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The Name of the Father

Arthur Griffith was born at 61 Upper Dominick Street, Dublin, on 31 March 1871. His widow later said that Dublin was ‘where his grandfather or great-grandfather had come to from Redhills in Cavan, having been thrown out by his Presbyterian family because he had become Catholic’.1

Arthur Griffith’s father, who was also named Arthur, was a printer. He was of the Dublin artisan class that comprised the backbone of the Fenian movement. Among Fenians who had been ‘out’ in the troubled year 1867 was another printer, the present author’s great-grandfather, Michael Kenny. In 1898 Michael took out of its frame an old printed oleograph sketch of ‘The Death of Ireland’s Liberator’ (namely Daniel O’Connell) that his own father had earlier framed in 1849. The sketch clearly meant something to Michael, for he carefully cleaned and reframed it.2

Young Arthur Griffith was known by his family, friends and future wife as ‘Dan’. Some believe that he got this name ‘because of his boundless capacity for debate and his consummate absorption with the cause of national independence. To his associates he was another Daniel O’Connell.’3 If so, the nickname identified Griffith with a political leader whose peaceful parliamentary campaign to repeal the union of Ireland and Britain had failed, and on whom in his younger days Griffith used to ‘pour unlimited scorn’.4 He preferred the writings and songs of the revolutionary movement that superseded O’Connell in the 1840s, looking up to the Young Ireland leaders Thomas Davis, John Mitchell and James Fintan Lalor. Scattered throughout the papers of which he became editor are many extracts from their works. Ironically, given such views, ‘Dan’ would later develop into a democratic constitutionalist, defending the nascent Irish state against those whom his colleague Kevin O’Higgins described as ‘wild men screaming through the keyholes’.5

Griffith’s nickname ‘Dan’ also hints at fatherly warmth, with its last consonant lengthening the first two letters that spell the most common Dublin term of endearment for a father, ‘Da’. One of his friends later wrote ‘that name, I think, gave his likeableness and his humour’.6

In 1899, Griffith delivered a public talk in the Workingmen’s Club on ‘The Songs of our Fathers’, including patriotic songs that reflected Young Ireland and Fenian values. This was probably the same Griffith lecture ‘on the ballad poetry of the Young Ireland period’ that a future president of Ireland, Seán T. O’Kelly (also Ó Ceallaigh), attended that year.7 In Griffith’s own life, the Young Irelander and veteran Fenian leader John O’Leary (1830–1907) became an occasional fatherly mentor or advisor.

Griffith’s Creed

In an editorial in the first issue of his United Irishman, on 4 March 1899, Griffith wrote:

Lest there be a doubt in any mind, we will say that we accept the [revolutionary] Nationalism of [17]98, [18]48 and [18]67 as the true Nationalism; and Grattan’s cry ‘Live Ireland – Perish the Empire!’ as the watchword of patriotism.

Two years later he repeated that sentiment. He also then described three movements as ‘tending to build up and brace the Nation for the final struggle for independence’, these being movements for the development of the Irish language, literature and industry. He regarded every objective as ultimately subsidiary to the achievement of independence itself:

A fatter Gaelic-speaking Ireland kissing its chains would be perhaps more contemptible than even a pauperized, English-tongued Ireland fighting with its mouth against the Government which believes in preaching to the weak from the ‘holy text of pike and gun’. What we wrote in the first issue of the United Irishman [4 March 1899, quoted above] we reaffirm as our creed.8

To understand Griffith, to fathom his methodology and motives, it is crucial to recognise his single-mindedness. James Owen Hannay, a Church of Ireland clergyman who penned popular novels as ‘George A. Birmingham’, wrote of Griffith that ‘He was more idea-possessed than any one I have ever met and the idea which possessed him to the exclusion of every other was that of an Ireland free to lead her own life and manage her own affairs.’9 Helena Molony, secretary of Inghinidhe na hÉireann between 1907 and 1914, admired his capacity to inspire people to overlook differences of opinion and work together.10

Five factors in particular shaped Griffith’s character and outlook, and he cannot be understood without appreciating the importance of each of them. Their burning significance for him may not be self-evident today when Irish people live in a very different Ireland, as he always hoped we would:

• His poverty and that of his city

• The Parnell affair and its lasting trauma

• The role of the Catholic Church

• Catastrophic and continuing emigration

• British economic and political repression

His Poverty and that of his City

Griffith was raised in the heart of a city teeming with poverty. The slums of Dublin were amongst the worst in Europe, with many of its Georgian houses that had been home to prosperous middle-class families before the Act of Union of 1800 now reduced to tenements.11 Dublin’s population had increased as people deserted rural Ireland, not least during the Great Famine, putting great pressure on its infrastructure. Political union with Britain after 1800 had not benefited Ireland, and both Dublin and Cork ‘saw the manufacturing share of their workforce halved between the famine and the early twentieth century’.12 Diseases such as tuberculosis and typhoid were rampant. Griffith’s own father suffered from bad health for years and the Griffiths moved a number of times, always renting rooms in central Dublin in an arc around Summerhill. It was an area blighted by decline.

Griffith’s parents Arthur and Mary had been married at Dublin’s pro-cathedral on 14 May 1860 and had five children.13 Their son Frank, born in 1874, said that his father ‘often’ spoke of having been in Richmond, Virginia, at some point during the US civil war of 1861–5, and of having worked as a printer on the popular Illustrated London News in England before settling back in Ireland.14 Frank himself sometimes helped to run the United Irishman office and was an usher in the Gaiety Theatre.15 Frank’s brother Billy was born in Dublin in 1865. Billy, ‘upright and conscientious’, became a hairdresser and, as registrar of the hairdressers’ trade union, found jobs for unemployed barbers. He died of pneumonia in 1924.16 Their sister Marcella was a machinist who, in 1900, died of an ulcerous disease of the larynx of a tubercular nature.17 Their other sister, Frances (known as ‘Fanny’), joined the women’s nationalist group Inghinidhe na hÉireann, and lived until 1949.18

In 1897 Arthur Griffith bid farewell to his parents and went to South Africa, working there at a small newspaper and in mining administration. He returned by September the following year ‘as poor as when leaving Ireland’ his widow later wrote. She added ‘Poor Dan never could make money.’19 His father died in 1904, aged 66.20 Griffith was still unmarried, and during the first decade of the twentieth century continued to reside in the family’s rented rooms at 83 Summerhill (today the site of a modern block). He supported his widowed mother and surviving sister Frances. A fellow tenant in that house later said that ‘The Griffiths lived a very quiet life.’ The house belonged to the widow of a seaman who had been drowned.21

The Griffiths moved in the shadow of ‘Monto’, a notorious district centred on Montgomery Street and known for prostitution. James Joyce memorialised it as ‘Nighttown’ in Ulysses. A description of the adjacent Gardiner Street about 1900 is graphic:

Fifty years ago this street was inhabited by professional people and other rich residents, and every house had its carriage, its coachman and its butler. To-day this imposing stretch of street has sunk to the condition of a street of tenement houses, inhabited not alone by the lowest class of society but by the tramp and vagrant, and mendicant classes. The area around it … constitutes, perhaps, the greatest blot upon the social life of Dublin and of Ireland. There is no such area in London, or in any other town of Great Britain, that I ever saw or heard of. Within this area the trade of prostitution and immorality is carried on as openly as any branch of legitimate business is carried on in the other portions of Dublin.22

Many impoverished Dubliners joined the army. Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses lies in bed musing on the attraction of a lost soldier, recalling one she liked who was killed on the British side in the Boer War: ‘he was a lovely fellow in khaki and just the right height over me … he was pale with excitement about going away … and I so hot as I never felt’.

Griffith and other contributors to his papers sometimes idealised Irish women and protested against certain theatrical depictions of them. There is a curious mixture of respect and chauvinism in his admonition to young Irishmen: ‘Do not talk lightly of women. To do so is to be English.’23 His attitude was partly informed by the degradation and exploitation that he saw before his eyes. When he conducted a campaign against Irish girls walking out with soldiers on Dublin’s main thoroughfare, he was not simply being priggish. His principal objective was to discourage recruitment, but he also saw the effects of economic deprivation on people’s options and of prevalent venereal disease on their health. In 1918 Francis Hackett wrote of those who followed James Connolly in rebellion that ‘They knew that incest and prostitution and syphilis accompanied that slum life, a life of indecencies so unmentionable that no one can fully quote the government reports [e.g. of 1914].’24 Unlike some of the clients of ‘Nighttown’, people who lived near it had not fragrant homes in the suburbs to which to retreat.

When he became an editor, Griffith liked to meet friends over a glass or two of stout, but he never grew rich and was widely believed to have refused better-remunerated journalism in Dublin and abroad in order to continue working on his advanced nationalist papers. Chrissie Doyle, an activist, later said that he was ‘awfully badly off … The story is true of his working in his office in stockinged feet while his shoes, the only pair he had, were being repaired at the shoemakers. He was the most simple of men … he would eat anything served to him’.25 Dan McCarthy, who helped Griffith to produce the United Irishman, described him as ‘poverty-stricken’, and McCarthy and others commented on his worn clothing.26

Sinn Féin, 13 November 1909. By Austin Molloy (‘Maolmhuaidh’). Dirty streets added to the threat of diseases such as TB and typhoid.

James Joyce appreciated Griffith’s efforts to improve the lot of his people. In 1906, in Italy, he wrote that

as far as my knowledge of Irish affairs goes, he was the first person in Ireland to revive the separatist idea on modern lines nine years ago. He wants the creation of an Irish consular service abroad and of an Irish bank at home … He said in one of his articles that it cost a Danish merchant less to send butter to Christiania and then by sea to London than it costs an Irish merchant to send his from Mullingar to Dublin. A great deal of his programme perhaps is absurd but at least it tries to inaugurate some commercial life for Ireland and to tell you the truth once or twice in Trieste I felt myself humiliated when I heard the little Galatti girl sneering at my impoverished country. You may remember that on my arrival in Trieste I actually ‘took some steps’ to secure an agency for Foxford Tweeds there.27

The Parnell Affair

The political divisions that marked Parnell’s downfall were deeply felt by Griffith. There was a pervasive bitterness such as Joyce encapsulated in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when a row over Christmas dinner in Bray ends with an angry but gleeful cry: ‘At the door Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage: – Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend! The door slammed behind her.’

When Parnell fell in disgrace for having an affair, and died soon afterwards, the door slammed shut for years on the prospect of Ireland winning back a measure of political independence through ‘Home Rule’, which Irish parliamentarians at Westminster had been seeking. Griffith as a young man emotionally defended Parnell, although he was not an enthusiast for Parnell’s parliamentarianism. He regarded Parnell’s downfall as an example of the factional distractions that destroy political movements, and to the end of his days insisted on the primacy of the fight for political independence over all else. This is the key to understanding his loss of interest in artists when they diverged on an individualistic or subjective track.

Similarly, he drew a clear distinction between private and public life when this suited his objectives. During the Parnell split certain leading English politicians and some members of the Irish Catholic hierarchy and of the Irish Parliamentary Party responded to news of Parnell’s relationship with Katharine O’Shea by turning on the leader. But Griffith articulated in the United Irishman a general principle that ‘A man can be a good patriot without being virtuous in his private life.’28 This was not the later sentiment of an anonymous writer of a Sinn Féin pamphlet in September 1917 who declared ‘The only way to be a patriotic Irishman is to do your best to become a perfect man.’29 Griffith in 1900 contrasted the example of an Arab leader who unwisely appointed ‘a notorious libertine’ to be keeper of the harem with one who appointed such a man as the State Treasurer:

I do not see, unless the libertine were also a rogue, why he should not prove himself a faithful public servant. I do not believe that a political leader should be deposed for any save a political offence. I believe the Irish people made themselves ridiculous by their treatment of Charles Stewart Parnell. He had committed no political crime. He had not sinned against them.

This led to debate in his paper between himself and a regular contributor, the nationalist priest Fr Patrick Fidelis Kavanagh.30 Griffith’s position was consistent when it came to the scandalous Oscar Wilde and his homosexuality, a sexual orientation into which Griffith may have had some personal insight due to the warmth of his devotion to his close friend William Rooney who died young:

Last week one of the most brilliant Irishmen of the century, Oscar Wilde, died. Our highly moral Dublin newspapers printed the announcement in their back columns. The Evening Herald timidly referred to the passing of Wilde in order to bring in a compliment to Mr John Redmond. For it appears that Mr Redmond had the moral courage, once upon a time, to quote some lines of Wilde’s poetry to the British House of Commons … It was not because Wilde was a sinner that our cowardly journals kept silence – it was because they feared to shock the fetid conscience of pharisaical England.31

And when reviewing A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue, edited by S.A. Brooke and T.W. Rolleston, Griffith complained of Wilde’s omission: ‘We have not Wilde. ’Twould have offended the virtuous Englishman to have included him.’32 That Griffith thus distinguished between Wilde’s public and private lives may surprise some who assume that his criticism of Synge’s Playboy was merely prudish.

Griffith’s inclusiveness meant that he wished the cause of Irish nationalism to encompass all who desired to embrace it. He made this clear in the first issue of his United Irishman, and repeated and endorsed that position in the issue of 18 May 1901 when wrapping up what had become a somewhat bitter exchange in the paper as to whether ‘there is no Irishman but the Gael’ (or ‘the Irish are now a composite race’). Of this proposition he wrote:

That the very same test which is the hall-mark of the American citizen ought to be the test of the Irishman, that he accept the doctrine of an Irish nation, Irish in its language, Irish in its policy, Irish in every outlook of its national life; and that to forswear all allegiance to every other nation in the world … be he Gael or Cromwellian, French-Huguenot or Spanish-Irish, the man who swears to an Irish Nation and he only is an Irishman.33

To this list he was explicitly to add Jewish people, as will be seen. In his United Irishman on 15 February 1902 he stated: ‘Ireland is our mother whichever father begot us.’ In 1927, when the minister for external affairs Desmond FitzGerald referred at a public meeting to Tom Johnson, the English-born leader of the Irish Labour Party, a heckler cried ‘He is an Englishman.’ FitzGerald retorted ‘Long ago Arthur Griffith said an Irishman was a man who was prepared to work for the Irish people, and in the Black and Tan days Tom Johnson did his part in the job.’34

The Parnell affair clearly demonstrated the threat of divisiveness to Irish political ambitions, but Griffith himself was under no illusions about his own shortcomings as a possible unifying national leader. In Ulysses, James Joyce has a character declare that Griffith ‘has no go in him for the mob’. Griffith readily placed his hopes in others. At the same time, his acquaintance Padraic Colum understood that the downfall of Parnell had taught Griffith the dangers of relying on just one man:

In Arthur Griffith’s mind there were contradictions. He was to devote his maturity to the formation of an order in which Parnellism or O’Connellism would have no part. And yet, more than any other man, he believed in the avatar. He saw Parnell as an avatar. He was to see Éamon de Valera as an avatar. Parnellism had been a tremendous force – he had felt it – but was it right that a country should put its whole trust in one man? And there was O’Connellism which, too, had left the country at a dead end. But here was one who would lead the country – William Rooney [his friend who died young].35

The Role of the Catholic Church

The vast majority of Irish nationalists were observant members of the Catholic Church, but Griffith was not afraid to question its authorities and pointed out that it was legitimate for a Roman Catholic to do so.36 His United Irishman contextualised Irish hierarchical power by noting a condemnation of anti-English Boers that was published in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, and recalling when ‘Bishop Moriarty condemned the Fenians’.37 One correspondent soon complained that ‘The United Irishman lends its pages to writers who slander the Catholic Church.’38

The fact that Griffith came partly of Ulster Protestant stock may have given him a particular insight into religion, with one of his ancestors leaving his church for the love of a Catholic woman. Griffith looked around at Ireland’s rapidly shrinking population and advised young men ‘if you can do nothing else for your country, get married’. He thought that Catholic priests were infected by a ‘gloomy Presbyterian spirit’:

Lack of employment and grinding poverty are largely responsible for the ever-continuing and increasing emigration. If the Irish people support their own industries they can mitigate those evils. But there is another and a potent cause in the drab dullness of Irish rural life. With the priests of Ireland the remedy lies; with good intentions, but bad judgement they frowned down upon the merrymaking, the ceilidh and roadside dance, which gave colour and joy to the lives of the poor. Irish men and women cannot live merely to work and eat and sleep, and thousands of those who flee yearly from the land do so to escape the dreary monotony of life in a country where the gloomy Presbyterian spirit seems to have infected so many of the Catholic clergy. The Gaelic League has done much to bring a little joy into the people’s life. The three thousand priests of Ireland, by being true to their own Irish nature, could do much …39

A week later, he pointed out that the proportion of Protestants in Ireland was rising relative to Catholics (and thus was Anglo-Irish culture spreading), demanding to know what the Catholic hierarchy would do to resist the trend.40 There were also sharp exchanges in his paper following its publication of a negative review of Canon Sheehan’s novel My New Curate.41 And a nationalist priest in sympathy with Griffith’s political aims nevertheless attacked a letter in the United Irishman written by the socialist Fred Ryan. The priest condemned its ‘heresy’ in ridiculing the doctrine of eternal hell in the context of a discussion of Chinese news, and demanded to know if the paper would ‘be used in future for disseminating such un-Christian and un-Catholic doctrines’. Griffith as editor blandly replied underneath ‘we are not responsible for the opinions of our correspondents’.42

Griffith favoured the provision of non-denominational higher education and published criticism of a ‘sycophantic speech’ about a Catholic university made to a gathering of Englishmen by the Jesuit intellectual Fr Thomas Finlay (with whom James Connolly also had a disagreement). Griffith’s objections to Finlay’s idea were as much socio-economic as secular, it being ‘proposed to tax the workers for the education of the sons of landowners and retired commercials’.43 Such critical views in his paper, including one outright reference by a letter writer to ‘the spirit of opportunism, full-fledged in the Irish Catholic Church’,44 cannot have endeared Griffith to its bishops. Those views may even have contributed to a perception of him as ‘un-Irish’, or not ‘typically’ Irish, that will be considered later. In the end, indeed, it was a defamation action by a priest that forced the United Irishman out of business.

W.B. Yeats described Griffith in his thirties as ‘an enthusiastic anti-cleric’,45 but the editor did not like being boxed in by definitions. Celebrating the survival of his first paper on its second anniversary, Griffith wrote ‘they accused us of being madmen, notoriety-seekers, socialists, bigots, cranks, anti-clericals, anti-Parnellites and Parnellites. We were none of these things. We were Irishmen, speaking straight to the people.’46

Straight talking got him into some trouble with a prominent churchman at a tense moment in October 1921. With the treaty talks due to begin in London, the Dáil’s cabinet was making detailed preparations. Nasty rumours about de Valera and his ministers were circulating, and the Irish republican delegation’s office in Rome informed Griffith that the rumours had reached the ears of John Hagan, rector of the Irish College there. Ministers suspected ‘enemy work’, and a brief note was dashed off on behalf of Griffith as minister for foreign affairs requesting Hagan to name whoever had spread the rumours in Rome. Hagan, who was sympathetic to republicans and was de Valera’s personal confessor for a period, took great umbrage at this innocuous note, claiming that it was ‘almost insulting in tone and written as from a superior to an inferior’. Margaret Gavan Duffy at the Irish office in Rome immediately contacted de Valera seeking his intervention, and the latter promptly wrote to the rector to explain, if not to apologise, that

the apparent curtness was due to the fact that it was dictated by the minister in charge in a moment’s interval in a Cabinet discussion on a reply which we were about to send to Lloyd George. The pressure of work here is very great and there is little time to give to our letters that polish and finish which we desire.

Emigration from Ireland

In 1918 Francis Hackett, the Irish-born founding editor of the influential left-wing New Republic journal in New York, pointed out that the population of Ireland halved between 1851 and 1914.48 The impact and scale of Irish migration in the nineteenth century and beyond can scarcely be exaggerated. Many who left went with a feeling of being wrenched away. The 1841 census of the United Kingdom, which is considered to be the first modern UK census, revealed that then, before the Great Famine, the population of Ireland (8.2m) was more than half that of England and Wales combined (15.9m). By 1901, it was about one-seventh, with just 4.5m inhabitants left on the island of Ireland but 32.5m people living in England and Wales. The United Irishman noted on 12 April 1900 that, on one day alone, ‘The extraordinary number of Irish people fleeing to the United States resulted in the frightful exodus of 1,100 on Easter Sunday, with “wild Irish howls”, as our friends say.’

In ten years to 1891 the population fell by half a million. From United Ireland, 11 April 1891.

In August 1900, it was reported that a rumour that French troops had landed in the west of Ireland swept through Irish migrant labourers in Lancashire and that up to a thousand of these workers fled home in panic to the west of Ireland.49 In September 1900 Griffith devoted two and a half columns to the trauma of emigration, within the context of addressing Franco–Irish relations. He evoked the memory of the French force under General Jean Joseph Humbert that had landed in Co. Mayo in 1798:

The mountain men of Connaught and Ulster, whose grandfathers marched after the banner of France and Humbert to Castlebar, still anxiously ask the sympathetic travelers when the French will come again … And France will not despise their simple faith. If fifty years ago, when nine millions of our people dwelt within our four seas, the tide of hope bounded fiercely through our veins and the lessons of self-reliance appealed strongly to us, it is not so today. We are a dwindling, sickly people, dwindling to extinction, and the blast of the war-bugles of France across our land is needed to rouse us from this death-sleep that is creeping upon us to save us from the Antichrist of Nations who e’er he destroys us, would fain mark us with the Mark of the Beast.50

On 15 December 1900 the United Irishman noted the death of Michael G. Mulhall (1836–1900), a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, whose dictionary of international statistics was widely read. Mulhall had made the point that, during the reign of Victoria, 1,225,000 Irish people had died of famine, 4,186,000 emigrated and 3,668,000 were evicted: ‘The only European country which has suffered depopulation in the present century is Ireland …. The marriage-rate and birth-rate are the lowest in the world.’51 Yet Griffith, a contrarian editor, also published a lengthy piece by Edward McVey advocating emigration as the best option for young Irish people.52

From time to time in Ireland, including in the United Irishman on 15 June 1901, it was claimed bitterly that the editor of the London Times wrote during the Great Famine: ‘A Catholic Celt will be as rare in Ireland as a Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan.’ The currency of the claim, regarded as symptomatic of British disdain, is reflected in a reference to it in Joyce’s Ulysses. The renowned Stanley Morison for The Times later suggested that the quotation had not appeared in a leading article, but conceded in respect to the Celts of Ireland ‘going and going with a vengeance’ that some such words ‘may have appeared’ in a letter or telegram that was published.53

British Economic and Political Repression

Griffith’s analysis of the actual causes of economic disadvantage in Ireland was detailed. Britain had long restricted Irish trade to its own advantage, and the Irish had little control of taxation or investment in their own country. Hackett thought that, for Griffith, ‘The economics of Ireland were secondary to his hatred of England, stones of wrath in a Ulysses battle against the Manchester Cyclops.’54 Kelly suggests ‘It is easy to be sceptical about Griffith’s constitutional theories, his economic projections, and his statistics.’55 But were Griffith’s arguments not at least as evidence-based as those of his opponents?

Griffith’s papers included much information on agriculture and banking and many other areas of Irish life. He condemned restrictions on Irish trade as well as the dearth of local capital for investment in Irish business, something that Catholics in particular felt keenly. He articulated their suspicion that they were discriminated against by Protestant bankers and investors in favour of Protestant and even Jewish businessmen, the latter being free to join the Freemasons while the Catholic Church forbid its members to do so. He pointed out that Ireland payed a disproportionately high share of taxation while enjoying a low share of the United Kingdom’s capital investment. On 23 March 1901, for example, the United Irishman indicated that invested capital in Ireland was one-forty-fourth of that available throughout the United Kingdom while taxation revenue was one-twelfth of the whole. Griffith also published pamphlets, with James Joyce buying his tract on The Finance of the Home Rule Bill, for example.56

Griffith’s Sinn Féin movement forefronted industrial development. He and other party members and supporters were closely involved in the Industrial Development Association (IDA), a voluntary precursor of the future state’s Industrial Development Authority. According to Seán T. O’Kelly, writing when he later became the president of Ireland, ‘Mrs. Wyse Power, afterwards Senator; Ryan who was afterwards the first Secretary of the I.D.A. and Kevin J. Kenny [grandfather of the present author], were the principal promoters of the I.D.A. in Dublin.’57 Jennie Wyse Power, nationalist and suffragette, ran the Irish Farm and Produce Company. At its shop and restaurant at 21 Henry St, Dublin, in the months before the 1916 Rising, O’Kelly frequently lunched with Griffith, Seán Mac Diarmada (MacDermott) and other activists. A plaque on the site now commemorates the signing of the 1916 proclamation there.

With Wyse Power, Mac Diarmada, Kevin J. Kenny, Bulmer Hobson, Helena Molony and others, Griffith in 1907 formed the first Aonach committee. The annual Aonach, or industrial fair, held under Sinn Féin auspices between 1908 and 1914, served to popularise that political movement amongst Dublin businesses and to emphasise its importance.58 When Griffith’s weekly Sinn Féin paper went daily for a period he subtitled it ‘The Daily National Industrial Journal’. From 1908 Griffith also published, through Sinn Féin, the innovative Leabhar na hÉireann: The Irish Year Book, which was a digest of information intended to boost Irish manufacturing. When he reorganised it for 1910, he stated that ‘the business side of the book has been entrusted to the capable hands of Mr Kevin J. Kenny’, who founded Ireland’s first full-service advertising agency. This commercial relationship did not stop Griffith later from publishing criticism of Kenny when the latter’s agency was hired to promote military recruitment.59 The Irish Year Book of 1910 included an article contending with certain prejudices among established Irish companies against advertising, a commercial practice that some saw as ‘undignified’ and ineffective.60

During 1910, Griffith described the Year Book and the Aonach, along with the Sinn Féin Co-operative People’s Bank Ltd which he had also founded (Plate 10), as three institutions Sinn Féin established that ‘could claim to be successful from the first’.61 If such innovative activities make Griffith a capitalist, they also place him in the mainstream of Irish economic ambitions before and after independence. His disinterest in taking on capitalism as a system in addition to taking on imperialism has irked some observers. Not least because of this, as Davis noticed, ‘Socialists and radicals naturally lost few opportunities for attacking Griffith.’62

During 1919 a brilliant young journalist and future renowned London theatre critic came to Ireland. The editor of The Guardian, C.P. Scott, had dispatched Ivor Brown to meet Sinn Féiners who were then on the run or expecting arrest. Brown wrote that the

Most powerful and clear-headed of these was Arthur Griffith. For a leader of rebellion in a romantic country he was totally unromantic. I met him in a clandestine way in a grubby little office where he sat with a bowler hat on one side looking like a grocer in his back room … But, he had, below his fanaticism, a Fabian capacity for handling facts and figures as well as ideas …63

Michael Laffan, in a recent entry for Griffith in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, writes of him as ‘inundating his readers with demographic, financial, and other statistics’. That he frequently presented cogent evidence-based arguments in support of his contention that Ireland was inequitably treated by Britain, both socially and economically, is not always clearly recognised. Welcoming the first annual report on the agricultural statistics of Ireland, issued by the government’s new department of agriculture and technical instruction, he thought ‘Politics or no politics we must have the facts, and the better and more widely these facts are known, the sooner we shall get rid of talking and theorizing, and get down to work to lift the country out of its present beggarly condition.’64 He believed that Ireland’s fundamental economic problem was its exploitation by Britain. Interned in an English jail when the rebel parliament, Dáil Éireann, first met on 21 January 1919, he wrote ‘England in her propaganda pointed to the Dublin slums as proof of Irish incapacity and corruption. The tables should be turned on her … Dublin slumdom is the creation of English robbery.’65 While he frequently berated Dublin Corporation and took aim at Irish traders and other locals whom he felt had selfish objectives, he never lost sight of the underlying problem caused by the extraction of resources from Ireland and by oppressive restrictions on his country’s trade and growth. In the late twentieth century, the leading economist Patrick Lynch acknowledged Griffith’s grasp of economic and financial realities.66