Book review: Redmond: The Parnellite
Irish Independent
By Charles Lysaght
Sunday May 11 2008
Dermot Meleady
Cork University Press, €49
John Redmond, the leader of nationalist Ireland from 1900 until 1918, was relentlessly denigrated by those in the republican tradition, who claimed that we owed our independence solely to those who took up arms between 1916 and 1921. They reviled him as an imperialist because he urged his followers to fight for Britain in the First World War and condemned the 1916 rebellion. They denied him credit for his achievement in converting British opinion to accept Irish self-government, which was an important building-block in the achievement of independence in 1921.
But Redmond was quietly revered for his high principles as well as his achievements among the older Catholic middle class and continued to be in pockets such as Waterford, where they returned members of the Redmond family to the Dail into the second half of the 20th century. He was an iconic figure for those who believed that we would have done better to proceed to independence less violently and who regretted the hatred, destruction, divisiveness and isolationist Anglophobia that was the legacy of the atrocities on every side between 1916 and 1923. In 1956, Eamon de Valera transcended these differences and downfaced his less magnanimous followers when he attended a ceremony in Wexford to pay tribute to Redmond on the centenary of his birth. When de Valera returned to power the next year, he had a stamp issued to honour Redmond.
Despite this lead, Redmond remained an anathema to those in the republican tradition. Even in the more inclusive climate of modern Ireland, where the State has honoured those who answered his call to fight in the Great War, it has been a step too far to honour Redmond himself. Last year Bertie Ahern, speaking in Westminster, where Redmond had been the most effective ambassador ever for nationalist Ireland, conspicuously omitted him from the Irish leaders whom he mentioned.
All this makes timely a new biography of Redmond, the first since Denis Gwynn’s magisterial work in 1932. This volume, written by schoolteacher Dermot Meleady, covers the period to 1900 when Redmond, aged 44, was elected chairman of the reunited Irish party. Helpfully, the author adds a concise preview of the remaining 18 years of Redmond’s life, which is to be covered in a second volume.
The Redmonds were Catholic merchants and minor landowners in Wexford. John Redmond was the child of a mixed religion, and not very happy, marriage — the author remarks perceptively that he may have learned his skills as a conciliator when reconciling his parents. After Clongowes, where he made his mark as a Shakespearian actor, he did less well at Trinity and left without a degree to go to London to assist his father, a Home Rule MP.
Redmond became MP for New Ross in 1881, aged 25. Although the Redmonds were landlords, he backed Parnell in committing the nationalist party to oppose landlordism and spent a term in prison for advising tenants to resist eviction.
In 1890, he supported Parnell when, having been guilty of adultery with Mrs O’Shea, his resignation was demanded by the liberal leader Gladstone and the Irish bishops.
Redmond was ever the conciliator, slow to be drawn into the type of foul-mouthed abuse that was then the common currency of Irish politics, and willing to make common cause for the benefit of the country with non-nationalists. It helped that his background freed him from the social resentment, as well as the crude racialism and sectarianism, that underlay much Irish nationalism.
He was also conciliatory towards nationalist extremists, who rallied to Parnell in the Split. Redmond was less absolute in his condemnation of violence than Daniel O’Connell or John Hume. In common with most of his party he honoured nationalists who had taken up arms in previous generations. He campaigned for the release of Fenian prisoners and visited men like Tom Clarke in prison. In Redmond’s book they were misguided, not wicked. He had his work cut out controlling some Fenians when he was chairman of the Independent newspaper, which started life as a Parnellite organ before being acquired about 1900 by William Martin Murphy.
To produce a rounded biography of Redmond is difficult because material is scant, except on his political career. There is no extant correspondence with either of his two wives or other family members. Few intimate recollections of family, close friends or colleagues at the Bar survive. He was a reserved very private man who, famously, never smiled in public.
But as a political biography this perceptive, balanced and sympathetic book is an important contribution at a high level of scholarship to Irish history.
- Charles Lysaght
