John Redmond

The new departure of the 1880s, which united various strands of Irish nationalism under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell, drew enormous support from Irish Americans.

Irish Americans were major funders of John Redmond's Irish party in the early part of the 20th century.

Irish opinion changed in World War I.

Uh, when World War I broke out, many Irish Americans switched their allegiance from the, from the, um, the Home Rule Party of Redmond that supported the war to, uh, those who didn't support the war.

And like, for example, Douglas Hyde, when he was president of the Gaelic League, went over and spent seven months traveling around America raising money for the Gaelic League.

John Redmond raised huge amounts of money for the Home Rule Party.

The Irish-American, who were the Fenian movement in America, they sent vast amounts of money back to Ireland to prepare for the Easter Rising.

And then, after the Rising, you had the establishment of the Friends of Irish Freedom, which campaigned for Ireland and for Irish independence.

Indeed, such was James Ryan's influence and prominence in Irish life that the Irish Times' political correspondent Michael McInerney asserted in 1965 that James Ryan was one of the chief architects of the new Ireland.

So this all very much begs the question, who exactly was this James Ryan? So he was born in 1892 in County Wexford, and he was the 11th of 12 children in a large farming family, and very much sort of typical of most of that time, James Ryan's father was a sort of constitutional nationalist, a supporter of John Redmond and the cause of home rule.

But like many of his generation, the Ryan siblings, they sort of had no interest in the limitations of home rule.

Instead, they fully embraced the Irish cultural revival and the ideal of a truly sovereign Ireland that was free to settle its own affairs without British interference.

There was a call for, from Redmond to, uh, go to war to, to support the war, and the, the volunteers split.

So, so this, uh, so, and Lusk, oddly enough, uh, the, the massive amount of, of the volunteers stayed with John Redmond, and they may not have gone to the war, although some of them did and sadly died there, but, but they, they, they stayed Redmondite rather than nationalist.

But Lusk split the volunteers at the time, 50/50, and they went on to be part of, in particular, the Battle of Ashbourne in 1916.

Uh, Ashe, sadly, uh, the 1917, he, he had been...

But o- one, one thing I want to stress here for listeners, which is interesting, I think, and is different from the later period, is that Fenians thought Parnell was basically good.

They don't see the Home Rulers as necessarily their enemies, like later republicans would see John Redmond and that generation of Home Rulers.

It's something different.

They like Parnell.

And Parnell gives them enough reason to believe that he's on their side.

Yeah, it's, it's just the contradictions of reading Irish history backwards.

Like John Redmond would have made his reputation as a Parnellite and as one of the more radical of the Irish Parliamentary Party, being very strongly pro-Boer during the Boer War.

And you can see the centenary of the 1798 rebellion, a lot of these people being very, very pro-1798.

In the western isle he was weakening a fortress that would one day be called upon to save us.

In that day his trusted ally, William Holland Zollerin, was to batter our ships and boats from the bite of Heligoland, and in that day his old and once imprisoned enemy, John Redmond, was to rise in the hour of English jeopardy, and be thanked in thunder for the free offer of the Irish sword.

All that Robert Cecil thought valueless has been our loss, and all that he thought feeble our stay.

Among those of his political class or creed who accepted and welcomed the Irish Leaders' Alliance were some who knew the real past relations between England and Ireland, and some who first felt them in that hour.