Mr O’Brien having retired from Cork, the vacancy should, in the ordinary course, have been filled in the course of a few weeks.  But the Nationalists of “the City by the Lee” made it clear that they wanted no other representative than Mr O’Brien, and they forbade the issue of a writ for a new election.  And so there was the extraordinary spectacle of a people who voluntarily disfranchised themselves rather than give up the last hope of a policy of National Conciliation in which they descried a Home Rule settlement by Consent as surely as the abolition of landlordism already decreed.  As an example of loyalty and personal devotion, as well as of patriotic foresight, it would be difficult to parallel it.  Towards the close of the session of 1904 Mr Jasper Tully, a more or less free lance member of the Party, took it upon himself to play them the trick of moving the writ for a new election.  And the Nationalists of Cork knew their own business so well that, without a line of communication with Mr O’Brien, they had him nominated and re-elected without anybody dreaming that anything else was humanly possible.  There were no conditions attaching to Mr O’Brien’s re-election.  He was free to rejoin the Irish Party if it should resume its position of twelve months ago or to remain out of it if a policy of mere destruction were persisted in.  He was re-elected because the people of Cork had the most absolute confidence in his integrity, good faith and political judgment, and because they were convinced that his return to public life represented the only hope of the resumption of the great policy in which their confidence never for a moment wavered.

Within a week of Mr O’Brien’s re-election an event took place which once again made it possible for him to take up the threads of his policy where he had surrendered them.  The landlords’ Conference Committee, to the number of three hundred of the leading Irish nobles and country gentlemen, met in Dublin and resolved themselves into a new Association, under Lord Dunraven’s leadership, which was named the Irish Reform Association.  It immediately issued a manifesto proclaiming “a policy of conciliation, of good will and of reform,” by means of “a union of all moderate and progressive opinion irrespective of creed or class animosities,” with the object of “the devolution to Ireland of a large measure of self-government” without disturbing the Parliamentary Union between Great Britain and Ireland.

Within three days of the publication of the manifesto Mr Redmond, who was on a mission to the States pleading for Irish-American support, cabled:  “The announcement [of the Irish Reform Association] is of the utmost importance.  It is simply a declaration for Home Rule and is quite a wonderful thing.  With these men with us Home Rule may come at any moment.”  It is known that the idea of the Irish Reform Association had been talked over between Mr Wyndham, Lord Dunraven and Sir Antony MacDonnell, but it is probable that it would never have emerged into the concrete if the Cork election had not opened up the prospect of a fair and sympathetic national hearing for a project of self-government, now advocated for the first time by a body of Unionist Irishmen.  Mr Redmond’s fervid message from America also was as plain a welcome to the new movement for genuine national unity as words could express.  But “the fly was in the ointment nevertheless.”