Judging Redmond and Carson: comparative Irish lives
by Alvin Jackson (Royal Irish Academy, €30)
Felix M. Larkin
This dual biography by one of Ireland’s most distinguished historians, Professor Alvin Jackson of Edinburgh University, is premised on the notion that – to quote its author – “the parallel lives of great rivals or great antagonists (or great friends) … [can] achieve an analytical traction that might not otherwise be possible with the consideration of an individual life”.
It certainly succeeds in challenging many popular perceptions of its subjects, John Redmond and Edward Carson, through a skilful comparative study of their personalities, values and actions. Its ultimate conclusion – that Carson was, by temperament and style, better suited than Redmond to lead an Irish popular movement – is, however, a highly contentious summation of the careers of these colossi of modern Irish history.
Generation
As Jackson shows, the two had much in common. They were of the same generation and educated at the same university; both had pursued a legal career in the same circuits, and they sat together as MPs in Westminster for 26 years; and each was a marginal figure in the party he led – Redmond as a loyal Parnellite in a party overwhelmingly anti-Parnell in the Split of 1890-91, Carson as a Dubliner in a largely northern Unionist party.
Moreover, they both failed in their main political aims: Redmond, while getting Home Rule onto the statute book, was denied a Home Rule parliament in which he would have been prime minister; Carson likewise did not succeed in his objective of saving the union of Great Britain and Ireland as constituted in 1801.
Neither man wanted partition, and the Ulster problem was for Carson initially a tactic to defeat Home Rule. The tactic eventually became the compromise, reluctantly accepted by Carson and Redmond, and opposed by many of their followers – though final agreement foundered on the areas to be excluded from Home Rule and whether exclusion was temporary or permanent.
Jackson argues that the Parnell Split defined Redmond’s politics and moulded his “political personality – demanding caution, pragmatism, consensuality, loyalty”.
In contrast, Carson’s political personality was confrontational and robust, no doubt owing much to modes of operation honed in his successful legal work. Jackson describes him as “contemptuous, charismatic and studiously unimpressed by the conventions of British politics” and so ironically closer to the “spirit of Parnell and Parnellism” than Redmond, Parnell’s more emollient successor.
No comedy
Carson, however, went beyond anything Parnell would have countenanced. As Jackson writes: “Carson abandoned his constitutionalism in 1911-12, in presiding over the development of an armed and paramilitary unionism, and in promoting the illegal importation of arms.” One of Carson’s friends described this episode as “opéra bouffe treason”, but it was far from comedy.
In the context of the Ulster Volunteers, Jackson addresses the question “whether or not he [Carson] introduced ‘the gun’ into Irish politics”.
He rejects that claim by reference to recurrent nationalist insurgency since 1798, but this fails to take account of the fact that the New Departure negotiated by Parnell, Davitt and Devoy in 1878, had effectively removed guns from Irish politics for the 35 years before the Ulster Volunteers landed their arms at Larne.
Prof. Jackson has, accordingly, posed the wrong question. The correct question is whether Carson reintroduced “the gun” into Irish politics. The answer to that must be an emphatic “Yes”. The island of Ireland has lived with the murderous consequences ever since.