John Dillon

John Dillon (born Sept. 8, 1851, Blackrock, County Dublin, Ire.—died Aug. 4, 1927, London, Eng.) was a leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party (Irish Nationalist Party) in the struggle to secure Home Rule by parliamentary means. Through the 1880s he was perhaps the most important ally of the greatest 19th-century Irish nationalist, Charles Stewart Parnell, but, after Parnell’s involvement as corespondent in a divorce case, Dillon repudiated him for reasons of political prudence.

The son of Irish patriot John Blake Dillon (1814–66), John Dillon was a member of the British House of Commons during 1880–83 and 1885–1918. For his vigorous work in the Irish Land League, which sought fixed tenure, fair rents, and free sale of Irish land, he was imprisoned twice between May 1881 and May 1882 and was Parnell’s fellow inmate in Kilmainham jail, Dublin, from October 1881. For six months in 1888 he was imprisoned for aiding William O’Brien, author of the “plan of campaign” against high rent charges by English absentee landlords in Irish farming districts.

When Parnell was named corespondent in Capt. William Henry O’Shea’s divorce suit in 1890, Dillon and O’Brien at first affirmed their support of him, but they finally decided that he would thenceforth be a liability as party leader. The party then split, the anti-Parnellite majority forming the Irish Nationalist Federation, of which Dillon served as chairman from 1896. In 1900, however, he agreed to join a reunited party under the Parnellite John Redmond.

During the prime ministry (1902–05) of Arthur James Balfour, Dillon came to believe that the British Conservative government intended to grant Irish reforms without independence, thereby “killing Home Rule by kindness.” In 1905 he advised Irishmen to vote for Liberal Party candidates for Parliament, and, after the Liberals had taken office that year, he supported their reform program. Throughout World War I he vehemently opposed the extension of British military conscription to Ireland, both because that measure would strengthen the agitation by the more extreme nationalist Sinn Féin (“We Ourselves” or “Ourselves Alone”) party and because he never accepted the view that British imperial interests necessarily coincided with those of Ireland. After the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, Dillon protested against the harsh measures that ensued and, in the House of Commons, made a passionate speech in defense of the Irish rebels.

On Redmond’s death (March 6, 1918), Dillon, who had broken with him over Irish support for the British war effort, succeeded him as Nationalist Party leader. By that time, however, the party had been discredited, and in the election of December 1918 Sinn Féin won easily. On losing his House of Commons seat to Eamon de Valera (afterward president of the Republic of Ireland), Dillon retired from politics.