John Redmond. Dermot Meleady
1905, RP Ms. 15,182 (7).
117F.J., 25, 27, 29 Sep. 1905.
118Dillon to Redmond, 3, 5 Oct. 1905, RP Ms. 15,182 (8).
119Donelan to Redmond, 4 Oct. 1905, RP Ms. 15,184.
120Cork Examiner, 31 Jul. 1905.
121F.J., 9 Oct. 1905.
122Ibid., 9, 12 Oct. 1905.
123Donelan to Redmond (with reply), 13 Oct. 1905, encl. O’Brien to Donelan, 14 Oct. 1905, RP Ms. 15,184; Dillon to Redmond, 15, 27 Oct. 1905, RP Ms. 15,182 (8); F.J., 4 Nov. 1905.
124F.J., 15 Sep. 1905. The piece was described as oblong, mounted on a silver base, surmounted by a second tier on which rested a central pillar, on either side of which were two round towers. There were also two figures of Erin, two Irish wolfhounds and the Redmond crest and arms, together with four silver shields with the arms of the four provinces, and the inscription in Gaelic and English: ‘Presented to Mr John Redmond MP and Mrs Redmond with the best wishes of the members of the Irish Parliamentary Party, 20th July 1905’, the entire work designed and executed by Edmond Johnson Ltd., Grafton St.
125O’Brien, Olive Branch, p. 288.
126Donelan to Redmond, 23 Nov. 1905, Redmond to Donelan, 25, 29 Nov. 1905, RP Ms. 15,184.
127Pádraig Ó Fearaíl, The Story of Conradh na Gaeilge: a History of the Gaelic League (Dublin, 1975), p.24
128Between 1898 and 1903, the numbers studying Gaelic in national schools had risen from 1,012 to 92,612, those in the intermediate schools from 504 to 1,804. F.J., 1 Apr. 1905.
129Ibid., 27 Feb., 22 Sep. 1905.
130Owen McGee, The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Féin (Dublin, 2005), p. 276.
131Ó Fearaíl, Story of Conradh, p. 29; F.J., 3, 7, 8, 17 Nov. 1905.
132Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht were immensely popular – in English translation. Yeats’ early poetry had drawn Gaelic myths and folklore into the English language. J.M. Synge’s plays The Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea were both completed in 1902, and brought Hiberno-English to the stage in the following two years. 1905 was the year when James Joyce both abandoned Stephen Hero, the prototype of the later Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and embarked on his nine-year search for a publisher for his completed Dubliners.
133I.D.I., 24 Oct. 1901. This education was seen to bear fruit when, during the 1902 US visit, young William replied to the greeting of a Gaelic-speaking South Boston lady with ‘Táim óg ach táim tír-grádhach’ (‘I am young but I am patriotic’). Newscuttings of 1902 US visit, RP Ms. 7432.
134F.J., 18 Mar. 1904; Bew, Enigma, p. 210.
135Redmond to O’Brien, 4 Oct. 1901, RP Ms. 10,496 (5).
136Warre B. Wells, John Redmond (London, 1919), p. 40.
137At Bermondsey in June 1901, he had spoken of the ‘incalculable good’ done by the Gaelic revival, before which ‘… nothing was thought fashionable except English modes of thought and English customs. And mind you… it was not the highest and best modes of English thought….’ Newscuttings of 1901, RP Ms. 7429.
138Maume, Long Gestation, p. 27.
139Newscuttings of 1901, RP Ms. 7429.
140NAI CBS 3/716, 26215/S. An example was the prosecution of a prominent Mayo Gaelic Leaguer for distributing seditious (anti-recruiting) literature. F.J., 13 Oct. 1905.
141Reports of Crime Special Sergeants for Feb. 1903, NAI CBS 3/716, 28288/S.
142Maume, Long Gestation, pp. 59–63, 236; Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices (Dublin, 1994), p.36.
143See Patrick Maume, D.P. Moran (Dundalk, 1995); Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices, pp. 33–88.
144McGee, IRB, p. 276.
145Maume, Long Gestation, p. 52. John Devoy, in his Gaelic American, took a malignantly anti-Semitic line. In October 1905, following the rejection at the Seventh Zionist Congress in Basle of a plan for a temporary home for the Jewish people in Uganda by arrangement with the British Government, Devoy wrote: ‘As to the Zionist desire to have a national home without national responsibility, it does not seem likely to be gratified. The Jews are destined to be the parasites of the human race until, in their insatiable greed, they have absorbed the life blood of all the nations, who must then perish, or to save their existence must turn round and destroy them.’ In December 1905 he wrote of the ‘so-called massacre’ at Kishinev, which, he claimed, the Jews, ‘the most ignoble race that fate has planted on the earth’, were using to involve the US Government in nefarious designs against the Russian Government. Gaelic American, 7 Oct., 30 Dec. 1905.
146F.J., 18 Jan. 1904. Ten years earlier on 9 May 1894, following indiscriminate attacks on Jews in Cork for which three people were imprisoned, Redmond had stated that he had ‘no sympathy with the persecution to which the Jewish community have been subjected in other countries… the great body of Catholics in Ireland, who have in the past known what persecution for religion’s sake meant, will never have any sympathy with the attacks upon the members of any creed’. On the anti-Parnellite side, Justin McCarthy had condemned the attacks in similar terms. Dermot Keogh, Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (Cork, 1998), pp.19, 26–53, 247.