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CHAPTER TWO

The Pro-Boer Republican (1897–1902)

Erskine Childers, a leading theorist of Gladstonian fiscal doctrine for the British Empire, claimed that ‘the whole history of South Africa bears a close resemblance to the history of Ireland’.1 This idea was only justifiable according to the British Empire’s plan after 1886 to turn Ireland into a similar colonial, financial entity. As Gladstone himself explained, the only motive of his Irish policy lay in imperial ‘finance devices … too subtle and refined’ to be announced to the general public. For security reasons, however, it was ‘of great consequence that in Ireland, with a view to holding in the people’, these realities remained ones to which Irish public attention should never be drawn.2 Some historians have claimed falsely that the provenance of Gladstone’s Irish policy ‘must be explained in terms of parliamentary combinations’ arising from electoral results,3 as if T.P. O’Connor’s return for Liverpool in 1885 necessitated a dramatic alteration of government policy. However, the reality was quite different. ‘Ireland’s future had now become more unionist and imperial’4 precisely because ‘the position of the landlord in Ireland has been directly associated with [the formation of] State Policy all along’ and it had now been simply arranged that the Irish Party would serve as a ‘body of moderate men’ suited ‘to take their place’ in forestalling any possibility of an opposition to British rule arising in Ireland. This was to be done not least by deliberately not acknowledging publicly in Ireland what the British government’s policy for Ireland was in reality.5 The perpetuation of a permanent secret service within Ireland was a reflection of this intent.

This trend in British governmental policy regarding Ireland was essentially why deep paradoxes arose in Irish party-political nomenclatures after 1886 and continued long thereafter. For instance, in Dublin, the independent nationalist MP William Field found his material support from Tory (‘unionist’) businessmen in demanding greater Irish fiscal autonomy and independence from Britain. By contrast, the chief ‘home rule’ parliamentary representative,William Martin Murphy, who was a ‘nationalist’ wholly committed, with the Jesuits’ enthusiastic support, to overthrowing the historic legacy of the Protestant ascendancy, was one of three Irish Party figures who not only supported those British raids for South African gold that led to the Anglo-Boer War but also made and developed his fortune from the related British colonial (‘gold coast’) railway schemes in West Africa.6 In this way, the general impact upon Irish society of the Anglo-Boer War might be typified as having been an illustration of the maxim that ‘the bond of Empire was at all times stronger than that of [the] Union’. This was because ‘the Empire … offered career opportunities—male and female, clerical and lay, that were simply not available in Ireland’, making the Empire seem like a more sensible guide to political and economic developments than the old (eighteenth-century) Irish nationalist adage of ‘perish the empire and live the [Irish] constitution’.7 Griffith would take a contrary view. In the short term, however, such considerations evidently mattered very little to him compared to the purely personal issue that he was receiving a working holiday. Indeed, as Griffith could never afford from his own wages to take a holiday longer than a few hours in the Dublin countryside,8 his time in South Africa was undoubtedly one of the most colourful episodes of his life.

During his travels Griffith met people of various nationalities for the first time: native Africans, Indians, Dutch ‘Boers’, Portuguese, Germans, Egyptians, Japanese and even the English. Having travelled across England to Southampton, he boarded a steamship bound, via the Mediterranean and Suez Canal, for Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique). The ship stopped first at the tropical island of Zanzibar, a territory recently acquired by the British off the coast of German East Africa (Tanzania). Here he went on a British guided tour of the capital city, which brought to life for him ‘a beloved storybook of our childhood’:

One cannot thoroughly appreciate or understand the Arabian Nights until he has visited an Arab city—until he has wandered through the narrow, tortuous streets with palaces towering to the sky … Sometimes we went into the courtyards of the princely merchants … and cooled ourselves under his palm-tree; sometimes we mingled with the whirling stream of Arabs, Swahilis, Singhalese, Egyptians, Japanese, Banyans and Parsees in the bazaar, and sometimes we explored the narrow dirty back streets, scarcely three-feet wide, lit by occasional lanterns … [observing] the fish-market and the slave-market and a mosque or two.9

In Mozambique, Griffith spent most of the time ‘lying all the morning round the deck, revelling in delicious laziness’. He learnt some phrases in a Hindu dialect and repeatedly defeated a German traveller in chess (‘I comforted him with large beer and the assurance that I was the champion chess-player of the Celtic race’).10 At night, however, he invariably envied his fellow travellers for their female companionship. This prompted him to rely even more than usual on the traditional refuge of loveless young men: his pipe, which he christened as his companion ‘Nicotina’:

On such a night—it is better to think Shakespeare than to quote him. Pray, what have I to do with lovers? I saw the Queen rising from the waves, and Helen and Maeve and Joan in her beautiful mob. Begone, O Aphrodite! Nicotina alone I serve—can your caresses drive her image from my heart? … My heart weeps …I cast aside my Nicotina. Shall I ever for one instant feel the divine joy of this one-time vilest of men, who loves and is beloved?11

Griffith shared in the British travellers’ bemusement at the ostentatious aspects of Portuguese culture. A Portuguese port town appeared to him to be full of diminutive soldiers, ‘black-moustached and yellow-faced’, who were inappropriately ‘carrying enormous sabres’. Life in the town appeared to Griffith as carnivalesque, bordering on the grotesque:

Every third day is a great saint’s day … The troops fire off their guns, the band plays at the kiosk, and the governor illuminates his residence. We go to the church and stare at the red-white-and-blue saints, dressed in tinsel-paper with cardboard crowns stuck on their heads …‘These Portuguese’, said a Saxon to me as we lay on deck that night, blowing our tobacco-clouds up in the face of divine Astarte, ‘are useless in the world … If England or America had magnificent Delagoa the trade and commerce of South Africa would be doubled in five years; but these little pride-inflated, lazy nincompoops, with their big swords and ten thousand saints, are ruining the country.’ 12

Such manifestations of British cultural prejudice against less industrialised Mediterranean nations were not alien to the Dubliner Griffith. His strong sense of identification with his English companions would disappear, however, whenever they boasted of the political achievements of the British Empire. At Zanzibar, for instance, several English travellers asked Griffith for his opinion of Britain’s performance in the recent Anglo-Zanzibar War. This had ended in just forty-five minutes after a British gunboat blew up the palace of the Sultan who had declared war. Griffith replied by expressing disapproval of the Empire, after which the English, who had hitherto been ‘very pleasant fellows as travel-companions’, turned on him with seething hatred, prompting Griffith to conclude that ‘each had a tiger sleeping in his heart’ that was born of a militant British nationalism.13

The nature of African town life led Griffith to the conclusion that Christian missionary work often went hand-in-hand with colonial exploitation. In one particular town, he found that the six richest men were Christian missionaries. Each man, it seemed to him, treated the natives simply as slaves:

He came to enlighten the heathen and in the process of enlightenment acquired wealth sufficient to enable him to live comfortably … He had converted six heathens who hewed wood and drew water for him, while he smoked his pipe and said it was good. As money is the root of all evil he gave them none but he occasionally hired them out at so much per day to do work for other people.14

Griffith’s sense of outrage at the colonists’ treatment of the native Africans as children prompted him to typify the Negro as ‘an old, old man’:

Once upon a time when your father and mine—my white brother— were lusty barbarians, the Ethiop was a mighty man, a warrior, a sailor, a poet, an artist, a cunning artificer, and a philosopher.15

Contemporary imperialist propaganda, issued by each of the European powers, invariably justified their financial exploits in Africa by portraying their adversaries as ‘robbers and murderers with a penchant for harpooning pious Christians’. Griffith, however, typified this as a denial of ‘the solemn truth the Japanese has grasped, that the Art of Destruction must be learned from the Christian nations’.16 He even suggested that life in Africa had probably been ‘comparatively godly’ before the Europeans had built their Christian churches there, in the halcyon days when ‘there were no crawling capitalist conspirators infesting the country’.17 Griffith’s cynicism regarding organised religion at this time included the Irish Jesuits, whom he accused of having substituted ‘the Gospel of Khaki’ (the British Army) for ‘the Gospel of the Prince of Peace’ (Christ) through their desire to benefit financially from British imperial colonialism.18

In Pretoria, Griffith discovered that the Dutch ‘Boer’ colony had become very militarised as a result of recent British raids into the territory. Here he met John James Lavery, a British businessman of Irish descent who had purchased a small newspaper in the town of Middelburg. Lavery was looking for some editorial assistance and Griffith seized this opportunity. Some local historians have dated the beginning of his editorial work to May 1897, although Griffith recollected that ‘it was a pleasant autumn evening when I struck the town’.19 The Courant was a badly printed country paper with a circulation of only 300 copies, some of which reached larger towns such as Johannesburg and Pretoria, and it was designed for the British citizens living within the Dutch colony.20 The newspaper office was tiny and grubby and ‘when I found the office I felt sorry I had come, but the die was cast … . We were sometimes short of type and often short of paper in the Courant offices, but our subscribers accepted this as inevitable.’ Griffith typified his work for this paper as provocative, prompting readers to ‘complain when I started writing in its columns’:

It had been the policy of the Courant to please all parties—the English for preference. I explained to its owner that if he wanted me to edit his paper, its policy must be one that would please myself. He agreed, and I pleased myself by arguing that the Boer and no one but the Boer owned the Transvaal, that the Queen’s writ didn’t run there and shouldn’t run there, and the God Almighty had not made the earth for the sole use of the Anglo-Saxon race. This offended the Englishmen and they sent word they would drop round one evening, burn down the office and finish the editor off. But they didn’t.21

In fact, Griffith’s job consisted mostly of reporting on local business matters, although he also drew attention to the formation of Maud Gonne’s L’Irlande Libre (Paris).22 Life in the town itself was dull as it contained only ‘two hotels, a Dutch church, an English church, and a jail’:

It was the centre of the coal-mining district … The young English managers of the mines played billiards all the month round in the town and ‘let things rip’, as they elegantly termed it. The shareholders in England paid for their fun.23

The most colourful episode to occur for Griffith in Middelburg was to meet Olive Schreiner, a daughter of Dutch and English Protestant missionaries who had the reputation in London, which she occasionally visited, of being the leading literary figure in South Africa. Prior to their meeting, Griffith had dismissed her literary reputation by arguing that ‘she has not grasped, or mayhap “disdained”, the fact that the literature of a people must be of and from the people’. He suggested that not unless someone ‘arises who can understand and sympathise with the ideals and aspirations of the people of this portion of the world, black as well as white, there can be no African literature’. Such a writer, he noted, would need to have ‘powers of expression and genius’ but such qualities were ‘as scarce in Africa as millionaires are plentiful’.24 When he actually met Schreiner, however, Griffith found that she was ‘a charming woman’. Later, he was delighted to find that she became a critic of British imperialism in South Africa,25 as indeed many contemporaries did.26

Griffith’s time with the Courant was cut short after he responded to the horsewhipping of an English townsman by a Dutch Boer landowner by writing that the former had received just what he deserved. The offended English party not only won a court case against the landowner but also pressed libel charges against the Courant, demanding five thousand pounds compensation from a paper that had a grand capital of thirty pounds. As a result, Lavery was arrested, receiving a sentence of either six months hard labour or a fine of one hundred pounds. Fortunately for Lavery, the population of Middelburg paid the fine but considerable ill feeling had developed and so the paper was disbanded.27 Griffith left the town in October 1897 with neither regrets nor, it seems, any sense of shared responsibility for Lavery’s misfortune. It was an example of which Griffith’s hero, John Mitchel, probably would have been proud. Noting how ‘I eventually managed to kill the paper’, Griffith recalled that while ‘there were some drawbacks to journalism in Middelburg … on the whole, it was exhilarating.’28

Returning to Pretoria, Griffith joined an Irish workers-benefit society named after John Daly, an imprisoned IRB leader who had recently been returned unopposed to parliament for Limerick city as a protest vote (his candidacy was immediately disqualified). Together with John MacBride, Griffith depended upon Solomon Gillingham, a successful baker of Irish descent and secret correspondent of Mark Ryan in London, to help him settle in the Dutch city. Through this channel, funds were forwarded to London for a fenian-amnesty agitation while an address was made to that wing of the American Clan na Gael that funded Ryan’s London activities.29 In this address, which was reprinted by W.M. Murphy’s Dublin newspaper, Griffith expressed a desire that Irishmen worldwide would use the centenary of the 1798 rising as an opportunity to ‘repudiate forever … the sham miscalled “constitutional action”’,30 which was the description that the Irish Party gave to their appeals to the British imperial parliament to better manage Irish affairs. Mark Ryan’s American contacts, secretly known as the Irish National Brotherhood (INB), were not reliable. Their propaganda was valued, however: as early as 1894 Griffith had persuaded the Celtic Literary Society to become subscribers to the Irish Republic (New York).31

It has been rumoured that Griffith was involved in a secret conspiracy in South Africa that planned to rob a local goldmine in order to finance an Irish revolutionary organisation.32 This seems unlikely, although the clear connection of his South African circle with a trans-Atlantic ‘Fenian’ communications network (this, as Griffith knew, had also existed during the first Anglo-Boer War)33 does at least explain the existence of a rumour. Griffith did work for a time as an overseer in a gold mine near Johannesburg where he nearly had a fatal accident. He later told the orphaned Dublin Protestant writer James Stephens that ‘I could have been a fairly wealthy man if I had the luck in those days to want to be dishonest’ because many individuals doing the work he was doing ‘were able to retire after a few years and buy theatres’ due to their subtle larceny.34

In Johannesburg Griffith occasionally received letters from William Rooney,35 which no doubt related to the activities of the 1798 centenary movement. Within weeks of Griffith’s departure, a 1798 Centenary Committee, led by John O’Leary, Henry Dixon and Fred Allan, was established by the YIL. Shortly thereafter, at a YIL convention chaired by P.N. Fitzgerald, it was proposed that centenary clubs should be established nationwide with a view to creating a new nationalist organisation.36 This 1798 centenary movement quickly grew large, but the Irish Party and the Catholic clergy launched a concerted campaign to wrestle control of the movement out of the IRB’s hands.37

The first circular distributed by the Centenary Committee argued that if the celebrations were to have ‘permanent beneficial results’ they would need to encompass equally the viewpoints of ‘the three great sects’ in Ireland. It was also argued that the United Irishmen’s greatest chance of attaining a fair constitution for Ireland had not been in the 1798 rebellion but rather in those political developments that had occurred prior to the government’s suppression of the Irish Volunteers during 1794 and the driving of the reformist United Irish movement underground.38 This argument was one that Griffith himself would repeat in later years.39 It was based on the understanding that the rebellion had been provoked by Britain to do away with the Irish constitution and facilitate a political and economic union between Britain and Ireland in order to maximise the former’s resources in fighting the Anglo-French War (1793–1815). Ireland, it would seem, could never quite escape from the demands of the British imperial economy. Griffith pointed out in 1911 that the existence of ‘international’ Irish republican conspiracies ever since that time was merely a cover to enable British consulates abroad to gather useful foreign policy information in their host countries.40 This was an additional paradox in Irish political nomenclatures, which was perhaps best reflected by the fact that the author of the famous nineteenth-century Irish nationalist ballad ‘who fears to speak of ’98’ was actually a leading unionist economist.41 It was also the reason why most contemporaries judged that no greater revolution could possibly take place in Ireland than the development, for the first time in history, of a political community that was truly determined to revolve on its own axis.

Virtually all those who had been present at Griffith’s farewell gathering at Dublin were prominent members of the 1798 Centenary Committee. A surprising exception was William Rooney, who was delegated instead to join Alice Milligan, the co-editor of the Belfast Shan van Vocht (which was partly funded, via Robert Johnston, by the New York Irish Republic), in doing insignificant propaganda work, such as organising small-scale historical lectures and exhibitions.42 This may be explained by the fact that Rooney was now concentrating primarily upon the Irish language movement, having helped the Gaelic League to organise its first of many Feis Ceoil Irish music events.43 Indeed, aside from contributing a ballad (as did Griffith) to Douglas Hyde’s Songs and Ballads of ’98, Rooney’s only direct contribution to the 1798 centenary movement was to propose that all memorials erected in honour of the United Irishmen should bear Irish language inscriptions only.44

Griffith and other Irish immigrants were able to hold their own 1798 centenary demonstration in Johannesburg on 30 August 1898.45 By that time, however, the centenary movement in Ireland had grown weak and two of Griffith’s closest associates in the movement, Henry Dixon and G.A. Lyons, blamed John O’Leary and, to a lesser extent, Fred Allan, for this, owing to their eventual capitulation to the Irish Party’s demand to have greater control over the movement.46 Furthermore, as the YIL had been converted into the 1798 Centenary Committee (each of which, like the IRB, had been nominally under O’Leary’s presidency), this meant that Griffith’s friends in Dublin had lost their only available political forum.

It was sometime during the autumn of 1898 when Griffith made the decision to return to Dublin. By January 1899, he was working as a compositor in the City Hall office of Thom’s Dublin Gazette and again attending meetings of the Celtic Literary Society.47 Well-founded rumours existed in Dublin that the ‘Parnellite’ Independent Newspaper Company, which had promoted the YIL, was about to be liquidated. In addition, the Shan van Vocht, which had been established to eclipse the influence of John Clarke’s Northern Patriot in the 1798 centenary movement (a task it accomplished), was ready to fold. This journal had been closely associated with the Celtic Literary Society and it was partly funded by Mark Ryan’s London-Irish circle. Upon receiving word in late 1898 that it would cease publication, Ryan proposed that Rooney should become the editor of a new journal to replace it. As Rooney had no previous editorial experience, however, Griffith landed the job. An additional factor that worked in Griffith’s favour here was that this enterprise was funded by capital previously forwarded to Ryan from South Africa.48

The United Irishman was founded in Dublin in March 1899 with Rooney and Griffith as its joint editors. It was expected by the IRB to be an organ for the surviving centenary clubs. Mark Ryan, by contrast, wanted it to promote a non-political cultural nationalism. In the face of these competing desires, Rooney and Griffith chose a similar stance as had Alice Milligan by adopting a middle course, declaring that ‘here are opinions to suit all classes. You pay your penny and you take your choice.’49 Up until a couple of months before his premature death in May 1901, William Rooney acted as the literary editor of the United Irishman, which was subtitled as a weekly review. Griffith took on the responsibility of tackling political subjects. These included the recent establishment of elective local government bodies and the role that the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War had in influencing the whole question of where Irish political allegiances should lie in the wake of the 1798 centenary celebrations. Reflecting his antipathy to contemporary party politics, Griffith wrote regarding the creation of new county and urban district councils that he hoped voters would ‘reject with equal contempt the slavish home ruler and the knavish unionist and vote for representatives, regardless of their party politics, who are honest men’.50 Men of professed nationalist sympathies but not necessarily of any specific party allegiance won 75 per cent of all seats, including many individuals who had once been connected with the republican underground.51

The outcome of these elections highlighted significant undercurrents within Irish political society. New county and town councillors erected dozens of memorials to Irish rebellions in the wake of the 1798 centenary, while some old republican figures as well as many members of William O’Brien’s new agrarian United Irish League (UIL) refused to follow requests from the Irish Party that they become justices of the peace because of the required oath of allegiance to the British crown.52 In Limerick, the released convict John Daly was elected as mayor and acted nominally in republicans’ interests by removing the royal coat of arms from City Hall and granting the freedom of the city to his fellow released convict Tom Clarke. Meanwhile, immediately upon the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War in October 1899, resolutions of sympathy with the Boers were passed by six of the thirty-two county councils in Ireland (Limerick, Kilkenny, Mayo, Kings County, Sligo and Cork) as well as about two-dozen urban and district councils, town commissions and board of guardians (mostly in the counties Monaghan, Tipperary, Clare and Galway).53

This was a somewhat startling development. It reflected a motive of the secret compact behind the Anglo-Irish security negotiations of 1884–7 and the purpose of the recently established Resident Magistrate System, which was launched during 1881. During the mid-1880s the idea of creating elective local government bodies in Ireland was deemed ‘unsound and dangerous’ purely for security reasons.54 The decision to withhold from the municipal authorities established in Ireland during 1899 the same financial autonomies as their British counterparts possessed since 1888 was a continuation of this legacy.

Griffith helped to found a small Pro-Boer movement in Dublin during June 1899 once it became clear that Britain was going to invade the Boer Republic. With the support of the Celtic Literary Society, local 1798 centenary clubs and Mark Ryan’s recently established Irish National Club in London, Griffith formed the Irish-Transvaal Committee under John O’Leary’s presidency. Three Irish Party members made a subscription to the Irish-Transvaal Committee, but the Boer War presented some problems for the Irish Party in promoting its nationalist reputation. This was because the Irish Party was expected in all British political circles, including South African ones, to celebrate the Empire.55 Disingenuously or not, Griffith sought to capitalise upon this chink in the Irish Party’s armour. The possibilities of doing so were limited, however, by republicans’ lack of a viable political organisation of their own.

During 1899, IRB leaders in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Limerick, Kerry and Mayo made efforts to keep the 1798 centenary clubs in existence. Their purpose in doing so was reflected in the political columns of Griffith’s United Irishman, which called for the creation a new ‘republican association’ in the country that would be entirely public and based around the centenary clubs. Griffith’s friend G.A. Lyons even made an exaggerated claim that ‘if we had a ’98 club in every town in Ireland, working as I know at least one to be working in Dublin, we would not fear for the future of an Irish republic’.56 In Dublin, the IRB leader Fred Allan operated a body known as the Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee to which these centenary clubs were supposed to send subscriptions, just as they had previously done to the now defunct 1798 Centenary Committee. It was evidently intended that Griffith’s United Irishman would act as the organ of this new movement. At the June 1899 Bodenstown demonstration chaired by P.N. Fitzgerald, Maurice Moynihan of Tralee, the new Munster IRB leader (and father of a future leader of the Irish civil service of the same name), called upon all nationalists to support ‘that sturdy and patriotic little sheet, the United Irishman’. Moynihan advocated the establishment of ‘an open organisation’ because ‘political opinion in Ireland at this time is in too unsettled, too chaotic, a state to start a real revolutionary movement’. Moynihan declared that the proposed new public organisation should have nothing to do with the Irish Party and its press but it need not ‘decry any existing organisation, whether connected with land or labour’, such as William O’Brien’s United Irish League. Reflecting republicans’ prejudice against land agitations, however, Moynihan felt certain that it was ‘to the young men of the cities and towns we must look for the formation of a national organisation’.57

About 8,000 people, primarily from Dublin, were present at this Bodenstown demonstration. This may well have seemed as evidence to Griffith that his journal was about to become a significant seller. However, many centenary clubs disbanded soon after and whatever funds that were subscribed to the central Wolfe Tone Clubs of Dublin seem to have been financially mismanaged. Nominally, these funds were supposed to be used to erect a monument to Wolfe Tone (an idea that Dublin City Hall would reject in favour of the idea of a Parnell or a Gladstone monument) but instead they became funds of the IRB that were deliberately misappropriated by J.P. Dunne, the first secretary of the Wolfe Tone Clubs and a former admirer of John Redmond. Indeed, it is doubtful that the United Irishman received regular funding from this quarter. Although the United Irishman expanded to an eight-page journal after the 1899 Bodenstown demonstration, John Devoy, the IRB’s American ally, recalled that Griffith considered the IRB as ‘too stingy’ in their support and so he looked elsewhere.58 His alternative backers would prove to be no more reliable.

Historians have sometimes attributed to Griffith the political opinions voiced in ‘Over the Border’. This was a front-page commentary on international affairs that appeared in the United Irishman during its first year of publication.59 However, these articles were actually written by Frank Hugh O’Donnell, a London-Irish figure and associate of Mark Ryan upon whom the United Irishman became financially dependent. A graduate of Queens College Galway who had been expelled from the Irish Party in 1885 (Parnell had considered both O’Donnell and John O’Connor Power as too much of a personal rival),60 O’Donnell had the reputation of being a controversial propagandist because of his tendency to overstate his arguments. By now, he had few admirers apart from Mark Ryan and some London-Irish Tories.

During the period of the Boer War, Irish Catholics’ great hostility to the French Republic’s state-controlled education programme (it would soon expel the Jesuits from France) encouraged the Irish Party’s press to adopt a very pro-British treatment of current Anglo-French relations. These were strained due to Britain and France’s rival colonial interests on the African continent. Acting partly on John O’Leary’s advice,61 the United Irishman chose to reflect an opposing viewpoint. To this end, O’Donnell, adopting the pseudonym ‘the foreign secretary’, wrote unquestioning defences of the French government from all international criticisms, including intensely anti-Semitic defences of the Parisian government’s handling of the Dreyfus affair. Some historians have cited this as evidence of a strong anti-Semitic streak in Griffith, although this is an exaggerated claim.62 O’Donnell was actually receiving funds from the French government to write this propaganda. He had used his connection with Mark Ryan’s London-Irish circle as a cover for claiming to be an Irish revolutionary leader and had approached both French and Dutch embassies looking for financial support for an anti-British propaganda campaign. In this, he outmanoeuvred American agents of John Devoy’s Clan na Gael (who attempted a similar objective, nominally on behalf of the IRB) and succeeded in acquiring funds to launch an Irish pro-Boer movement, his efforts in Paris having succeeded partly due to the assistance of Maud Gonne and her war-mongering French imperialist (ex-Boulangerist) associates on the Parisian city council. In this way, O’Donnell, Ryan and Gonne effectively financed the Irish Pro-Boer movement from London and Paris. It appears, however, that their circle was not above passing information to the British Foreign Office on French attitudes towards international affairs.63

In some Irish Party quarters (which were privy to what was taking place at Dublin Castle), it was rumoured not entirely without reason that the pro-Boer movement was also connected with more dangerous British secret service plots.64 Whatever the case, Maud Gonne, who grew up in Dublin Castle social circles and took after her military father, clearly attempted to endear herself to Griffith at this time. She sent him a large signed photograph of herself and a copy of a novel The Mountain Lovers, both bearing an inscription pledging her friendship to him.65 Reputedly, Griffith thereafter entertained serious romantic illusions about Gonne,66 who had attained celebrity status as supposedly one of the most beautiful women of the day. If so, these hopes were no doubt short-lived: she was not known as Ireland’s Joan of Arc for nothing. A political association remained, however, for at least the length of the Anglo-Boer War. Griffith even horsewhipped a newspaper editor for claiming to have proof that Gonne was a Parisian agent of the British Foreign Office.67 This action led to Griffith’s arrest and his violent action was very probably motivated by self-defence: it was well known that the United Irishman was financially dependent upon Gonne’s circle. However, even if Griffith was in receipt of some monies that came from suspect sources—this being an almost inevitable feature of being associated with revolutionary organisations—this did not have a great bearing upon his own work.

Griffith’s opposition to the Irish Party, which was more intense than that of any Irish Tory member of parliament, would become a defining feature of his political editorials. As had been the case since the late 1880s, it continued to be expressed primarily as a sense of outrage at the party’s indifference to the urban working class. Griffith continued to believe in the idea of a state-sponsored socialism while opposing all notions of politically engineered class conflicts. He argued that the establishment of more state institutes of technical education for the working classes was the most pressing educational need facing the country and that state grants should be created to enable the working classes attend university, as was the case in France and Germany.68 As a result of its decision to allow the Catholic hierarchy determine its policy on education, the Irish Party was understood by Griffith to have equated Irish educational needs with the question of denominational education alone.69 He typified Irish Party politicians and journalists as royalist flunkeys for two reasons. First, they took part in loyalist social events. Second, there was an inevitably close working relationship between all the country’s elected politicians and its police forces. This reality was presented by Griffith as a symbolic representation of parliamentarians’ indifference to the urban working class.70

Griffith frequently gave voice to this quintessentially working-class perspective of police forces being inherently oppressive tools of social control for so long as he lived in poor circumstances himself. It underpinned his fascination with the history of the Fenian movement—regarding which he knew very intricate details 71 —as well as his fondness for attending republican commemorative events. For example, in expressing praise for P.N. Fitzgerald’s 1901 Bodenstown speech against middle-class political opportunism Griffith drew the personal conclusion that police harassment of workers on their way home to Dublin from Bodenstown demonstrated what motives underpinned both middle-class political attitudes and all the activities of the police.72 Catholic clergymen often attempted to dissuade working-class figures like Griffith from holding such attitudes. This was done by pointing out that secret revolutionary movements, in Ireland as much as in the rest of Europe, were invariably established by police forces as a tool to detect and manage sources of discontent among the poor. Old fenians like Fitzgerald sometimes attempted to counter this argument by telling their followers, in the same breath as they espoused the value of bearing firearms, that priests were, consciously or unconsciously, an ally of the police in oppressing the poor.73

Fr P.F. Kavanagh, a Franciscan monk and popular historian of the 1798 rising, gave valuable support to the pro-Boer movement by launching an anti-enlistment campaign. He challenged Griffith directly on the issue of secret societies in the pages of the United Irishman.74 To refute Fr Kavanagh’s arguments, Griffith argued that secret societies were very often a necessary evil in overthrowing tyrannical powers. His belief in this idea appears to have been rooted primarily in his appreciation for the fact that members of such organisations, by espousing a republican dichotomy between the concepts of citizenship and slavery, had often helped to sustain a sense of self-reliant patriotism in Irish political debate: ‘we owe what national self-respect we still retain mainly to the secret society of the United Irishmen and the secret society of the Fenian Brotherhood … They made men out of slaves.’ Meanwhile, in an attempt to speak in defence of the existence of secret societies, Griffith also spoke of the underground nature of the early Christian church and argued that the modern church had lost its sense of perspective in these matters, thereby frequently becoming a bastion of aristocratic conservatism.75 Griffith himself came to the realisation that there were many dubious features to the history of Irish revolutionary organisations, not least because he knew from his own youth in Dublin of horrific episodes that pointed to unsavoury conclusions regarding the true nature of all revolutionary undergrounds.76 Overall, he evidently viewed the broad question of the relationship between agencies of social control and the activities of revolutionary organisations from a practical standpoint. He knew that secret machinations involving the police’s political intelligence forces were an inherent feature of this environment. However, he also acknowledged that, in the pre-democratic age and semi-colonial political context in which he lived, such organisations often provided the only ladder available for men of his social background to gain an entry point into the power game that defined the world of politics.

If Griffith was willing to defend the history of Irish revolutionary organisations, his own activities at this time were less an underground conspiracy than a form of protest politics that was shaped by specific Dublin circumstances. The Irish Party was beginning to eclipse the Tories in Dublin parliamentary representation.77 As Griffith would note, however, the city’s politics was still governed by a unique partition that stemmed from the legacy of the imperial treasury’s deliberate withholding, not long after the admission of Catholics to municipal office in 1840, of the city’s quit and crown rents that were paid annually for the city’s upkeep. Dublin was now the only city in the world where the suburbs, which were invariably the home of a city’s labour force, housed its wealthiest inhabitants and contributed nothing to the upkeep of a city that was left to subsist if that were possible (generally it was not) only on the taxation of the city’s labouring population.78 It was not for nothing that Griffith typified Dublin city’s completely unparalleled housing and sanitation problems as a totally avoidable ‘Viceregal microbe’. The Dublin Chamber of Commerce had become a moribund body that, more often than not, maintained a deliberate and embarrassed silence, while contemporaries invariably associated wealthy Dublin society exclusively with royal court society, or the suburbs, and the poor with City Hall, i.e. the city’s actual government, which was deprived of resources and then accused of incompetence.79

An additional factor that uniquely coloured Dublin life was peculiarities that existed on the level of political organisation and journalism. Although the Irish Party had progressively abandoned its association with Land League radicalism after 1881, continuities existed on the simplistic level of personnel. Reflecting this, ex-Land League officials from the provinces lacked influence equally with the Irish Party and the British government but nevertheless maintained a proud tradition of moving to Dublin in an attempt to act as behind-the-scenes party administrators or nationalist journalists. Although the age of the by-line had not yet arrived, men of this social background played a significant part in colouring political debate in Ireland, while unionist opinion generally took perpetual comfort from the British government’s effective guarantee that ‘Dublin does not lead Ireland as Paris leads France.’80 Like many a nationalist journalist, Griffith wrote his columns as if this simply should not be the case. Unlike various ex-Land Leaguers, he had the additional vantage point, or motive, of being a native of Dublin; the home of many ‘statesmen on the street corners’.81 Although many fellow journalists typified Griffith’s understandable attacks on the Irish Party as either counter productive or downright unfair, they nevertheless generally understood and respected his place in the world of Dublin letters.

Griffith’s determination to act as a thorn in the Irish Party’s side manifested itself several times during 1900. First, to coincide with the nominal reunification of the Irish Party under John Redmond’s leadership, Griffith supported Mark Ryan in proposing that John MacBride be put forward for a south Mayo parliamentary by-election as a means of protesting against British rule. In doing so, they publicised the fact that MacBride had recently formed a small commando unit on the Boer side in the Anglo-Boer War. There was another context to this election, however, about which Griffith may well have been unaware. Under Dublin Castle’s supervision, Ryan had recently met up with MacBride’s Castlebar associates and spoke publicly of initiating arms importations along the Mayo coast. This action enabled Dublin Castle to achieve its longstanding ambition to persuade the British Admiralty to begin placing Royal Navy gunboats in Clew Bay.82 This reflected a peculiar context of the social world of republican activists. This was always characterised by engagement with nationalist debating clubs, working-class political organisations (urban and, to a lesser extent, agrarian) and popular cultural nationalist organisations (most notably the GAA) within Ireland itself. This prompted most activists, including Griffith, to view themselves as engaged in a nationalist challenge to the authority of Dublin Castle. However, the latter’s political intelligence work always had much broader ramifications than the local (friendly or unfriendly) DMP or RIC detectives who were standing on Irish street corners. In conjunction with various activities of the Foreign Office, War Office and the Admiralty, it was financed by the Secretary of State’s secret service fund to promote and protect British strategic or diplomatic interests worldwide, including the financing of both national and international security concerns.83 Griffith claimed to have expected a negative result in MacBride’s parliamentary campaign, but nevertheless attempted to use MacBride’s defeat repeatedly thereafter as a means to criticise the Irish Party’s supposed lack of patriotism.84

Griffith’s next attack upon the Irish Party was equally indirect. Maud Gonne and Mark Ryan funded him to attempt to negate the political influence within Dublin of Fred Allan. As the former manager of the Irish Daily Independent, Allan was considered to be too personally sympathetic towards John Redmond, who was now chosen as a new leader for the Irish Party partly because it was considered that his political lineage (his family had been in politics since the 1850s) made him a good potential successor to Parnell as a man who could at least pose as an individual that was above ‘mere’ party politics and thus assume the standing of a prospective national leader. Allan had recently accepted the job as secretary to the lord mayor of Dublin to strengthen the hand of the Wolfe Tone memorial movement but was then embarrassed by the mayor’s announcement that he intended organising a large welcoming celebration for Queen Victoria and so decided to offer his resignation to City Hall. However, John O’Leary dissuaded Allan from doing so (he deemed the Queen’s visit to be politically insignificant). This prompted Gonne to fund Griffith to blacklist all corporation officials who took part in the royalist demonstration.85 As a result, Allan lost his position as the leader of the Wolfe Tone Clubs in June 1900 in the same week as the United Irish League set up a central executive in Dublin and officially declared itself to be the supporting body of John Redmond and the Irish Party. Thereafter, Griffith also broke up a meeting in the Rotunda and gathered about 2,000 people to break up a relatively small rally in the Phoenix Park in an attempt to prevent the UIL from establishing branches in Dublin.86

These activities, funded by Gonne, reflected a peculiar and longstanding dynamic to the revolutionary underground in Ireland. In acting as a thorn in the side to moderate nationalist politicians, it frequently served unionists by diverting attention away from the manner in which they were being politically protected the most in the manner of oligarchs by the exercise of the golden rule in society. During the Queen’s visit, Griffith published bitter United Irishman editorials against the Irish Party’s willingness to pledge their allegiance to ‘The Famine Queen’, took part in Irish Socialist Republican Party street brawls with the police (Griffith was a skilled boxer)87 and succeeded in getting himself arrested twice and his journal prosecuted.88 Griffith’s willingness to engage in street brawls was probably influenced by deep frustration in his personal life at this time. The previous winter, he was unable to save his father from the shame of being forced to enter the workhouse while his beloved older sister had just died from tuberculosis.89

T.D. Sullivan MP, a mayor of Dublin during the Land League days, knew the Griffith family slightly during the mid-1880s but he had recently announced his intention to retire from politics. He responded to the prosecution of the United Irishman by pointing out that it was an insignificant cultural nationalist organ of Maud Gonne’s that did not represent a dangerous political movement. Therefore, it was absolutely ridiculous for Dublin Castle to have treated it, or, indeed, to have drawn great political attention to it, in the way that it did.90 The political context of these developments was essentially the scheming of John Clancy, a key figure in Dublin republican circles for many years despite the fact that he was the electoral registrar and sub-sheriff of the city from 1885–99. He was now a representative of the new municipal ward of Clontarf.91 Clancy supported Gonne and Griffith’s failed efforts to get City Hall to confer the freedom of Dublin upon the president of the Boer Republic and to get released convict Tom Clarke appointed to a clerical position in the corporation (Clarke subsequently became the New York agent for the United Irishman). Acting on the advice of J.P. Nannetti, a printing-firm owner previously associated with the IRB but who now joined the Irish Party, that winter Clancy committed himself to the UIL and helped to establish it in Dublin by making it vocally supportive of a policy of removing all loyalists from the corporation.92 This set the tone for subsequent developments.

Griffith had called previously in the United Irishman for the formation of a new movement that would commit itself primarily to removing all royalist flunkeys from Irish municipal politics.93 These campaigns reflected a desire to undo a legacy of the 1892 general election, the first post-1886 general election to be held. This was a widespread tendency to abandon the old pledge of the Irish National League, set during 1882 and partly sustained by the Plan of Campaign of 1886–90, that nationalists should not take government offices.94 The revival of the sectarian Ancient Order of Hibernians among the beleaguered Ulster Catholic population after 1904 would see this idea re-emerge as a factor in political debate.95 It essentially remained a minority position, however, that, in the meantime, was championed mostly by Griffith’s nascent political movement in Dublin. This was also the context for the launch of an anti-enlistment movement, for which Gonne financed the printing of 40,000 circulars and Fr Kavanagh declared the Boer War to be an unjust war according to the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Gonne also financed the creation of two new cultural nationalist organisations that were founded at the Celtic Literary Society meeting rooms in Dublin. The first was the Daughters of Erin, a small women’s nationalist organisation, and the second was ‘Cumann na nGaedhael (Confederation of the Gaels)’, which expressed support for promoting the Irish language and held joint social functions with the Daughters of Erin. Only a few dozen people were present at its initial meeting, at which Griffith was appointed its provisional leader.96 When its first convention was held, however, Griffith was not elected to any position. Instead, its executive consisted mostly of individuals who were elected in absentia due to their status as figureheads in the pro-Boer agitation, namely John O’Leary (president) and Fr Kavanagh, John MacBride, Robert Johnston and James Egan (vice-presidents).97

With Gonne’s support, Fr Kavanagh also formed a branch of the Celtic Literary Society in Cork and subsequently wrote to the United Irishman stressing that the new movement must not be allowed to fall under the influence of men who held ‘un-Catholic doctrines’.98 In the light of his previous quarrel with Griffith, Fr Kavanagh may have used his influence to exclude him from its executive. This stance was motivated primarily, however, by a desire to marginalise all political activists of John Daly’s generation who, through their association with surviving 1798 centenary clubs or trade and labour associations, were either sympathetic to the early radicalism of the United Irish League or the old school of fenian political anticlericalism. To marginalise all such men, Cumann na nGaedhael sought recruits exclusively among young members of the Gaelic League. Early adherents such as Terence MacSwiney and Liam de Róiste of Fr Kavanagh’s Celtic Literary Society in Cork, as well as Bulmer Hobson and Denis McCullough in Belfast, made no secret of their distaste for political activities of the preceding generation. It was not a coincidence that this formation of Cumann na nGaedhael coincided with the establishment of D.P. Moran’s Leader. This was a new Catholic newspaper that, although nominally an independent organ, existed to propagate a self-confident cultural nationalism that sought to undo, or screen over, all the divisions that had erupted in Irish Party circles after 1890.99

During the height of the pro-Boer campaign in the summer of 1900, Griffith had enjoyed the excitement of being brought by Robert Johnston, a wealthy Belfast republican, to Paris to meet Maud Gonne and her war-mongering French political associates.100 A year later, however, Griffith was writing to John MacBride that there was ‘not the ghost of a chance of my being able to go over’ to Paris again and that he was ‘all alone in Dublin now and half-dead’.101 In March 1901, Rooney had fallen terminally ill due to a slum-contracted disease. He died three months later. Coming very shortly after the death of his own sister from the same cause and his father’s incarceration in a workhouse, this hit Griffith particularly hard. Meanwhile, if Griffith’s enthusiasm for the pro-Boer campaign had declined, this was only natural as the centre of the political controversy had shifted far away from Griffith’s orbit, namely to Irish-America.

After expelling T.M. Healy and his clericalist followers from the party, the Irish Party discovered that the UIL, whose branches consisted of many parish priests, was not very willing to contribute to its funds. To counteract this trend, it was decided to send men to the United States to establish an American fund-raising wing of the UIL. Maud Gonne and John MacBride, who had fled from South Africa, went to America on Mark Ryan’s orders. While Griffith believed they were opposing the Irish Party’s mission, they actually worked for the American allies of Michael Davitt. Essentially acting as the Irish Party’s fifth columnist, Davitt had resigned from parliament purely to supervise the development of the Pro-Boer movement. He went to the United States to attempt to shut down the old Clan na Gael organisation of John Devoy, which was currently promoting an American lecture tour for John Daly and no longer supporting John Redmond (the chief ‘independent nationalist’ after 1891) after he rejoined the Irish Party. Devoy complained to MacBride about this situation but the later justified this course of events by stating that Cumann na nGaedhael had been decided upon as the movement of the future, not the old republican networks. Reflecting Maud Gonne’s strategy, he also wrote to the United Irishman that he believed that the public organisations identified with the new Irish-Ireland movement within Ireland itself, such as Cumann na nGaedhael, the Gaelic League and (increasingly) the GAA, were bringing ‘a new soul into Erin’ and he suggested that they adopt a new motto of ‘Sinn Féin’ to describe their objectives.102 At the time, with Gonne’s support, Mark Ryan was proposing to form a new international organisation, under MacBride’s presidency, that would link Irish-American contacts with his own circle in London and Cumann na nGaedhael in Dublin.103 It was intended that this would replace the old Clan na Gael-IRB networks and create a new movement that was more in line with mainstream Irish nationalism.

Not surprisingly, the political outcome of the Pro-Boer movement did not become evident until the Anglo-Boer War ceased in October 1902. That month, the Irish Party’s fortunes were partly secured by the formal establishment of the United Irish League of America while the success of Davitt’s mission meant that the Clan na Gael nearly disbanded altogether. The cessation of the Boer War also brought an end to the funding that had sustained the O’Donnell– Ryan–Gonne–MacBride network and, in turn, the United Irishman. Griffith was therefore left once again in the position of needing financial backers: due to its very limited advertising and sales revenue, the United Irishman had to rely on private donations from shareholders to keep afloat.

Mark Ryan still had sufficient funds to impose his will upon the old IRB organisation and attempt to create a new executive and strategy for that movement. Since the 1901 funeral of James Stephens, he had pressed for uniting his movement with the IRB on the condition that the latter would rebuild itself totally from scratch exclusively among young Cumann na nGaedhael or Gaelic League activists. As a result, P.T. Daly, an active Dublin trade unionist, was simultaneously appointed the first full-time travelling organiser for Cumann na nGaedhael, which soon developed branches in each major Irish and British city, and the secretary, or ‘chief travelling organiser’, of a new IRB organisation in October 1902.104

MacBride would soon call upon Devoy to fund both Griffith’s journal and P.T. Daly’s organisation through the medium of Mark Ryan in London.105 However, Cumann na nGaedhael’s status as a public organisation connected with the new Irish-Ireland movement meant that the necessary funding was more likely to be attained from entirely different quarters. This was a reality that was appreciated most by Maud Gonne. These trends would soon enable Griffith to take his first steps out of the police-supervised world of street protest politics and find a niche for himself in mainstream politics, thereby slowly but surely distancing himself from the revolutionary underground that had embroiled him in its dark secrets since 1894.

The clericalist wing of the Irish home rule movement led by T.M. Healy, W.M. Murphy, John Sweetman and their followers remained in favour of decentralising authority within the United Irish League. Unlike T.M. Healy and his followers, the Irish Party had failed during 1902 to support an English education act that was supported by the Catholic hierarchy because of the boost that it gave to denominational schools in England. This created a backlash against the Irish Party in Catholic circles in both Ireland and Britain. D.P. Moran’s Irish-Ireland movement had already been established as a tool for putting pressure upon the Irish Party to obey the Catholic bishops, not the intellectual fashions of British public life or the Liberal Party, in the politics of education. Soon, Maud Gonne would take it upon herself to contact John Sweetman, a very wealthy former Healyite MP, looking for financial support for the United Irishman, noting that ‘the editor Mr. Griffith is not aware that I am writing to you and to one or two more’.106Sweetman admitted to being a constant reader of Griffith’s journal despite the fact that ‘sometimes it annoyed me very much by some of its writers sneering at religion’. If this practice ceased entirely, however, he would agree to become its principal shareholder. Gonne let Griffith know the terms of Sweetman’s offer and then informed the latter that ‘I quite agree with you that all attacks on religion should be avoided … I am sure they will be.’107 Soon afterwards, on Griffith’s behalf, she persuaded Sweetman to increase his shareholding in the company further, as ‘Mr. Griffith feels confident if things go on as they are going at present, in about 3 months the paper will be paying its way.’108

In addition to Sweetman, another valuable patron Griffith found at this time was Walter Cole. He was a successful Liverpool-born fruit merchant and Catholic community activist who served on Dublin city council as an alderman. A former Healyite within the YIL, Cole also admired Michael Davitt’s politics. Upon joining Cumann na nGaedhael, Cole not only established a close friendship with Griffith but also offered him much needed personal financial assistance. This certainly did not go unappreciated. Henry Egan Kenny, Arthur’s closest friend, once recalled that Griffith told him that ‘Walter has been Mother, Father and ideal friend to me. I could not have lived through those days of stress without his unexampled care and princely hospitality.’109 While Griffith’s family had fallen completely apart due to poverty several years previously, after the cessation of the Boer War the support Griffith received from his new Catholic patrons allowed him to rescue his ailing father from the workhouse and the Griffith family were able to resettle in a small family home of their own, based in Summerhill, for the first time in almost a decade.110

At the relatively late age of thirty-two, Griffith’s life began to undergo a significant change due to the fact that he had finally found a career. Thanks to Maud Gonne’s initiative, he had found a means of leaving the very insecure life of poverty he had known behind him and to embark on a journalistic career with a degree of confidence because he had found stable financial backing from well-to-do individuals. After years of troubling ill health from living in slum conditions, he was certainly lucky to escape the same fatal fate of Rooney and his older sister Marcella, and to not have to follow the same path as had been taken by his brothers, most of his youthful friends (including former United Irishman contributors) and other former pro-Boer activists (including James Connolly), which was emigration to perform menial labouring jobs. Not surprisingly, he was not prepared to throw away his recent good fortune.

Arthur Griffith’s days of working overnight for a minimum wage, dressed in the ink-stained overalls of a compositor or the sweat-soaked clothes of a South African miner, were now over. Instead, he would begin to revel in his newfound role as a respectable and well-dressed, if far from well off, editor of a ‘national review’. If the stylish pince-nez that now adorned Griffith’s face betrayed a degree of personal affectation, however, it was his already well-developed and incisive intelligence that would ultimately allow him to catch the public eye.