which was one of the issues that damned him with the radical generation emerging in early-20th-century Ireland; the attempt of a “youth wing” to regenerate the party received little support from him.
His (and Dillon’s) plague-on-both- their-houses attitude to the great labour crisis of 1913 was also, as Meleady admits, a failure of leadership. But, as recent work has shown, he adroitly managed neo-Fenian elements, contrived to keep his warring party more or less together against all the efforts of prima donnas such as Tim Healy and William O’Brien, and brought a Home Rule bill into being in 1912-14. The revolutionaries’ enduring vindictiveness towards Redmond stemmed from their fear that he might, even then, pull the chestnuts from the fire.
Whether Home Rule would have stood a better chance if Redmond had openly allowed Ulster a county-by-county opt-out scheme is debatable; in public he had to take an intransigent line against the “mutilating” effects of any form of partition. But Meleady shows his unexpected astuteness in manipulating public opinion, as well as the strong hand he played in bringing Home Rule back to the forefront in 1910, and challenging the control of the Volunteers a few years later. There is an argument, indeed, that his Woodenbridge speech, where he committed the movement to fighting for the Allies, was part of a deliberate ploy to drive out the extremists. Here and elsewhere, he was a formidable political operator.
This is the brunt of Meleady’s book, though he also illuminates the private and family man. Redmond’s retreats to Aughavannagh, the remote Wicklow shooting lodge that he took over from the Parnell family, sustained him but also distanced him from his supporters in an oddly Parnell-like way. A happy marriage and family life were marred only by early deaths and increasing ill health, but politics was his life, and Meleady’s immersion in the huge Redmond archive enables him to show a subtler and more analytical approach to the real matters at issue.
In a fascinating document drawn up at the time of the Buckingham Palace conference in 1914, Redmond accepted the “hateful expedient” of allowing Ulster counties to opt out without a time limit – in Meleady’s words, “combining ruthless pragmatic regard for what was politically possible within his nationalist constituency with a bold, innovative and conciliatory gesture to the other side that would stretch his constituency’s loyalty to the limit – all to avoid the drowning of the newborn Irish State in blood.”
A bloody birth, of course, was what came to pass. War and insurrection made much of Redmond’s story irrelevant, but it is important to remember and remap these roads not taken. The slow accommodation of nationalist Ireland to the realities of unionism has recently imposed a reassessment of “Redmondism”, in the work of historians such as Paul Bew, Michael Wheatley, Colin Reid and Patrick Maume, and in James McConnel’s powerful and original articles on the politics of Edwardian Ireland. McConnel’s new book on the third Home Rule crisis complements Meleady’s biography, in showing, for instance, that Redmond’s myopia about the significance of the 1913 Lockout was a reflection of his party’s reaction at large. More decisively, McConnel adds materially to our understanding of the way the “bourgeois tribunes” of Redmond’s party sustained their links with their constituencies and created a sophisticated brokerage system that, arguably, re-emerged in the politics of the independent state.
The mesh of interests and pressures (not always approved of by Redmond at his most Olympian) is richly delineated in his book, with the political warp and weft nicely flavoured by literary and anecdotal illustrations; James Joyce crops up, though some of McConnel's material is more evocative of George Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island. The political challenges mounted by Sinn Féin are illuminated from below, in terms of local political struggles, rather than relying on Arthur Griffith's brilliant denunciations and fulminations, and this adds to the picture of Home Rule MPs occupying a more nuanced and clued-up position in Irish life than often assumed; a tour-de-force chapter describes their London life, far from the world of gentlemen's clubs and silk hats conjured up by Sinn Féin propaganda. In the end, the expected future of Home Rule was derailed by the UVF in Ulster and Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo. But McConnel's important book is a valuable corrective to judgments based on hindsight .
So is Meleady’s. In a suggestive counterfactual appendix he sketches out the way that all-Ireland Home Rule might have passed without the war, and with the acceptance of the kind of opt-out mechanism that Carson was privately ready to accept. The zeitgeist, however, decreed differently. In the 1920s the philosopher AE (George Russell), an astute observer of Irish politics and a moving spirit in the failed 1917 Convention, reflected that the antipathy of the Irish towards British rule was rooted not in tyrannical and exploitative government, which was no longer relevant, but in “the psychological factor”: the memory of distant oppressions, the cultivation of cultural difference, and a belief in the therapeutic value of separatism. Redmond and his followers distanced themselves from these feelings and paid the price. But the problems that their less exalted style of politics attempted to address did not go away, and we grapple with the inheritance still.
Roy Foster's latest work is Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change, 1970-2000.
