to home rule. Dudley made open avowal of his sympathies and wish to see Ireland governed in accordance with Irish ideas. When in fact it actually seemed they had sought to govern Ireland through confidential conversations and so defuse the Home Rule movement. Despite his denials, it is likely that Wyndham tacitly encouraged the debate on devolution in August, and it is possible that he even involved Tim Healy MP in an effort to broaden the reformists base. Both the mainstream Conservative Party and the Ulster Unionists for whom the Association was a Trojan Horse for home rule,<ref>Bew, Paul: Ireland', The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006', p.363, Oxford University Press (2007), </ref> sensed political treachery, the Irish party held outside the centrist consultations. John Dillon MP, the Irish party deputy leader, who believed that the party could maintain its hold upon the country only if it remained pledged absolutely to Home Rule, and those other nationalists such as Michael Davitt, who thought like him, had taken to the field against what Dillon called 'Dunraven and his crowd', and savagely repelled his movement towards a national unity that would embrace all classes and creeds, Joe Devlin MP telling his constituents "they were not going to seek the co-operation of a few aristocratic nobodies"''. Dispelled In March Wyndham, hounded by Unionist MPs, fell from office for having broken faith in Unionism. He retired in May 1905 driven into political oblivion by a union of angry loyalists and nationalists, including Dillon, which helped to precipitate a schism which lasted the life of the Home Rule movement. Wyndham's successor Walter Long MP pursued tighter administrative enforcement and MacDonnell was confined to a subordinate role. It was a severe blow to the hopes of O’Brien and Dunraven for further advancing the spirit of conciliation. During the “devolution crisis” Ulster Unionists were so outraged that the head of the Civil Service in Dublin Castle, MacDonnell, a Catholic appointed by Wyndham, was involved in the devolution plan to run Ireland through elected councils, that they set up the Ulster Unionist Council, later important in organising unionist resistance to the Government of Ireland Act 1914. O'Brien remained firmly convinced that the only way forward to achieving All-Ireland self-government lay in co-operation with the Dunraven reformists. In September 1905 when his newspaper The Irish People reappeared it carried in its second number the manifesto of the Irish Reform Association, calling