John Redmond and the Irish past’s ‘battle chest’

The Decade of Centenaries sparked renewed debate about the parliamentary party and its former leader, John Redmond – a figure often seen as central to arguments about two of the biggest events in modern Irish history: the Easter Rising and the first World War. If, as Margaret O’Callaghan suggests, “the Irish past can be a battle chest from which political opponents haul out stories, personages and events to sharpen as weapons in contemporary political conflict”, then Redmond is indeed, as she avers, “a particularly potent totem to take out to battle”.
State commemoration of the anniversary of Redmond’s death on March 6th, 2018, was marked by a symposium organised by the National University of Ireland and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, in collaboration with the School of History, University College Dublin, and the Royal Irish Academy. The papers delivered at the symposium, and the Royal Irish Academy discourse given by Alvin Jackson, form the basis of John Redmond and Irish Parliamentary Traditions.
The essays draw on histories stretching well beyond the Rising and the first World War – exploring Redmond alongside predecessors and contemporaries Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell, rivals such as Edward Carson, and ultimately exploring the careers of his daughter-in-law Bridget Redmond and the longer legacies of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) and Redmondism as a political philosophy. As the contributors show, understanding the dilemmas, triumphs and failures of Redmond and the party still hold the key to understanding much about Irish politics, partition and Anglo-Irish relations today.
When Redmond died in 1918, his son succeeded him in the parliamentary seat, and the term Redmondite has never fully disappeared from the Irish political lexicon through war, democratisation, independence, partition, the creation and renewal of new political movements and even centenary commemoration. The Ireland Redmond was born into in 1856 was radically different from the one from which he passed in 1918 and while his lifespan and that of his party help to illuminate much about Irish history, they also shed light on alternative journeys that contemporaries would perhaps have anticipated.
Nicholas Mansergh once argued that if circumstances were different Redmond “could have been an Irish Botha” – a reference to the Boer War leader who later became first prime minister of South Africa and a key figure in the British Empire of his day. Colin Reid demonstrates something of the imperial but also UK-wide dimensions of Redmond’s political thought by framing the history of the IPP from 1879 onwards as the legacy of Isaac Butt – the federalist thinker who first introduced “home rule” to the political language in Ireland and influenced Redmond more than any subsequent leader.
Many portrayals of Redmond note his failure to match Parnell in terms of personal power, and the scholarly consensus on Redmond has, as Pauric Travers notes, certainly posited him as “chairman” rather than “chief”. Yet Travers’s examination of his core political instincts throughout his career highlights that the harsh verdict on Redmond in comparison to Parnell sometimes overlooks the context of both men’s leadership.
Partition and war of course loom large in all discussions of the IPP led by Redmond. Michael Wheatley challenges any notion that Irish Party decline was inevitable or that the party, broad-based and often vibrant across Ireland, was simply a decrepit political organism ready to be swept aside by the tumult of the first World War. Wheatley, however, distinguishes the most active arms of the Home Rule movement from the political project of the party’s leader even before Redmond’s fateful call on Irishmen to enlist in the global war.
Wheatley clearly illustrates a “policy impasse” brought on by the course of events in Ireland and Europe that threatened the party’s supremacy before the transformative effect of rebellion during Easter 1916. Jackson’s consideration of Redmond and Carson brings the discussion up to the present day, drawing important threads of comparison between proposals for the exclusion of Ulster counties and different schemes for Home Rule and partition with the debates surrounding “hard” and “soft” borders in the context of Brexit.
While Redmond was arguably the first leader to face the realities of how intractable some questions of sovereignty and borders would become, he was not the first (male) nationalist leader faced with the questions of women’s enfranchisement and political participation – and like others, his record bears critique. Margaret Ward argues that the grand narratives of Irish history covering aspects of these years disregard the gendered implications of a Home Rule settlement that omitted the female half of the population.
Ward’s narrative does justice to the feminist campaign, putting into context the anomaly of men doing their best to assure other men that Home Rule posed no threat to their political and cultural identity, while continuing to deny Irish women of any political persuasion the right to citizenship in the forthcoming constitutional arrangement. She concludes: “Redmond and many of his colleagues were opponents of women’s suffrage long before they raised the pretext that Home Rule would be jeopardised if a women’s suffrage measure was passed.”
While Redmond died in 1918 and the party suffered a crushing election defeat six months later, these events did not mark the end of Redmondism or the party for everyone. Examining the iterations of nationalist parties from 1918, O’Donoghue considers Sinn Féin, both sides of the Treaty split, and the Nationalist Party in Northern Ireland. While there was no true reincarnation of the IPP, the old Irish Party structures retained greater strength in Ulster. Yet while Joe Devlin and others played leading roles in the Nationalist Party, it bore little resemblance to the Irish Party in grassroots or parliamentary politics.
Conversely, Sinn Féin, which learned much from its Home Rule predecessors, provided the foundation stone for Civil War politics – former Home Rulers who sought power in independent Ireland had to join with those with revolutionary heritage.
Claire McGing examines the political career of Bridget Redmond through the lens of gender. Situating her in the male-dominated political culture of the Free State as well as bringing to the fore Redmond’s input beyond simply the political organisation inherited from her husband, William Archer, McGing sheds new light on the contribution to public life of the last “keeper of the Redmondite flame” in Waterford.
Paul Bew explores what the politics of Redmondism can tell us in an age where the themes of unity and approaches to Anglo-Irish relations once more stimulate public debate. He suggests that:
“Many have argued that Redmond failed on partition but, for a hundred years since, other traditions have taken over and they too have failed … He was not offering a solution to partition; he was offering the best possible and most benign and fairest compromise to the rights that existed on all sides.”
This fundamental tension has continued to be at the heart of Anglo-Irish relations from the Government of Ireland Act 1920, the Boundary Commission through to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, and the Belfast Agreement in 1998, and more recently the UK’s post-Brexit relationship with the European Union. Indeed, Bew asks if contemporary defences of Redmondism may be impossible in the aftermath of Brexit, and if an independent Irish State that faces Europe rather than Britain is in fact the legacy of James Connolly and Roger Casement rather than Redmond.
Viewed a hundred years on, Redmond’s legacy has been traditionally interpreted based, in particular, on the years 1912–18. Yet throughout his career, Redmond was, to varying degrees and at different times, hampered by the machinations of the Irish Parliamentary Party itself, by the complicated nature of Irish political developments, and Anglo-Irish relations. Public debates do not always delve into Redmond’s career from 1880 to 1900 – as O’Callaghan argues, “from the perspectives of those decades, John Redmond’s career cannot bear the weight of the battles that contemporary polemicists place upon him and it”.
Conversely, Redmond can sometimes remain slightly obscured in accounts of Irish parliamentary traditions in comparison not just to the enigmatic Parnell, but also the charismatic Daniel O’Connell, Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera. In Jackson’s words, “it was John Redmond’s tragedy that he all too clearly embodied compromise, ambiguity, and struggle. But at the same time these complexities also reflected the reality of much individual and collective Irish historical experience. And herein lie both Redmond’s authenticity and his importance for us all today.” The compromise, ambiguity and struggles of parliamentary politics between the 1870s and the 1950s did not exist in a vacuum, but they did in many ways help to shape modern Ireland.
John Redmond and Irish Parliamentary Traditions, edited by Martin O’Donoghue and Emer Purcell, is published by UCD Press. The book is the third in a series of publications by the National University of Ireland to mark the Decade of Centenaries.