William Hoey Kearney Redmond (13 April 1861 – 7 June 1917) was an Irish nationalist politician who served as a Member of Parliament (MP).

[1] After school he first apprenticed himself on a merchant sailing ship, then took a commission in the Wexford militia the Royal Irish Regiment on 24 December 1879 (Stephen Gwynn commenting "he was an instinctive soldier") .

In February 1882 he was arrested in possession of seditious literature and sentenced under the Irish Coercion Act and imprisoned for three months in Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, together with Parnell (with whom he shared a cell), William O'Brien, John Dillon and others.

He and his brother John Redmond then travelled to Australia in February 1883 to raise funds, collecting £15,000 sterling for the nationalist cause.

They developed close links with James Dalton of Orange, New South Wales, meeting two lady members of his wealthy and very influential family who later became their wives.

[1] During this decade many were his narrow escapes from capture by police during the Land League campaign when he and William O’Brien and others like them made the country ring with their exploits.

During the Parnell Commission he was cited as one of eight who had “established and joined the Land League organisation with the intent by its means to bring about the absolute independence of Ireland as a separate nation”.

[7] At the centre of Willie Redmond's political philosophy stood the belief he had inherited from his father on Irish home rule.

Home Rule was necessary he declared, because the Union has "depopulated our country, has fostered sectarian strife, has destroyed our industries, and ruined our liberties".

[9] He was ejected several times from the House of Commons for his verbal excesses and involved in several violent confrontations with Unionist MPs, but nevertheless remained popular even with his political opponents.

[12] In condemning the South Africa Boer War in 1899 he joined with the younger nationalists such as Arthur Griffith, James Connolly and Maud Gonne.

He addressed vast gatherings of Volunteers, Hibernians and the UIL, encouraging voluntary enlistment in support of the British and Allied war cause.

In November 1914 he made a famous last recruiting speech in Cork when standing at the open window of the Imperial Hotel he spoke to the crowd below:I speak as a man who bears the name of a relation who was hanged in Wexford in ’98—William Kearney.

I speak as a man with all the poor ability at his command has fought the battle for self-government for Ireland since the time—now thirty two years ago—when I lay in Kilmainham Prison with Parnell.

As a captain he commanded 'B' Company of his Battalion, and was soon in action, receiving a Mention in Dispatches from the British Expeditionary Force in France & Flanders Commander-in-Chief Douglas Haig.

[20] Redmond was convinced that the shared experience of the trenches was bringing Protestant and Catholic Irishmen together and overcoming the differences between Unionists and Nationalists.

In December 1916, he told his friend Arthur Conan Doyle: "It would be a fine memorial to the men who have died so splendidly if we could, over their graves, build up a bridge between North and South.

He petitioned that the British Government immediately introduce the suspended Home Rule Act, and presented the war as a chance to bring the two peoples in the island of Ireland together.

[1][23] The speech concluded: In the name of God, we here who are about to die, perhaps, ask you to do that which largely induced us to leave our homes; to do that which our mothers and fathers taught us to long for; to do that which is all we desire; make our country happy and contented, and enable us, when we meet the Canadians and the Australians and the New Zealanders side by side in the common cause and the common field, to say to them: 'our country, just as yours, has self-government within the Empire.'

[21] On 4 June 1917, three days before his death, at a dinner organised by officers of the 7th Leinsters, he made a speech in which he “prayed for the consumption of peace between North and South'.

Stretcher bearers from the 36th (Ulster) Division, one of them Private John Meeke of the 11th Inniskillings, who was himself wounded, brought him back into the British lines from no man's land, and he was conveyed to a Casualty Clearing Station at the Catholic Hospice at Locre (now Loker) in Dranoutre.

His detached 'lonely grave' came to be emblematic in the subsequent political passage of events in Ireland in the 20th Century of the dislocation and ambiguity that the Irish nation felt for its sons who had chosen to fight in the conflict.

[38] A further act of commemoration came with the unveiling in 1932 of a manuscript-style illuminated book of remembrance for the House of Commons, which includes a short biographical account of the life and death of Redmond.

Twenty-seven years after his last speech in the House of Commons in March 1917, Winston Churchill in April, 1944, speaking in a debate on the future of the Commonwealth, recalled what he called that gallant figure and reflected sadly that "maybe an opportunity was then lost".

[41] In the town of Wexford there is a bust of him by Oliver Sheppard in Redmond Park which was formally opened as a memorial to him in 1931 in the presence of a large crowd including many of his old friends and comrades and political representatives from all parts of Ireland.