Sinn Féin oppose John Redmond’s attempt to control Volunteers

Volunteer Executive agree to Redmond’s demands

Sinn Féin have strongly opposed the proposals of John Redmond to reform the leadership of the Irish Volunteers in a way that would place the Irish Parliamentary Party in control.

Alderman Thomas Kelly said: ‘We in Sinn Féin have no sympathy with or no desire to have political sectarianism connected with the Volunteers at all. We are strongly opposed to it and we hope better counsel will prevail and that this Volunteer movement, so full of promise, will not be wrecked at its very start.’

Mr. Kelly acknowledged that he spoke at the foundation meeting of Volunteers but then claims to have withdrawn: ‘I thought it best to keep out in order that the organisers of it would not be hampered by having pronounced politicians connected with it.’

He continued: ‘It is to be hoped it will not be like the ’98 movement, which was a great movement also until the same political sectarian spirit got into it and left it only a shadow.’

A watercolour of Frank Hugh O'Donnell by Theobald Chartran, published in Vanity Fair, 28 August 1880. Mr O'Donnell described the Irish Party's involvement in the Volunteers as 'the suicide of our self-defence'.(Image: © National Portrait Gallery, London)

Speaking from London, the veteran nationalist politician and journalist Frank Hugh O’Donnell, also opposed the initiative from the Irish Parliamentary Party: ‘Mr. Redmond’s suggestion to intrude the spirit of party into the military and national organisation of the Irish Volunteers would be the suicide of our self-defence. A military force can only be directed by discipline and soldiership, and the wild idea of putting Parliamentary nominees in the place of military instructors is the saddest revelation of factious stupidity ever known.’

Despite these objections, Eoin MacNeill and L.J. Kettle, on behalf of the Volunteers, appear to have agreed to John Redmond’s ultimatum to reconstitute the leadership of the organisation: ‘We are glad to recognise that the time has come when the Irish Parliamentary Party, with John Redmond at its head, have been able, owing to the development of the Irish Volunteer organisation on sound and well-defined national lines, to associate themselves by public declaration with a work which the nation has spontaneously taken in hands.’

A statement continued: ‘Their accession is all the more welcome since, from the outset of the Irish Volunteer movement, we have it our constant aim to bring about a whole and sincere unity of the Irish people on the grounds of national freedom.’