T.P. O'Connor returned to the charge with another demand for
Home Rule without further ado.
The debate on Mr. O'Connor's motion on the 7th of March was made
memorable by the speech of Major William Redmond, home on leave from the
trenches in France, whose sincere and impassioned appeal for oblivion of
old historic quarrels between Irish Catholics and Protestants, who were
at that moment fighting and dying side by side in France, made a deep
impression on the House of Commons and the country. And when this
gallant officer fell in action not long afterwards and was carried out
of the firing line by Ulster soldiers, his speech on the 7th of March
was recalled and made the peg on which to hang many adjurations to
Ulster to come into line with their Nationalist fellow-countrymen of the
South.
Such appeals revealed a curious inability to grasp the realities of the
situation. Men spoke and wrote as if it were something new and wonderful
for Irishmen of the "two nations" to be found fighting side by side in
the British Army--as if the same thing had not been seen in the
Peninsula, in the Crimea, on the Indian frontier, in South Africa, and
in many another fight.
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