JOHN REDMONDS LEGACY.......A RESPONSE TO THE IRISH TIMES

On the 11 April 1912, 100 years ago, the Third Home Rule Bill was presented, for the first time, to the House of Commons. Under it a united Ireland of 32 counties would have enjoyed a devolution of  the powers of legislation and domestic administration, but without control over foreign and military affairs and without control of customs duties. Any exclusion of Ulster counties  was to be purely temporary.

In an editorial on 11 April 2012, the Irish Times newspaper described the introduction of the Bill as “moment of triumph “ for John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party. But it then went on to condemn John Redmond for  “a disastrous miscalculation “  in asking, three  years later, for Irish men to join the Army to fight against German aggression against neutral Belgium.   The Irish Times claimed that “a generation of young Irishmen paid a terrible price” for this supposed “miscalculation”.

In this, the Irish Times both underestimates what Redmond achieved, and grossly overstates his responsibility for the Irish casualties in the Great War.

WHAT JOHN REDMOND ACHIEVED

 His achievement was enormous. Relying on wholly constitutional and parliamentary methods, Redmond  had succeeded where O Connell, Butt and Parnell   had all failed.  He actually got Home Rule onto the Statute Book .

 After an intense political struggle, in face of vetoes by the House of Lords, threats of mutiny within the military, and threats of physical violence by the Ulster Volunteers, the Home Rule Bill was finally passed into law on 18 September 1914.  

This was a month after the war had broken out with Imperial Germany. When the War first broke out in August 1914, the Asquith led  Liberal Government initially wanted to postpone the final passage of the Home Rule Bill, which  was still strongly opposed by the  Conservative party, as part of a  wartime political  truce,   which was, in Asquith’s words, to be “without prejudice to the domestic  and political positions of any party”.

 But John Redmond insisted that Home Rule be brought into law. He got his way. The law was passed, and  assented to by the King, but its operation was suspended for twelve months, or until the end of the war, whichever was to come  later. This postponement was seen as reasonable in the circumstances. It allowed the energies of all concerned to be concentrated on winning  what was expected to be a short  War.

THE TIMING OF REDMONDS WOODENBRIDGE SPEECH....TWO DAYS AFTER SIGNATURE OF HOME RULE INTO LAW

 It was as a direct response to the success of his tactic in forcing the Liberal Government  to  put Home Rule on the statute book on  18 September, that , just two days later, on 20 September 1914, John Redmond called at Woodenbridge Co Wicklow on members of the Irish Volunteers to  freely join the  Army to fight to  defend France and Belgium. This is what the “Irish Times” now condemns.

I believe the newspaper is unfair, and mistaken.

REDMOND WAS RIGHT ON THE ISSUES AT STAKE IN THE WAR.......

The German invasion of neutral Belgium the previous month was entirely unprovoked.

 Germany found itself facing a war with Russia. It was worried that France might go to war support Russia. But France had not yet done that.  Imperial Germany it did not wait. It decided to attack France first, hoping it could quickly knock out France like it had done in 1870. And the best route by which to attack France   was through Belgium. Belgian neutrality was to be treated as an irrelevance.

 The Irish Times seems to believe that ,as an Irish Leader, John Redmond was wrong to takes sides in such a war to defend the territorial integrity of a neutral state. This is a strange position to take, given that we make so much of our own neutrality today. Or perhaps the view is that only our own neutrality is important, and other people’s neutrality does not matter. That is hardly a sustainable position in international relations. 

AND THOSE WHO ALLIED THEMSELVED WITH THE CENTRAL POWERS WERE WRONG

Redmond’s position was much more responsible than that of the rebels of Easter Week 1916, who explicitly stated, in their Proclamation , that they were  allied with what they described as  their “gallant  allies” in Europe. These “allies” were Imperial Germany, the Austro Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire.  The morality of this “alliance” has never been seriously questioned or debated in Ireland in the past century, and perhaps it is time that it was.

UNITY BY CONSENT WAS HIS GOAL

Leaving morality aside, was Redmond tactically foolish to call for Irish men to join the Army in September 1914?

This question has to be judged by what Redmond was trying to achieve at the time.  He was trying to persuade Ulster Unionists to voluntarily come in under  a Home Rule Government in Dublin.

All the concessions he made, including accepting Home Rule as a final settlement and accepting a reduction in Irish  representation in the House of Commons , were made to achieve that  goal, free acceptance of  Home Rule by Unionists, or ” unity by consent”.

 Redmond believed it was attainable, but only if he could demonstrate to Ulster Unionists that  Home Rule did not mean abandoning their British loyalty.  Redmond believed that one way of making Ulster Unionists see Irish Nationalism in a different light, would be if Irish Nationalists stood shoulder to shoulder with them in a common endeavour to defend Belgian neutrality, and the rights of  small nations. Rather than being opponents, as they had been in the previous four years of bitter domestic political struggle, they would thus  be  on the same side.

Redmond  knew he was taking a risk in his call at Woodenbridge. But it was a calculated risk. He took the risk in an attempt to achieve genuine Irish unity by consent.

THE METHODS TO ACHIEVE UNITY USED BY REDMONDS CRITICS FAILED OVER AND OVER AGAIN

 Given that all subsequent attempts, including terror, boycotting Northern goods, and  demanding that the British  deploy the threat of coercing Unionist into a  united Ireland, have  failed to achieve  voluntary (or any other kind of ) unity, one should be slow to criticise Redmond, unless one has, or had, a better plan.

 Of course, if a united Ireland by consent was never a serious goal,  was more of a necessary piety, and if  maximum  separation of just 26 or 28  counties  from Britain was the real  goal, one could take a different view.    But that was not John Redmond’s position. He believed he could  win over Unionists, but  he did not believe that was possible, if  he stood aside from a conflict that Unionists regarded  as existential, and he could show was inherently just on its merits anyway.

WAR WAS LONGER THAN ANYONE PREDICTED

 One might accuse Redmond of making a miscalculation because he did not foresee that the war would  go on so long,  that there would be so many casualties, and that it would  bring down the Liberal Government whose dependence on Irish party parliamentary support after the 1910 election support had made Home Rule possible in the first place.  

At the time most people, including most military experts , expected that this war, like most of the wars of the nineteenth century, would be over within  a year or so. Unfortunately they were wrong. Improved defensive military technology, like the machine gun, which made it harder to advance, and easier to defend ground, meant that the war dragged on for four and a quarter awful years.

IRISH WOULD HAVE JOINED ARMY ANY WAY

It is wrong to make Redmond responsible for the terrible price that was paid in the trenches. Large numbers of Irish men would have joined up anyway, especially now that Home Rule was passed, whatever Redmond said or did not say at Woodenbridge. All the historical evidence suggests points in this direction.

 After all, just fourteen years after the passage of the hated Act of Union,  40% of Wellngton’s army at Waterloo was Irish. Large number of Irish fought in the Crimean War. In his book on that war, Olando Figes states that in the parishes of Whitegate and Aghada in East Cork, almost one third of the male population died fighting in the British Army in the Crimea.

 So to say that Redmond’s stance is responsible for the  “terrible price” that a  generation of  young Irish men paid in the trenches is  unhistorical .

 The only way Redmond could have affected the issue would have been if he had campaigned for Irish men NOT to join up. But if he had done that, he would have been saying goodbye to Irish unity, and would  have run the risk that the Home Rule Act, he had worked  so hard to pass, would have been repealed ,on the  ground that Home Rule, in those circumstances, would have been a threat to British security.

The Irish Times is right to  editorially commemorate the introduction of the Home Rule Bill  100 years ago. But introducing the Bill was one thing, passing it ,and implementing it on an all Ireland basis  was another. That was what Redmond worked for, which subsequent generations have yet to achieve.

33,000 IRISH JOBS THAT ARE BUILT ON CONFIDENCE

The International Financial Services Industry provides 33,000 well paid jobs. In the past 10 years employment in the industry has risen by 400%. No other industry can match that performance. It  contributes 1 billion euros in Corporation Profits Tax and 0,7 billion in payroll taxes to the Irish Exchequer.
It consists of 500 separate firms in range of different sectors . These a mobile jobs. They are here by choice. And they can leave by choice. They are here because we have built a talent pool in Ireland, in the relevant specialist fields, that is second to none.
Basically these jobs are here because people feel that their money is safe here. They have confidence in us.  That confidence is not something one can put in the bank. It has to be earned  over and over again, every day, as people in this industry travel the world selling  this country, and their business here in this country.
One of the reasons this country has succeeded is that it is in the European Union. In fact the biggest single component of the IFSC in jobs terms is the funds industry, and the funds industry has developed here around a special, EU devised, product, the UCIT.  Without that EU devised product , the funds industry here would have much fewer employees.
So staying on top of our game in Europe is very important to IFSC.
THE ONLY NOVEL ELEMENT IN THE FISCAL COMPACT WILL NOT IMPINGE ON IRELAND
In that context, I would like to say a few words about the referendum on the Fiscal Compact Treaty.  The only really novel element in this Fiscal Compact Treaty , the only element that is not provided for in EU Treaties the Irish people have not already endorsed, is the requirement to have a structural budget deficit of no more than 0.5%.
This will be an important discipline on other countries who may be tempted, at some time in the (probably distant) future, to embark on boom and bloom economics, of the kind Ireland engaged in from 2002 to 2007. 
But the 0.5% limit will make no difference to Ireland itself for the next 20 years, because we will have to run structural surpluses every year anyway, simply to get our debts down to levels we agreed to long ago in the Maastricht Treaty ....a debt to GDP ratio of 60%.
A NO VOTE IS   A VOTE FOR  SHARP AUSTERITY
 Advocates of a NO vote are falsely claiming that a No vote is a vote against austerity.
The direct opposite is actually the case. 
A NO vote would be a vote for more austerity, not less.  It would be a vote for cuts and tax increases. It would be a vote for higher interest rates.
 Because a No vote would deprive us of a right to apply to the European Stability Mechanism for funds, we would have to borrow, if  at all, at higher interest rates from private investors, unless of course market perceptions of Irish public  finances improve significantly. 
As it stands, even if we had no debts at all, and thus had no interest rates to pay on past debts, we are today spending about 10 billion euros more per year on public services, than we are taking in this year in tax.
 In economic jargon, we have what is called a primary deficit.   Having a primary deficit makes a country vulnerable.
Because it would drastically reduce our borrowing options, I believe that a NO vote could, if global lending conditions for Governments were to disimprove for reasons that could be completely beyond our control, put us in a position where we had to eliminate that primary deficit almost immediately, because of the general loss in confidence in lending to Governments with financial problems.
If we deprive ourselves of eligibility for the ESM, we could then find ourselves having to manage or finances, as a nation, on a cash basis. We could only spend on any given day, the cash we had in hand that day, so to speak.
That would require devastatingly sudden tax increases and expenditure reductions to get our cash outgoings down to level of our cash incoming.
A CHALLENGE TO ADVOCATES OF A NO VOTE
I challenge the NO advocates to say where they might find that 10 billion euros, to eliminate our primary deficit, if we have to, because we have rejected eligibility for the ESM, and cannot borrow anywhere else, other than at exorbitant interest rates.
 Because a No vote would deprive us of a right to apply to the European Stability Mechanism for funds, it would certainly mean that we would be forced to borrow at higher interest rates from private investors.  Because of our self inflicted ineligibility for the ESM, the risk premium on lending to Ireland would be increased because those lending to us would know that we had no fall back position.
I ask those who advocate a NO vote how they would explain to people on waiting lists, that they would have to wait longer for their operation, because the money that should have been there to pay for their operation, is instead having to be diverted to pay extra interest rates on loans, extra interest rates which had been brought about by our NO vote.
To use the analogy of a household, advocates of a NO vote are asking us as a household to take our custom away from the Credit Union, of which we are a longstanding member and which is helping us through a bad patch, and to place our fate in the hands of the moneylenders and loan sharks.

Speech by  John Bruton, President of IFSC Ireland, at an IFSC event in  the Stock Exchange, Dublin  at 5pm on Thursday 25 April

WOODENBRIDGE COMMEMORATION

When John Redmond spoke here in September 1914, he was speaking to his friends and neighbours, the men of the East Wicklow Volunteers. He probably would have been personally acquainted with a majority of the men in the parade, and their families.
 He was on his way to his home in Aughavanagh.
 He had left London a day before, having succeeded in the great task of his life, seeing the Home Rule Act passed into law, after over thirty years of patient parliamentary work and public  peaceful agitation.
He had taken the boat from Holyhead and was passing here by car and  saw the parade taking place under the captaincy of the local schoolmaster and  friend of his, a Captain McSweeney, who, in addition to his work as a local teacher and captain in the Volunteers, was a keen activist in the Irish language revival movement. 
Having told the men on parade that he knew they would make efficient soldiers,  referring to the German invasion of Belgium, John Redmond urged his friends to support the Allied cause  as follows;
“Go on drilling and make yourselves efficient for the work, and then account for yourselves as men, not only in Ireland itself, but wherever the fighting line extends in defence of right and freedom and religion in this war”
 Under the Home Rule Bill ,that had passed into law two days before John Redmond  spoke here, a united Ireland of 32 counties would have enjoyed a devolution of  the powers of legislation and domestic administration, but without control over foreign and military affairs and without control of customs duties. Any exclusion of Ulster counties was to be purely temporary.
 Some have minimised Redmond’s achievement in getting Home Rule passed,  criticised  the  speech two days later in Woodenbridge,  and blamed him for Irish  casualties in the Great War.
I believe such critics are mistaken.
WHAT JOHN REDMOND ACHIEVED
 John Redmond’s achievement was enormous. Relying on wholly constitutional and parliamentary methods, he had succeeded where O Connell, Butt and Parnell   had all failed.  He actually got Home Rule onto the Statute Book.
 After an intense political struggle, in face of vetoes by the House of Lords, threats of mutiny within the military, and threats of physical violence by the Ulster Volunteers, the Home Rule Bill was finally passed into law on 18 September 1914, two days before he spoke here. 
This was a month after the war had broken out with Imperial Germany. When the War first broke out in August 1914, the Asquith led  Liberal Government initially wanted to postpone the final passage of the Home Rule Bill, which  was still strongly opposed by the  Conservative party, as part of a  wartime political  truce,   which was, in Asquith’s words, to be “without prejudice to the domestic  and political positions of any party”.
 But John Redmond insisted that Home Rule be brought into law. He got his way. The law was passed, and assented to by the King, but its operation was suspended for twelve months, or until the end of the war, whichever was to come later. This postponement was seen as reasonable in the circumstances. It allowed the energies of all concerned to be concentrated on winning what was expected to be a short  War.
I believe John Redmond was right on the issues at stake in that War and in his support for the Allied cause .
REDMOND WAS RIGHT ON THE ISSUES AT STAKE IN THE WAR.......
The German invasion of neutral Belgium the previous month was entirely unprovoked.
 Germany had  found itself facing a war with Russia, over Germany’s support for excessive demands the Austro Hungarian Empire was making on Serbia. Germany was worried that France might go to war support Russia. But France had not yet done that.
 Imperial Germany it did not wait. It decided to attack France first, hoping it could quickly knock out France like it had done in 1870. And the best route by which to attack France   was through Belgium. Belgian neutrality was to be treated as an irrelevance.
 Some believe that ,as an Irish Leader, John Redmond was wrong to takes sides in such a war to defend the territorial integrity of a neutral state. This is a strange position to take, given that we make so much of our own neutrality today. Or perhaps the view is that only our own neutrality is important, and other people’s neutrality does not matter. That is hardly a sustainable position in international relations.  
Redmond was criticised at the time, by a minority in the Volunteers who later seceded, for not waiting for an Irish Government first to be formed in Dublin before taking sides. But they did not say it was, as such, wrong for an Irish leader to take a side.
The rebels of Easter Week 1916, did not wait for an Irish Government to be formed or for a mandate from the people,  before taking a  side,  the opposite side to the one chosen by John Redmond, when they explicitly stated, in their Proclamation , that they were  allied with what they described as  their “gallant  allies” in Europe.
 These “ gallant allies” were Imperial Germany, the Austro Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire.  The morality of this “alliance” has never been seriously questioned or debated in Ireland in the past century, and perhaps it is time that it was.
Looking at the facts as they were in September 1914, the unprovoked invasion of neutral Belgium, the excessive demands made on Serbia, and the atrocities committed in Belgium by the invaders, I believe Redmond’s position on the War holds up better   than does the self proclaimed alliance of the 1916 men with the German, Austro Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires.
  I do not believe that the maxim that your neighbour’s difficulty is your opportunity, is necessarily a good one, or one that trumps other considerations. Irish people had then, and have now, a sense of justice, not only for ourselves but for other countries too.
UNITY BY CONSENT WAS HIS GOAL
Leaving morality aside, was Redmond tactically foolish to call for Irish men to join the Army in September 1914?
This question has to be judged by what Redmond was trying to achieve at the time.  He was trying to persuade Ulster Unionists to voluntarily come in under a Home Rule Government in Dublin.
All the concessions he made, including accepting Home Rule as a final settlement and accepting a reduction in Irish  representation in the House of Commons , were made to achieve that  goal, free acceptance of  Home Rule by Unionists, or ” unity by consent”.
 Redmond believed it was attainable, but only if he could demonstrate to Ulster Unionists that  Home Rule did not mean abandoning their British loyalty.  Redmond believed that one way of making Ulster Unionists see Irish Nationalism in a different light, would be if Irish Nationalists stood shoulder to shoulder with them in a common endeavour to defend Belgian neutrality, and the rights of small nations. Rather than being opponents, as they had been in the previous four years of bitter domestic political struggle, they would thus be  on the same side.
Redmond knew he was taking a risk in his call at Woodenbridge. But it was a calculated risk. He took the risk in an attempt to achieve genuine Irish unity by consent.
THE METHODS TO ACHIEVE UNITY USED BY REDMONDS CRITICS FAILED OVER AND OVER AGAIN
 Given that all subsequent attempts, including terror, boycotting Northern goods, and  demanding that the British  deploy the threat of coercing Unionist into a  united Ireland, have  failed to achieve  voluntary (or any other kind of ) unity, one should be slow to criticise Redmond, unless one has, or had, a better plan.
 Of course, if a united Ireland by consent was never a serious goal, was more of a necessary piety, and if  maximum  separation of just 26 or 28  counties  from Britain was the real  goal, one could take a different view. 
  But that was not John Redmond’s position. He believed he could  win over Unionists, but  he did not believe that would be  possible, if  he stood aside from a conflict that Unionists regarded  as existential, and he could show was inherently just, on its merits anyway.
WAR WAS LONGER THAN ANYONE PREDICTED
 One might accuse Redmond of making a miscalculation in his speech here 98 years ago, because he did not foresee that the war would  go on so long,  that there would be so many casualties, and that it would  bring down the Liberal Government whose dependence on Irish party parliamentary support after the 1910 election support had made Home Rule possible in the first place. 
At the time most people, including most military experts , expected that this war, like most of the wars of the nineteenth century, would be over within  a year or so. Unfortunately they were wrong. Improved defensive military technology, like the machine gun, which made it harder to advance, and easier to defend ground, meant that the war dragged on for four and a quarter awful years.
IRISH WOULD HAVE JOINED ARMY ANY WAY
It is wrong to make Redmond responsible for the terrible price that was paid in the trenches. Large numbers of Irish men would have joined up anyway, especially now that Home Rule was passed, whatever Redmond said or did not say at Woodenbridge. All the historical evidence suggests points in this direction.
 After all, just fourteen years after the passage of the hated Act of Union, 40% of Wellngton’s army at Waterloo was Irish. Large number of Irish fought in the Crimean War. In his book on that war, Olando Figes states that in the parishes of Whitegate and Aghada in East Cork, almost one third of the male population died fighting in the British Army in the Crimea.
 So to say that Redmond’s stance is responsible for the “terrible price” that a  generation of  young Irish men paid in the trenches is  unhistorical .
 The only way Redmond could have affected the issue would have been if he had campaigned for Irish men NOT to join up. But if he had done that, he would have been saying goodbye to Irish unity, and would  have run the risk that the Home Rule Act, he had worked  so hard to pass, would have been repealed ,on the  ground that Home Rule, in those circumstances, would have been a threat to British security.
It is right to commemorate the introduction of the Home Rule Bill 100 years ago, in 1912. But introducing the Bill was one thing, passing it ,and implementing it on an all Ireland basis  was another. That was what Redmond achieved in September 1914, ninety eight years ago, something which subsequent generations have yet to achieve, a united Ireland.

Speech  at a ceremony in Woodenbridge Golf Club, Co Wicklow, on Sunday  29 April 2012, at the unveiling of a stone commemorating the speech of John Redmond MP, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, in Woodenbridge in September 1914 to a parade of the   Irish Volunteers.