What followed is so faithfully and impartially related in Mr O’Brien’s book, An Olive Branch in Ireland, that I reproduce it: 

“One of our first cares on my return to Cork was to restore vitality to the labourer’s cause, and formulate for the first time a precise legislative scheme on which they might take their stand as their charter.  This scheme was placed before the country at a memorable meeting in Macroom on December 10, 1904, and whoever will take the trouble of reading it will find therein all the main principles and even details of the great measure subsequently carried into law in 1906.  The Irish Land and Labour Association, which was the organisation of the labourers, unanimously adopted the scheme, and commissioned their Secretary, Mr J.J.  Shee, M.P., in their name, to solicit the co-operation of the Directory of the United Irish League in convening a friendly Conference of all Irish parties and sections for the purpose of securing the enactment of a Labourers’ Bill on these lines as a non-contentious measure.  If common ground was to be found anywhere on which all Irishmen, or at the worst all Nationalists, might safely grasp hands, and with a most noble aim, it was surely here.  But once more Mr Dillon scented some new plot against the unity and authority of the Irish Party, and at the Directory meeting of the secretary of the Land and Labour Association was induced without any authority from his principals to abandon their invitation, and thus take the first step to the disruption of his own association.

“I bowed and held my peace, to see what another year might bring forth through the efforts of those who had made a national agreement upon the subject impracticable.  Another year dragged along without a Labourers’ Bill, or any effort of the Irish Party to bring it within the domain of practical politics.  The Land and Labour Association determined to rouse the Government and the country to the urgency of the question by an agitation of an unmistakable character.  Mr Redmond, Mr Dillon and all their chief supporters were invariably invited to these demonstrations; but the moment they learned that Mr Harrington, Mr Healy and myself had been invited as well, a rigorous decree of boycott went forth against the Labour demonstrations, and as a matter of fact no representative of the Irish Party figured on the Labourers’ platform throughout the agitation.  This, unfortunately, was not the most inexcusable of their services to the Labourers’ cause.  When the Land and Labour Association held their annual Convention, the secretary, who had infringed their instructions at the Directory meeting, finding himself hopelessly outnumbered, seceded from the organisation and formed a rival association of his own; and sad and even shocking though the fact is, it is beyond dispute that this split in the ranks of the unhappy labourers, in the very crisis of their cause, was organised with the aid of the moneys of the National Organisation administered by the men who were at that very moment deafening the country with their indignation against dissension-mongers and their zeal for majority rule.