As you well know, there is a great outside Irish public, and I am convinced we can appeal to them with success… They are only beginning to realize slowly in America that the reunion in Ireland is genuine, and I am convinced that our appearance together on American platforms would have an enormous effect in every part of the United States.72
It was soon clear that neither Dillon nor O’Brien, both pleading exhaustion, would be part of the delegation. Davitt, who would be in the US in early autumn on private business, promised to take part in the first meetings in New York, but decided to come home early.73 A disappointed Redmond told O’Brien of feeling ‘very sore about this… Of course it will be taken as a clear proof that “unity” is all humbug….’74
Lacking the big names that would advertise the reunion of constitutional nationalism, he had to settle for P.A. McHugh, the Leitrim MP and proprietor of the Sligo Champion, just out of prison having served a six-month sentence. Sailing with them on 24 October was Thomas O’Donnell, the young Irish-speaking MP for West Kerry.75 In a five-week tour of north-eastern US and Canadian cities, the delegates were received by the pro-Home Rule President Theodore Roosevelt and the Canadian Premier, met a group of Irish–American millionaires and addressed a conference of Irish societies in New York City. American supporters impressed on them the need for organization across the States. Redmond kept Dillon informed on the progress of the struggle against the Clan. In November, when they had already held ‘enormous meetings’, he reported that:
…the Clan are offering a most malicious opposition. In New York, Devoy and some others personally waited on our leading friends and threatened to break up our meetings. The success of the meetings and the enthusiasm must have opened their eyes.76
Late that month, exhaustion was setting in but the League could not be stopped:
The Clan is suffering heavily from its attacks on us… This cannot go on, and I have been approached within the last couple of days to know if I would meet Devoy and some others to discuss a possible arrangement. We are stronger in America than I had any idea of.77
On his return, Redmond could report the founding of an American UIL auxiliary organization. His hopes of funds at Land League levels were still high, but there were no precise figures.78 The ‘first fruits’ were announced on 20 January as $3,000 (£600), received from Irish New Yorkers. In the spring of 1902, Willie Redmond and Joe Devlin, the leading Belfast organizer of the League, were sent to the US to follow up the delegation’s work. Devlin returned at the end of June to announce that 200 branches of the League had been founded; however, although a ‘million-dollar fund’ had been started in Boston, they were able to send home only $5,000 (£1000).79 Redmond’s confident earlier estimates were a mirage. In the opinion of Irish police intelligence, the mission had been a failure, the footsteps of the delegates having been dogged by the Clan.80
V
With a post-Tory future in mind, Redmond was anxious to cultivate the natural allies of the Home Rule cause in the growing British labour movement.81 Before leaving for the US, his call for local Irish support for a Labour candidate against a Roseberyite (anti-Home Rule) Liberal in a Scottish by-election had used the language of socialism:
The ruling classes in England are as much the enemies of the masses of the English people as they are enemies of the masses of the Irish people, and we in the House of Commons have shaped our course during the past session so as to prove to the masses of the toiling workers of England that we are after all their best and truest friends….82
Quoting Lecky’s claim that ‘no great democratic reform for the benefit of the people of Great Britain was ever carried out exclusive of the vote by the Irish members’, he listed several measures – bills regulating the working hours of miners and factory workers and providing for sanitary and safety inspections – on which the Irish Party vote had been critical in winning majorities.83 Yet a different attitude was evident when Labour values clashed with the interests of Catholic religious orders on an Irish issue affecting perhaps the most defenceless workers of all. During the committee stage of a bill to amend the Factory Acts in July 1901, the Irish Party resisted an attempt to remove the exemption from inspection of Irish convent laundries – the ‘Magdalen’ laundries employing women socially disgraced by extramarital pregnancy – defending them as institutions ‘conducted in good faith for religious or charitable purposes’. Previous opposition from the Irish MPs had forced a Liberal Home Secretary to abandon an earlier attempt in 1895 to have these institutions inspected. Now the Irish members rejected a compromise proposal from the Home Secretary, and an amendment in Dillon’s name called for the continuation of the blanket exemption for convents, prisons, reformatories and industrial schools. Dillon threatened to block the entire bill if this were not accepted. By the time Willie Redmond stood up to propose Dillon’s amendment, Home Secretary Ritchie had already given way, despite strong protests from Liberal MPs, to save the bill from defeat. Willie stated their motives:
No scandal had occurred in these institutions in Ireland; no such scandals could occur… [the amendment] would have the effect of exempting those very limited number of Magdalen asylums, the conductors of which stated that… they could not continue to conduct them if they were thrown open to the ordinary inspection by the Government.84
One of those objecting most strongly to the exemption demand was the Scottish Liberal John Burns MP, one of the strongest advocates of the Home Rule cause and a future minister in the Liberal Government that would enact Home Rule. Although Redmond would have to take care not to alienate such supporters over such issues, six years later a Liberal Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone, at his urging, would continue the exemption from the provisions of the Factory Act of ‘charitable, reformatory or religious institutions’.85
The party’s adherence to Catholic social values did not mean unquestioning obedience to the Church authorities on more purely political matters; indeed, during the following year, it ran into direct confrontation with them. The party had decided in secret on 7 October 1902, just before Redmond’s departure on a second visit to the US, to attend Westminster in strength at the opening of the autumn session to denounce coercion, then withdraw to Ireland to continue the struggle. Parliament reassembled on 16 October; eleven days later the party, led by O’Brien, made its protest and abandoned the House. It was thus absent from the debates on the later stages of the Tories’ Education Bill, which had already passed its Commons committee stage. That bill, which proposed to give public funding to Anglican and Catholic primary schools in England and Wales, was strongly supported by the hierarchies of those British churches and approved by the Irish Catholic bishops, though deeply unpopular with the members of the