BRITISH AND FOREIGN NEWS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIV, Issue 18, 20 July 1907, Page 13

BRITISH AND FOREIGN NEWS.

SPECTATOR SUMMARY (For week ending Saturday, 25th May.) MR. REDMOND'S CONSISTENCY. The Irish Nationalist Convention, attended by upwards of three thousand delegates from all parts of the country, met in Dublin on Tuesday, and unanimously rejected the Government's Irish Council Bill. Mr. John Redmond, who presided, moved tho rejection in a long speech largely devoted to a vindication of hia own consistency. He b^gar by vigorously repudiating the insinuation that he and other leaders of the Parliamentary Party were committed to tho Bill or to the Government, and declared, on the contrary, that the fr-mers of the Bill had entirely refused the advice he had given them as to the only safe basis on which the new council could be founded. But he could not have denounced the Bill directly it was introduced without breaking , his solemn pledge to submit the Bill to THE convention. Mr. Redmond quoted at length from his speeches to show that ho was committed all along to reject any proposal calculated to injuro the power and prestige of the Irish Party, his first and greatest policy, overshadowing everything else, being to pl'eser'v-e a unitod National Party in Parliament, and he now stood before them to fulfil that pledge. Mr. Redmond indignantly repudiated the charge that they had refused a better scheme offered them three years ago by the Tory Party. With all its faults, the present Bill was r. thousand ' times better tSan the Devolution scheme of Lord Dunraven, which, moreover, was never offered to them.