Irish politician, born in Dublin, Ireland. He was called to the bar in 1886, and entered parliament in 1881. A champion of Home Rule, he became chairman of the Nationalist Party in 1900. He declined a seat in Asquith's coalition ministry (1915), but supported the War. He deplored the Irish rebellion, and opposed Sinn Féin.
John Edward Redmond (September 1, 1856 – March 1918) was the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1900 to 1918.
He was the elder brother of William Hoey Kearney Redmond and father of William Archer Redmond both of whom were to serve as MPs in his party.
Education and professional career
John Redmond was born in County Wexford in Ireland. A nationalist by birth, whose father had been a nationalist Irish Member of Parliament (MP), he was educated by the Jesuits in Clongowes Wood, and in Trinity College, Dublin.
Distinguished political career
However like his father he soon became involved in politics, being elected as an MP for New Ross the Nationalist Party in 1880 (also known as the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1882).
A devotee of Charles Stewart Parnell, Redmond was passionately opposed to physical force nationalism, campaigning for Home Rule, a limited form of self government for Ireland within the United Kingdom. When the Irish Parliamentary Party split over Parnell's long-term relationship with Katherine O'Shea, the wife of a fellow MP, whom he later married, Redmond sided with his deposed leader. With the Lords' veto gone under the Parliament Act 1911, Irish home rule (which the Lords had blocked in 1894) again became a possibility, the odds increasing when the Irish Parliamentary Party came to hold the balance of power after the 1910 general election. Asquith introduced the Third Home Rule Bill to allow for Irish national self-government.
Home rule
His successor, John Dillon claimed that Redmond had removed all the obstacles to Irish unity except those of the Ulster unionists.
Home rule, however, was vehemently opposed by many Irish Protestants and Ulster's Orange Order, who feared domination in an overwhelmingly Catholic state. Though strongly opposed to any form of partition, Redmond and his party reluctantly agreed to what they thought would be a temporary exclusion, under Redmond's aspiration that "Ulster will have to follow" .
Redmond could have had every expectation of becoming head of a new Irish government, based in the old Parliament House in College Green. After the onset of the Great War, principally in the belief that the attained measure of self-government would be granted in full after the war as well as being in a stronger position to stave off a final partition of Northern Ireland, he together with the National Volunteers enthusiastically offered support to Britain's war effort and her commitment under the Triple Entente.
He believed that Imperial Germany's military expansion threatened the freedom of peace loving people throughout Europe and that it was Ireland's duty, having been promised home rule, to defend the freedom of "small nations" to the best of her ability. Redmond requested the War Office to allow the formation of a separate Irish Brigade as had been done for the Ulster Volunteer Force but Britain was suspicious of Redmond's declared intentions of having his National Volunteers armed in this way and having Irishmen leading Irishmen, eventually making the gesture of an Irish Division, commanded unlike the 36th (Ulster) Division, by English officers. His own brother Major Willie Redmond MP., one of four Irish MPs who enlisted in the 16th (Irish) Division, was killed in action in June 1917 in the Messines ridge offensive.
He was criticised for having encouraged so many Irish to fight in the Great War.
Easter rebellion
However in Easter 1916, a rebellion of the remaining Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army took place, led by a small number of influential republicans, under Pádraig Pearse. Though large numbers of Irish men had willingly joined up, the likelihood of enforced conscription created a backlash, which although the Irish Party walked out of the House of Commons in protest and returned to Ireland to organise opposition to the proposal to extend conscription to Ireland, it boosted Sinn Féin, the small separatist party that had played no part in the Rising, but which having been wrongly 'blamed' by Britain and the Irish media, was then taken over by surviving Rising leaders, under Eamon de Valera and the IRB.
In December 1918, Sinn Féin subsequently won the vast majority of seats in the general election, 25 unopposed, leaving the Nationalist Party with only six. In a Declaration Sinn Féin proclaimed an Irish Republic, (abolished again in 1921 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty), with a new parliament, called in the Irish language Dáil Éireann, that is the Assembly of Ireland.
Redmond, however luckily did not live to see the destruction of the political party he had given his life to. A later Irish Taoiseach (prime minister), John Bruton, hung a painting of Redmond, whom he regarded, because of his commitment to non-violence, as his hero, in his office in Ireland's Leinster House Government Buildings.
Redmond's personal vision
Redmond's personal vision did not encompass a wholly independent Ireland he stated that
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