Thirty years ago R.T.É. featured a Thomas Davis lecture series that was subsequently published as a book of essays edited by Ciarán Brady entitled, Worsted in the game: losers in Irish history (Dublin, 1989). Not surprisingly, perhaps, John Redmond figured prominently in that fraternity. Was he a loser? Certainly Redmond, the Irish Parliamentary Party and the home rule movement were overtaken by the dramatic events of the early twentieth century – the Ulster revolt, the founding of the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Irish Volunteers, the outbreak of the First World War, the 1916 Rising, the collapse of subsequent negotiations, the conscription crisis, and finally the disastrous election result in December 1918. Following hard upon those events were the emergence of Sinn Féin, the election of Dáil Éireann, the War of Independence, the creation of the Irish Free State, the Civil War, Eamon de Valera's 1937 constitution, and eventually Ireland's leaving the British Commonwealth. The result was a new Ireland, in which the old issues that had surrounded John Redmond and home rule seemed increasingly remote. Indeed, if a home rule parliament had been brought into being without controversy in 1912, would such a government have proved satisfactory as the politically turbulent twentieth century unfolded? A difficult question for which there is no certain answer.

Within the last few years several full-scale biographies of John Redmond have appeared – Joseph P. Finnan, John Redmond and Irish unity, 1912–1918 (Syracuse, 2004), Dermot Meleady, John Redmond: the Parnellite (Cork, 2008) and John Redmond: the national leader (Dublin, 2014), and now Chris Dooley's Redmond: a life undone (Dublin, 2015) – the first since the 1930s. They remind us of just how close the parliamentary, constitutional process came to resolving the problems arising out of the Act of Union and the subsequent Irish question of the nineteenth century. These were extremely dramatic events and after the 1910 elections the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Liberals formed a comfortable majority in the House of Commons and were able to reform the House of Lords so that chamber could delay but not defeat legislation. This made the passage of a home rule measure seem inevitable and John Redmond appeared to be the prime minister-in-waiting of the new Irish parliament. The reader is given an insight into the sense of momentum and tension behind the parliamentary process and the perception that home rule was a fact.

Of course the ominous counter theme of unionist resistance challenged these parliamentary procedures and the Liberal government became increasingly preoccupied with devising a form of compromise that would give most of Ireland a form of self-rule but leave some portion of Ulster beyond the jurisdiction of a Dublin government. A downward spiral of disastrous and unanticipated events intervened, beginning in 1914 and continuing through 1918. Steadily the whole home rule parliamentary process disintegrated and John Redmond, rather than becoming the triumphant premier of a restored Irish parliament, was reduced to the role of a tragic figure in Irish history, one of those ‘worsted in the game’.

Dooley's book is a political biography of Redmond, beginning with the events in 1909 and 1910, but it is also a history of the home rule movement up to its collapse and Redmond's death in 1918. Dooley, an Irish Times journalist rather than an academic historian, is very good in recreating the colour and excitement of the rallies and parades and speeches that constituted the campaign to win home rule, drawing on newspapers and Hansard to provide vivid descriptions. In addition to his research in the major newspapers of the time, Dooley also makes extensive use of the manuscript collections of John Redmond, John Dillon, David Lloyd George, and Andrew Bonar Law. These are rich collections of both incoming and outgoing correspondence and memoranda, and give the reader a sense of the immediacy of the events unfolding.

However, the reader might well ask why the papers of a number of other key actors in the home rule drama were not consulted, such as those of Prime Minister Herbert H. Asquith or perhaps the Ulster Unionist leader Sir Edward Carson. Also worrying is the deliberate omission of annotation. The author notes that he has signalled the source of his extensive quotations in the text, but such general allusions are not very helpful for either scholars or students. The book, therefore, is a very vivid and readable account of John Redmond and the collapse of the home rule movement, perfect perhaps as an introduction to the general reader, but for the more serious student it will need to be augmented by the more recent scholarly studies of Finnan and Meleady. As for John Redmond, despite home rule being shouldered aside, it seems quite unfair to dismiss him as one of Ireland's historic ‘losers’. Rather perhaps he is more accurately described as one of modern Ireland's most tragic figures; certainly his was ‘a life undone’.