BACK PAGES: John Redmond, leader of the reunited Irish Parliamentary Party, returned to Ireland after a fund-raising visit to the US in 1902 to be greeted with a series of formal addresses by supporters, processions and meetings in Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire) and Dublin. Part of the address read to him outside the offices of the United Irish League at Sackville Street (O'Connell Street) went as follows:
‘THE MAGNIFICENT and historic Convention held in Boston a few short weeks ago proves to demonstration that the sea-divided Gaels are again united in a last effort to crush and wipe out forever the accursed system of landlordism, which has drained Ireland of its life-blood. With such assistance Irishmen at home need have no fear of the Barrymores, or their illegitimate offspring, “Extermination, Ltd.,” backed though they be by all the petty tyrannies of Dublin Castle. With the all-important land question settled upon terms suitable to the peasantry of Ireland, with the great grass ranches converted into fields of produce, with men and women and children in place of bullocks, the Irish party and the Irish National organisation, the United Irish League, will have done more to prevent the appalling emigration that has gone on unceasingly since ’42 than dozens of tinkering Land Bills, aided by Castle Boards and departments emanating from puny statesmen of the Horace Plunkett type.
Emigration stopped, a contented and comfortable peasantry would soon result in an Irish Ireland industrially prosperous. A fight against vindictive coercion must for the present take place in Ireland, in the Press, on the platform, and, if need be, in jail. All that is determined and National in Ireland is solidly behind you in the policy of fight resolved on.”
Mr. John Redmond, speaking from the balcony of the United Irish League offices, addressed a huge assembly crowded in the street below. He said he took it that that great gathering of the citizens of Dublin was a conclusive proof that they thoroughly understood and appreciated the importance of the work upon which he had been engaged in America (Cheers). Up to the present the Irish race throughout the world had not come together as they had in Ireland, but from this day forward he could promise them in the name of their exiled brethren in the free Republic of America that they would stand at the backs of the people of this country so long and no longer than the latter opposed a courageous front to Ireland’s enemies at home. today they were in the magnificent position that never in the whole history of the Irish land question was there a time when all the conditions seemed so favourable to its settlement.
The landlords, or, at any rate, a great majority of them, for the first time in their history, were showing a spirit of good sense and conciliation; and, on the other hand, the Irish people and the tenantry of Ireland, while they were answering conciliation with conciliation and reason with reason, were at the same time associated in a movement of resistance to coercion and landlord robbery stronger and more firm than, he believed, ever existed in Ireland in the past.
The other party concerned, the English Government, had told them from the lips of Mr. Wyndham - (hisses) - that the only function that the Government could perform was to give facilities for the carrying out of any agreement that might be come to between landlord and tenant.
Therefore he said the conditions were favourable, and he told them their hearts should be full of hope and courage.
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