FORMER TAOISEACH John Bruton yesterday unveiled a monument erected at Woodenbridge, Co Wicklow, to mark the speech which John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, made there nearly 100 years ago.
The monument marked the spot where he delivered his speech under an oak tree at Woodenbridge Golf Club to the Wicklow section of Irish Volunteers in September 1914. He was on his way home from the House of Commons when he made his way to Woodenbridge, where, it is said, he addressed upwards of 10,000 people.
Mr Bruton said: “John Redmond’s achievement was enormous. Relying on wholly constitutional and parliamentary methods, he had succeeded where O’Connell, Butt and Parnell had all failed – he actually got Home Rule on to the statute book.”
He also said that the rebels of Easter Week 1916 were allied with imperial Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. “The morality of this ‘alliance’ has never been seriously questioned or debated in Ireland in the past century and perhaps it is time that it was.”