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Griffith and Mother Ireland

Arthur Griffith was ‘an enigma’, mysterious or difficult to understand, wrote his contemporary James Stephens. He was ‘the father and the founder’ of Sinn Féin, John Dillon MP informed the House of Commons in 1916.1

A photograph of Griffith taken in London during the treaty talks in late 1921, but published by The New York Times in 1922 above the caption ‘Head of the Irish Free State’ is a reminder of his resilience (Plate 1), – until civil war finally undid him.

Harry Boland, who fought against Griffith’s side in that civil war and who died just eleven days before him, is purported to have said of Griffith to a friend, ‘Damn it, Pat, hasn’t he made us all?’2 The first prime minister of the Irish Free State, W.T. Cosgrave, declared in 1925 that Michael Collins could but say ‘Griffith was the greatest man of his age, the father of us all.’3

Griffith was a politician and thinker, a cultural and economic analyst. Yet when the French journalist Simone Téry met him in Dublin in the summer of 1921, she remarked: ‘With his broad-shoulders, square fists and square face, Arthur Griffith looks more like a manual worker than an intellectual.’4

He was one of the founding fathers of the Irish state, if not indeed the founding father. It took courage and judgement for him to sign the articles of agreement for an Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. Doing so after him, Michael Collins said that he had signed his own death warrant. Assessing Griffith – warts and all – tells us something about ourselves. For, like him or not, he shaped the political framework of modern Ireland. When he died, his devastated and loving widow Mollie bitterly described him as having been ‘a fool giving his all, others having the benefit’.5

James Joyce sought his advice when trying to get Dubliners published, and Griffith gave W.B. Yeats both paternal guidance and what John Hutchinson has described in his study of the Gaelic Revival as ‘invaluable’ aid.6 Joyce and Yeats had complex relationships with their own fathers, who were not very practical.7 Griffith’s helpful dealings with these men merit closer attention than they have received to date, and they are explored in this volume. Yeats has a reputation that sometimes seems to depend on diminishing Griffith, and Joyce cannot be fully appreciated if his interest in Griffith’s politics and his respect for Griffith’s journalism overall is discounted.

In the Dublin societies to which he belonged when young, Griffith’s friends loved him. They went rambling and cycling in the country. They swam naked at ‘The Forty Foot’ in Sandycove, sun-bathing nearby on the hidden roof of an old Martello Tower. James Joyce also visited that tower and located there the opening scene of his novel Ulysses (Plate 6). The era of Joyce’s Ulysses, set in 1904 but not published until 1922, was also that of Griffith. What is it about this shy, hard-working nationalist, who enjoyed a quiet glass of stout with his friends and delighted in street songs, that irks some people and can find him begrudged a generous mention on commemorative occasions?

This book will take a fresh look at Griffith’s life from its humble beginnings to its sudden end, and in the context of his relations with Maud Gonne, James Connolly, Éamon de Valera, James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, among others. His creation of Sinn Féin, his leadership of the treaty negotations in London and his presidency of Dáil Éireann are traced through exciting and disturbing developments of his day. But we also see Griffith the man, father and father figure, who whistled and sang ballads and arias; who was an influential journalist and a loyal friend and husband. Darker issues are also addressed, including Irish anti-Semitism and racism.

Politic Words

One morning recently, in the hushed surrounds of Ireland’s National Library where Griffith liked to read, I met someone suspicious of Griffith even yet. The man was struggling with a microfilm and requested my help. He informed me, in a strong Ulster accent, that he was trying to access back issues of The Freeman’s Journal. He asked me what I was researching and I told him. ‘Ah’, he said, giving me a certain look. ‘Some people didn’t like Griffith’. Then, ‘He signed The Treaty’ and ‘he wasn’t a republican’. I did not ask my neighbour to define ‘republican’.

Griffith arrives at Earlsfort Terrace for Dáil Éireann’s treaty debate in December 1921 (National Library of Ireland (INDH386]).

‘Arthur Griffith, as the world knows, was the father of Sinn Féin,’ said Griffith’s acquaintance Kevin O’Shiel.8 Yet the notion that Griffith somehow let down a victorious struggle of which he disapproved, or that the treaty that he signed was to blame for partition, gained traction following his sudden death in 1922. This is despite the fact that partition was already a reality when negotiations for a treaty began. The parliament of Northern Ireland had opened. It was axiomatic that the Irish went to London to make concessions in return for concessions. An unbending demand for the political unity of the island of Ireland as a republic would not succeed where military action had already failed. It was not partition itself, nor the continuing use of some Irish ports by the British navy, but the form of oath prescribed for members of the new Dáil and the nature of the new state’s future relationship with the Crown that finally led to civil war.

In the early 1900s, Griffith laid out a constructive and principled path to independence and, within twenty years, he and his team agreed treaty terms in London that created the Irish Free State. The signing of those terms in Downing Street was an act of compromise and statesmanship by which they acknowledged that, with independence, came responsibilities. They were subsequently backed by a majority of representatives in Dáil Éireann, and thereafter by a majority of voters in a general election who chose candidates supportive of the treaty. Griffith told the people that the treaty was the basis for further developments: ‘It has no more finality than we are the final generation on the face of the earth.’9

Griffith and his treaty delegation in London engaged in real politics with a United Kingdom government that was itself vulnerable to its own domestic pressures. The emotive and shifting nature of such constitutional negotiations has been clearly evident again during the recent Brexit debates in Britain. Brexit has been a reminder of the great challenges involved in reconciling very different perspectives, both cultural and political. Irish people, then and since, might too easily overlook the difficulties on the British side in 1921. And de Valera’s refusal to attend the crucial negotiations with Prime Minister David Lloyd George from October to December 1921, no matter what his rationale, greatly complicated the challenges involved.

Griffith, like any revolutionary or politician, had both strengths and weaknesses. This book is a critical assessment, not the hagiography of a saint. It will contextualise his occasionally problematic attitudes but not seek to excuse them. Was he ‘narrow’ as some detractors allege? Overall, his voluminous journalism suggests otherwise. However, given how much he wrote and that he did so usually to a tight deadline, it is unsurprising to find that Griffith sometimes penned or printed regrettable statements. He was no perfect Marvel-comic hero. He was a small, limping, lower-middle-class politician with poor eyesight, an unglamourous wife, an aversion to dramatising violence and a tendency to sharp comments. Yet his leadership inspired a generation.

Was Griffith also among those who regarded art or literature ultimately as ‘the scullery maid of politics’? W.B. Yeats used that term dismissively about people whom he distinguished from ‘the men [sic] of letters’ and from those ‘who love literature for her own sake’ (whatever that might mean). It is true that Griffith believed literature should serve purposes other than those of mere entertainment or even speculation. Yet for him the priority of Irish independence by no means precluded art from providing pleasure or enlightenment. While he was strongly critical of The Playboy of the Western World, his antipathy to John Millington Synge has been somewhat exaggerated, and the weekly papers that he edited for twenty years bear eloquent witness to the fact that he was no philistine. In any event, literature is never entirely free of ideological, social or political implications.

Griffith is an awkward father figure, the one who cannot be denied but whose actions and foibles risk exposing characteristics and contradictions in ourselves that we would rather not see. In the case of Yeats, it is instructive to recall the period when that poet was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and when Griffith boosted Yeats’ career. Yeats later wished to put behind him his former IRB membership but it possibly helped him to win a seat in the senate of the new Irish Free State.10 When considering the dynamics of the relationship between Griffith and Yeats it should be remembered too that both men were closely involved with the dazzling Maud Gonne, a fact that the patrician Yeats turned to his reputational advantage even as the paternal Griffith did not.

Born in the heart of Dublin, Griffith was a hard-working artisan who married late due to his poverty, who then had two children whom he deeply loved. He was ready to compromise, including with unionists, but firm in his resolve that independence was Ireland’s right and that the Irish Free State was a stepping-stone towards greater things. ‘How time has justified the Irish Treaty,’ wrote the ambassador Michael MacWhite to W.T. Cosgrave as the Irish Free State became a republic in 1949. ‘We know now what Griffith meant when he wanted freedom to achieve freedom,’ he added.11 The fact of partition was already a reality when Griffith signed the agreement for a treaty and, contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, was not the immediate cause of de Valera’s resignation as president of a Dáil that then voted to accept the document that Griffith and Collins had signed in London.

Mother Ireland

A constellation of defeat, dependency, despondency and martyrdom – in the face of sometimes brutal imperialism – gave strength over centuries to the myth of Mother Ireland as a poor woman reduced to demanding the self-sacrifice of her sons for an almost hopeless cause. That woman, known as ‘My Dark Rosaleen’, ‘Kathleen Ni Houlihan’, ‘Shan Van Vocht’, ‘Éire/Erin’ etc., was both an object of desire and a pietà, whose beloved children’s blood watered a tree symbolising national regeneration or resurrection. For James Joyce’s Stephen, Ireland was ‘the old sow that eats her farrow’.12 Griffith himself invoked regeneration by using the word ‘resurrection’ in the title of his key 1904 tract on the constitutional and economic salvation of Ireland (The Resurrection of Hungary), while the weekend that rebels chose for the ‘rising’ in 1916 was significantly that of the festival of Christ’s resurrection. In 1917 Yeats wrote of Ireland that ‘There’s nothing but our own red blood can make a right Rose Tree,’ while also expressing dismay that ‘a breath of politic words has withered our Rose Tree’. He was still singing in 1938, as he flirted with fascist ideas:

And yet who knows what’s yet to come?

For Patrick Pearse had said

That in every generation

Must Ireland’s blood be shed.

Griffith preferred ‘politic words’ to bloodshed, regarding them as an art and a democratic necessity rather than a withering disease. Yet, he was no pacifist, for he advocated defensive force and even countenanced attack where it was necessary. In 1914 he attended a key private meeting with Patrick Pearse and other future signatories of the 1916 proclamation and, as will be seen, agreed a broad strategy with them. He participated in the Howth gun-running of 1914 and later drilled dutifully with the rifle that he got there, although he was not at the barricades on Easter Monday 1916. He subsequently became acting president of the provisional government during the War of Independence, when de Valera went to America for eighteen months.

Griffith informed and guided the political consciousness of a cultural revival that had floated on an ocean of sentimental affection for the idea of Mother Ireland, or ‘Erin’ – that poor old woman worn down, but destined to come into her queenly inheritance and be rejuvenated: ‘There was much Kathleen Ni Houlihan, Dark Rosaleen poetry written,’ Mary Colum later remarked somewhat sarcastically of the period.13 Griffith himself was not adverse to idealising Ireland and Irish women when articulating his vision of an Ireland that he hoped would be self-sufficient, while also being less materialistic than England. However, his unifying emphasis was ultimately modern and pragmatic.

In an effort to explain the significance of Sinn Féin’s sensational victory at the polls in 1918, the Anglo-Irish anarchist Jack White offered a psychological interpretation inspired by the ‘subliminal uprush’ idea of pioneering psychologist Frederic H. Myers, who also influenced W.B. Yeats. White saw Sinn Féin’s function as one of ‘re-introducing pure emotion as a factor in Western world-politics’, which could only be prevented from ‘lapsing into hysteria’ by the restraints and objectives of organised labour. White’s well-intended theory ran the risk of once more casting ‘the Irish race’ (as he called it) as essentially the wild and ‘intuitive’ type.14 Griffith’s plan was not ‘pure emotion’ but was to harness national consciousness within national political structures such as existed elsewhere in Europe, taking advantage of an expanding electorate with its broader social base and with some women enfranchised for the first time in 1918. He wanted voters to accept the need for and benefit of self-reliant institutions rather than just venting their anger or lapsing into reliance on favours from the Westminster parliament. He wished to see people develop independently and, in that respect, attempted to exercise on a national level that which Carl Jung has represented as the centrally organising psychic function of a father.

In July 1922, as Ireland faced into civil war, the distinguished Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones also addressed non-political factors that might throw light on the political roots of the English–Irish conflict. He recognised the particularly rich variety of female names used by the Irish for Ireland, remarking that ‘the customary one of Erin … would content most countries’. The tradition of the Gaelic ‘aisling’ or dream poetry had fostered such variety. Jones wrote that ‘The complexes to which the idea of an island home tends to become attached are those relating to the idea of woman.’ He suggested that history might have been different had England ‘instead of ravishing Ireland as though she were a harlot, wooed her with the offer of an honorable alliance’.15 He also discerned Oedipal implications in the strong identification of the homeland as ‘mother’, and these are relevant to a consideration of the fate and reputation of anyone cast in the national role of ‘father of us all’.

In a gloss on Jones’ commentary, one Irish analyst in 1998 cautioned against seeing the dominance of the myth of Mother Ireland as some kind of deterministic or primary given. Cormac Gallagher related the myth to what he saw as a singular lack of Irish father figures. Instead, there are ‘sons and brothers who have been willing to lay down their lives to defend the honour of their mother’. He asked, with an eye perhaps to Freud’s key text on the biblical patriarch, ‘Where do we find an Irish Moses?’16 In doing so, he echoed the lament of Gaelic poets who identified Ireland’s plight with that of Israel.

For years after King William routed King James at the battle of the Boyne in 1690, many Irish regarded the possible return of a Jacobite king or prince as their best hope of salvation. The impoverished poet James Clarence Mangan, who died in 1849 and who intrigued not only Griffith but also Yeats and Joyce, ended his rendering of an old Jacobite song by praying that ‘He who stood by Moses, when his foes were fierce and strong’ might ‘show forth his might in saving Kathleen-Ni-Houlahan [i.e. Ireland]’. Gradually, Irish writers identified possible Irish versions of the biblical patriarch who had led the Jews out of captivity in Egypt. Charles Stewart Parnell in particular but also Michael Davitt by Fanny Parnell were cast in this fantasy role.17 Another candidate was ‘Griffith’, albeit as Moses in the shape of a leader for an industrialised and democratic age, or even as a modern version of the Irish patriarch St Patrick, determined to drive out all snakes of faction and convert his people from UK parliamentarianism to Irish independence.

Ireland grapples with the serpent ‘Faction’ following the death of Parnell in October 1891 (Weekly National Press, 24 October 1891).

However, in Yeats’ influential play Kathleen Ni Houlihan, written with assistance from Lady Gregory and even ostensibly with some help from Griffith as will be seen, it was not sustained paternal leadership but the blood sacrifice of her children that was seen to redeem Mother Ireland. Indeed, relative to certain ‘typical examples’ of ‘innumerable’ identifications of Ireland as a woman that he cited (and for the selection of which he thanked one Violet Fitzgerald), Ernest Jones found the final scene of Yeats’ Kathleen Ni Houlihan to be for him ‘the most moving description of all’.18 Yeats himself later wondered if his words were responsible for sending men out to die in the Rising.

Following that bloody revolt of 1916, Éamon de Valera stepped into the sandals of Moses but then delegated to Griffith the task of crossing the Irish Sea to negotiate a treaty. Although in 1923 a former IRB man George Lyons described Griffith as ‘the Moses who led his benighted people out of the shadows into the light’, Griffith never satisfied de Valera. Was de Valera, whose own father and mother were absent from most of his childhood,19 unconsciously taking revenge by sending the man then known as the ‘father of Sinn Féin’ to London instead of going himself? De Valera was ‘president’ or first minister of the new Dáil Éireann and might reasonably have been expected to sit opposite Prime Minister Lloyd George during those negotiations. His absence was critical.

Griffith long encouraged people to assert their independence (sinn féin, sinn féin amháin: we ourselves alone) rather than wait impassively to be washed clean by the blood of martyrs or yearn impotently and submissively for that salvation from abroad that Gaelic poetry long invoked. Yet anyone who thought that he might have earned for himself the eternal gratitude of all those whom he led to the promised land of an Irish state had not reckoned with the kind of patricidal or Oedipal undercurrents that are as much a feature of nations as of families.

During a bitter parliamentary debate on 27 April 1922, Griffith claimed that when he agreed the previous October to lead a delegation to negotiate a treaty, de Valera said to him, ‘There may have to be scapegoats.’ He told the Dáil that he replied to de Valera that he was ‘willing to be a scapegoat to save him from some of his present supporters’ criticism’. And Griffith was to become something of a scapegoat, not just in respect to the treaty but also as regards Irish anti-Semitism. His reputation as well as his life fell victim to the civil war, during which he collapsed and died in August 1922.

Patriotic verses that Yeats wrote in 1891 mourning Parnell as Moses were reprinted in 1922 to mourn Griffith in the same terms. Since then, some politicians have used his name to bolster their arguments, but others have opted not to speak of him at all. That may be easier than admitting that he was an Irishman who perhaps represented the emerging consensus of an increasingly inclusive electoral franchise more accurately than did his more violent friends and acquaintances. To this day remembering Griffith disturbs our national psyche. If we drop a bucket into his pond we draw up a mix as real but less heady than the blood of which Yeats sang so gloriously. We may unconsciously yearn for the intoxication of heroic daydreams.

It is true that twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of Ireland might not have achieved what level of independence they did in 1922 without the shock of the rebellion and executions of 1916 or the plotting of the IRB and the Volunteers. However, it was the constant commitment and steady hard work of Arthur Griffith and a few others that created and sustained the Sinn Féin movement, giving context and shape to the emotional desire for freedom and eventually enshrining that ambition in a viable constitutional compromise that was pragmatic rather than fanciful. Griffith risked his life, but saw no good reason to throw it away. His way was fatherly, at times paternalistic. His friends and critics alike frequently used epithets to describe him that were characteristic of positive and negative aspects of the father archetype.

The Ireland of the European Union, of the United Nations, of the Good Friday Agreement is the kind of everyday Ireland for which Griffith worked. The state’s foundation in 1922 should not be recalled in 2022 without generously recognising his crucial role in its conception and birth.