Few people in Irish history, in my opinion, have been as unfairly maligned by Irish nationalists as John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons from 1900 until it was wiped out by Sinn Fein at the election of 1918.
In popular (if not official) Irish history, he is the weakling: The man who preferred to negotiate feebly for Irish Independence rather than win it by force of arms. To be associated with his name in some quarters is to be associated almost with unionism, and love of the crown. This is probably because in Redmond’s latter years as the most senior Irish nationalist politician, he was a staunch advocate for Irish participation in the first world war, calling for “Irishmen and Ulstermen to come together in the trenches and risk their lives together and spill their blood together”. He believed that “when those men come home, there will be no power on earth that can induce them to turn as enemies on one another”. He believed that all of us on this island, regardless of our heritage, are ultimately one people bound by blood. That made him rare in his own day, and the equivalent of the dodo in ours.
Redmond, though, was no west-brit weakling. It is often forgotten that so angered was he by the plight of Irish tenants that during the land war he received five months imprisonment (with hard labour) for speeches he made denouncing British landlords and their record in Ireland. Despite Irish voices being outnumbered massively at Westminster, he nevertheless used every tactic at his disposal to put Irish interests at the heart of matters in the house of commons, securing in just one decade a raft of new laws for Ireland that would have been previously unthinkable.
It was Redmond, for example, who secured the abolition of British-dominated local government in Ireland and replaced it with the system of locally elected county councils that survives to this day. He secured housing for Irish labourers; support for evicted tenants and limits on who could be evicted; he secured the old-age pension for Irish residents; he secured the foundation of the first Irish university open to catholics; and of course in 1910 he secured the promise (which would never be fulfilled due to the war) of Home Rule. There is no evidence that he had ever viewed Home Rule as anything more than a temporary stopgap on the ultimate road to independence.
He was not, however, a man for armed struggle, and viewed the prospects of one with horror. When that struggle ultimately (though partially) succeeded, he was probably doomed to be viewed forever, and deeply unfairly, as a weakling and a lesser patriot. History, after all, is written by the winners. John Hume finds his legacy suffering a similar fate, north of the border.
In many ways, Redmond’s career has much in common with that of John Bruton, who idolized Redmond and spent much of his life being unfairly maligned for having broadly similar instincts, despite being possessed of what was in fact an identically fervent patriotism.
Much will be written elsewhere about the nuts and bolts of Bruton’s career as Taoiseach. In truth, your correspondent was too young at the time to have strong views on much of it at all. It was marred on the one hand by the Esat Digifone scandal, but marked on the other by genuine progress north of the border and the first budgetary surpluses in decades.
By the time I came to know him, very slightly, he had long since left office and become – in the manner of Garrett Fitzgerald – a fixture on the college and university circuit, where he genuinely adored talking to and thinking alongside young people, probably, as his former employee Karl Brophy noted yesterday, because he had come to politics very young himself. He had a number of things he was genuinely passionate about, the most obvious of those being his belief that Irish participation in the European Union was this country’s single most vital national interest. One might doubt the wisdom of that belief, but nobody who ever met Bruton could doubt the sincerity of it, or the passion for his own country that lay behind it.
The other was his firm conviction that romanticizing armed struggle was toxic for Irish nationalism and for peace and, ultimately, political unity on the Island. He made no secret of the fact that he was, and would ever be, a Redmondite. For him, the label was a badge of pride. Securing recognition for Redmond and his work – for example on stamps – was something he was deeply passionate about.
For that, and his generally warm disposition towards Unionists north of the border, his opponents called him “John Unionist” – a label that, no doubt, hurt politically as well as personally. Bruton was no unionist. He simply believed something that too many other Irish nationalists decline to believe – that the Protestant people in Northern Ireland are Irish as well as British, and that the hand we extend to them should be one of friendship and acceptance rather than domination and rejection of their Britishness.
In all of this, Bruton was ultimately fighting a losing battle. If anything, romantic Irish nationalism and reverence for the armed struggle (either in 1916 or in Northern Ireland) has deepened and become more entrenched than it was when he left office, or even when he entered it. In the election of 1997, where his Government was narrowly defeated for re-election, Sinn Fein won 2.5% of the vote. In the most recent poll, they are on more than ten times that level of support. If Bruton wished to mainstream Redmondism he failed, more’s the pity.
There can, however, be both dignity and honour in a failed crusade. Across the political spectrum yesterday, those who had served with him and known him in later life spoke with one voice to acclaim his basic decency and goodness. He was not Taoiseach for long, but he was – by general agreement – Taoiseach well. He used that office to build bridges north of the border which were ultimately essential for the peace that came after he had left office. He went on to serve with some distinction as the European Union’s ambassador to the United States.
Above all though, Bruton was something that’s almost entirely absent in modern Irish politics: A senior figure willing to challenge the dominant cultural consensus even when he knew himself to be outnumbered. He might have been the very last Redmondite – or at least the last to willingly embrace the label – but if the tradition dies with him, then he has ensured that it can be buried, like himself, with honour.