Scholarly interest in John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party has revived in recent years with significant offerings from James McConnel, Conor Mulvagh, Alvin Jackson and Stephen Duffy. In his contribution, Irish liberty, British democracy, James Doherty seeks to extend the thesis of Eugenio Biagini's British democracy and Irish nationalism, 1876–1906 (2007) to the third home rule crisis. Both books argue for the centrality of Irish home rule to the ideology of British Liberals, with Doherty setting out to demonstrate how it enabled Redmond to harness sections of Liberal opinion, especially its radical wing, for the purpose of applying pressure on the Liberal prime minister, Herbert Asquith. In doing so he challenges Patricia Jalland's contention in The Liberals and Ireland (1980) that rank-and-file Liberals exerted only a negligible influence over Asquith. Doherty goes further still, arguing that it was Redmond's ‘potential for splitting the Liberal Party, even more than the possible defection of the seventy-odd Irish nationalist votes in the House of Commons, that constrained Asquith's freedom of action’ (p. 9).

The focus on Redmond and his attempts to exploit disaffection in Liberal ranks, and to manage the same destabilising phenomenon in his own party, dominates Doherty's narrative. It produces some of the book's more interesting interpretations, such as its presentation of the main party conflict in this period not as Liberal versus Conservative, but as the Irish Parliamentary Party versus the Liberal and Conservative front benches, particularly on the question of the special treatment to be given to Ulster. Not subject to the Liberal whip, Doherty contends that Redmond was often cast as the spokesman for backbench Liberal discontent, especially among the party's old radicals, though he is careful to acknowledge that the Irish leader's liberal credentials were doubtful across a range of issues, from women's franchise to free trade. But Doherty's determined defence of Redmond's motives and tactics in securing any home rule bill from the Liberal government also leads to less convincing detours and counterfactuals, such as the great weight placed on the potential for Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism to reach an agreement on temporary exclusion, but for the outbreak of the First World War. Moreover, the detail given to the internal dynamics of Irish nationalism is not matched by the book's treatment of the Liberal side of the equation. The latter is arguably its most original contribution, yet Liberal opinion is largely gleaned from a select number of periodicals, pamphlets and the correspondence of several contemporary figures, not all of them British Liberals. As a result, there is comparatively little on the actions and views of Liberal parliamentarians of all hues, and the emphasis on vertical tensions in the party is at the expense of examining its horizontal divisions and strains. In explaining and justifying Redmond's tactics in dealing with British liberalism, there is also the danger of overemphasising the Liberal Party's internal problems. The requirements of statecraft inevitably arouse the concern of backbenchers and out-of-doors supporters of whichever party is in government. This dynamic was especially noticeable in the tense circumstances of Edwardian politics, when many ordinary Liberals and Conservatives, let alone Irish Nationalists and Ulster Unionists, tended to equate ‘democracy’ with their respective partisan outlooks and agendas.

The value of Irish liberty, British democracy is in drawing attention to Redmond's attempts to exploit this situation for his own ends, and how this became caught up in his struggle to retain control over Irish nationalism and at the same time deal effectively with the Ulster question. Doherty addresses the various contending forces on the ground that buttressed and battered Redmond, Asquith and even Carson, and as such his account is not a traditional high politics approach to the period. Yet, he persists in viewing these phenomena from the Olympian perspective of the party leaders and concludes the book with the hope that the ‘foregoing analysis in no way downplays the perfidy of Asquith and his colleagues, nor the root cause of the acute crisis in 1914: British Conservatives’ cynical exploitation of Ulster as an electoral card in the game of domestic politics’ (p. 236). It is a curious note on which to end a book that opens with the argument that Redmond should not be seen as a passive victim of British duplicity or as a foredoomed political leader in the unfolding crisis that led ultimately to the growth of advanced nationalism and the partition of Ireland.