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John Redmond is traditionally associated with Charles Stewart Parnell, whom he replaced at the head of the small Parnellite faction following the split of the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1890. More recently Redmond has been compared to Edward Carson in an attempt to highlight that, despite being political opponents, both men also shared much in common. Redmond might have succeeded Parnell as one of the senior figures of the Irish Home Rule movement and yet historians concur that he ‘did not resemble his erstwhile hero and mentor […] either in his power or in his style of leadership’. Beyond the question of leadership and political clout, it may also be suggested that Parnell was not the only figure that played an influence in shaping Redmond’s ideas and discourse. In a 2014 paper, Colin Reid contended that ‘[w]hile the Parnellite strand of John Redmond’s political leanings has received considerable attention in recent years, his Buttite inheritance remains to be explored by historians, shaping as it did his conciliatory rhetoric, imperial sensibilities and openness to a federalist solution’. Our proposed paper intends to further explore this suggestion and compare Isaac Butt and John Redmond. Personal lives, historiography and the questions of Home Rule, federalism and empire will be focused upon.

In Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-3749 (1992), I. F Clarke contends that 1871 inaugurated the emergence of a new type of predictive literature, which, in the next decades, became more ‘violent’, ‘vindictive’, and often ‘nationalistic’. The 1916 Rising was prepared in secret but the months and years immediately preceding it witnessed the publication of several well-known works of fiction clearly anticipating the armed revolution that was to come. Patrick Pearse’s plays such as The King (1914) or The Master (1915) have been interpreted as texts exploring the notions of redemptive self-sacrifice and violence as a means to achieve national independence. Similarly, The Revolutionist, a slightly earlier play by Terence MacSwiney (1912), may be read as a rejection of mere Home Rule and a plea for action and self-sacrifice. However, the idea that only an armed revolution could work as a viable solution to obtain Ireland’s independence was clearly toyed with decades earlier, notably in the anonymously published The Battle of Moy (1883). This article will examine this lesser known text in order to show how this example of 19th-century nationalist science fiction might have fostered the idea that only violent action and war could turn Ireland into a nation.