“To agree to the permanent partition of Ireland would be,” he said, “an outrage upon nature and upon history.”  He quoted a phrase used by Mr. Austen Chamberlain, who had described it as “the statutory negation of Ireland’s national claim.”  But, he argued, no such sacrifice of principle had been made.  The demand of Nationalists was for a Parliament for the whole of Ireland, having power to deal with “every purely Irish matter.”  Temporary limitations of this demand had already been accepted.

“We have agreed, as Parnell agreed in the Bill of 1886, and as we all agreed in the Bill of 1893, that the power of dealing with some of the most vital of Irish questions should not come within the purview of the new Parliament for a definite number of years.”  The control of police, for instance, was reserved to the Imperial Parliament in all those Bills for a term of years.  But this did not mean that Parnell or we abandoned Ireland’s right to manage her own police.  Reservation of the police in perpetuity would have been impossible to accept.  In the same way, said Redmond, “the automatic ending of any period of exclusion is for us a fixed and immutable principle.”

To maintain this conformity with national sentiment great advantages were sacrificed.  The whole debates of this period turned on the question of the time-limit.  If it had never been raised, opposition would still have existed, but the fact would have been plain from the outset that Protestant Ulster claimed to dictate not only where it had the majority, but where the majority was against it.  Redmond probably believed that the opinion of Nationalists in the North could not be brought to consent to abandonment of the time-limit.  If so, he probably underrated, then as always, the influence he possessed.  It is always easy to persuade Irishmen that if you are going to do a thing you should do it “decently.”  What is more, a real effect could have been produced on much moderate opinion in Ulster by saying to Ulster:  “Stay out if you like, and come in when you like.  When you come in, you will be more than welcome.”  But the decision for this course would have needed to be taken before the proposals were made, since any attempt to enlarge them was bound to renew and intensify the inevitable storm of Nationalist dissent.  Whatever the proposal, it should have been absolutely the last word of concession.

If a clear proposal of local option by counties without time-limit had been put before Parliament and the electorate, I do not think our position in Ireland would have been worse than it was made by the proposal of temporary exclusion, and it would have been greatly strengthened in Parliament and in the United Kingdom.  All moderate men, and many pronounced Unionists, were becoming uneasy under the perpetual menace of trouble.  Events which now followed rapidly turned the uneasiness into grave anxiety, but did not turn it to the profit of the Government.