Leadership Quote by John Edward Redmond

Redmond’s sentence is a courtroom brief disguised as ceremony: he draws a hard line between power and legitimacy, then dares his audience to pretend they’re the same. “Altho that is so” concedes the brute fact of the Act of Union’s existence, but only to strip it of the one thing empires most need - consent. By splitting the objection into “legally or morally,” he’s building a two-front case. If Westminster insists the paperwork is valid, Redmond shifts the battlefield to ethics and national self-respect; if critics accuse him of sentiment, he replies that legality itself is in dispute. Either way, the Union becomes something endured, not owned.

The key verb isn’t “denied” but “assembled.” This is politics as choreography: gathering bodies on a “historic occasion” turns dissent into an institution, a repeatable public ritual rather than a flare-up. “Renew our protest” signals continuity, not rebellion for rebellion’s sake. He’s claiming a stable national memory that outlasts administrations and arrests. “To place it upon record” is a procedural phrase with bite: Redmond is future-proofing the argument, speaking to historians and international opinion as much as to London. It’s a bid to make Ireland’s case legible in the language of constitutionalism.

In the Home Rule era’s tightrope walk - parliamentary strategy under the shadow of militant nationalism - Redmond’s intent is to keep the moral temperature high while the method stays officially respectable. The subtext: the Union may govern Ireland, but it will never settle Ireland.