D. D. Sheehan - All-for-Ireland League

All-for-Ireland League

By 1907 there were seven earlier Irish Party MPs outside of the party. Proposals to reunite the party were made by both O'Brien and the Irish Party leader John Redmond with a meeting summoned for the Mansion House, Dublin in April 1908. Sheehan, O'Brien and others rejoined the party temporarily for the sake of unity. However when Redmond called a National Convention for February 1909 to discuss amended funding of the 1903 Land Purchase Act, it ended with O'Brien and Sheehan being again driven from the party at what became known as the Baton Convention. It was "probably the stormiest meeting ever held by constitutional nationalists".

Subsequently, together with D. D. Sheehan as its organising honorary secretary, William O'Brien then inaugurated his new political movement, the All-for-Ireland League (AFIL) in Kanturk, March 1909. The League was a distinctively new political group whose deep conviction was that the success of a United Ireland parliament must depend on Irish Home Rule being won with the consent rather than by the compulsion of the Protestant minority. The political slogan of the AFIL was "the Three C's" – for Conference, Conciliation and Consent as applied to Irish politics, particularly to Home Rule. Sheehan rejected the Party leader Redmond's uncompromising "Ulster will have to follow" approach to Home Rule. The political activist Canon Sheehan of Doneraile was also a central AFIL founder member.

Prophetically farsighted, both Sheehan and O'Brien advocated granting Ulster every conceivable concession to overcome its fears of a Catholic-dominated Dublin parliament, as otherwise an All-Ireland settlement would fail. The two Sheehans contributed regularly to the League's newspaper the Cork Free Press, before it was suppressed in 1916 by the Chief Press Censor.