In a short period it produced a unanimously agreed report recommending an amiable solution to the long waged land war between tenant farmers and their landlords.
[7] When the Chief Secretary for Ireland George Wyndham introduced a Land Purchase Bill early in 1902 which fell deplorably short of the necessities of the situation, the UIL wanted no paltry compromises and entered upon a virile campaign against the rack-renters.
[8] Captain John Shaw-Taylor (the younger son of a Galway landlord and a nephew of Lady Gregory's) set out a proposal for a landlord-tenant conference in the following terms: "For the last two hundred years the land war has rages fiercely and continuously, bearing in its train stagnation of trade, paralysis of commercial business and enterprise and producing hatred and bitterness between various sections and classes of the community " He went on to invite a number of fellow landlords and Irish Nationalist MPs to a Conference in Dublin at which " An honest, simple suggestion will be submitted and I am confident that a settlement will be arrived at".
On the Nationalist side, John Redmond MP, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, indicated on two occasions that he was in favour of conciliation, even if the landlords had to get better terms than they deserved from their history.
[14] After publication of the Shawe-Taylor letter which proposed O'Brien, Redmond, Timothy Harrington MP and Russell as the tenant representative, there was enough conciliation in the air to generate a scheme that would bring the parties together.
[18] After only six sittings, a unanimously agreed conference report proposing a vast purchase scheme along the lines framed by O'Brien, seven of the eight of the tenant's requirements were conceded outright, the eight covered by a compromise,[19] was published 4 January 1903.
[22] The calm was first ruffled by Archbishop Walsh of Dublin, who, although the Bishop's Standing Committee expressed approval of the Report, in letters to the Freeman's Journal he challenged the accuracy of certain figures.
Dillon regarded O'Brien's enthusiasm for the Conference policy with deepening suspicion and had begun to diverge from the line taken by his friends, with consequences which in the long term were to be momentous.
[27] As the bill progressed through Parliament, O'Brien became convinced that the conference method could bring other social reforms and secure unionist consent for limited self-government, developing into full Home Rule.
The deep divisions this created were initially kept in check but the opposition of Dillon, Michael Davitt, Thomas Sexton MP and his daily Freeman's Journal to the collaboration between nationalists, landlords and a Conservative Government intensified.
[34] Although the Act resulted in vastly extended sales of entire estates – and in this regard deserves to be characterised as revolutionary, the adversary campaign led by Dillon, Davitt and Sexton which claimed it was a landlord victory, created a climax of disillusionment.
[30] Added aggravation came from Arthur Griffith who denounced the Land Conference as a landlord swindle and seized on Dillon's reaction to prove the party self-confessed incompetents.
Redmond balked fearing a rupture with Sexton, Dillon and Davitt, all respected veterans of the Land War, would cause a split and the end of unity in the party.
[38] William O'Brien, distressed and marginalised by Dillon's assault, told Redmond on 4 November 1903 he was retiring from Parliament and the UIL Directory, withdrawing from public life and closing the Irish People.
[39] O'Brien embarked on a lengthy career of independent opposition to the Parliamentary party and although he briefly returned, together with Healy, in January 1908 in the interest of unity and to test the strategy of conciliation again, disappointment remained his lot.
When in 1917 Lloyd George and Redmond called the Irish Convention in an attempt to win over Ulster for a Home Rule settlement, O'Brien declined an invitation to attend on the grounds that it could not succeed with a hundred and one delegates.
His proposal to reduce the numbers to a dozen genuinely representative Irishmen from North and South, on the lines of the Land Conference, was not accepted, the Convention consequently ending as he predicted in disagreement.
In Ulster Unionist eyes this added particular sinister significance to the whole affair, scented a political conspiracy and were outraged that a permanent official should dare to tamper with the sacred British connection.
[44] Nationalist leaders taken by surprise by the Association's proposals, reacted ambiguously, Redmond at first greeted the devolution scheme, then sided with Dillon who was vehemently against it, regarding the Irish party as the only standard bearer of self-government.
[44] The Dunraven group were atypical of their cast, but for a time combined with O'Brien's sense of nationalism and Healy's opportunism, produced with the Land Conference—one of the most sustained and extensive attempts at unionist-nationalist co-operation in the twentieth century.
[45] On the other hand, the Dillonite dogma of hostility towards any form of reconciliation or conference between agnostic classes and conflicting parties, that is, towards any collaboration with the hereditary enemy at any level, precipitated into subsequent events on the political stage in Ireland up to the end of the century.