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The machinery of the Irish parliamentary party in the general election of 1895
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2016
Extract
Each of the general elections that took place between 1885 and 1910 was significant in the history of the party, but that of 1895 had an interest peculiar to itself, setting it apart from the others in the series. It was not an election which brought about any major change in the relative strength of the various parties; it was not even notable for the number of seats to be contested. Nor was it fought upon any major issue of policy, since it was obvious to all but the most optimistic that home rule was not—and for a long time was not likely to be—a matter of practical politics; even the question of whether or not to continue the liberal alliance—a question hotly debated ever since Lord Rosebery's unpromising reference to home rule in March 1894—seemed largely academic in view of the probability of a unionist victory in Great Britain. For the Irish party—or, to speak more precisely, for the anti-Parnellites—the importance of the election of 1895 lay in quite a different direction; it lay in the fact that as a result of this campaign the methods whereby in the past the party had controlled the conduct of the elections over a large part of Ireland were deeply and permanently discredited, and the party itself confronted with a very serious crisis. It is the purpose of this paper to trace the development of that crisis, but before proceeding to consider it in detail, it will be necessary to describe very briefly the way in which this control over the elections was exercised.
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References
1 In 1892 (the previous election) the 103 Irish seats had been distributed as follows : Parnellites 9, anti-Parnellites 71, unionists 23. In 1895 the figures were: Parnellites 11, anti-Parnellites 70, liberal home rulers, 1, unionists 21.
2 In 1895, 61 out of 103 seats were uncontested; in 1892—admittedly an exceptional year—only 21 were uncontested. For these figures see Lyons, F. S. L., The Irish parliamentary party, 1890–1910, chap. 2.Google Scholar
3 This was the speech in which, soon after succeeding Gladstone as prime minister, Rosebery had declared that before home rule could be granted to Ireland, ‘ England, as the predominant partner of the three kingdoms, will have to be convinced of its justice and equity ’. For the background of this speech see Crewe, Lord, Life of Lord Rosebery, 2. 44–5.Google Scholar
4 Throughout this paper the term ‘ party ’ refers to the parliamentary party and to the anti-Parnellite section of it which out-numbered the Parnellite M.P.s on the eve of the election in the proportion of 7 to i.
5 The rules of conventions were published in Freeman’s Journal, 6 Oct. 1885. For a very full description of the origin of the convention system and of its working during Parnell’s ascendancy, see O’Brien, C. Cruise, ’The machinery of the Irish parliamentary party’ in Irish Historical Studies, vol. 5, no. 17 (March 1946).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 For the provisional constitution of this body see Irish Times, II March 1891. It did not take final shape until a national convention was held more than eighteen months later. Freeman’s Journal, 16 Nov. 1892.
7 Such was the testimony of O’Connor, T. P., who was familiar with the working of the system. See his Memoirs of an old parliamentarian, 2. 15.Google Scholar
8 According to a resolution of the party setting up this committee it was to consist of John Dillon, Τ M. Healy, William O’Brien, David Sheehy, Michael Davitt, W. M. Murphy and one of the party whips. Minutes of the Irish parliamentary party, 26 May 1892 (Dillon MSS). It appears from the list of members given in the minute-book of this election committee (J. F. X. O’Brien MSS) that both the whips—J. Deasy and Sir Thomas Esmonde—participated.
9 Minutes of the election committee of the Irish parliamentary party, 31 May-i Aug. 1892 (J. F. X. O’Brien MSS).
10 Since the split a committee had been associated with the chairman in the management of the party’s affairs. It was annually elected at the beginning of the parliamentary session. The committee for 1895 consisted of W. Abraham, E. Blake, T. J- Condon, John Dillon, T. M. Healy, W. O’Brien, T. P. O’Connor, T. Sexton. After the result of the ballot had been declared, T. M. Healy informed the chairman that it was not his intention to serve. Minutes of the Irish parliamentary party, 5 Feb. 1895 (Dillon MSS).
10a The decision was taken at a party meeting by 33 votes to 12, the strength of the party at that time being 70 members. Minutes of the Irish parliamentary party, 24 June 1895 (Dillon MSS).
11 As is well known, Healy had from an early stage of the crisis of 1890 been one of Parnell’s most consistent opponents. Dillon and O’Brien did not finally break off negotiations with the deposed leader until February 1891 and did not throw in their lot with the anti-Parnellites until July of that year. For discussions of the two points of view see O’Connor, T. P., Memoirs of an old parliamentarian, 2. 210–35Google Scholar; Healy, T. M., Letters and leaders of my day, 1. 326–56Google Scholar; O’Brien, W., An olive branch in Ireland, chaps, 1. and iiGoogle Scholar; O’Brien, R. Barry, Life of Pariteli, 2. chaps, xxii, xxiii and xxivGoogle Scholar; Gwynn, D., Life of John Redmond, pp. 61–75 Google Scholar. At the general election of 1892 O’Brien and Dillon would have preferred a truce with the Parnellites, whereas Healy was for continuing the war to the end. The case for a truce was put by O’Brien in a speech at Cork in May 1892 and by Dillon in a speech at Bradford in June 1892; see Freeman’s Journal, 14 May and 6 June 1892, for the respective speeches of O’Brien and Dillon. Healy’s attitude is described in his pamphlet Why Ireland is not free, p. 72.
12 Freeman’s Journal, 29 June 1895. It was in the course of this speech that Healy used the prophetic phrase : ’ I say that I believe in the Irish policy of the future, shin fain ’. Dillon’s acquiescence in the Rosebery policy is criticised by Healy in Why Ireland is not free, p. 95.
13 From the time of the split until 1895 he could only count for certain upon the support of one other member of the committee—Arthur O’Connor—from December 1890 to 1893 and T. D. Sullivan in 1894. The names of the committee were published each year. See Freeman’s Journal, 9 Dec. 1890, 6 Feb. 1892, 1 Feb. 1893 and 15 March 1894; the committee consisted usually of eight members.
14 In Freeman’s Journal, 26 June 1895, there appeared an appeal for funds by the chairman, Justin McCarthy. On June 27 the committee held its first meeting for election purposes and on June 28, June 29, July ι and July 10, lists of conventions appeared in the press.
15 The two members of that committee who were not at that time also members of the party were W. M. Murphy and Michael Davitt. But Murphy had not long retired from parliament and Davitt was then about to enter it.
16 For Healy’s speech and for these resolutions see Freeman’s Journal, 29 June 1895. It was in the course of this speech that Healy announced his neutrality as between liberals and conservatives, to which reference has already been made.
17 Strictly, the centre of power in the Irish National Federation was its council, consisting of thirty-two county delegates, thirteen civic delegates and the members for the time being of the Irish parliamentary party. Freeman’s Journal, 16 Nov. 1892. This, however, was a cumbersome body and only met once every three months. At its first meeting—January 1893—it elected an executive committee of twenty-five members with five ex officio members (two secretaries and three treasurers) composed of twelve delegates of the Federation and thirteen members of the party This executive committee met as a rule once a month and was the real controlling authority of the Federation. It had a quorum of only five members. Minutes of the council of the Irish National Federation, 9 Jan. 1893 (Dillon MSS).
18 For the voting see Minutes of the executive committee of the Irish National Federation, 2 July 1895 (Dillon MSS). The resolutions were published in Freeman’s Journal, 3 July 1895.
19 Rule eight ran as follows : ‘ Power to summon a convention of delegates from branches is reserved to the executive committee or council ’. There is a printed copy of the rules for the guidance of branches (issued on 25 Mar. 1891) pasted inside the cover of the minute-book of the executive committee of the Federation (Dillon MSS).
20 Healy’s cause at this time received enthusiastic support from the Irish Catholic, though it is a question whether its violent language did not do him more harm than good. For example, in its issue of 29 June 1895 it commented as follows on the decision authorising the committee to conduct the elections : ‘ On the part of all that is thoughtful and substantial in the land to-day we repudiate and denounce this vicious, this insane, this degrading proposition’. In its issue of a week later— July 6—the same newspaper put forward a seven-point programme which, besides the usual plea for the right to select candidates ‘ unfettered by exterior influences ’—advocated the abolition of the committee and the transfer of all financial business, including the payment of members, to the Federation.
21 Freeman’s Journal, 4 July 1895.
22 In Galway there had been a drop in the number of branches from 25 to 8, in Clare from 26 to 9, in Fermanagh from 16 to 10, in Tyrone from 30 to 16, in Derry from 8 to 4, in Armagh from 12 to 9, in Waterford from 13 to 1, in Kilkenny from 32 to 17, in Meath from 21 to 1,4, in Donegal from 31 to 9. Report in Minutes of the executive committee of the Irish National Federation, 31 March 1894 (Dillon MSS).
23 Speech at Askeaton, , Freeman’s Journal, 25 Nov. 1895.Google Scholar
24 Minutes of the executive committee of the Irish National Federation, 2 July 1895 (Dillon MSS).
25 The friends were W. M. Murphy, Joseph Mooney, Dr J Fox, M.P., and T. D. Sullivan, M.P.
26 For the proceedings at these meetings see Minutes of the executive committee of the Irish National Federation, 3, 4, and 5 July 1895 (Dillon MSS).
27 The seven conventions which insisted upon local chairmen were : Cavan, King’s County, north Louth, north Monaghan, south Monaghan, Newry and Westmeath. The two which allowed the committee nominees to play a limited part in their proceedings were Kildare and Wexford.
28 Minutes of the Irish parliamentary party, 16 Aug. 1895 (Dillon MSS).
29 The discontent was not confined to any particular part of the country (as was the case with the All-for-Ireland movement in 1909-10) but was, on the contrary, very widespread. The conventions where signs of friction could be detected were : South Armagh, Carlow, Cavan, Donegal, Kerry, Kildare, Kilkenny (county), King’s County, Limerick, north Leitrim, south Leitrim, north Louth, south Louth, Mayo, north Monaghan, south Monaghan, Newry, Queen’s County, east and south Tipperary, north and mid Tipperary, Tyrone, Westmeath and Wexford.
30 For example, Kildare and Newry, reported respectively in Freeman s Journal, g and 10 July 1895.
31 Examples of very hostile conventions were Kilkenny (county), Cavan and Donegal—reported respectively in Freeman’s Journal, 6, 9 and July 1895. Amongst those which demanded a national convention were Carlow, Wexford and Kerry—reported respectively in Freeman’s Journal, 5, 9 and 16 July 1895.
32 For example, Queen’s County, north Monaghan and south Louth— reported respectively in Freeman’s Journal, 6, 11 and 16 July 1895.
33 This convention was intended to choose candidates for both divisions of the county. Many of the priests were on retreat and the delegates for south Leitrim, having failed to secure a postponement of the convention, withdrew en bloc. Whereupon Jasper Tully, who was to have been selected for south Leitrim, read to the remainder of the convention a letter from the bishop of Ardagh to the effect that if the convention for south Leitrim were not postponed, the clergy of that division would take no part in the election should he, Tully, subsequently have to fight for his seat. Freeman’s Journal, 5 July 1895. In the result a separate convention for south Leitrim was held several days later.
34 For the two Tipperary conventions see Freeman’s Journal, 5 and 6 July 1895.
35 O’Brien, W., An olive branch in Ireland, pp. 83–5Google Scholar. O’Brien says also that Dillon attempted in like manner to challenge Arthur O’Connor’s re-selection in Donegal, but equally in vain. An example of the same technique in reverse—where the dissident wing of the party challenged the selection of the sitting members was provided by the Queen’s County convention. On that occasion the names of W. M. Murphy and Arthur O’Connor were put forward in opposition to those of the nominees of the committee—Eugene Crean and Dr M. A. MacDonnell—both of whom had represented the county in parliament since 1892. Neither Murphy nor O’Connor were present at the convention and the former wrote a letter to the press which was published on the same day as the report of the convention’s proceedings and in which he denied that he had authorised his name to go forward. None the less the convention divided on the question of whether to select him or Crean; the latter received a majority of votes. Freeman’s Journal, 6 July 1895. On July 8 there appeared a letter from Arthur O’Connor in which he too denied that he had allowed his name to be proposed at the convention. In fact it had been withdrawn in the course of the debates, but the fact that local nationalists had been prepared to pit prominent supporters of Healy against their sitting members was symptomatic of how greatly the appreciation of the need for unity had declined in the country at large.
35a See Lyons, F. S. L., ’The Irish parliamentary party and the Liberals in mid-Ulster, 1894’, in Irish Historical Studies, vol. 7, no. 27 (March 1951).Google Scholar
36 The convention was actually summoned to select candidates for only two out of the four divisions in the county—i.e. east and mid-Tyrone.
37 Nearly a week previously a gathering (it was called a convention but was not one in the usual sense of that term) of nationalists had met at Strabane at the instance of the local branch of the Federation. It had been a mixed gathering, attended by some protestant farmers and presided over by a priest, Canon H. O’Hagan. At this meeting it was decided to adopt Serjeant Hemphill as a liberal home rule candidate, Freeman’s Journal, 6 July 1895.
38 The account used here is that published in the Irish Times, 9 July 1895, since this was the one printed by the Freeman s Journal when on July II it was obliged to break silence. It is fair to point out that Healy described the press reports as ‘chiefly works of the imagination ’, —see his letter in Freeman’s Journal, 11 July 1895. In a later letter which was published in the same newspaper on August 8 he wrote that he denounced as heartily as did his opponents ‘ the violation of the privacy of the convention or the calumnious misrepresentation of what took place thereat ’. In fact, however, he did not specifically repudiate the language which had been attributed to him personally, as distinct from the language used in the letter that he read. ‘ I withdraw nothing that I said at Omagh ’, he wrote, ‘ Mr Dillon heard me and knows what I said ’ . . . . Freeman’s Journal, 12 July 1895. Dillon’s own account— in a statement he made to the party in August—corresponded closely with the published reports, except that where the latter referred to the question about Tyrone having been put by ‘ a delegate ’ Dillon identified the questioner as Healy himself. The party meeting was in private, but there survive among the Dillon MSS notes in his handwriting which from their contents can only refer to this episode and which were apparently used as the basis of his statement to the party on 16 August 1895. The notes are undated, but are contained, together with other documents concerning the Tyrone convention, in an envelope dated August 1895.
39 See the references to English press comments in Irish Times, 10 July 1895 and Freeman’s Journal, 12 July 1895.
40 Ibid., 12 July 1895.
41 Ibid., 15 July 1895.
42 It is not possible to say with certainty whether Healy read a full draft or a paraphrase of the letter at the convention, though as we have seen (footnote 38 above) he condemned the ‘ calumnious misrepresentation ’ of what took place there. His own account, written to his brother on the night of the convention (the letter is dated 8 June 1895, but this should obviously be July) simply said : ‘ I read Blake’s letter and Dillon was livid with rage and hadn’t a word to reply ’. Healy, T. M., Letters and leaders of my day, 2. 422 Google Scholar. Dillon himself, however, remarked in the course of his statement to the party : ‘ I have since learnt that this document had been in Mr. H.’s possession since the month of December last ’ (Dillon MSS). This implies that Dillon at least believed that the letter had been read at the convention, and nowhere in his statement to the party did he suggest that what had been read was not the true version. One possible hypothesis—and it is only a hypothesis—to explain the wide difference between the original and the press version, is that the reporters at the convention either did not hear or did not grasp the details of what was being read and thus misinterpreted the real sense of the letter. For the full text see F. S. L. Lyons, ‘ The Irish parliamentary party and the liberals in mid-Ulster, 1894’ (as above).
43 Edward Blake to T. A. Dickson, 19 June 1894 (Dillon MSS). On the same day Blake sent a copy of the letter to J. F. X. O’Brien, the secretary of the committee of the Irish parliamentary party. With the copy he enclosed a letter in which he said that he had shown the original ‘ to such of the committee as I could find, viz. Messrs. McCarthy, Sexton and Dillon ; and as they approved I sent it on ’. In my article on ‘ The Irish parliamentary party and the liberals in mid-Ulster, 1894’, to which I have already referred, the date of this letter from Blake to J F. X. O’Brien is given as 19 June 1895; this should read 19 June 1894.
44 This was Healy’s view. As he said in reply to Justin McCarthy’s manifesto of August 6—‘ The writing of the Blake letter and the making of the compact it discloses is the sole charge brought by me against any colleague’. Earlier in the same letter he had asserted that north Tyrone was as much a nationalist seat as north Longford or north Louth. Holding this view he would naturally regard the making over of the seats on any grounds whatever as quite indefensible. For his letter see Freeman’s Journal, 8 Aug. 1895.
45 Freeman’s Journal, 11 July 1895.
46 Both men took the same line in their explanations—in fact Blake wrote to Dillon on the eve of the party meeting, advising him about the statement he should make. He suggested that great stress should be laid upon the fact that the accusations were made at a convention where it was far from certain that secrecy could be preserved. Dillon was also to counter Healy’s dismissal of the press reports as ‘ imaginative ’ by showing the close similarity between those published by the Irish Times and the Irish Independent. Blake to Dillon, 15 Aug. 1895 (Dillon MSS).
47 The extracts which Dillon quoted are in the handwriting of the then secretary to the committee of the party—J. F. X. O’Brien. They are interspersed amongst Dillon’s notes for his statement (Dillon MSS).
48 A second extract from the minutes of the committee in J. F. X. O’Brien’s handwriting and on the same sheet of paper as the first, states that those present were : Justin McCarthy in the chair, William O’Brien, Edward Blake and T. M. Healy (Dillon MSS). Healy denied that he had been present while the minute was being read and confirmed, though he conceded it was possible that he might have entered the room after that part of the committee’s business had been concluded. See his letter in Freeman’s Journal, 12 July 1895.
49 Minutes of the executive committee of the Irish National Federation, 2 July 1895 (Dillon MSS). The local conference of nationalists mentioned in the report was presumably the one held at Strabane on July 5, and to which reference has already been made.
50 This extract was also copied out by J. F. X. O’Brien. It is to be found among Dillon’s notes for his statement (Dillon MSS).
51 Statement to the party (Dillon MSS).
52 Statement to the party (Dillon MSS). Dillon added that at the time both William O’Brien and himself had been opposed to the policy.
53 This decision had been taken—on Dillon’s motion—at a meeting in 1893. Minutes of the Irish parliamentary party, 4 Sept. 1893 (Dillon MSS).
54 Freeman’s Journal, 7 Aug. 1895.
55 Minutes of the Irish parliamentary party, 16 Aug. 1895 (Dillon MSS).
56 Justin McCarthy in his manifesto wrote that it would be ‘ almost impossible to overestimate the disastrous effects of Mr Healy’s unfounded charges against his colleagues at Omagh—made as they were . . . at a period of the election when there was no possibility of counteracting their effect upon the polls’. Freeman’s Journal, 7 Aug. 1895. One of the factors most irritating to Healy’s opponents was that he should have chosen the moment that he did to make his disclosures, since it was established that he had in fact known of the existence of the letter for some time before the convention. He was reported at the convention as saying that he had heard of it ‘ two months ’ after it had been sent. Irish Times, 9 July 1895. He himself later said in one of his public letters that he had known nothing of the transaction ‘ for months afterwards’. Freeman’s Journal, 12 July 1895. In a subsequent letter he explained his long inaction on the grounds that until he actually learned at the convention that there would be no nationalist candidate for north Tyrone, he had been prepared to hold his peace. Freeman’s Journal, 8 Aug. 1895.
57 For the elaborate precautions to prevent the party regaining its control over the conventions see the constitution of the United Irish League, published in Freeman’s Journal, 21 June 1900, and the rules governing the summoning of the conventions published in the same newspaper on 20 September 1900. The most important of these rules provided that the chairmen should be local representatives of the league.