Ancestral voices is an extended essay interpreting the parallel political careers of John Dillon and Charles Stewart Parnell between their rise to political prominence in the 1870s and the end of Dillon’s life following defeat and disillusionment in the independent Ireland of the 1920s. Paul Bew draws heavily on his earlier life of Parnell and counterpoints his arguments with those of previous biographers, most especially F. S. L. Lyons in his lengthy studies of both men. The title points to the significance of ‘ancestral voices’ in shaping their converging and diverging political personas, highlighting Parnell’s ‘patriotic’ antecedents and Dillon’s milieu of the rural Catholic bourgeoisie and more specific formation by the Young Ireland coterie in which his father played such a prominent role. Whether Bew intends Parnell and Dillon to serve as ‘ancestral voices’ to be heeded in our own time is a bit more opaque. As he observes in the foreword, of the two decisive choices made by the Irish people that have framed our contemporary sense of the past, the first — the 1918 electoral victory of Sinn Féin that retrospectively validated the 1916 Easter Rising — appeared to shunt to the sidelines the politics of home rule they both embodied. In contrast, the second — the enshrining of the principle of consent regarding the reunification of the island in the dual referenda of 1998 — should draw our attention back to the complex ways in which both Parnell and Dillon struggled with, but ultimately endorsed, that principle with reference to Ulster and the broader politics of conciliation.

Given his longer lifespan and the relative paucity of scholarly discussion of his life, this book has more to offer on judging Dillon. Parnell features more as his sparring partner or uneasy (at best) ally from their first encounters around the time of the Meath by-election of 1875 to the ghostly presence that overshadowed Dillon following Parnell’s premature death in 1891. Dillon himself is presented as the conflicted product of a mix of inherited Catholic hostility towards the landed ascendancy and the complex and contradictory nationalist legacies of Young Ireland. His political apprenticeship, as aide to John Mitchel during the latter’s turbulent return to Ireland in 1873–5, appeared at first to reconcile these inheritances, and Dillon certainly came to embody Mitchel’s ideological fury over state and landed responsibility for the Great Famine. However, this meant turning a blind eye to his continuing brash defence of slavery and putting aside for the moment the more meliorist and liberal stance adopted by his father John Blake Dillon after 1848. This tension between the emotional pull of Mitchelism, and the pragmatic and intellectual attractions of liberalism (and ultimately of the Liberal Party alliance from 1886) became the central dynamic of Dillon’s political life.

The Irish land crisis of the late 1870s drew Dillon and Parnell closer together and into an alliance with Michael Davitt and the neo-Fenians leading to the Land League in 1879. Both travelled to the U.S.A. that year to raise funds from Irish Americans, with Parnell modulating his rhetoric more closely to Dillon’s as circumstances demanded. Back in Ireland, however, Dillon found himself increasingly alienated by Parnell’s tactically fluid, but ultimately non-revolutionary, parliamentary strategy and acquired a public reputation for intemperate words and actions. He was highly sceptical of the compromises at the heart of the 1882 Kilmainham Treaty, to the extent of resigning his seat and then taking several years out as a rancher in Colorado.

The rising prospects of home rule drew Dillon back to the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1885, even while he regarded Parnell’s new emphasis on class conciliation in Ireland and tactical alliance with the British Conservatives distasteful. When the renewed compact with Gladstone did not produce the desired legislation on self-government or agrarian reform, Dillon impetuously put himself at the forefront of a new round of land agitation — the Plan of Campaign — winning popularity in the countryside at the cost of Parnell’s antagonism. Unionist coercion and legal threats temporarily prevented an open breach, but this ended explosively with the Parnell divorce scandal and the latter’s refusal to accept Liberal demands that he step down from party leadership. The resultant split, Bew observes, transformed Dillon’s political identity from a firebrand of the agrarian left to a hardline advocate of the Liberal alliance for home rule, a stance that would ultimately end in disappointment and the disintegration of the I.P.P. by 1918.

Parnell’s 1891 Belfast speech appeared to signal a belated acknowledgement of the ‘principle of consent’ on the national question, a pragmatic stance inherited by Dillon’s rival for nationalist leadership, John Redmond. Nevertheless, Dillon also came to regard any coercion of the north with distaste and, reluctantly, to accept the principle of some form of partition, preferably temporary, by 1913–14. Against the odds, he clung to the hope that some constitutional compromise might still be possible long after Easter 1916. This was not to be. W. E. Forster’s ‘honest and melancholy desperado’ of 1881 had declined into W. B. Wells’s ‘mere ghost lingering superfluous on the political scene’ (183–4). Bew’s achievement is to draw this complex figure out from behind Parnell’s shadow and trace his legacies to modern Ireland.