REDMOND, JOHN EDWARD (1856-1918), Irish poli tician, son of W. A. Redmond, M.P., was born at Ballytrent. He was educated at Trinity college, Dublin, and was called to the bar at Gray's Inn in 1886, and subsequently to the Irish bar, though he never practised. He was a clerk in the vote office of the House of Commons before he entered parliament in 1881 as member for New Ross. From 1885 to 1891 he represented North Wexford. As party whip he rendered great service to the Irish members by his thorough grasp of the procedure of the House. At the time of the rupture of the Irish party consequent on the Parnell scandals, Redmond was the most eloquent member of the minority who continued to recognize his leadership, and in 1891 he became the accredited leader of the Parnellites. In 590o the two nationalist parties were amalgamated under his leadership. He contested Cork unsuccessfully in but was elected for tx7-.4.-.4„...1 1 • - _ _ events under his leadership of the Irish parliamentary party up to 1910, see IRELAND: History; ENGLISH HISTORY, etc.).
Redmond obtained for the first time a position of real power in parliament after the general election in Jan. 191o. Though he had amalgamated the two Irish Nationalist parties under his own lead in 1900, he had never hitherto been able, owing to the large Unionist majority of 190o and the Liberal majority of 1906, to hold that balance of power in the House of Commons which had proved such a formidable weapon in the hands first of O'Connell and then of Parnell. But the reduction of the Liberal forces in Jan. 1910 made it impossible that Asquith's Government should long continue unless it found favour with Redmond.
The first use which he made of this new authority was to insist that Lloyd George's famous budget of 1909, on which the dis solution had turned, should be postponed till after the constitu tional resolutions directed against the House of Lords—his one object being to remove the veto of the Upper House, which was the main barrier against Home Rule. This order of procedure was also demanded by the Labour party and by the Radicals; and the Government complied. But Redmond pressed further for an assurance that the royal prerogative would be at the prime min ister's disposal to overbear any rejection by the Lords of the veto resolutions. He was impatient at the constitutional conference
called in the summer at the beginning of King George's reign to endeavour to discover a solution by consent, and went to America to secure sympathy and funds. The conference having broken down, he conducted a strenuous campaign on behalf of the minis terial programme for the second general election of the year, in spite of a harassing movement on his flank by a small party of independent Nationalists under O'Brien and Healy, who accused him of having sold the Irish vote to the government.
When the result of the polling had confirmed Redmond in his tenure of the balance of parliamentary power, he forwarded the progress of the Parliament bill in 1911 by the steady vote of his party. In the autumn he was regularly consulted on the details of the forthcoming Home Rule bill, and when the bill was intro duced, in April 1912, he procured its enthusiastic acceptance from a nationalist convention in Ireland. His speeches during its passage through parliament were, on the whole, moderate; he disclaimed separation but denounced any attempt to take Ulster out of the bill as a mutilation of Ireland. In token of the union of feeling between Nationalists and Liberals, he attended the meeting of the National Liberal Federation at Nottingham in Nov. 1912, and spoke for the first time on the same platform as Asquith. When the determined attitude of Ulster began to sug gest to the Liberals the advisability of compromise, Redmond was very loth to agree, denouncing the Unionists and Ulster as engaged in "a gigantic game of bluff and blackmail." He in sisted that Asquith's county option scheme was the extreme limit of concession. He was being pressed in Ireland by the rising power of Sinn Feiners and other extremists who had raised, in reply to Ulster, a great body of ioo,000 nationalist volunteers, over whom. Redmond only obtained control in June 1914 after a sharp strug gle. Nevertheless he took part, at the end of July in the abortive Buckingham Palace Conference.