In my opinion these modifications of the Bill were never adequately discussed in the meetings of the Irish party.  All was done between the Government and Redmond’s inner cabinet, consisting of Redmond himself, Mr. Dillon, Mr. Devlin and Mr. T.P.  O’Connor.  The negotiations were most delicate and difficult, and above all secrecy is hard to maintain when a body of over seventy men, each keenly concerned for the view of his constituents, comes to be consulted.  Yet I think it a pity that the party never thrashed this question out.  Once the principle of option was admitted, a great deal had to be considered.  Voting must be a referendum either to the province as a whole, to the constituencies separately, or to local units of administration.  A referendum by constituencies was as impossible as one by parishes:  for instance, Mr. Devlin’s West Belfast, out of the city’s four divisions, would certainly have voted to remain under the Irish Parliament, and an absurd situation would have resulted.  The choice lay between a vote by counties or by the province as a whole.  In the province, three counties out of nine were as predominantly Nationalist as any part of Leinster.  In two others, Tyrone and Fermanagh, Nationalists were about 55 per cent of the electorate.  But the bulk of the population of Ulster resided in four counties of the north-east, so that Protestants over the whole province had a majority of some two hundred thousand.  An appeal to the province, therefore, might involve the exclusion from Home Rule of a very large area which was thoroughly Nationalist.  On the other hand, every scheme of exclusion had in view the possibility of the excluded area changing its mind on the question after a short trial.  To separate the four overwhelmingly Protestant counties was to set up a body in which a change of vote would be much harder to bring about than in the province.  As a matter of statesmanship there was much to be said for closing with the Ulstermen’s original demand that the province should come in or stay out as a whole.  It satisfied Ulster’s sentiment and lessened the chances of crystallizing a Protestant block of excluded territory, which would tend to become less and less Irish.

The answer to this was that Nationalists would never consent and did never consent to the possibility of permanent exclusion for any part.  Insistence on the time-limit was from this point of view a matter of absolute principle.  Yet many believed then, and believe now, that if any part of Ulster were excluded by legislation it would certainly come in voluntarily after a short period.  On the other hand, if any part were excluded even for a year, it was difficult to believe that it could ever be brought in except by its own consent.  The view, however, to which we were committed (with the party’s general approval), was expressed by Redmond at the customary St. Patrick’s Day Nationalist banquet in London.