Mr. Dillon, however, thought it better not to serve, though Redmond pressed him very strongly to do so.  He considered he could best help the Convention from outside its ranks.  Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Healy had, on different grounds, come to the same conclusion, so that we lacked the assistance of three commanding personalities in Irish life, though we were thereby freed from some dangers of personal friction.  A vacant place was thus left in our five, and since the Ulster party had decided to put in only two members of Parliament, filling the other places with local men, it was thought well that we should take a similar representative, Mr. Harbison, who spoke for the county of Tyrone.

Of the four representatives of the hierarchy, Archbishop Harty of Cashel had always been a downright outspoken supporter of the Parliamentary party.  He had publicly denounced the rebellion both on civil and on moral grounds.  But he had never been prominently concerned with political affairs as such; nor had the Bishop of Down and Connor, Dr. MacRory, a man young for his office and not long in it.  He had been chosen, no doubt, to guard the special interests of Catholicism in the north-east corner.  The others were of a very different stamp; no two in Ireland had a better right to the name of statesmen.  Dr. O’Donnell, the Bishop of Raphoe, had been for many years officially one of the treasurers of the United Irish League.  Since the foundation of the Congested Districts Board, he had been one of its members, and served on the Dudley Commission which inquired into these regions.  His native Donegal could show the traces of his influence in applying remedial measures to what was once its terrible poverty.  Dr. Kelly, the Bishop of Ross, came from the extreme south of the same western coast-line; a keen student of finance and economics, he had been a member of the Primrose Committee on Financial Relations, and, before that, of Lord George Hamilton’s Commission on the Poor Law.  His repute was great in his own order and outside his own order.  In any assembly these two brains would have been distinguished.

The question which was discussed among us chiefly on that evening concerned the choice of a chairman.  Government had originally proposed to nominate this all-important officer, but having failed to solve the interminable difficulties, had left it to the assembly.  Much trouble was anticipated by the public.  On the whole, our conclusion pointed, but not decisively, to the choice which was eventually made.  Redmond swept aside peremptorily the suggestion of himself.

Next day we assembled—­some ninety persons.  The main bulk consisted of local representatives—­thirty-one chairmen of County Councils, one only having declined to serve.  Two of these, Mr. O’Dowd and Mr. Fitzgibbon, were members of our party.  There were eight representatives of the Urban Councils, over and above the Lord Mayors of Dublin, Belfast and Cork and the Mayor of Derry.  Labour had seven representatives, one of whom, Mr. Lundon, representing the Agricultural Labourers’ Union of the South, was an Irish member of Parliament.  One was a railway operative from Dublin; one a Catholic Trade-Unionist leader from Derry; the remaining four came from Belfast.  Organized labour in Dublin and the Southern towns had endorsed Sinn Fein’s attitude and declined to recognize the Convention.