Enigma

by Paul Bew

  Many Parnellites interpreted the clerical role in the Parnell split as an expression of resentment at the curtailment of clerical and episcopal power through the emergence of an established nationalist party. When Emmet Larkin first gained access to the Dublin Diocesan Archives, this Parnellite tradition conditioned him to expect to find evidence that the bishops had conspired to bring down Parnell, and he was startled to find that Archbishops Walsh and Croke had in fact done their best to contain the split and work out a compromise to preserve Parnell’s dignity. Without the Parnell split, and despite the grumblings of episcopal mavericks like E. T. O’Dwyer of Limerick and the suspicions and discontents of some provincial clergy, Walsh, Croke and their allies would have continued to maintain the unofficial concordat whereby Parnell received episcopal support in return for safeguarding Catholic interests in areas such as education.7 Given the extent of residual Protestant privilege and the development of European Catholicism in the same period, the vision of Ireland as a specifically Catholic nation and the rise of an Irish ‘Catholic Action’ movement would certainly have taken place; but without the shock administered to clerical opinion by the willingness of a third of Irish Catholics to side with Parnell against clearly expressed clerical condemnation, its full development might have taken longer. Perhaps in that parallel universe, one of Joyce’s short stories, haunted by the refrain ‘Davitt is dead’ and climaxing in the cry ‘Davitt, my dead king!’ might have presented, as its crowning symbol of Irish hypocrisy and conformity, Sir Charles and Lady Parnell being shown around Maynooth by obsequious clerics perfectly well aware of the nature of their original relationship. Similarly, anticlericalism of various types among the Catholic population existed before the split and would probably have continued to spread afterwards, but as a slightly more marginal phenomenon, more visibly reflecting separatist and British or continental radical influence.8 Bishop Thomas Nulty of Meath would not be remembered (as he now is) chiefly for his massive excommunications of Parnellites during the split, but for his longer record as a ‘patriot prelate’ like his contemporary Patrick Duggan of Clonfert (whose retirement before the split owing to ill-health left his reputation relatively untainted by its squabbles).9

  On the left, the renewed agrarian discontent which erupted in Connacht at the end of the 1890s might have been contained and turned to the service of Parnell’s party, as was actually the case in the reunion of the party in 1899–1902. Perhaps William O’Brien, instead of leading the UIL in his own right, might once again have served as a proxy whom Parnell could use while disavowing his more reckless words and actions.

  A united party under Parnell’s leadership would have maintained a far more dominant role in Irish civil society, allowing less space for the cultural revival to flourish—though it is arguable that the revival was a response to the upheavals of the land war, and that the Parnell split provided its catalyst rather than its genesis. The party might have succeeded in turning the Gaelic League into an auxiliary institution (as Redmond tried to do), with Douglas Hyde feeling constrained to accept the offer of a parliamentary seat from Parnell (which he turned down from Redmond) in order to represent the League’s interests at the table of power.10 W. B. Yeats might have written less of Parnell (and some of that little in scorn) and more of John O’Leary. It is even possible that there might have been an alternative cult of a heroic lost leader. Some of Isaac Butt’s friends, such as John Butler Yeats and Bishop O’Dwyer, resented Parnell as his supplanter. Even though Parnell and his lieutenants regarded the deposition of Butt as politically necessary, they had uneasy consciences about it; during the split Parnell accused Healy of wishing to kill him as he killed Butt, while Healy in turn accused Dillon of having betrayed not only Parnell but Butt before him. Without Parnell’s martyr cult, Butt’s ultimate political ineffectiveness might have been overshadowed by recollections of his personal charisma and courtroom presence, and by the tragedy of his downfall. Even his whiskey-drinking and his messily public maintenance of two families (by his wife and a mistress) might have appeared audaciously romantic in contrast to the furtive, hypocritical and half-concealed Parnell–O’Shea relationship; even separatists could have contrasted the gifted lawyer who abandoned prestige and promotion to defend the Young Irelanders and Fenians in court, and who refused official appointments from patriotic motives when he and his family were struggling in poverty, with the prosperous imperial statesman of Avondale.11 How might Yeats have handled these themes in ‘Butt’s Funeral’?12

  The problem with Mulhall’s hypothesis of a Parnell-led Irish Party securing devolution from a Conservative government in 1904–5 (at the time of George Wyndham’s flirtation with the subject) is that it overestimates the willingness of the Unionist government to make such a concession. Opposition to Home Rule was the government’s central defining issue—it was, after all, a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Unionists; furthermore, unionism had considerable popular appeal. Arthur James Balfour, the Conservative Prime Minister, believed that his principal task was to keep together a government deeply divided on other policy issues, and above all else wished not to imitate Sir Robert Peel, who by repealing the Corn Laws which he had been elected to defend, split his party and kept it out of office for a generation. It is inconceivable that Balfour would ever have accepted devolution.

  The devolution issue is more relevant to the possibility of Parnell accepting the devolutionary Irish Council Bill which the Irish Party was offered as an interim measure by the Liberal government in 1907, and which the membership rejected as insufficient despite the leaders’ initial support for it. Could Parnell, with his greater prestige and political skills (and perhaps with the ability to obtain a few more concessions from the post-1906 Liberal government) have persuaded his followers to accept devolution as an interim settlement, to give Irish nationalism a chance to show that it could govern competently? Could we even hypothesise that he might have been able to persuade them to bypass Ulster Unionist opposition by accepting the exclusion of the unionist regions of Ulster from the scheme on a trial basis, arguing that this would enable nationalists under his leadership to show how baseless were fears of maladministration and religious persecution?13

  The prospect of Parnell at the head of a devolved Irish administration raises speculation to a whole new level, for Parnell as we know him was to a considerable extent a protest politician. One argument advanced by nationalist opponents of the Irish Council Bill was that its acceptance would have forced the Irish Party to share responsibility for the governance of Ireland without having sufficient power over it. The central problem facing the Irish Parliamentary Party in its later years in some ways resembled that facing Sinn Féin in the later stages of the peace process; it had to be at the same time an anti-system protest party, channelling nationalist discontent, and a potential party of government which could convince British political opinion that if admitted to power under Home Rule it would work responsibly within the British political system. This dilemma only arose after Home Rule became a real possibility with Gladstone’s conversion in 1886, and the real-life Parnell never had to face its full implications because Gladstone’s 1886 government was so short-lived, and after its fall Liberals and Nationalists were able to join in attacking Salisbury’s Unionist government without spelling out their preferred alternative in detail.

  In our hypothetical situation, the ageing Parnell opts for real though limited power, in a devolved assembly with a significant minority of government nominees (mainly southern Unionists) with the aim of showing that nationalists can govern competently and the hope of using it as a base to lever further power.14 He gains the prestige of office and the reinforcement of official patronage; but he has to take tough decisions which disappoint some of the high expectations aroused in the past (e.g. policing land disputes), and the Irish Party support coalition splinters at its edges. At the time of the third Home Rule Bill its supporters predicted that the first Home Rule parliament would see the overwhelming return of
the existing Irish Party leadership as an endorsement of their achievement, but that over time a realignment would occur, with the existing leadership coalescing with the more moderate southern Unionists in a Conservative government drawing on clericalists, middle-class elements and large to medium farmers, while local and social discontents produced a loosely knit opposition describing themselves as ‘democrats’. (Davitt made a similar prediction, with more optimism about the prospect of the ‘democrats’ eventually becoming the majority.) Under a devolved Parnell administration, we might imagine the principal opposition arising from a loose alliance of local and agrarian malcontents under a figurehead such as William O’Brien (highly volatile, a natural protest politician, and financially independent) or the ‘ranch warrior’ Larry Ginnell.15 As part of this grouping, or in loose association with it depending on the electoral system, might be an independent Labour Party channelling the Edwardian upsurge in trade union militancy and an IRB front party led by a figure such as Arthur Griffith (who stated in 1913–14 that his advocacy of abstentionism applied only to Westminster and not to a Home Rule parliament). In the eyes of these more determined opponents, Parnell would be a highly compromised figure, and they would regularly criticise his regime as supported by undemocratic nominated members and sustained by jobbery and corruption. The Young Irelanders’ criticisms of O’Connell’s reliance on Whig patronage, and Parnell’s own youthful denunciations of the ‘nominal Home Rulers’, would have been quoted frequently.16

  Under these circumstances, Parnell would have relied on displaying firm but competent government (he might, for example, have been better able to broker and enforce a compromise in the 1913 lockout than the Dublin Castle administration, even at the cost of some discontent among the most militant Larkinites; but if an Irish parliament had come into existence before women’s suffrage, it might have been delayed in Ireland for a considerable time)17 and on reiterating the need for unity in order to secure further devolved powers from Westminster. Assuming the indecisive elections of 1910 were replicated under this turn of events, he might well have succeeded in using his parliamentary strength to secure further concessions; the Conservatives might have criticised them, but, without the Ulster issue and with a noticeably loyalist Parnell administration in Dublin, Ireland might not have been the great mobilising factor of post-1910 Conservatism, which would have turned more on social and economic issues. In actual history, in 1910–14 some Conservative intellectuals talked of a historic compromise with Irish nationalism as a stepping-stone towards imperial federation; under these hypothetical conditions, such suggestions might have been more numerous and influential.18

  This brings us to the last chapter in the career of the parallel Parnell, during the First World War. Having made the crucial move away from protest politics in 1907, Parnell might be expected to support the British declaration of war in 1914; if the South African Jan Christian Smuts, who waged war against Britain in 1899–1902, could support the British war effort and even join the war cabinet, surely Parnell could have done so, despite criticism from more radical nationalists (as Smuts was criticised by his own bitter-enders, the ancestors of the later National Party) and angry reminiscences by John Devoy in the Gaelic American.19 Part of John Redmond’s problem in the first years of the real-life First World War was that he saw himself as an equivalent to the Dominion Prime Ministers, but was seen by officialdom as just another minor British politician; Parnell, as Prime Minister of Ireland, would have had a recognised position.

  Mulhall’s suggestion that Parnell might have used the war situation to secure greater autonomy, perhaps even Dominion status, is plausible—but he does not address the question of what price he might have had to pay in return. Perhaps we may visualise him in the debates on the introduction of conscription in Britain at the beginning of 1916, announcing that, symbolising the shared Allied commitment to the freedom of small nations, his administration would implement conscription in return for further autonomy (perhaps full Dominion status) and a Council of Ireland to explore matters of common concern with their Ulster brethren, whose accession would surely be brought nearer by their shared sacrifice.20 We may even hypothesise him winning a narrow victory in a wartime election, sustained (according to his opponents) by ruthless use of official patronage and wartime emergency legislation. The harsh and decisive censorship of the dissident ‘mosquito press’, the arbitrary arrest and detention without trial of well-known malcontents such as Pearse and MacDermott merely for using martial language of a sort frequently deployed by Parnell’s own lieutenants in the past, and which surely was not meant seriously,21 would be recalled with bitterness in a post-war Ireland full of traumatised veterans and coming to terms with its losses and the post-war slump.

  On 6 October 1918 Parnell dies in the arms of his grieving wife, a victim of the great influenza epidemic. At his funeral in Glasnevin on 11 October (heavily policed against Larkinite and separatist demonstrators) his chosen successor, Edmund Gray, hails the recently created Lord Avondale as the greatest hero of Irish history, the Moses who led his people into full national freedom and whose practical statesmanship won his country renown in the councils of the Empire. In somewhat more measured tones, and with a mild undertone of scepticism, the long-serving Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, John Dillon, salutes his old colleague’s talents, remarking that a more eloquent tribute might have been paid by the dead man’s most faithful disciple, the recently deceased John Redmond. On behalf of the imperial government, Lord Chancellor Carson pays tribute to the late-flowering imperialism of the deceased, though at the same time intimating that while Ulster is willing to assist the Irish administration so long as it remains true to the dead man’s policies of imperial loyalty, its own interests require it to remain separate. Some of the more militant Catholic papers make veiled remarks about Freemasons; Mr Justice Healy drops a few private witticisms about the grieving widow. Those separatist commentators who are not already in jail make comparisons with Pitt and Castlereagh. In the less restrictive atmosphere of Belfast, the trade union leader Joseph Devlin, with one eye on police note-takers, declares to a mainly Catholic audience that they have been sold into slavery for the sake of one man’s political ambitions, and calls for the release of their brother James Connolly, so unceremoniously jailed under an Irish government for resisting conscription.22

  How such a Home Rule government claiming political descent from Parnell might have fared amidst the economic and political upheavals of inter-war Europe, or responded to the contrast between the continued urban and rural poverty of post-1918 Ireland and the expectations of economic development under protectionism (Home Rule, of course, entailed continued free trade) entertained by Irish nationalists (including, in the distant past of the early 1880s, Parnell himself), must be matter for further speculation.23 The fate of W. T. Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal government may provide an indicator; but we will never know whether an early grant of Home Rule would have released enough of Ireland’s inbuilt stresses to prevent an eventual explosion, or whether this would have merely postponed it.

  Perhaps all this speculation is beside the point. Writing in retirement in the late 1920s, Ignatius O’Brien claimed that Parnell’s personal physician and political ally, Dr J. E. Kenny (d. 1899) had told him that Parnell suffered from a heart condition which he knew would shorten his life expectancy, and this was one reason why he refused to entertain proposals that he should retire for a time after the divorce and return to leadership later. Certainly Parnell suffered a serious illness in 1887 which led to rumours that he was dying (though these were partly due to his seclusion as he was nursed by Mrs O’Shea). How might Irish history have been affected if he had died in 1887?

  ABBREVIATIONS

  BL British Library, London

  Bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford

  Hansard 3 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series: 1830–91 (356 vols, London, 1831–91)

  NAI National Archives, Dublin

  NLI National Lib
rary of Ireland, Dublin

  PRONI Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast

  Spec. Comm. Proc. The Special Commission Act, 1888. Reprint of the Shorthand Notes of the Speeches, Proceedings and Evidence taken before the Commissioners appointed under the above-named Act (12 vols, London, 1890)

  TNA The National Archives, London

  NOTES

  Preface

  1. Quoted in preface to W. R. Fearon, Parnell of Avondale (Dublin, 1937), p. xi.

  2. T. M. Healy, Letters and Leaders of My Day (2 vols, London, 1928), ii, 367.

  3. William O’Brien, The Parnell of Real Life (London, 1926), p. 182.

  4. One journalist even suspected that Parnell exploited the fact that on these railway journeys journalists, for professional reasons, lit up their compartments, with the consequence that the expectant crowds at railway stations knew exactly where to gather to receive him with acclamation: see Andrew Dunlop, Fifty Years of Irish Journalism (Dublin, 1911), p. 32.

  5. James Loughlin, ‘Constructing the Political Spectacle: Parnell, the Press and National Leadership, 1879–86’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), Parnell in Perspective (London, 1991), pp 221–41.