Читать книгу Arthur Griffith - Owen McGee - Страница 12

CHAPTER FOUR

The Resurrection of Hungary and the Birth of Sinn Féin (1904–5)

Tom Kettle of University College Dublin considered The Resurrection of Hungary to be the publication that gave a policy to the Irish revolutionary underground for the first time.1 This was because its unilateral definition of Anglo-Irish relations without reference to British requirements was informed by trends in Catholic diplomacy that also shaped the Irish Party’s politics.

Hitherto, the clandestine activities of Ireland’s self-styled republican conspirators had always reflected British foreign policy interests regarding the republics of the United States and France. This situation had changed by 1904 when an Anglo-French diplomatic alliance ended centuries of Anglo-French conflict: hence the sudden political retirement of Maud Gonne, amongst others. By 1904, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was effectively the last great Catholic power, or explicitly Catholic state, on the European continent. Since the days of the Congress of Berlin (1878) its significance in British foreign policy rested on its role as a key intermediary for Britain between Germany and Russia in all matters, as well as between Britain and Russia regarding the perpetual disputes over the Balkans. There was no actual link between Ireland and Britain’s new principal enemy, Germany, aside from links between the Irish and German Catholic immigrant communities in the United States, both of whom now maintained that ‘Europe, not England, is the mother country of Europe.’2 This trend of opinion reflected the growth of a greater diplomatic role for the Catholic Church in the United States. This in turn made it a factor in Anglo-American relations.

There was nothing new about suggesting a parallel between the Anglo-Irish and Austro-Hungarian political relationship. It had occurred to several political leaders—British as well as Irish—during the mid-Victorian era and it still exercised an influence over political opinion during the mid-1880s.3 Reviving this idea after 1904 could serve to remind politicians that the Catholic Church had been the key player in the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1885–86. Both the President of Maynooth College and the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster supported Griffith’s publication. This development reminded the Irish Party that Catholic support was inherently conditional precisely because Griffith’s book included a stinging criticism of the Irish Party in its conclusion. Reflecting this, John Redmond paid a personal visit to the Vatican shortly after Griffith’s book became a top-selling publication to reassure the Pope that the Irish Party would again faithfully represent the Catholic interest in the British imperial parliament for both Ireland and Britain.4 An essential context to Griffith’s publication, therefore, was the church’s ambiguous relationship with the Irish Party, which had connotations not only for Anglo-Irish relations but also the general tenor of Irish political debate.

Along with John MacBride, Griffith had essentially been the chief spokesman for the republican underground ever since his return from South Africa. They had maintained that ‘there is no constitution in Ireland’ because a constitution is something ‘founded by the people and for the people’ and that for any political community not to act upon this reality ‘daily enfeebles the oppressed whilst it more than in the same proportion strengthens the usurper’.5 In common with T.M. Healy’s clericalist wing of the home rule movement and some Irish Tories, they also maintained that the obsessive emphasis of the Irish Party upon maintaining a monolithic political platform within Ireland had become deeply debilitating and unproductive, cultivating ‘the habits of servitude’, political idleness and lack of critical thinking among the Irish populace at large.6

The key general election of 1885 was preceded by preparatory actions by political elites in an attempt to manipulate the outcome within Ireland of the enfranchisement of half of adult British males. Parnell decided during the summer of 1884 to alter the financial management of Irish Party support bodies in both Ireland and America by placing them in Catholic clergymen’s hands,7 while Dublin Castle’s security department simultaneously rounded up and imprisoned the IRB’s leadership, leading to the implosion of the revolutionary underground on both sides of the Atlantic.8 These developments formed the backdrop for several things: Parnell’s decision to grant Catholic clergymen the right to be ex-officio members of all National League committees, the Irish Catholic hierarchy’s decision to make a public statement in October 1884 that it was prepared to rely on Parnell’s party to represent the Catholic interest in the British imperial parliament and the launching of secret negotiations between Dublin Castle, the Irish Party and the Catholic hierarchy through the medium of Sir George Fottrell and the Freeman’s Journal.9 The results of these negotiations was that the Irish Party not only committed itself to trust in a slow, conservative evolution of the British political system but, at Dublin Castle’s request, nationalist propaganda was also toned down in the press, men of seditious or nationalistic tendencies were removed from all the Irish Party’s support bodies and the National League’s more radical or democratic ideas were simply abandoned, hence the Special Commission of 1888.10 This had been the price for allowing the question of home rule to be even raised in British politics. All accepted this consensus not least because the Irish Party, notwithstanding its being prised to win majority political representation with the church’s support, represented neither the propertied interests nor the wealth of Ireland.

In the past, IRB and Land League revolutionaries had cited the Hungarian example of the 1860s in defence of the idea that Parnell’s party should abstain from Westminster and unilaterally establish a parliament in Dublin in an attempt to dictate Irish nationalist terms to the British imperial parliament.11 If the Irish Party had ever taken this option, however, it would have faced total opposition from the Irish banks, the Irish business community, the Irish legal profession and the country’s principal property owners (who directed the militias of Ireland),12 placing it in a completely powerless and self-defeating position. Twenty years later, nothing had essentially changed in this regard. Nevertheless, Griffith revived the idea. Michael Davitt’s career partly explains why this was done.

The concordat established during the mid-1880s between the British government and the Catholic Church regarding the government of Ireland and the preservation of the Union later encouraged twentieth-century British government officials to look back fondly upon this time as marking the birth of ‘the Ireland that we made’.13 However, Michael Davitt’s success, as an accredited lay representative of Archbishop Walsh, in convincing Pope Leo XIII to grant the leader of the Irish College in Rome official diplomatic status as the sole intermediary between the Irish Catholic hierarchy and the Vatican, independent of any British political arrangement or the status of the Catholic Church in the rest of the United Kingdom (a situation which lasted from 1886 up until 1929),14 meant that the international organisation of the Catholic Church, especially the religious orders, had provided Irishmen with a diplomatic outlet outside the confines of the British Empire for the very first time in modern history. This was a significant development because irrespective of the church’s great conservatism and the papacy’s relative lack of clout in international affairs, Catholic diplomacy was naturally very well informed about the international political order as well as highly professional and securely independent in nature. It did not exist in a world of revolutionary make-believe or cloak-and-dagger conspiracies. Conterminous developments within Irish-America reflected this reality.

From the 1884 American presidential election onwards, Irish-American politicians (political friends of Davitt) emphasised the potentially great contribution to be made to the American Republic specifically by the Roman Catholic Church and Catholic schools. In turn, they abandoned their previous focus of acting as critical ‘fenian’ spokesmen on Anglo-American relations.15 Reflecting the positive state of Anglo-American relations, over one hundred US congressmen of Irish descent expressed appreciation for Gladstone during 1886 for announcing his willingness to introduce a Government of Ireland bill in parliament.16 Simultaneously, John Devoy lost his career as a newspaper editor and relative significance as an Irish-American public figure. By 1903, the American AOH, without formally expressing opposition to the Irish Party, was deliberately distinguishing itself from the United Irish League of America because the latter body had grown closer to the British business community in New York than to the American Catholic hierarchy (needless to say, all non-naturalised Irishmen in the United States were still British citizens). By targeting this Catholic AOH readership, Devoy was able to launch a very successful newspaper in September 1903, the Gaelic American (New York). Together with Davitt, Devoy expressed appreciation for Griffith’s Hungarian Policy and, more or less, called for an end to the old Fenian tradition of political anti-Catholicism.17 As Devoy was still its paymaster, the IRB in Ireland followed suit. In a sense, this brought the revolutionary underground on both sides of the Atlantic into line with the Catholic Church’s diplomatic role in Anglo-American relations as it had developed since the mid-1880s.

Just prior to beginning his Hungarian series, Griffith had argued that nationalist revolutionaries should aim to ‘capture the municipal administration of all Ireland’ as a means of putting pressure upon the Irish Party to abstain from the imperial parliament and make a stand for Irish independence.18 Griffith’s idea of turning local government office into a platform for promoting this idea was one that failed to impress Michael Davitt, Mark Ryan and John O’Leary when he discussed it with them, however.19 All bar the last few of Griffith’s articles on the Hungarian theme dealt exclusively with recounting the Hungarian struggle for independence after 1848 involving parliamentarians and republican rebels. This was done primarily to influence the IRB and ex-Land League readership. Regarding this body of opinion, Griffith judged that ‘it is the parallel rather than the logic which I think will most powerfully affect’ them.20 In particular, he hoped that this historical narrative would help to remind ‘his compatriots’ in the IRB that there was a practical ‘alternative to armed resistance’ that could bring about political freedom.21 This was a fairly reasonable hope.

Since its inception, the IRB was nominally committed to creating a volunteer force for Irish nationalist purposes. However, it had never been a movement led by the landed gentry; the traditional creators of such volunteer corps. Instead, it was a movement of obscure lower-class political activists whose secret social networks frequently overlapped with British military figures, who owned much property in Ireland, as well as the country’s police forces. Although the IRB had nominally been the most numerous Irish political organisation prior to the 1880s, like the British Chartist phenomenon which preceded it, its lack of control over public opinion, or impact on political elites, usually relegated it an insignificant position beyond having acted as ‘a political school’ for some notable individuals who went on to achieve more significant careers in other directions.22 Those who left the organisation frequently justified their decision on the grounds of having grown ‘weary to death of playing roles and striving to roll impossible balls up impossible hills’.23 Some who remained spoke sadly of their frustrated determination ‘to get in a blow at the power which has been banging me about the head—in common with my brethren—since I was born’.24

The political bankruptcy of the IRB’s position hitherto lay in its response to British state centralisation. A brief debate in Chartist circles during the early 1840s as to whether or not ‘physical force’ was needed to back up the ‘moral force’ of their ignored petitions for reform had been elevated by British political leaders into an ideological standpoint to counter any verbal challenges to the constitution.25 As a result, the IRB, in perpetually speaking of the moral justice of a rebellion, was essentially playing the same political game as those British elites that it professed to oppose. This made its existence a product of British security considerations as much as it was a genuine vehicle for sincere young Irish nationalists to attempt to come more fully to terms with the political society that they inhabited and, in particular, the ready-made debates that had been prepared for them. As both participants and auxiliaries to public Irish movements, members of the IRB frequently displayed considerable talent in initiating significant new departures, at least on the level of political debate. This was often done as a preliminary step to embarking on different careers. Griffith essentially stepped into this role during 1904 just as Davitt had done twenty-three years previously. There was good reason to expect that the IRB would follow Griffith’s lead. The almost entirely new and slim-line IRB organisation established in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War was based entirely around the Gaelic League. Although some republicans disliked the Gaelic League’s very conservative and avowedly non-political leadership, they nevertheless accepted it as their principal forum. The thought of engaging in conspiratorial work was neither entertained nor suggested. Over 50 per cent of the Gaelic League’s membership were civil servants or national school teachers who worked for British state institutions, while its IRB membership was drawn mostly from that 25 per cent who worked as clerks or shop-assistants.26

At the time, Davitt was arguing that the vote of Catholic politicians of Irish descent in America had much more importance in the context of British international relations than Irish politicians’ vote in Westminster. Griffith cited Davitt’s argument to defend the idea that international Catholic diplomacy could aid the ‘Hungarian Policy’.27 This ignored the fact, however, that the potential of an Irish-American vote to influence the American government’s attitude towards Anglo-American relations had no bearing whatsoever on the Anglo-Irish relationship itself, which was an entirely separate and purely British matter. Its very suggestion nevertheless reflected Griffith’s growing political indebtedness to John Sweetman. The latter had long been a regular financial supporter of Catholic interests in the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy but had had no interest in Irish nationalism prior to its becoming wedded to Catholic interests during 1884. Sweetman was now a firm believer that the Irish Party’s presence in Westminster was of no advantage to anybody.

Having taken part in the negotiations surrounding the 1893 Government of Ireland bill, Sweetman realised that the politics of home rule was a meaningless charade that was deliberately launched by Gladstone only to mislead the Irish public regarding how the country was really being governed. Disgusted by the fact that the Irish Party was now subsidised largely by the British Liberal Party, after failing to persuade the Irish Party to withdraw from Westminster, Sweetman resigned from parliament in 1895 and helped W.M. Murphy to establish his first newspaper, the Daily Nation. This championed the Healyite policy of decentralising authority within the Irish Party’s support body and placing more power in its branches, which were governed mostly by priests.28 During the Boer War controversy, Sweetman had formed the Irish Financial Reform League and the General Council of County Councils to protest against the over-taxation of Ireland and to encourage business activism in local government.29 When Griffith was publishing his initial Hungarian articles in the United Irishman, Sweetman wrote to the Freeman’s Journal calling upon all Irish Party supporters to pay very close attention to the series. Reflecting Sweetman’s influence as one of the richest Irish Catholics (he was an estate and brewery owner as well as a major railway shareholder), Griffith was glad to note that the initial response to Sweetman’s suggestion ‘seems to indicate that the Parliamentary Party is not prepared to oppose the Hungarian policy very strongly. It does not commit them to any opposition.’30

Sweetman’s London Catholic friends were the first group to support Griffith’s Hungarian Policy. They had organised themselves into the Irish National Society of London. This was a small breakaway body from the United Irish League of Great Britain (the Irish Party’s fund collection body in Britain, led by T.P. O’Connor) and it was also associated with the Gaelic League of London. The Irish National Society received a special blessing from Pope Leo XIII after it opposed the Irish Party on the grounds of the latter’s failure (at the insistence of Liberal Party) to support a Tory bill at Westminster providing for state support for denominational education, including all Catholic schools.31 Led by a wealthy architect Thomas Martin, the Irish National Society was closely associated with the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster who, for a time, ordered that the United Irish League of Great Britain be no longer permitted to use Catholic halls and schools as venues for its meetings.32 Through this channel, various historic letters of Monsignor Persico of Rome to Cardinal Manning of Westminster were leaked to Griffith’s United Irishman. The publication of these letters was meant to show that Irish Party figures were wrong to have criticised the church at the time of a papal rescript against an Irish agrarian agitation that demanded rent reductions during the late 1880s because this decision was (supposedly) not popular in Vatican circles. These letters were later republished in Catholic newspapers throughout the continent in order to present the Catholic Church as having democratic sympathies, thereby echoing the thrust of a notable papal encyclical of 1891. Griffith himself characterised them as proof that the Irish Party had always been a ‘Castle Catholic’ party whose pro-British leanings had caused them to become divorced from a true sense of social justice.33

During the summer of 1904, Martin’s London society appealed to John Daly, the most well known republican politician in Ireland, and to T.M. Healy to help them organise an opposition movement to the Irish Party. This initiative won Healy’s sympathy. Reflecting his ambiguous relationship with the Irish Party, however, Healy felt that he could not come out openly in support of a rival party as, rather like the bishops, ‘my own share in politics must I fear be individual’ or, at least, appear to the general Irish public to be so.34 In August, Martin’s friends travelled to Dublin to meet Griffith, Edward Martyn and aldermen Thomas Kelly and Walter Cole of Cumann na nGaedhael. Cole had recently worked with Sweetman and Charles Dawson, an ex-mayor of Dublin, in promoting the idea of holding an Irish national industrial exhibition as a riposte to Dublin Castle’s international exhibition of British industry.35 As the Dublin representative of the Irish National Society, Cole now convened a conference to discuss the idea of calling for the withdrawal of all Irish MPs from Westminster. In preparation for this, Griffith himself travelled to London to organise the visit of thirty local Gaelic Leaguers to this Dublin meeting. This was done with the cooperation of Art O’Brien and Michael MacWhite, two well-educated associates of Martin’s in London who were also growing dissatisfied with the Irish Party.36

This circle evidently felt hopeful that if Griffith’s articles were publicised more widely through being republished as a pamphlet, they could win the cooperation of known political allies of the Catholic hierarchy such as Michael Davitt, Eoin MacNeill and D.P. Moran.37 To this end, John Sweetman purchased the vast majority of the United Irishman shares that winter and financed the publication of Griffith’s articles as a pamphlet.38 Due to Sweetman’s close association with Daniel Mannix, the president of Maynooth College (who would encourage further publications of Griffith’s writings),39 much of Catholic Ireland, lay and clerical, were inclined to examine its contents and The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland became a top-selling publication, selling tens-of-thousands of copies in a very short space of time.

Griffith was not blind to what political interests he now represented. While he had directly opposed the stance of Archbishop Walsh on education and criticised Maynooth College for promoting royalist attitudes in the not too distant past,40 he would not do so again. He also understood, with delight, the political significance of Redmond’s concern at Maynooth College’s acceptance of the Hungarian Policy:

Another fact, and one fraught with significance for the future of Ireland, is that the students of Maynooth, a few days ago, after a prolonged debate, decided in favour of the Hungarian Policy as the policy for Ireland. The future is with us and we face it with confidence.41

As early as December 1904, Griffith was writing to Sweetman that the Catholic clergy in Dublin and Leinster were ‘all strongly advocating the policy in private’; that the Irish News (Belfast), associated with the new West Belfast MP Joseph Devlin (who was also president of the revived AOH), was becoming sympathetic; as was the Scottish section of the United Irish League. In addition, he felt that the expected victory by the National Council of ‘the most compact and intelligent party’ in Dublin City Hall combined with Sweetman’s intention to promote Griffith’s policy at the General Council of County Councils would give them a strong platform to build upon. This led Griffith to view the overall course of current affairs as ‘foreshadowing the general adoption of the Hungarian policy’.42 Banking on this expectation, Griffith finally mustered the courage to propose to Maud Sheehan (she accepted). It would be several more years, however, before Griffith could afford to marry, not least because his proposed programme would fail to find as many supporters as he had hoped. This was due to a fundamental paradox that it embodied.

Griffith’s Hungarian Policy was attuned to Catholic disaffection with Westminster and the fact that Catholic Church diplomacy in the English-speaking, or Anglo-American, world was now of much more significance to Ireland’s future than whatever preoccupation still existed amongst continental European powers regarding any potential strategic significance of Ireland.43 However, its argument still had little or no relevance to the dynamics of Irish party politics. This was because of its retrospective focus and emphasis on an idea that nobody except the Tories, the self-styled ‘unionists’ of contemporary Irish party politics, was essentially prepared to support. This was that the Irish Party had led itself into a political ‘cul-de-sac’ in 1886 through committing itself to Gladstone’s programme and that the ‘vanity and selfishness’ of its leaders was ‘preventing them from admitting the truth and retracing their steps’.44 It was all very well for Griffith to emphasise that the Irish public had spent over £600,000 to keep the Irish Party in Westminster ever since 1886 only to see a commensurate increase in the imperial over-taxation of Ireland.45 This had indeed been Gladstone’s intention. In itself, however, this did not offer a solution, only a critique. Likewise, Griffith’s subsequent effort to justify the Hungarian Policy by using the Financial Relations Report of 1896 to show that ‘in the memory of living man … no more excessive taxer of the Irish people has ever been known than William Ewart Gladstone’46 was ineffective in a party-political sense precisely because Gladstone (who died in 1898) had already been retired for over a decade.

In the Resurrection of Hungary, Griffith suggested that the Irish Party revert to its independent political stance prior to 1884 and accept the ‘one statesmanlike idea’ that the elderly Daniel O’Connell had been tempted to follow, alongside the Young Irelanders, during the mid-1840s. This was to set up in Ireland a national council of three hundred representatives that would act unilaterally as an Irish parliament, establish their own arbitration courts (which Griffith believed could now be supported by the new local government bodies) and force the British government to abandon the unequal relationship that had come to define the Union by recognising Irishmen’s right to political self-determination.47 Looking back even further in time, Griffith suggested that those Gaelic Leaguers who declared themselves willing to promote Irish economic development should follow the example of the Irish Volunteers of 1779. This volunteer movement instigated a boycott of British goods in an attempt to force the British government to surrender its control of the Irish economy; the event that prefigured the establishment of Irish legislative independence in 1782–3.48 Griffith cited this historic case study and the Irish Party’s current toleration of the over-taxation of Ireland in order to drive home his argument that the Irish Party had completely surrendered all political direction to the imperial parliament, in the process ensuring that the Irish nation was becoming a defunct concept: ‘a man who runs his business on such lines ends up in the bankruptcy court. A nation that runs its business on such lines must inevitably go smash.’49

As Sweetman had not been an MP since 1895 and Healy had refused to come out in favour of the Hungarian Policy, Griffith had no allies among Ireland’s parliamentary representatives. Meanwhile, his sole claim to credibility as a spokesman on economic matters stemmed from his membership of the five-man executive of the Industrial Committee of the Gaelic League. However, together with Douglas Hyde, two of its members had been in favour of the British government’s international industrial exhibition of 1903.50 In addition, while Sweetman and the Catholic Church desired that Irish-America would henceforth fund the Gaelic League rather than the Irish Party,51 in practice this ambition related primarily to the financing of Irish education, not the state of the nation. As an avowedly non-political body, the Gaelic League could not support Griffith’s Hungarian Policy. Furthermore, while its Industrial Committee had declared its intention to draw on the advice of independent economic experts, its circulars requesting suitable nominations of personnel had received no names in return.52 This reflected the fact that Gaelic League activities were primarily social, such as summer schools and dances that were run by travelling teachers and supervised by the clergy. Meanwhile, despite its nominally non-sectarian platform, its membership would soon become religiously segregated.53 This was not a promising development.

Douglas Hyde’s claim that the Gaelic League was non-political was disingenuous. It was closely connected to Dublin Castle, the Irish Party and the Catholic Church according to the consensus established during 1886. Dublin Castle’s National Education Board accepted the league’s exclusive identification with the principle of voluntary rather than state-run schools. The leader of its industrial committee Tom Finlay S.J., who unusually for a UCD Jesuit was the son of a Scottish Presbyterian, was also the vice-president of the recently established Irish Agricultural Organisation Society that worked with Dublin Castle’s new Congested District Board and Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction.54 Some historians have typified the establishment of these bodies (inspired by Lord Dunsany’s son, Sir Horace Plunkett, and led by Lord Monteagle) as marking a shift in British government policy regarding Ireland because they supposedly favoured interventionist activity in the economy.55 However, their administrative lynchpin Sir George Fottrell, the secretary of the Irish Land Commission, was a Catholic administrator at Dublin Castle who, alongside E.G. Jenkinson, was knighted for his role in negotiating the secret Anglo-Irish security consensus of 1884–6.56 This had involved a total Irish political acceptance of Gladstone’s longstanding imperial fiscal plan for Ireland. The Tories professed willingness to invest a higher percentage of Irish revenue in the Dublin Castle administration did not overrule or alter this consensus in the slightest. Reflecting this, Fr Finlay, with the moral support of George Russell and the enthusiastic support of D.P. Moran (who would continue to make no secret of his detestation for all Griffith’s ideas),57 accepted the judgment of the Congested Districts Board that the chief dynamic of both emigration and economic stagnation in Ireland was the absence of economically viable land holdings in the west of the country. The solution was deemed to be the creation of a rural economy that was more self-sufficient and that would not continue to be burdened by a surplus population.

At the inception of the United Irish League (1898), both William O’Brien and Michael Davitt had denounced this idea of labelling the west of Ireland as a ‘congested district’. Laurence Ginnell, a passive sympathiser with Griffith’s writings,58 would soon attempt to revive a political agitation on behalf of the rural poor.59 This agrarian tradition in Irish politics had always lacked power however.60 Ever since the reunification of the Irish Party (1900), it was being labelled as reactionary in its response to supposedly progressive governmental reforms. In his capacity as a UCD professor of economics (formerly, he was a professor of moral philosophy), Finlay would shape the thinking of many future Irish political leaders. In doing so, he has been described as a conservative rather than a reactionary in his thinking.61 However, Finlay was temperamentally inclined to judge all political matters far more from an ethical rather than a practical standpoint. Therefore, he was ill suited to conceiving of any potential initiatives and was content to let decision-making rest with Whitehall.62

Land law reform was a UK wide and in no sense specifically Irish phenomenon. Ever since the 1880s, the chief divergence between the British and Irish application of this reform was that the British reforms were designed to facilitate a prioritisation of the municipal authorities’ capacity for promoting business over that of the traditional ruling landowning class. No such provisions were made for the development of an infrastructure for business within Ireland, however.63 This made the Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898 an insignificant reform. As an extension of this, current UIL branch leaders, which included many local government officials as well as parish priests, owned extensive grazing land themselves and had no interest in promoting Irish business. They conveniently forgot, or rather deliberately ignored, that the original ideal of the Irish National Land League (its ‘Irish National’ title had already been permanently erased from history books) was to conceive of the rural and urban Irish economies as one entity and to launch an Irish nationalist political agitation upon precisely that basis.64 This had reflected the input of republican radicals into that agitation. Griffith’s attitude towards both emigration and the general economy was rooted in this tradition. This made him reject the British government’s policy that agriculture was inherently the basis of the economy of Ireland. Instead, Griffith focused on the indisputable fact that the union of the British and Irish exchequers was inherently the central dynamic of all economic developments on the island, both rural and urban. Therefore, this development combined with the imperial taxation regime launched by Gladstone was unquestionably ‘at the root of the question of emigration and lack of employment in Ireland’.65 Although entirely logical, this was a deeply unpopular stance. This was because it did not fit with the material interests of Catholic Ireland as they had developed. It also made Griffith the odd-man out on the Gaelic League’s industrial committee (although, in time, Sweetman would succeed in getting himself nominated onto that body).66

During 1904–1905, the only member of the Gaelic League’s Industrial Committee with similar attitudes to Griffith was Robert Lindsay Crawford of Lisburn, Co. Antrim. Together with Thomas Sloan, a Belfast Methodist street preacher, and Belfast trade unionist Alex Boyd, Crawford favoured a labour-led political uprising against the existing leaderships of both the Ulster Party and the Irish Party, each of which were deemed to be cowardly reactionaries and mindless clericalists in politics.67 Crawford, however, was not a popular figure. The Ulster Party would soon work to have him removed as editor of the Irish Protestant. Crawford created an Independent Orange Order in opposition to the landed-gentry led Orange Order but his organisation never acquired a large membership. This reflected his powerlessness to overcome the legacy of the British government’s handling of the Irish land question.68 Dublin Castle officials typified the political consensus established during 1886 as serving the purpose of ‘making Castle rule popular’. This was made possible because the Irish Party and its support bodies were henceforth allowed to ‘know almost as soon as the Law Officers themselves everything which transpires in the secret councils of Dublin Castle’.69 If this could be typified as a government by consensus, it had the result of making the Irish Party—not just the historic governing gentry class (who now concentrated on the new Ulster Party)—an instrument of clientelism. Priding itself on being a supposed government party with special insider political knowledge, the Irish Party now exacerbated a tradition in Ireland (common to all British imperial colonies)70 of turning politics into a mere dispensary for private patronage networks, even within the civil service.71 This was not an example of plutocracy at work so much as a deliberate curtailment of the potential relevance of party politics as an instrument of change. This made the establishment of effective platforms for demanding reforms of any kind almost impossible. This was particularly debilitating for those like Griffith who were attempting to establish such platforms.

Specifically in the Dublin area, in common with Griffith’s two business allies Cole and Sweetman, William Field and James McCann had demanded fundamental fiscal and banking reforms in Ireland. They failed, however, to establish an effective platform for the Irish Financial Reform League (1897– 1901); a movement that was also supported by Thomas Lough, the owner of the leading Ulster cooperative, and Ned (later Sir Edward) Carson of Dublin. This body was forced to disband soon after the reunification of the Irish Party and upon nominally joining that party, Field and McCann were requested to simply keep quiet.72 A similar dynamic ensured that the chances of Griffith or Crawford using the Industrial Committee of the Gaelic League as a basis for establishing a platform for fiscal reform were negated.

J.P. Boland, owner of Boland’s Mills in Dublin, and Tom O’Donnell, an Oxford-educated Kerry politician who, with encouragement from Maurice Moynihan (now electoral registrar for Tralee), toyed with the idea of promoting abstention from the imperial parliament,73 professed sympathy for the Gaelic League’s industrial committee. Their attempts to promote such ideals in the west of Ireland failed, however, due to the unwillingness of banks to fund their ideas. Indeed, the only recent companies whose formation was assisted by Dublin Castle’s Congested Districts Board and its associated English banker J.H. Tuke (who also promoted all assisted emigration schemes in Ireland) was a handful of woollen mills that were run by the Catholic religious orders for their own private gain.74 As a result, Field, McCann, Boland and O’Donnell were left in the position of standing still politically and grew increasingly isolated. A similar fate was to await Griffith’s proposed Hungarian Policy.

Thanks to Sweetman, Griffith found a prestigious candidate to launch his Hungarian Policy in Dublin City Hall. Sir Thomas Henry Grattan Esmonde, MP for Wexford, was a former whip of the Irish Party who had also been the Jesuits’ principal choice as an Irish Party MP in 1885.75 Together with Sweetman, Esmonde had founded a body known as the General Council of the County Councils during 1899 in an attempt to compensate for the complete lack of directive powers that were granted to the new county councils by the imperial parliament. Esmonde, a descendant of Henry Grattan, convened a meeting of this body to adopt a historic resolution of the Irish Volunteers in Dungannon in 1782 as its own. This stated that ‘no parliament is competent to make laws for Ireland except an Irish parliament sitting in Ireland’ and that ‘the claim of any other body of men to make laws for or to govern Ireland is illegal and unconstitutional’. It also argued that the Irish constitution of 1783, denying the right of the imperial parliament to overrule Irish legislation, should still have some jurisdictional relevance. However, no follow-up meeting could be held (representatives of four Ulster counties had also refused to attend this initial gathering). This was because the General Council of County Councils, which consisted mostly of UIL representation and legally had no jurisdictional powers, did not declare itself in favour of politicians withdrawing from the Imperial Parliament.76

Griffith attributed this development to the baneful influence of the UIL Directory, the executive of the Irish Party’s political machine, and its associated newspaper the Freeman’s Journal. He typified both as the political heirs to Leonard MacNally, a former Freeman editor who had worked covertly with Dublin Castle to bring about the Act of Union through underhand methods.77 Although Griffith was also able to acknowledge the Freeman’s history of quality newspaper reportage,78 over the next decade, he would repeatedly equate the politics of the Freeman’s Journal (whose former proprietor had been, with Fottrell, the central figure in the secret Anglo-Irish negotiations of 1884–6) with MacNally’s historic legacy.79 This was provocative and essentially foolhardy: Archbishop Walsh certainly had been and probably still was one of the Freeman’s company directors.80 To some extent it reflected Griffith’s sincerity regarding his own political stance. According to two associates, Griffith turned down the offer of a very well paid position with the Freeman, as well as an offer to become a member of the Irish Party, because he viewed this as an attempt to bribe him into a political silence.81 His willingness to attack the Freeman was also tactical. Sweetman and several Catholic bishops had already transferred their allegiance from the Freeman to W.M. Murphy’s new Irish Independent. This led Griffith to typify the latter as a quality newspaper and even as a fellow traveller with his own journal in championing progressive political ideas:

Every sound idea, every logical item, on the programme of the parliamentarians has been filched from the columns of the United Irishman. We don’t grudge them these stolen ideas since they shall be ultimately of some service to Ireland—we merely invite them to come and steal ore.82

Such boastful claims to political relevance were always Griffith’s favourite tactic in attempting to popularise his ideas. This may not have been an effective gambit, however. Fellow writers, who liked nothing better than a persuasive turn of phrase, generally admired Griffith’s journalism, whether they agreed with him or not. Much of the contemporary middle class reacted to Griffith’s affronts, however, by speaking about him with derisive contempt: why should a nonentity amongst Ireland’s professional classes feel entitled to not only claim to understand the political situation much better than they did, but also claim a right to perpetually pass damning and blanket judgments upon them all? The Irish Party hated Griffith for precisely this reason and so labelled him as ‘a factionist in the pay of the unionists to smash home rule’, which was their means of saying that they feared that if his ideas became popular this could undermine the basis of their own personal wealth as a newly-arrived middle class by destroying that political consensus upon which that wealth was based. On this level, Griffith was certainly a poor politician. He once typified the entire Irish reading public as ‘human ostriches’ because the political programme of his book was not being discussed, even though it had sold six times more than any publication of the previous five years.83

The Irish Party consciously attempted to confine debate on Griffith’s programme to Tom Kettle’s Young Ireland (i.e. UCD) Branch of the United Irish League. Kettle did point out some real flaws in Griffith’s programme. Rather than appealing for the creation of a new Irish constitution, Griffith had referred back to the Irish constitution of 1782 and the Renunciation Act of 1783, which recognised the legislative independence of the historic (and exclusively Protestant) Irish parliament. Griffith maintained that if all Irish MPs united in declaring themselves in favour of this legal precedent and in demanding fiscal reform on the basis of the Financial Relations Report of 1896 then existing nationalist and unionist divisions would disappear and a united Irish nation would begin to emerge politically. By contrast, Kettle emphasised that a historic Irish constitution from over a century ago could have absolutely no material connotations or popular appeal in the present. In addition, the very existence of the Irish county councils, upon which Griffith placed so much emphasis, were subject to the law of the imperial parliament.84 Griffith retorted that the non-requirement of taking an oath of allegiance upon entering local government office meant that Irish county councils could pledge their loyalty to the 1783 constitution without breaking the existing law.85 He also claimed that

No Irish movement can be constitutional unless it be based on the Irish Constitution, which the volunteers won for Ireland and which Ireland intends to retain, even though it may cause as much trouble in London as the retention of its constitution by Hungary caused in Vienna.86

Griffith’s repeated justification of this policy by claiming that the Act of Union was actually illegal essentially explains why this was not done, however. The existence of a legal precedent of Irish legislative independence was an academic curiosity. In the present, however, it could not be the basis of a political policy that was anything other than seditious. Another reason for the deafening silence of Ireland’s professional classes in response to Griffith’s writings was a deep distrust of his association with the IRB. Reflecting this, Kettle suggested that ‘this pamphlet [the Resurrection of Hungary] will have justified its existence if only it leads up to a working alliance between the two sections of nationalism, now standing deplorably apart’. As far as Kettle was concerned, ‘there is nothing in the nature of things to prevent our separatists and “constitutionalists”, our nationalists and nationists87—if I may invent a word—from cooperating’ in support of the ‘nationist’ Irish Party in the British Imperial Parliament.88

A weakness in Kettle’s critique was his deliberate decision to ignore Griffith’s point about the Irish Party’s support for both Gladstone’s imperial fiscal policy and the over-taxation of Ireland. Instead, he focused purely upon Griffith’s treatment of Hungarian history. Kettle emphasised that the Hungarians’ decision to abstain from the Austrian parliament during the 1860s was the result of a process of constitutional experimentation (namely, the possibility of creating new representative assemblies) that had been taking place in central Europe ever since 1848, whereas ‘the parliament we have to confront is not precisely a novice’. Kettle also repeated an argument against abstention that the Irish Party had made after Parnell’s death. He argued that Bohemia was a closer parallel to Ireland’s case than that of Hungary and yet the Czechs, after having tried the abstentionist policy for a number of years, decided that they were better off materially in the Imperial Parliament.89 Griffith did not agree with this assessment, however. He typified Kettle’s critique as being motivated by the simple fact that he ‘writes from the parliamentarian side’. Although he agreed with Kettle that the policy required to be thought out ‘clearly and exhaustively in terms of Irish politics’ if it was to be of any benefit, he comforted himself with the idea that ‘even if the people did fail it, there is consolation in the thought that it could not possibly leave the country worse off than it found it’.90

Griffith’s intended trump card in defence of his programme was his claim that the contemporary home rule movement was slowly but surely disintegrating by becoming divorced from its political roots, having abandoned its initial nationalist radicalism, at Gladstone’s request, during 1885–6.91 Griffith could only really justify this claim, however, by emphasising the potency of IRB–Land League radicalism during 1879–1882. For example, John Morley’s Life of Gladstone was quoted to show that Britain’s temporary abandonment of the Transvaal to the Boers in 1881 had been justified on the grounds of a felt need to keep sufficient troops in Ireland to prevent the possibility of Britain losing control of the country to the Irish National Land League.92 The reality of the time, however, was that this British political insecurity reflected little more than a fear of the potential political consequences of an eclipse of the power of landed gentry in Ireland, if not in Britain. A real security danger to the state can hardly be said to have existed during 1881. The IRB had been at its absolute all-time peak in terms of its financial, numerical and military strength at this time (curiously, the southern landed gentry, mostly Tory in politics, were simultaneously arming themselves), but neither a pitched republican battle with the aristocracy nor a nationalist rebellion had been contemplated, notwithstanding the imprisonment without trial of over one thousand Land League officials that winter.93

The most significant aspect of the political consensus established during the 1880s was that the Irish Party wholly agreed with the British cabinet that any changes in government personnel in Ireland should only ever be done very slowly, cautiously and gradually in order to prevent the risk of any possibility of disorder or sedition.94 For this very reason, there was really no question of Irish local government bodies ever being used as a revolutionary platform in the manner that Griffith suggested. Furthermore, there was also the unavoidable professional reality that, from 1886 onwards, it was virtually a career necessity for members of all British and Irish political parties, as well as all lawyers and academics (including historians) within the universities (who were themselves civil servants), to accept the consensus established during 1886. Its provenance was no longer of any significance with the passage of time compared to its actual establishment and, in turn, its increasing hold over the public imagination. Essentially realising this, Griffith soon modified his Hungarian Policy. Instead, he launched on behalf of the National Council, a nominal organisation that was still Griffith’s only platform, what he typified as ‘the Sinn Féin Policy’. This was deliberately done to coincide with the launch of the Irish ‘Industrial Development Association’ (IDA) in November 1905. As a counter offensive, Dublin Castle and the Irish Party soon persuaded the National Board of Education to withdraw state funding from the Gaelic League.95

In launching the Sinn Féin Policy, Griffith explicitly sought to capitalise upon the existence of the Gaelic League. He argued that although ‘the end of education is to make men patriots’ such values did not exist in Ireland outside of a British state context and, therefore, it was essential to support the programme of ‘a friend of mine in London’ (Thomas Martin) to make voluntary schools in Ireland the basis for an Irish national education system. Such a goal, Griffith maintained, could be supported ‘by the Irish people throughout the world’,96 or, in other words, those Catholics of Irish birth or descent within the English-speaking Catholic diaspora who gave their money to the church to promote Catholic schools. Upon this basis, Douglas Hyde would soon visit the United States to collect funds for the Gaelic League.

As he was an ideological nationalist at heart, Griffith was certainly not the most suitable Irish candidate to promote this ideal of education. His motive was reflected by a series of articles on various small nations in Europe that were written in an attempt to highlight ‘what can little Ireland do’. In this series, Griffith presented most contemporary European nations as having more progressive attitude towards education than Britain due to their having a broader conception of the non-denominational basis of the Christian-democratic tradition. For instance, from this premise, Griffith suggested that ‘Holland breeds Protestants and Catholics but she breeds no bigots’ while, by inference, British secularism was a comparatively divisive and restrictive influence upon the development of political societies.97 Following Sweetman’s orders never to treat religion as a problematic political question, by 1905 Griffith was essentially giving implicit support to the idea that the churches could not possibly be at fault in politics. This led W.B. Yeats and George Moore to typify Griffith as having shifted his position under the new Sinn Féin banner to one analogous to that of the Christian Scientists, which was a contemporary Protestant reaction against secularist rationalism in Britain.98 For Griffith, however, the essential question was simply to first acquire a political platform from his Catholic patrons on the question of education from which he could then begin to champion his vision of a political (i.e. economic) Irish nationalism. Without doing so, Griffith could have no patrons or platform whatsoever.

W.M. Murphy’s Irish Independent once typified the establishment of the IDA as a direct outgrowth of the work of the Gaelic League’s Industrial Committee. Reflecting this, Griffith’s motive in launching the Sinn Féin Policy was evidently a desire to acquire a seniority of influence over that body. Noting that ‘agriculture in Ireland is resolving itself into the cattle trade’ alone, Griffith highlighted that the post-famine Irish economy had been so manipulated by the British government that the rural economy existed almost entirely to provide meat for the English market, while the urban Irish population was, in turn, being fed entirely by consumable English imports. At both levels, England alone was deriving full economic benefit from this,99 but Griffith believed that ‘there is no reason whatever’ that this system should be made permanent. In particular, Griffith believed that it could be undone if Irish businessmen accepted the ideals of the American economist Henry Carey, the German economist Frederich List and several others on ‘the national system of political economy’. These writers ‘brushed aside the fallacies of Adam Smith and his tribe’ by positing that the prerogatives of an imperial economy should not be allowed to dictate all government policies. As the economic history of Europe ever since 1860 had proved, this economic philosophy suited Britain but no other European nation.100

Griffith’s essential concern here was that British economists were still maintaining ‘that our destiny is to be the fruitful mother of flocks and herds—that it is not necessary for us to pay attention to our manufacturing arm, since our agricultural arm is all-sufficient’ for the British Isles’ needs. However, Griffith emphasised that ‘a merely agricultural nation can never develop to any extent a home or a foreign commerce … or make notable progress in its moral, intellectual, social and political development.’ This was partly because

A mere agricultural state … is always economically and politically dependent on those foreign nations which take from it agriculture in exchange for manufactured goods. It cannot determine how much it will produce—it must wait and see how much others will buy from it.

From this standpoint, Griffith maintained that ‘an agricultural nation is a man with one arm who makes use of an arm belonging to another person, but cannot, of course, be sure of having it always available. An agricultural-manufacturing nation is a man who has two arms of his own at his own disposal’ at all times.101

Fr Finlay’s espousal of the idea of creating a more self-sufficient agrarian economy in Ireland had reflected the economic ideal of protectionism that was championed by both the Tories (who had been in power since 1896) and Horace Plunkett’s new Department of Agriculture at Dublin Castle. However, Griffith maintained that the only value of protectionism lay in its capacity to create a more balanced economy. True protectionism, he emphasised, ‘does not mean the exclusion of foreign competition—it means rendering the native manufacturer equal to meeting foreign competition … [by refusing to] see him crushed by mere weight of foreign capital’. Protectionism, therefore, meant maximising the potential benefits to be derivable from both domestic and international commerce in both an agricultural and manufacturing sphere.102 As was reflected by his call for Ireland to become an agricultural-manufacturing nation, Griffith desired for Ireland to become a competitive trading nation. This necessitated breaking through Britain’s protective trade wall that governed the economy of Ireland by dictating that Ireland could not trade outside the United Kingdom. To some extent, Griffith echoed Tory propaganda since the end of the Anglo-Boer War in calling for ‘that unity of material interests which produces national strength’: this was how he defined ‘the policy of the National Council’.103 Nevertheless, Griffith meant this in a purely Irish, rather than United Kingdom, context. Other minds were working in a similar, if somewhat different, direction.

Irish Tories had recently established an ‘Ulster Unionist Council’ to champion the idea of making local government representation the bedrock for their political organisation. As an extension of this trend, the old Ulster Party leadership represented by landowners like Edward Saunderson were being challenged by the likes of James Craig, the new MP for East Down. Craig identified far more with the empire as a purely commercial entity than with the British state, advocated tariff reform and, with the assistance of Belfast city council (first established in 1888), had attempted in vain to establish a Belfast Stock Exchange to prioritise local Irish economic interests.104 Griffith claimed that the Sinn Féin Policy’s ‘hope lies in the future attitude of the Protestant democracy of Ulster’. He expressed a hope that it would soon reject ‘the bloated plutocrats and hungry lawyers whose Protestantism was confined to beating the Orange drum once a year’ and join with his National Council and Crawford’s party in realising that all Irish workers ‘have been sold by English parties without any material gain to the country’.105 In making these arguments, he was clearly hoping to make some inroads upon Craig’s political support base.

Robert Lynd, a popular Belfast writer and essayist from a Presbyterian background, agreed with Griffith’s perspective. He wrote a pamphlet for the National Council in which he cited Griffith as the best possible political guide for northern workers. Lynd noted that while many Ulster Protestants were being encouraged to point to the rapid growth of Belfast from a small town into a major city as an indication that Ireland was well governed, ‘no true Orangeman, I am sure, will consider a thriving Belfast anything but a small compensation for a dwindling and decaying Ireland’. Furthermore, as recent developments had shown (namely, Craig’s failure to establish a viable Stock Exchange in Belfast), Belfast’s commercial success was not at all dependent upon local entrepreneurial ability but rather a total servitude to more powerful London-based firms, thereby potentially bringing about Belfast’s ultimate economic decline.106 The Dublin Tory author Standish O’Grady similarly suggested that Griffith’s policy should encourage all Irish Tories to ‘shift their ground’: ‘they can only oppose the Constitution of 1783 by proclaiming themselves a foreign garrison. They cannot oppose it as Irishmen.’107

Griffith placed much emphasis upon the question of Ireland’s harbour, port and dock boards. He noted that these port authorities were currently refusing to publish annual returns of goods imported solely because London firms’ shipping agents governed them. However, he suggested that it was potentially in their power to work with the county councils in calling for the restoration of Irish customs authorities.108 ‘To bring Ireland out of the corner and make her assert her existence in the world’, Griffith also argued that an effort should be made to encourage the Dublin Stock Exchange and the banks of the country (principally, the former ‘national bank’, the Bank of Ireland) to end their unionist policy of directing all Irish capital to be invested in British stock rather than in industries within Ireland.109 Griffith also protested that of the £250,000 subscribed to the Irish Party over the past decade ‘not a shilling of that money was expended during all those years by the Parliamentary Party in explaining to the Irish people how they were overtaxed, in outlining any policy for them to follow in the matter, or even in assembling them to consider the question’.110

Some of Griffith’s concerns were echoed by A.W. Samuels K.C., the successor of W.E. Lecky and predecessor of Edward Carson as the MP for Trinity College Dublin. He was also president of that college’s Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland. This society’s journal had subscribers in universities throughout Europe and North America. Samuels similarly maintained that the question of the management of Irish finances ‘require earnest consideration on the part not only of those who interest themselves in economic problems or take part in the administration of Ireland, but also of every person who, as public man or private citizen, dwells in or has to do with this country’.111

Samuels maintained that ‘the system of subvention of the local needs of Ireland and Scotland, inaugurated in 1888 [in conjunction with the English local government act of that year], is neither constitutional nor financially sound’. This was because ‘the basis upon which the percentages of 80 per cent for England, 11 per cent for Scotland and 9 per cent for Ireland were fixed has never been explained, and the figures and calculations upon which it was established have never been disclosed.’ In the absence of the office of Vice Treasurer of Ireland (abolished by Gladstone in 1872), no means of appealing for financial fair play for Ireland even existed. Instead, all Irish revenue was included within that of the United Kingdom and only a maximum of 9 per cent of such revenue could ever be reinvested in Ireland. While some English politicians maintained that the respective populations of each country justified this arrangement, Samuels argued that this ‘is not in accordance with constitutional right or fair play’ as ‘taxation should be so arranged as to fall equally—that is with equality of burden according to their resources—upon each of the three kingdoms … fairly applied to meet the particular needs of each of the three kingdoms’. If this was not done, then the existence of the Union could only be ‘to the detriment of Ireland’. Therefore, Samuels suggested, there was a need to return to ‘the financial principles [of equality between the kingdoms] upon which they entered that Union’ in 1801; principles that had first been established or won during the later-eighteenth century by Grattan’s parliament.112

Griffith’s principle hope for the Sinn Féin Policy was evidently that this particular Irish Tory (‘unionist’) case could be adapted and made to serve Irish nationalist purposes through the medium of the National Council. However, although 75 per cent of the 6,000 individuals currently employed by the urban and county councils and poor law boards in Ireland claimed to hold nationalist sympathies, they equated this sympathy simply with loyalty to the Irish Party in opposition to all the Irish Tories’ ideas. They were certainly not likely to embrace Griffith’s idea of making a unilateral decision to act like ‘a national civil service’, as opposed to an imperial one, by joining the National Council because that would have inherently meant rejecting the Gladstonian politics of home rule to which the Irish Party leadership was committed. Meanwhile, in Ulster if not in Dublin, the Tories, being committed by party politics first and foremost to opposing the Irish Party, were suspicious of any ‘nationalist’ scheme, no matter how well it was justified, because of the majority Irish Party’s closeness to the material interests of the Catholic hierarchy. In this way, a combination of misleading party-political nomenclatures in Ireland, Dublin Castle clientelism and sectarian attitudes was likely to sink the Sinn Féin Policy at its inception.

The Hungarian Policy of calling upon Irish MPs to abstain from attending the imperial parliament was justified as part of the new Sinn Féin Policy economically. Griffith claimed that as trading figures showed that Britain was claiming almost all of the yearly profits from Irish trading, it would be of infinitely greater value to Ireland than sending representatives to the imperial parliament to attempt to establish the identity of Ireland as a distinct economic and trading entity internationally by seeking to break the British boycott on direct Irish trade with the international community.113 Tory opinion, represented by Craig and Samuels, was not so sure about Griffith’s claim about the possibilities of international trade. For example, Samuels lamented that ‘since 1825 there has been no records kept of Irish imports and exports’ owing to the abolishment of separate customs boards for Ireland. Although Plunkett’s Department of Agriculture would begin publishing during 1906 ‘for the first time a report on the trade in imports and exports at Irish ports’, the reliability, as well as the source, of this information and what it actually meant for the economy of Ireland was totally unascertainable. This was because

There is at present no means of accurately distinguishing from the colonial and foreign trade of Great Britain, the indirect colonial and foreign trade of Ireland which passes to and from Irish ports through those of Great Britain, especially Liverpool and London … The consequence is that the total trade of Ireland with countries outside of Great Britain cannot be at present definitely ascertained.

This very uncertainty was Craig and Samuels’ motive for continuing to uphold the Union. This mentality was reflected by Samuels’ decision to accept on faith that the overall figures for British imperial trade were so positive that ‘Irishmen, too often prone to pessimism’, should think optimistically about ‘the opening markets of today and of the years to come’. Furthermore, as ‘by far the greatest part of our commerce is, and always will be, with Great Britain and care must be taken that this shall be developed and not diminished’, it was not necessarily opportune ‘to be looking on their country as an impoverished island’ or to be considering the necessity of opening wider markets.114

Britain was the only country in Europe that could neither feed its own population nor provide the raw material for its manufacturing industries without imports. This was why Griffith was correct in pointing out that every European economy except Britain’s (and, by default, Ireland’s) encouraged the greatest possible degree of international trade without depriving their country’s industries from protective tariffs. Protective tariffs were also the lever of negotiation in all contemporary international relations. In this way, ever since 1892, the French and Germans were eclipsing the British in economic power, forcing Britain to rely more on trade with its own colonies than trade within Europe (although this trend was also being emulated to a lesser extent by most other European nations). It was for this very reason, however, that Griffith’s idea of developing an extensive Irish trade with the European continent—something that the British could not manage—could appear quite absurd. In addition, no matter how much tariff barriers to trade were erected or dismantled within Europe, the economies of all small independent European nations remained virtually co-dependent with the economies of their larger and stronger neighbours.115 Partly for this reason, Irish unionists considered that an independent Ireland was not inherently necessary and an idea that was actually best dismissed altogether. In effect, alongside with the Irish Party, it was considered that Griffith’s politics could not be profitable. As a result, Griffith’s politics were not adopted and his personal profits remained slim.

Being an Irish nationalist, Griffith deemed Ireland to be politically backward due to its failure to grasp that every country’s political and economic development was inherently rooted in resistance to any centralisation of power that was not in its own self-interest.116 In making such arguments, Griffith was fully aware of the ‘propagandist nature’ of what he wrote.117 An ideological bent existed within all aspects of (supposedly impartial) contemporary writings on political economy,118 and it was Griffith’s ideological nationalism which inspired his claim that he made the arguments which he did only because ‘I could induce nobody else to say what I believed if left unsaid would cause the nation to rot.’ Another reflection of Griffith’s ideological nationalism, or indeed republican frame of mind, was his argument that ‘the truisms of life elsewhere’ had become ‘novel doctrines in a country where the elemental rights of the citizen had ceased to be understood’.119 To some extent, in keeping with the Young Ireland tradition of the 1840s, Griffith’s patriotism was also essentially a matter of seeking to claim for Ireland a right to a national self-determination as strong as Young Englander Tories within England had once claimed for their own country. However, the dynamics to Irish party politics and, in particular, their material foundation, made it virtually impossible to advance such ideals beyond their first, or purely propagandist, base. The first five years of Sinn Féin’s existence provided clear indications of why this would remain the case.