The Redmond Family in Parliamentary Politics

Abstract

The Redmond Family in Parliamentary Politics1 John Bruton John Redmond was a member of parliament (MP) in the British Houses of Parliament from January 1881 right up to his death on 6 March 1918. He had worked briefly as a clerk in the House, before he became an MP. His father had been an MP from 1872 to 1880 and his uncle, and namesake, was a member from 1859 to 1865. His brother, Major Willie Redmond, served alongside him in the House of Commons from 1883 until 1917, when, as a fifty-six year old volunteer in the Royal Irish Regiment, he died from wounds suffered at the Battle of Messines Ridge. John’s son, also William Redmond, who later served on the Western Front, had been elected as an MP in 1910. He successfully defended his father’s seat in the Waterford by-election of 1918. He won the Waterford seat again in the General Election of the same year, becoming the only elected Nationalist MP from Southern Ireland to take his seat in Westminster, which he did until the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. He later became a member of Dáil Eireann. The character of John Redmond In a recent biography, Alvin Jackson, Professor of History at Edinburgh University, described John Redmond as ‘patient, careful, consensual – but occasionally capable of necessary anger, who held together, from a position of weakness, a national enterprise (Home Rule) which he brought to the cusp of victory in 1914’. Dermot Meleady,2 the author of a comprehensive two-volume life of Redmond, has recently edited Redmond’s vast correspondence, illustrating the huge practical difficulties he faced in holding together the numerous constituencies he had mobilised in support of Home Rule. In order to exercise influence in Westminster, Redmond spent a lot of his life in London. To mobilise occasionally dubious British Liberal opinion behind Home Rule, he had to address meetings all over the rest of Britain. In 1907, for instance, he addressed the Oxford Union on a motion favouring Studies • volume 107 • number 426 176 Home Rule.After his address, the local Oxford newspaper said: ‘It is doubtful if the Union has ever heard, or will hear again, a speech that will have such influence on its hearers’. In his work in Britain he was greatly assisted by T P O’Connor, an Irish Parliamentary Party MP, who represented a Liverpool constituency. In order to reconcile Irish public opinion to the compromises he needed to make to achieve Home Rule by constitutional methods, he had to spend a lot of time in Ireland. Here the role of his deputy leader, John Dillon, who spent more time in Ireland than Redmond could, was vital. They complemented one another. To raise funds and exert pressure on the British government, he had to travel often to the United States and Australia. In fact it was on a fundraising trip for the Irish Parliamentary Party that he met and married his first wife, Johanna Dalton. All this travel and stress eventually took a toll on his health, and contributed to his death, at the relatively young age of sixty-one. Born to a well-off family, John Redmond lived modestly and died a comparatively poor man, having put public service ahead of his own and his family’s financial interests. Travel and communications were much more difficult in those times, so much of Redmond’s negotiations were done by letter. The correspondence Dermot Meleady has published shows how Redmond was instrumental in seeking to curtail, and eventually to heal, the damaging split between Parnellites and anti-Parnellites within the party. In 1890, Redmond stood by Parnell, a stance that Carson always admired. But, by 1900, he was the one chosen to lead a reunited party, the majority of whom had been opponents of Parnell and, by extension, of Redmond himself. Redmond was able to succeed in the undertaking because he had won the trust of his opponents as well as of his friends. These same qualities enabled him to win over sceptical British opinion to the idea of Irish self-government. Ending the House of Lords veto John Redmond’s career is sometimes presented...