A great reconciler is traduced again

THE battered old shade of John Redmond was probably not in the least surprised to be traduced yet again at Arbour Hill last Sunday, when the Fianna Fail leader, Bertie Ahern, implied that enthusiasm for the once leader of the Irish Party was inappropriate for the elected Taoiseach of the Irish nation. Poor Redmond grew well used to that kind of thing during his lifetime.

John Redmond was a politician - who recognised that absolute policies, created regardless of conditions, will inevitably meet absolute resistance from those not in agreement with them. He was a compromiser, which to the fundamentalists of Irish political life means that he was a betrayer.

Yet John Redmond was Parnell's most loyal lieutenant during the Kitty O'Shea crisis, which he described as "the same old fight that in the old dark days was fought by the brave Irishmen on the hillsides." He strongly opposed church involvement in politics and sought a reconciliation within both the ranks of the party and within the Irish nation generally. After the calamitous split over Parnell, he brought the Irish Party together and was its leader for the passage of the Wyndham Land Act and, more historically, for the successful passage of the Home Rule Bill.

Under his stewardship, not merely were the lands of Ireland being redistributed to those who worked them, but the legal reversal of the Tudors' political conquest was begun. That conquest was the first in the formation of the British empire; to John Redmond would go the honour of taking the first successful post imperial step this century. He was a pioneer; and as a pioneer, he was the first to take on the challenge of trying to persuade the unionists of Ulster to cease to be unionists. Like all who have tried since, he failed; and for that failure he has been vilified by republicans who have been as dismally unsuccessful.

Redmond's shade is used to vilification. One of Redmond's defenders in 1914 spoke at a meeting of nationalists in Dublin, and his plea "for a charitable attitude towards the Irish Party drew taunts that [the speaker] was a moderate, very boorishly and ignorantly expressed with all the crudity of exasperated doctrinaires." The speaker who defended Redmond and the Irish Party was Patrick Pearse, and the man who wrote his account of this meeting was Pearse's pupil and secretary, Desmond Ryan.

Pearse himself welcomed Redmond's achievements. Speaking in Irish at a Dublin rally with Eoin MacNeill, Joe Devlin and John Redmond, Pearse said: "But the person who would refuse the present Bill which is before the British Parliament because the Bill denies the complete supremacy of the Gael in his own territory, or because he did not think the freedom under such an Act would be sufficient for us, would ... postpone unnecessarily . . . the advantage of his people."

IT is true that by today's standards, John Redmond would not pass muster. He certainly a republican in a modern European sense; but then, who was? For him, Home Rule was an interim step for Irish autonomy, with an Irish police force and an Irish army, within the empire. The deeply anti Semitic Arthur Griffith's ambition was for a dual monarchy. Bulmer Hobson, member of the Supreme Council of the IRB, sought an Irish kingdom headed by a German prince.

This interesting vision of principality republicanism came to be shared by both Pearse and Ernest Blythe, provided, presumably, the prince was not a scion of the House of Saxe Coburg Gotha. Pearse was also totally against old age pensions on moral grounds, and his encomium for the bloodshed of the first World War exceeded in sanguinary pornography anything that Redmond might have said.

Redmond was, as one observer noted, a chaste, careful and studied speaker who sought accommodation within Ireland between unionist and nationalist as once he sought it between Parnellite and anti Parnellite. He no doubt thought his hour of glory was at hand after he told an ecstatic House of Commons: "For [the defence of Ireland] the armed Catholics of the south will be only too glad to join with the armed Protestant Ulstermen. Is it too much that out of this situation a result may spring which will be good, not merely for the empire, but the future welfare and integrity of the Irish nation?"

We know now: yes, it was too much. But that was not knowable then. As the historian Joe Lee sagely points out: "No one genuinely committed to Irish unity could have acted differently from Redmond in the autumn of 1914 . . . No British government could have imposed Home Rule on armed Ulster supporting Britain at the dictate of an unarmed nationalist Ireland threatening neutrality. The alternative to Redmond's policy would have been to clinch the unionist case that Home Rule Ireland would invariably stab England in the back in her hour of danger. The neutrality mentality was a partitionist mentality."

Redmond's attitude to the outbreak of war was not simply a conciliatory one. Like many at that time, he thought it justified. "The war is undertaken in defence of the highest principles of religion and morality and right and it would be disgrace forever to our country, a reproach to her manhood ... if young Ireland [shrank] ... from the firing line."

HE was the last leader of the Irish people to be popular with Ulster Protestants. "Everyone - orange and nationalist - gave him a cheer. We buried the hatchet of bigotry in war," reported John Lucey, a soldier from Cork at the front. And initially, like virtually the entire Irish establishment, in eluding most bishops and newspapers, he denounced the 1916 Rising as a pro German plot (which of course in part it was). But he was gradually appalled at the executions, and privately besought the British prime minister Asquith to halt them. His best efforts to save the last three leaders - Thomas Kent, James Connolly and Sean MacDermott failed, but he managed to save Eoin MacNeill's life.

Contrary to republican myth, he was opposed to conscription, telling Lloyd George: "[It] is impossible for Ireland." His last days were spent in the Irish Convention, the forum for the last civil and civilised public discourse between Irish unionism and Irish nationalism. He died in March 1918, to the end a forgiving if heartbroken gentleman. Despite the calumnious neglect into which he has fallen since, he was esteemed by those who knew him, including by his last biographer, Denis Gwynn, the most brilliant student of a teacher who would never have spoken as ill of Redmond as his more ignorant successors have - Patrick Pearse.