Granard, who sat with them, was a Catholic peer who had commanded a battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment in the Tenth Division and had held offices in Mr. Asquith’s Government.  He had now the brilliant idea of reopening for the period of the Convention one of the most beautiful eighteenth-century dwellings, Ely House, and making it a centre of hospitality and a meeting-place for friendly outside intercourse.  Few more useful assistances were rendered to our purpose, and certainly none more pleasant.

Lord Desart, a distinguished lawyer, acted closely with Lord Midleton.  Sir Bertram Windle, President of University College, was another of Government’s choices—­a man of science who was also very much a man of affairs.  Another, far less of a debater, far more of a power, was Mr. William Martin Murphy, Chairman of the Dublin Tramways, a powerful employer of labour who had headed the fight against Larkin in 1913, and had been mainly responsible for the character of the employers’ victory.  He was the owner of the most widely circulated Irish paper, the Irish Independent—­which stood in journalism for what Mr. Healy represented in Parliament—­an envenomed Nationalist opposition to the Parliamentary party.

Mr. Edward Lysaght, the son of a great manufacturer in South Wales, combined like his father an aptitude for literature and for business; he wrote books, he was concerned in a publishing venture, but he was chiefly interested in his farm in county Clare—­where he had voted for de Valera.  He had been chosen deliberately as a link with Sinn Fein.  It stamped an aspect of the Convention that he was the youngest man there—­for he would not have been noticeably young in the House of Commons.  We were a middle-aged assembly.  Another link, though not so explicit, with Republican Ireland was Mr. George Russell, “A.E.,” poet, writer on co-operative economics, a mystic, with all a mystic’s shrewdness, an orator with much personal magnetism.  Lastly, there was Sir Horace Plunkett, perhaps the only member of the Convention except Redmond whose name would have occurred to every Irishman as indispensably necessary.

Two other personages should be noted.  Mr. Walter MacMurrough Kavanagh, Chairman of the Carlow County Council, was by tradition and training a strong Unionist, by inheritance the representative of one of the old Irish princely families.  He had been elected to the Vice-Chairmanship of his County Council while still a Unionist; later, he adhered to Lord Dunraven’s proposals of devolution, but finding no rest in a half-way house, came into full support of Redmond and for some time was a member of our party; by temperament deeply conservative, he was in no way separated by that from many of the ablest Nationalists, lay and ecclesiastic.  As a speaker he had few equals in the Convention; no man there, indeed, except Redmond, could throw equal passion into the plea of urgency for a settlement, for I think no other man felt it with such earnestness.