Sir, – As columnists, commentators and letter-writers charge across the pages of The Irish Times in defence of John Redmond's achievements, they might pause briefly to note what was said in volume one of the Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs issued by Oxford University Press in 1937. In the words of the author, WK Hancock: "The act which Redmond was willing to accept from Parliament as a 'final settlement'– Sinn Féin would never allow Redmond to forget that disastrous phrase – was nothing more than a scheme of provincial autonomy. It was a scheme of provincial autonomy so circumscribed that an Australian colony, even sixty or seventy years earlier, would have rejected it with indignation. [He then lists the matters excluded from the competence of the Irish parliament.] Ireland, to all intents and purposes, remained within the British financial system: at the head of six limitations on her fiscal autonomy, customs and excise were listed. Ireland, in the future as in the past, would send representatives to Westminster. The act left intact the framework of the United Kingdom. If this was what home rule meant, home rule – although its excited partisans and opponents could not see it – was in fact another form of unionism."
It would be unusual, I imagine, for a state to celebrate an initiative that fell so far short of the statehood that was later achieved. Hancock proceeds: “In method and theory also the Irish leaders who were willing to accept this act worked within the framework of the United Kingdom. Their strategy and tactics assumed the validity of the Act of Union. The Irish had accepted English rules.”
John Redmond underlined the point by encouraging his followers to join the British army. He appears by then to have become a sincere imperialist. Some other home rule leaders made a more pragmatic calculation that limited home rule was the best available option for nationalism at the time. Their position was undermined both by the power of unionism and by changes – some gradual, as in changing attitudes to the war; some rapid, as in the aftermath of 1916 – in popular understanding of the war and its political lessons. As Hancock says, the home rule leaders had “accepted the constitutional principle of the sovereignty of [the British] parliament. They staked everything upon this principle. They lost their stake.”
They were of their time and misread the future, as most of us do most of the time. More seriously, they played with war – and human lives – and lost. This is surely something to remember and analyse rather than to celebrate. – Yours, etc,
BARRA Ó SEAGHDHA,
Martin’s Row,
Chapelizod, Dublin 20.