John Redmond. Dermot Meleady

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:

The new men are a great improvement on the old. We now have no drinking brigade. The party is made up of steady, sober, thoroughly decent and capable men. We have no galaxy of genius, no men likely to turn out as brilliant as Sexton and a few others did in Parnell’s time, but I believe we have a better average of talent in the party than ever we had.33

      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.

At home, the chief threat to his influence lay in the prolific propaganda of the small separatist group centred on the Dublin journalist Arthur Griffith and the London-born beauty Maud Gonne, who had adopted the cause of Irish nationalism, in extreme form, as her own. This group, which had organized demonstrations against the 1897 Jubilee celebrations and the visit of Queen Victoria in 1900, acted in limited co-operation with some Irish Party MPs against the Second Boer War. Willie Redmond was co-treasurer of the Transvaal Committee, set up to provide ambulance supplies for the Boers and John MacBride’s Irish brigade in South Africa, and had been in close contact with Gonne since they had met in Paris in 1898.34 In the first electoral challenge to constitutional nationalism since the 1870s, Griffith and Gonne had promoted, unsuccessfully, MacBride’s candidature in the South Mayo by-election of February 1900.35 Griffith, opposed to its attendance at Westminster, would mount a sustained assault on the party as a fountain-head of place-hunting and corruption. Constructing a myth of a quasi-separatist Parnell, he cast Redmond as undeserving of the Parnell legacy.36 His United Irishman had earlier greeted the Irish Party’s reunification with withering scorn:

The spectacle of… Mr John Redmond as the Independent and Sturdy Patriot provides sufficient merriment for all who take an interest in the fortunes of the Constitutionalists and are aware of the motives which have induced them to come together again after many years.37

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

The Irish Parliamentary Party has given the seal of its approval to the policy of ‘Home Rule plus the Empire’ by electing Mr John Redmond as its chairman… his Imperialistic sentiment was strong enough to allow him to part company without a pang with the men who had fought beside him for five years under the delusion that he, too, was an Irish Nationalist….38

      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….

If he could have the entire party suspended again near the end of the session, hold the National Convention in Dublin and come over to the US at once, he would ‘sweep America from one end to the other, as Parnell did’. This would ‘make it impossible for anybody any longer to misrepresent or misunderstand what it is you stand for in Ireland’.39

Advice of a more sober kind came from Edward Blake, the sixty-eight-year-old MP for Longford South, former Canadian Liberal Government Minister, former anti-Parnellite and Dillon confidant, who had helped to bring about the reunion and was eager to move quickly to constructive work.40 Blake suggested how the parliamentary situation might be used to maximum Irish advantage. The new rules of debate made obstruction on the old Parnell lines impossible, but the Government’s difficulties in finding time for its ever-increasing volume of business could be exploited. What was needed was a system by which party members would insist on discussing every item of Government business, Imperial, British and Irish. Since speeches could not be long, they would need a considerable number of speakers; since they must be relevant, the speakers must have mastered their subjects; since arguments must not be tediously repeated, different speakers must take different lines.

The whole business, though in a sense guerrilla,