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ОглавлениеCHAPTER FIVE
The Stillborn Party: Sinn Féin (1906–10)
T.W. Rolleston, an Irish Tory patron of Horace Plunkett’s cooperative movement, wrote to Lady Aberdeen regarding Griffith’s Sinn Féin Policy that he believed ‘unless the parliamentary movement can offer on its side a programme equally clear, honest and self-consistent, it must inevitably go down before its antagonist’.1 This perspective reflected an appreciation for Griffith’s capacity to engage constructively with Tory politics. As was being demonstrated by the career of William O’Brien MP, however, this was also a recipe for political ineffectiveness in Ireland. Griffith would promote his programme by arguing that ‘the Unionist or the Parliamentarian need not be exceeded in patriotism by the Sinn Féiner. Of the nation they are equally units with equal duties and rights’.2 This was practically an admission, however, that the ‘unionist’ and the ‘parliamentarian’ had no real need for a ‘Sinn Féiner’.
The intended status of the National Council as a platform for defectors from all other parties necessitated that Griffith targeted all corners. Frequently, however, he ended up winning none because of the absence of a credible political leadership, or party base, for the National Council. Its chairman Edward Martyn (one of the 40 per cent of the Irish landed gentry who were of the Catholic religion) was an enthusiastic member of the landed gentry’s Kildare Street Club.3 He was widely considered to be a mere eccentric, with a greater enthusiasm for Our Lady’s Choral Society and the Abbey Theatre than for politics. John Sweetman was a very wealthy and thereby influential individual, but he had little prospect of escaping from his semi-retired political standing. This was because the Irish Party and the United Irish League was irrevocably committed to ostracising him from public life. Party politics was definitely not Sweetman’s forte. There was also the problem that the two planks in Griffith’s platform—the Gaelic League and the Industrial Development Association (IDA)—not only represented myriad interests but their leaders also tended to dismiss Griffith as a man who was attempting to hijack these organisations for his own purposes.4 This resistance prevented Cumann na nGaedhael from ever becoming a vibrant political movement.5
The Cork nationalists who initiated the IDA, Terence McSwiney and Liam de Roiste, read and occasionally contributed to Griffith’s journal but politically they worked with Irish Party activists. These included J.J. Horgan (vice-president of the Cork Gaelic League) and J.P. Boland MP. These two men were responsible for persuading the Imperial Board of Trade in London to register the official trademark of the IDA (Deánta i hÉireann), thereby putting it on some solid political footing.6 William O’Brien and T.M. Healy, each of whom had political connections with some small to medium-sized business owners, as well as Tory (‘liberal unionist’) landlords such as Lord Dunraven and Captain J.S. Taylor, gave the IDA some footing in Munster, while it also had the sympathy, if not the active support, of both the Ulster loyalistBelfast Newsletter and the managers of the Harland & Wolff shipbuilding firm in Belfast.7 As Griffith hoped, the IDA planned to gather data on Irish industrial and natural resources. However, at its conferences it emphasised to Griffith’s dismay that it considered agriculture as inherently Ireland’s primary industry and that it had no desire to change this situation. This reflected the IDA’s status as a British government-approved body.8 Griffith’s desire that Ireland could become an agricultural-manufacturing nation was inherently made impractical by the fact that a strategically planned import campaign would be necessary to facilitate this goal but the practical non-existence of Ireland as a distinct legal and economic entity gave Irishmen no basis upon which to build. There were also ideological reasons for the unpopularity of Griffith’s programme.
The writings of Griffith’s Irish contemporaries were essentially characterised by a prevarication between the options of seeking funding for state or voluntary (church-centred) bodies. Horace Plunkett championed the state-centred approach in his book Ireland in the New Century. Monsignor O’Riordan of the Irish College in Rome wrote a popular antithesis Catholicity and Progress. Cultural nationalists like George Russell dedicated their writings to both quarters. All, however, generally ignored the Sinn Féin Policy, which was deemed impractical because it was proactive in a way that was too contrary to both the government’s plans and established practice.9
The fear of challenging the government encouraged most to remain silent or neutral in matters of policy, as if policy formation was inherently the sole prerogative of the imperial civil service as the Irish question in British politics unfolded. Reflecting this, most Irish writers focused almost exclusively on ethical considerations of modernist trends in education and their role in shaping a collective sense of values. No alterations of existing financial norms were either envisioned or proposed. For instance, in ‘sufficiency indicating the general spirit in which I would have Irish education recreated’, Patrick Pearse of An Claidheamh Solus (a supporter of voluntary education) was simply following a long-established trend in The Murder Machine, as in all his subsequent writings, by emphasising that ‘I say little of organisation, or mere machinery. That is the least important part of the subject.’10 To focus on ends and means, as Griffith had done and kept suggesting, would have entailed questioning the role of all existing financial institutions within Ireland, as well as the wealth of the Protestant and Catholic Churches, but nobody was prepared to do this. In this way, one might say that the dynamics of Irish party politics under the post-1886 consensus was as much a bastion of conservative inaction as Buckingham Palace and the Vatican.
The Catholic Church’s mission to combat state control of education was facilitated by the semi-independent status of Dublin Castle’s National Board of Education. This, in turn, formed the essential context for all the Gaelic League’s activities. The league’s status as a voluntary body reflected the bishops’ desire for comparatively weak and dependent Irish public representatives, as well as the nature of the Gaelic League’s relationship with the civil service. Indeed, its voluntary ethos (whatever influence notable league members had was supposed to be exercised only as individuals) was practically guaranteed by the fact that half the Gaelic League’s membership was junior civil servants. On this particular question, Griffith was the victim of a common form of myopia. He fantasised that the cultural nationalism of Gaelic League civil servants could prompt them to collectively decide to act against the British state, as well as counter the corrupting legacy of party-political brokerage in civil service appointments.11 However, their cultural nationalism was essentially a manifestation of their desire for promotion within this same British civil service, which had facilitated this particular trend.12
Griffith’s National Council could acquire no funding from the Gaelic League. At the league’s annual fund-raising events (usually held on St Patrick’s Day), Stephen Gwynn, a Tory supporter of Redmond,13 and Eoin MacNeill collected all the financial proceedings. Meanwhile, Griffith’s National Council associates and would be co-promoters of the Sinn Féin Policy (Aldermen Tom Kelly and Walter Cole, Seamus MacManus, Edward Martyn, James Connolly and Henry Dixon) were confined to representing only the league’s ‘Cumann na Leabharlann’ (Library Club) in an associated parade.14 As such, Griffith was still in a comparable position to what he occupied as the twenty-two year old chairman of John O’Leary’s Young Ireland League; an organisation then typified by many Irish Party supporters as a group for ‘harmless crazy bookworms’.15 Griffith’s conflict with the leadership of the Gaelic League was subtle but perpetual. It was illustrated best by his attempt to present a call by Douglas Hyde for the finances of the National Board of Education to be managed locally instead of by the Imperial Treasury as a Sinn Féin stance and the categorical refusal of Hyde (an ally of Archbishop Walsh on the National Board of Education) that this was case.16 The failure of the National Council to appeal to the Gaelic League ensured that the most critical determinant of the Sinn Féin Policy’s chances of success was the nature of the business community within Ireland.
The landslide Liberal Party victory in the 1906 British general election was a source of much enthusiasm to the Irish Party. Considering the Liberals as their allies, Redmond and his party would even hold a special Westminster banquet for Liberal Party leaders such as John Morley (Cabinet Secretary for India, formerly Gladstone’s Chief Secretary for Ireland), Lord Loseburn (Lord Chancellor of England), Winston Churchill (Colonial Under Secretary) and Augustine Birrell (Chief Secretary for Ireland) to celebrate their return to power.17 The business community in Ireland, however, continued to be primarily Tory in politics. This was reflected by the IDA’s fortunes in Munster and Belfast. Nevertheless, the Irish Party invariably celebrated the fact that Irish Tories ‘in the councils of the English Tory party are an ignored minority … wholly unable to deflect its policy to the advantage of Ireland.’18 This was the Irish Party’s justification for believing that the Liberal Party would ultimately ensure their material triumph over the Tories within Ireland and in the process defeat the ‘Protestant ascendancy’. In doing so, the Irish Party essentially downplayed the significance of the fact that the Tories had been the authors of the home rule policy even more so than the Liberals and the Liberals were the initiators of the constructive unionism policy in Ireland alongside the Tories.19 Strange to say, this reality did not hurt the Irish Party. A matter that did hurt the Irish Party after 1906, however, was that the Liberals were opposed to the Tory policy of the National Education Board supporting the Gaelic League. As a result, the controversy surrounding the English education act of 1902 would return with a vengeance after 1908 when a Liberal government took up the Tory policy of establishing a ‘national university of Ireland’. Griffith appreciated the extent to which this trend in the politics of education could work to the National Council’s advantage.20
The true significance of these trends in Irish Party circles for the Sinn Féin Policy stemmed from Griffith’s consequent need to deal with the Tory business community within Dublin. Although it puzzled some of Griffith’s friends, business figures in Dublin City Hall (associates of Crawford) actually helped Griffith in producing his economic-nationalist analyses.21 The Irish Party, having allied itself to the Catholic Church and its property interests, had neither influence with nor much interest in the fortunes of the Chambers of Commerce in Ireland, but the nature of the Sinn Féin Policy was such that these financial institutions were central to Griffith’s programme. This was demonstrated by the first effort made to promote the Sinn Féin Policy. This was to call for the nationalisation of Irish railways; an idea that Sweetman first championed, on Griffith’s behalf, at a meeting of the General Council of County Councils.22
In support of Sweetman’s Irish Financial Reform League, during the late 1890s William Field, formerly the independent parliamentary representative of Griffith’s YIL, had advocated the establishment of a new ‘commercial party’ in Irish politics that would make the nationalisation of the railways its first demand. Field noted that railway nationalisation had taken place throughout Europe, the Americas and the British colonies (indeed, everywhere except the United Kingdom) because ‘if the state does not manage the railways, the railways will soon manage the state’ due to their centrality to business. Both manufacturing and successful trading in manufactured goods required cheap transit. However, the current English directors of railway companies within Ireland were charging very high rates for transit within Ireland and offering very preferential rates to British merchant-shipping owners and importers, making ‘commercial success unattainable’ in Ireland except to British-based firms.23 Similarly, a contemporary French observer noted that ‘all the productive capacity of Ireland [for business] is made barren by this inverted form of protectionism’, favouring a centralisation of the country’s commercial interests within Britain and effectively making the ports of Dublin and Belfast and the connecting Irish railways mere extensions of the Chambers of Commerce of Liverpool and Glasgow.24 In terms of political representation, this was essentially why T.P. O’Connor was returned for Liverpool rather than Dublin and John Ferguson made Glasgow rather than Belfast his political home.
Field noted that it was cheaper to ship goods between Dublin and Liverpool or London than it was to transport goods within Ireland. As a result, the commercial life of Dublin, Belfast and all other Irish cities had become completely divorced from each other. Instead, each was totally dependent on distinct and private business connections in Britain.25 If Dublin, Derry and Belfast faced a perpetual challenge in surviving as significant trading ports, the port towns of Drogheda, Dundalk and Newry had already entered into a reputedly terminal decline. Galway had ceased to be a significant commercial centre during the 1860s after the British government closed and never reopened its American trading routes (well-founded rumours existed that this policy would soon be extended to Cork in order to better facilitate the commercial development of Southampton), while Limerick had barely survived as a commercial centre. This had occurred only because James O’Mara, a son of the treasurer of the Irish Party who would soon defect to Sinn Féin, managed to make Limerick joint host with London of his successful bacon factory (a fact that had already given Limerick a somewhat derogatory nickname—‘pig city’).26
To reverse these trends, James McCann, the Louth-born Chairman of the Grand Canal Company, had joined with Field in calling for the ‘local nationalisation’ of all Irish railways and waterways. In this way, the transport companies could begin working together in promoting a common economic policy that was based upon a consideration of purely Irish business interests. In defence of this idea, McCann emphasised that the much-lauded yearly agricultural produce of Ireland, although larger (under current circumstances) than its manufacturing produce, was actually quite small in itself. Directly mirroring the state of the national economy of Britain (of which Ireland was being managed as just a small part), the yearly agricultural produce of Ireland was totally insufficient to provide for the needs of the Irish population. Instead, they were fed mostly by mass-produced English consumable imports that were produced using Irish exports. Ireland’s annual agricultural produce was also smaller than the capital raised annually by the Irish railways alone. McCann argued that the managers of Irish transport companies should take the lead in demanding a cessation of the over-taxation of their country and, in turn, demand a greater investment of all revenue collected in Ireland in local business enterprises, including the meat industry. This should be accompanied by a deliberate alteration of their rates to favour Irish over British traders, as the combined effect of the inherently interrelated issues of commercial transit and national taxation practices were the cause of all Ireland’s economic woes.27
McCann, a Dublin MP much admired by Griffith, died suddenly in 1904,28 but his ally Field (MP for St Patrick’s Division, Dublin) had recently been elected to Dublin County Council as a member of the Dublin Port and Dock Boards. In this capacity, Field supported Sweetman’s Sinn Féin motion before the General Council of County Councils in October 1906.29 The timing of Sweetman’s motion was influenced by the fact that English railway directors, having recently created ‘Tourism Ireland’ in Dublin, were championing the idea of nationalising control of all Irish railways in London as a means of securing a total English monopoly over the expected future rise of a significant tourism trade in Ireland.30 Sweetman, a lifelong shareholder in J.T. Pim’s Great Southern and Western Railway, maintained that while the current management of the railways was destructive to Irish business interests, placing them in the hands of the British government (an idea first touted during the late 1860s, when Sweetman was a member of the Liberal Party)31 ‘would also be detrimental to Ireland’. The solution Sweetman recommended was that the railway companies should be brought under one management ‘subject to the control of some body representing the people of Ireland’. He suggested that ‘the General Council of County Councils could be made use of as such a representative body, if no other representative body were formed’.32
As Sweetman himself noted, a major stumbling block to his own proposal was that the General Council, a creation of Sir Thomas Henry Grattan Esmonde MP, acted just in an advisory capacity. It had neither law-making nor coordinating powers over the local government bodies or their finances. Sweetman believed, not unreasonably, that the General Council, by potentially representing all local government representatives in Ireland, was far more deserving of state funding than the Department of Agricultural and Technical Instruction, which owed its existence as a Dublin Castle cabal to a single politician who had been repeatedly defeated at the polls: Horace Plunkett.33 Sweetman’s proposed solution to the problem of the General Council’s lack of authority was to send a copy of his resolution to every local government body in Ireland to recommend their support for his proposal. He suggested that the rates collected by the county councils each year could be used as security for a long-term purchase agreement with the railways provided that they were first brought under a central management rather than the present situation of a multitude of separate boards of directors.34
In common with the shipping companies, most very wealthy businessmen in Ireland had some share in the railway companies although they were generally owned more by English than by Irish shareholders.35 In addition to the shipping companies, the membership of the railway companies’ boards of directors overlapped greatly with the board of directors of the banks within Ireland. Many of these men also served as chairmen of the (Tory) Dublin Chamber of Commerce. This placed control of the most important financial institutions of Ireland into a very small number of people’s hands. All these people were located within Dublin, not the Ulster Unionist Party’s heartland of Belfast or the Irish Party’s political heartland of the provinces. Their families also generally intermarried rather than risk any dispersion of their personal wealth.36 Reflecting this, it was significant that although James McCann, a respected Dublin stockbroker, had been able to give his views on ‘the economics of the Irish problem’ to the Bankers’ Institute of Ireland (a body recently established by Andrew Jameson, the Scottish director of the Bank of Ireland and an active unionist),37 this had evoked no actual response from such quarters. The Sinn Féin Policy was widely perceived to have its greatest potential support in Dublin (hence the use of Griffith’s writings by Kettle’s UCD society as a template for its own counter-propaganda).38 However, the fact that ‘Dublin does not lead Ireland as Paris leads France’ made the assumption of the political leadership of Ireland from a Dublin base or, indeed, the development of an Irish nationalist politics, a virtual impossibility.39 This situation was essentially the direct result of the extant banking arrangements of the 1820s.
The abolishment of the Irish customs houses during the 1820s progressively weakened the significance of the Chambers of Commerce in Ireland. Inevitably, this had an impact on Ireland’s political representation as well. Irish politicians were powerless to champion the commercial interests of these institutions, while Irish businessmen were equally powerless to assist politicians in mobilising effective platforms. This was why, for instance, William Dargan (1799–1867), the chief initiator of the Irish railway companies, at no stage maintained an association with any Irish politicians.40 During the 1900s, the competing demands for championing an industrial exhibition of Irish industry or an exhibition of British industry within Ireland was made meaningless by the nature of the country’s financial institutions.41 Inevitably, it was the latter option that was chosen (during 1907) and this resulted in the creation of new imperial parks and monuments in both Dublin city and Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) to celebrate the prosperity of imperial (London-based) merchant firms that operated in Ireland. This prosperity, however, neither had, nor was going to be, reinvested, or kept, within Ireland.42
The 1907 industrial exhibition in his hometown was a blow to Griffith’s programme. Ongoing religious divides within the Irish business community also evidently discouraged the formation of new commercial parties in Irish politics. For instance, in Dublin, there were many noted Quaker business leaders in the city. One of the most well known, the bookseller Alfred Webb, was, to his own admission, ‘very much in accord with the Sinn Féiners’, if they would avoid certain dubious, i.e. IRB, connections.43 Ever since the 1870s, however, the Quakers, as well as many Catholics, had been deliberately excluded from the city’s Chamber of Commerce, whose members were almost strictly members of the Church of Ireland.44 This reflected the irony of Dublin Tories’ passive support for Griffith’s propaganda. They evidently valued it only because it assisted their own arguments against the Irish Party. However, as Samuels’ career showed, they did not have the courage of their convictions.
On the question of nationalising financial institutions, Griffith realised that to speak of state ownership when there was no separate Irish government was contrary to his own definition of the potential benefits of nationalisation. He viewed nationalisation as a principle of government that was not inherently a good thing but merely a matter that suited current Irish needs, to resist the process of British centralisation.45 The many impasses the Sinn Féin Policy faced on the railways question essentially paled into insignificance, however, compared to the obstacles facing the Sinn Féin Policy of nationalising the banks. Griffith’s approach to this question reflected a major weakness in his reasoning. Griffith usually spoke of nationalisation not as a policy that began at the apex of the Irish commercial world, namely the banks. Instead, he spoke of it as a policy that began at the lowest levels of municipal or county council government and could somehow, in time, be impressed upon commercial elites.46 This was unreasonable, however, because of the nature of party politics and local government bodies as they operated within Ireland. In addition, his National Council was subsidised by as little as £500 a year (or sometimes far less). On such a budget, the best the National Council could do was to issue propaganda or—as would be attempted in the wake of the 1907 exhibition—publish yearbooks of relevant statistical information while patronising small-scale Christmas exhibitions of Irish-made goods.47 The very small scale of such enterprises made Sinn Féin seem ridiculous to many people.
While Griffith ridiculed ‘Irish conservatism’ as the ‘ostrich policy’, supposedly shared equally by Irish Tories and the Irish Party,48 Sweetman’s advice to Griffith that it was not their responsibility as Sinn Féiners to present any direct party political opposition to the Irish Party was an idea that Griffith accepted in practice, even if the tone of his propaganda very often indicated otherwise.49 Meanwhile, Sweetman’s deeply conservative Catholicism and his shareholding in the United Irishman certainly made it an increasingly conservative organ on social issues at least.50 Often, there was little positive for Griffith to focus on politically. This prompted the publication of editorials on minor subjects such as single products as part of the ‘buy Irish’ campaign of the IDA or localised quarrels at Gaelic League events that were chaired by priests unsympathetic to the UIL. Any time potential supporters were elected to local government, Griffith would simply repeat the idea of establishing a national council of 300 representatives and present the UIL rather cynically (owing to the knighting of some of its local government officials) as an organisation whose chief function was to save British loyalists from political extinction.51
Griffith renamed his journal Sinn Féin in April 1906 in an attempt to capitalise upon Douglas Hyde’s successful US fund-raising tour for the Gaelic League and the fact that one of the promoters of Hyde’s tour thereafter expressed a desire to invite a Sinn Féin speaker to America.52 Griffith expected to be invited. Instead, he was bypassed because of some of those same dubious associations that repulsed Alfred Webb from Sinn Féin and that Sweetman simply did not understand.
Griffith continued to promote the anti-enlistment campaign as part of the Sinn Féin Policy. He now justified this campaign primarily on economic grounds, noting that Britain’s imperial wars during the nineteenth century—on the continent, in the Crimea, in Sebastopol, in Afghanistan, in Egypt and in the Transvaal—had never been a direct concern of Ireland, yet the country was forced to contribute many millions of pounds to these war efforts despite the fact that ‘every pound of that Irish gold could have been better spent in Ireland’.53 Simultaneously, Griffith protested that while the police forces in Britain were subject, both administratively and financially, to the control of municipal governments, the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) and the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) were governed directly by Dublin Castle, which was not responsible to Irish municipal authorities, yet these same municipal authorities were forced to issue, collect and pay the taxes for the upkeep of these police forces.54 These were effective criticisms of the dynamics of the highly centralised and unaccountable nature of the imperial administration at Dublin Castle. However, other men promoted the anti-enlistment cause in a very different manner.
In October 1902, to mark the end of the Boer War, obscure Trinity College students founded a new ‘Dungannon Club’ of the IRB. It called openly for the formation of an international alliance of secret revolutionary organisations along anti-British lines in supporting anti-enlistment: ‘a section of Russia, Ireland, India and China have partly together struck on this new policy’, which ‘must be applied … outside Ireland’.55 This propaganda essentially reflected the survival of the Victorian tradition of an overlap between the worlds of Irish imperial war-correspondent journalism, Fenian propaganda and British intelligence programmes. Mirroring developments during the mid-1880s,56 it also led an Indian politician to call upon Griffith, ironically with a request for an introduction to the leadership of the Irish Party.57
The Dungannon Club had recently been extended beyond the confines of Trinity College. With some passive support from George Gavan Duffy, a prominent London barrister who was curious about Sinn Féin, P.S. O’Hegarty, a Cork-born clerk, launched this initiative. Acting on P.T. Daly’s orders, O’Hegarty replaced the elderly figure of Mark Ryan as the London IRB lynchpin and demanded that P.N. Fitzgerald retire in favour of his own brother Sean O’Hegarty.58 O’Hegarty’s instrument to spread the Dungannon Clubs was Bulmer Hobson, a young Protestant Gaelic Leaguer from Belfast who was popular with local cultural nationalists and also maintained an association with Sir Roger Casement, a British Foreign Office official of Irish Party sympathies who acted as his political mentor.59 Hobson was chosen in New York instead of Griffith to represent Sinn Féin in America partly because Patrick MacCartan, the Dublin correspondent of John Devoy’s New York Gaelic American, noted that Griffith was a relatively poor public speaker.60 For the most part, however, it was motivated by Clan na Gael’s need to establish new intermediaries with the IRB.61 Acting under P.T. Daly’s direction, the IRB officially declared itself a supporter of the Sinn Féin Policy in April 1906 to facilitate Hobson’s tour, yet it rejected Griffith’s emphasis on the significance of the precedent of the Renunciation Act of 1783, whereby the imperial parliament was denied the right to legislate for Ireland.62 This was an inconsistent position.
The fallout of Hobson’s American tour was the establishment of The Republic (Belfast). This short-lived journal of the Dungannon Clubs maintained that Irish nationalists’ battle should be ‘not with England, but with the people of Ireland— it is the battle of self-respect … against the moral cowardice, the slavishness, the veneration for any authority however and by whoever assumed—that have marked the people of this country for generations.’63 Behind this republican moralising and revolutionary posturing, however, was a practical refusal to support Griffith in his desire to win Irish Party defectors over to the National Council (The Republic declared the Sinn Féin Policy’s emphasis on local government representation to be futile).
One legacy of the Anglo-Irish consensus of 1884–6 was the rapprochement between the Irish Party and Dublin Castle actually coincided or perhaps even led to a rapprochement between the Irish Party and the IRB.64 The latter moribund organisation had operated on an essentially caretaker executive since October 1902. This was financed on Mark Ryan’s behalf by the equally elderly figure of Robert Johnston of Belfast. On the suggestion of Seamus MacManus (Johnston’s son-in-law) in America, Johnston and his followers had tried to mobilise the Irish AOH organisation behind the Sinn Féin Policy instead of the Irish Party, but P.T. Daly responded by expelling Johnston and his followers from the IRB and also misappropriated American funding rather than let it reach Griffith’s hands.65 John Redmond, while keeping a close watch on Daly, employed F.B. Dineen, a controversial leader of anti-enlistment movement within the GAA,66 to act as a Sinn Féin mole on behalf of the Irish Party.67 This IRB obstructionism helped to ensure that Griffith was not able to capitalise upon the greatest political opportunity that came his way at this time, namely the possibility of many defections from the Irish Party to the Sinn Féin Policy after Redmond and Dillon gave their support to Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell’s deeply unpopular Irish Council Bill of May 1907.
As a permanent settlement of the question of Irish self-government, Birrell proposed making the heads of a few select departments within the Dublin Castle administration open to public election. The Irish Party’s more youthful members reacted by expressing doubt about the leadership ability and political judgment of the senior ranks of their party in their acceptance of this plan. In the recent past, John O’Donnell MP, general secretary of the United Irish League, had demonstrated some sympathy with the National Council idea, although the assistant secretary of the UIL continued to label it ‘the Sinn Féin Humbug’.68 Several prominent backbenchers now expressed a willingness to defect from the Irish Party to Sinn Féin.69 The most significant of these was James O’Mara, a leading Irish businessman who was the son of the co-treasurer of the Irish Party alongside Patrick O’Donnell, the Catholic bishop of Raphoe. O’Mara had been expected by John Redmond to become a senior party member. Instead, he would soon resign from Westminster, choose to financially support Griffith in promoting the Sinn Féin Policy and encourage further defections from the Irish Party.70 This necessitated a direct response from Redmond regarding the Sinn Féin Policy.71 Meanwhile, John Dillon re-emphasised the necessity of strengthening the Irish Party’s control over the press, noting to Redmond that ‘I do not believe it is possible to maintain the Irish Party without some newspaper [the Freeman’s Journal] in Dublin.’72 Redmond himself judged that he had two challenges: first, the perpetual one to preserve Irish Party unity (‘my chief anxiety ever since I have been Chairman of the Irish Party’) and, second, to meet the general feeling in the country that ‘a great effort should be made to get all of Ireland into one movement—O’Brienites, Healyites and Sinn Féiners—and that the Party is strongest and most representative body to do this’.73
The fact that Sinn Féin prioritised local government representation as its political platform led Redmond to blame the rate-collecting county councils for all Ireland’s economic woes, including a failure to address the question of over taxation. Griffith retorted that 90 per cent of the taxes collected in Ireland stemmed from the Imperial Parliament’s indirect taxation on goods and services rather than county council rates. He also emphasised that the revenue collected from indirect taxation in England was necessarily granted by law to the local authorities every year in order to improve the services of municipal authorities and to promote local business enterprises, but in Ireland this revenue went directly into the imperial exchequer with no legal provision for any return to Ireland. The local government bodies had no authority or say in this matter. As a result,
The British tax gatherer sits in every dining room in Ireland and stands behind the counter of every public-house, grocery and tobacconists in the land…This has been done and is carried on under the direction and superintendence of an old gentleman living at Rathfarnham, outside Dublin, and known as Sir Robert Holmes. This man is the British Treasury Remembrancer in Ireland and the real governor of the country.74 The Aberdeens and Birrells [the Lord Lieutenant and Chief Secretary at Dublin Castle] who loom so large in the public eye are merely the screen behind which men like Holmes carry on the financial plunder of Ireland, as are the three Englishmen, Pittar, Parry and Crawford, who rule the Custom House interdict upon direct trade between Ireland and the Continent. Ireland has got to realise who her real governors are and direct her blows at them.75
Griffith was here highlighting the often only nominal powers of the ‘Irish’ executive, as well as its departments, at Dublin Castle. This was due to extent of its subordination to the Imperial Treasury in London in all matters of governance; a situation launched by Gladstone’s civil service reforms of the mid-nineteenth century.76
Redmond responded by ridiculing the idea that the Dublin Castle administration’s policy was ‘the financial plunder of Ireland’ on the grounds that the British government had generously granted Ireland with various monies. Griffith pointed out, however, that ‘every penny expended by the British Treasury in Ireland is raised out of Irish taxation’ and that the land annuities were issued as long-term loans at significant interest rates, not as grants, despite the fact that these loans were only small fractions of the Irish revenue that should have been expended annually in Ireland regardless.77 As a genuine example of a British grant, Griffith cited Gladstone’s granting of £4,000,000 to the Dublin Castle administration during 1854 to offset the imposition of a special spirit tax he had introduced to define the parameters of the Irish liquor trade, but in return for this one-off payment Ireland had since paid to Britain £109,250,000 in spirit taxes.78 The reason why business and banking practices in Ireland were doing absolutely nothing to improve the material welfare of the Irish people, Griffith emphasised, was that ‘Irish capital is locked up in English savings banks and there is no movement [of that capital] to keep the people in Ireland.’ He emphasised that ‘if that money were brought into play in the country it would mean the revivification of Ireland, industrially and commercially’,79 but Britain simply did not want Ireland to ever have the slightest capacity to become a financial competitor.
Sinn Féin made its strongest political showing during 1907 in north Wexford, where Sean Etchingham’s Enniscorthy Echo newspaper and Sir Thomas Henry Grattan Esmonde, the local MP, declared their support for Sinn Féin. Griffith responded by speaking in support of Esmonde’s re-election at a rally in Enniscorthy that was attended by 5,000 people. Although he had given lectures in private halls, this was probably Griffith’s first-ever experience of open-air public speaking. Esmonde himself did not attend. He sent a letter to Griffith, however, in which he stated that although ‘how far … my opinions coincide with yours I do not know’, he believed ‘we are back to our position of 1885’ because ‘parliamentary agitation, as now conducted, has spent its force’ and, in the process, ‘freed the hands’ of Irish politicians to adopt a different course. He declared himself in favour of the repeal of the Union, as did the local leader of the UIL, who wrote to Griffith that ‘I hope sincerely that Sinn Féin as a rallying cry will have more reality and more tangible results’ than the Irish Party’s rally cry of ‘home rule’.80
The speeches of the Sinn Féin speakers present reflected the nature of the nascent party’s support. The local activist Robert Brennan focused upon the significance of Esmonde’s statement ‘as striking testimony from the inside’ of the political bankruptcy of the Irish Party’s position. Alderman Walter Cole emphasised that ‘in putting forward a policy different from that which had been generally accepted as the policy of the Irish nation [the Irish Party] for the last generation [since 1885] they did not presume to claim for themselves any monopoly of patriotism’. Together with Sean T. O’Kelly (who spoke in Irish), Alderman Tom Kelly defined the purpose of Sinn Féin as being a more stalwart defender of Catholic interests than Redmond’s party could possibly be at Westminster. The most significant speaker was C.J. Dolan MP, who stated that he could affirm from direct personal experience of the imperial parliament the absolute truth of what Griffith had been arguing for years in his journals. Dolan noted that if the Irish public ‘believed the Freeman’s Journal they would believe that the British Parliament hung attentive on the lips of the Irish members, but what really occurred was this’:
They would be given one day to discuss Irish business … but when the expected day arrived they found the English and Scotch benches were empty … [Westminster treats] Ireland’s affairs and Ireland’s representatives with contempt … I will not continue to be a party to a policy which can do nothing for Ireland, but which prevents her, by raising false hopes in her breast, from doing something for herself.81
Griffith himself emphasised that, contrary to popular belief, Parnell’s years of significant activity in Westminster were confined to just ‘3 or 4 years … [c.1877-1881 when] he found the weak spot in parliament and used that spot. That weak spot is now removed’. Even when Parnell was at his most effective, however, the Irish Party was ‘as powerless to prevent England passing evil legislation for Ireland as they were to compel her to pass good legislature’. This was why the Irish Party could not point to a single piece of legislation over the previous thirty-five years as its own creation. Indeed, bills introduced by Irish MPs at Westminster almost never reached a second reading. Emphasising that Parnell was as unpopular with the Freeman’s Journal and the rest of the Irish press during his obstructionist days as Sinn Féin was during the present, Griffith argued that ‘the flowing tide’ was now with Sinn Féin as it was with Parnell in the maiden years of his political career:
The evicted tenants carried out the Sinn Féin policy in the Land League days … The idea about the necessity of sending men to parliament to force concessions from the English parliament is contradicted by history. When O’Connell started his movement and won [Catholic] Emancipation, there was no Irish Party in the British Parliament ... I have known members of parliament, honest and patriotic men, who went into it good Irishmen and who came back from the House of Commons … [regarding] every measure from the point of view of the exigencies of English parties and not from the point of view of the Irish people … [yet the public] were told that when the Irish members left parliament, they were leaving the battle ground.82
Griffith maintained that as soon as the Irish public withdrew its representatives from the imperial parliament and supported the anti-enlistment campaign against the British army, Britain would be forced to abandon the unequal Anglo-Irish relationship that was defining the Union and allow Ireland the status of an equal. Suggesting that there was ‘nothing wild’ about the Sinn Féin policy, Griffith argued that if ‘the Gaelic League gives Ireland a firm foothold in true Irish nationalism’, ‘the Sinn Féin movement gives Ireland a firm foothold in true Irish politics’ so that ‘a few years hence, men will wonder at themselves at having ever looked to Westminster for Irish salvation’.83
After James O’Mara (MP for Kilkenny) resigned from parliament, some prominent Irish Party figures wrote to him expressing their opinion that it was a courageous thing to do.84 This was because, as was the case with John Sweetman’s resignation in 1895, what was possible for O’Mara was not possible for most other party members: lacking his financial independence, they could not afford to do without their parliamentary salary.85 Resigning from parliament would have meant the end of their careers in more senses than one, while few had the good fortune of the popular nationalist leader William O’Brien to be married to a wealthy Russian lady who had saved him from bankruptcy on more than one occasion.86 The fact that O’Brien’s wife was also Jewish even made him the subject of anti-Semitic rants by Irish Party supporters.
There was also the issue of party discipline.87 Refusing to tolerate any opposition, the UIL had already responded to the Sinn Féin challenge by using its influence to demote Esmonde and Sweetman from their positions as president and vice-president respectively of the General Council of County Councils.88 O’Mara realised the difficulty of this situation. While he contributed money to Sinn Féin (which still made a loss, under Sean T. O’Kelly’s management, of about £130 in its first year of publication),89 he encouraged C.J. Dolan (MP for Leitrim) to adopt a policy of parliamentary obstructionism within the Irish Party instead of resigning. This was because Sinn Féin did not yet have a credible political organisation. This would have been a constructive political strategy. It was also in keeping with Esmonde’s sense of the political situation. C.J. Dolan, however, decided to resign (not suddenly, for ‘as you know I took a long time to make up my mind as to the wisdom of the Sinn Féin policy’)90 and seek re-election to parliament in Sligo-Leitrim as a National Council candidate. This was despite the fact that the National Council (‘Sinn Féin’) did not yet have a political organisation outside of Dublin city council.91 This was a foolish decision.
Reluctantly, O’Mara offered the funding for Dolan’s election campaign but Esmonde, in the name of common sense, backed off and instead appealed to the UIL not to follow Dolan’s example.92 As a result, when Tom O’Donnell, one of O’Mara’s closest allies in the Irish Party, moved in favour of the withdrawal of the Irish Party from Westminster at a meeting of the UIL Directory, only four present voted in favour of the motion.93 Redmond’s chief agent to defeat Dolan’s election campaign was P.A. McHugh MP, editor of the Sligo Champion and close confrere of AOH president Joseph Devlin, the young MP for West Belfast, who rapidly became the political leader of Catholic Ulster after Bishop O’Donnell, the Irish Party treasurer, lifted the church’s ban on membership of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (hitherto known derogatively to most Ulster Catholics as ‘the Green Order’). McHugh assured Redmond that Dolan did not have the slightest chance as the Catholic Bishop of Kilmore ‘has nailed his columns to the mast in support of the party’.94 This fact ensured that all UIL branch leaders, being parish priests, worked to defeat Dolan, who did not poll well.
Although Griffith had believed that ‘the party—or at least the majority—will not consent to withdraw from Westminster’, he had intended in the run up to the Dolan campaign that Sinn Féin would attend a conference of Irish Party backbenchers that Tom Kettle was planning to convene to discuss all future alternatives for the party.95 This was potentially a great opportunity for Griffith to present his case. The passive sympathy for Sinn Féin of Laurence Ginnell’s Independent United Irish League in the midlands and the call of William O’Brien’s Irish People in Cork (probably the most influential provincial Irish newspaper) for the creation of a new political movement that would reflect popular opinion by incorporating Sinn Féin also reflected the existence of significant potential.96 However, at National Council meetings, IRB activists P.T. Daly and Bulmer Hobson started arguing ‘for some reason I can’t understand that the present [National Council] constitution permits the whittling-down of the national demand’ and argued against attending Kettle’s conference.97 Noting that this stance was definitely ‘not calculated to do good’, Griffith emphasised that ‘the platform of the National Council is broad enough for all Irishmen—whether they be republicans or repealers—and to narrow as a small number wish to the former only would make the Sinn Féin movement impossible of achieving its end’. This was because it would prevent it from making a persuasive case to the Irish Party and other political interest groups to join its ranks.98
The death of John O’Leary in March 1907 had led to the amalgamation of Cumann na Gaedhael (of which he had nominally been president) with the Dungannon Clubs under P.T. Daly’s presidency. Daly named this group the Sinn Féin League. After months of republican obstructionism, it was not until late in 1907 that this Sinn Féin League and Griffith’s National Council amalgamated and officially became known as the Sinn Féin Party. The first Sinn Féin Party Executive consisted of Edward Martyn as president, John Sweetman and Griffith as vice-presidents, Aindrais O’Broin (Andy Byrne) as general secretary and Walter Cole and Sean T. O’Kelly as honorary secretaries. Its Dublin-centred focus was reflected by the subdivision of its National Executive (at 11 Lower O’Connell Street) into ‘resident’ and ‘non-resident’ members, the former consisting entirely of inhabitants of Dublin. As the influence of the National Council representatives in Dublin city council (totalling seventeen councillors) far outweighed the importance of the Dungannon Clubs, the Renunciation Act clause was kept in the party’s constitution.99 This fact was of far less significance, however, than Sinn Féin’s failure to develop a party organisation that summer when it was needed the most thanks to P.T. Daly.100
To mobilise enthusiasms, Sinn Féin would soon boast, unrealistically, of having the support of ‘one-fourth of the whole population, despite the opposition of the entire daily press and misrepresentation from nearly every quarter’.101 Griffith would later claim, alongside new supporters such as Sean Milroy (an English-born nationalist activist in Ulster), that it was Sinn Féin alone that saved Ireland during 1907 from the debacle that was Birrell’s Irish Council Bill.102 The Irish Party’s decision to withdraw its support from the Irish Council Bill was certainly wise and opportune, but this was evidently motivated by the state of opinion within its own party alone. For instance, the Dublin Irish Party MP Tim Harrington felt confident in typifying Griffith alongside P.T. Daly and Henry Dixon as ‘the representatives and the agents of [the American] Clan na Gael’ and, upon this basis, suggested that they had ‘no real grip in the city’.103
Notwithstanding Griffith’s claim that there was ‘nothing wild’ about the Sinn Féin Policy, it was practically revolutionary in its logic. For instance, Griffith had suggested that while the British treasury gave £2,000,000 every year to the Irish poor law boards on the condition that they buy all their workhouse supplies in Britain, the poor law boards (consisting mostly of UIL members) could simply ignore this provision and instead use this money to purchase Irish supplies to boost Irish businesses, in the process reducing unemployment and ensuring less Irish people would have to rely on poor law aid or else emigrate.104 In effect, he was talking about launching an immediate economic war against Britain. People could admire such ideas in theory but nobody was prepared to support them in practice.
One achievement of Griffith’s propaganda campaign was to re-highlight discrepancies in the Irish Party political tradition. For instance, as had been the case in the past, its publicity body in Britain, J.J. Clancy’s Irish Press Agency (established 1886), was often prepared to publish rational critiques of British rule in Ireland, including damning Griffithite criticisms of the system of over-taxation.105 This was done to influence British voters into believing in the justice of Irish complaints. However, specifically before an Irish audience (and under the watchful eyes of Dublin Castle), the Irish Party and its press never did this from 1885 onwards (this being a condition of the Anglo-Irish security consensus of 1884–6).106 Instead, it simply celebrated the legacy of Gladstone as the first man to introduce the question of ‘Irish home rule’ into British politics as a reason for the Irish public to have faith in the party’s inevitable future success.
Griffith absolutely hated this trend, believing (with good reason) that it was serving to deprive the Irish public of any true sense of the realities of British and Irish politics or, indeed, recent history. The extent to which Griffith kept returning to citing Gladstone’s career (he suggested that Gladstone’s only actual legacy was that ‘every man, woman and child in Ireland is owed at the present moment £90 by the British Exchequer—money fraudulently taken from you and your parents since 1853’)107 was motivated by his felt need to provide a wake-up call to Irish Party supporters. It was also motivated by his idealistic dream that both Irish Tories and the Irish Party could come together under the umbrella of the National Council if they simply accepted the fact that ‘there is one platform on which Ireland ought to and should unite … the platform of financial redress’. Maintaining that ‘so long as Ireland sends representatives to Westminster’ it was giving assent to its own economic exploitation, he suggested that ‘our policy—to stop the plunder of Ireland’ was one upon which ‘the Irish unionists still profess their willingness to combine with Irish nationalists … but only a United Ireland can win it an early and complete victory.’108
Once again, however, Griffith was essentially talking about launching an economic war against Britain that nobody was prepared to support in practice. For instance, it was technically true that, by law, no article could cost any more in Ireland than it did in Britain under the Union of 1801. British customs had simply ignored this law ever since Whitehall abolished Irish customs in the 1820s. As a result, every single Irish consumer was being subtly and illegally exploited financially on a daily basis for the past eighty-five years.109 Griffith’s idea, however, of ‘a united Ireland—unionist and nationalist—responding to England’s refusal to do elementary financial justice to this country by a policy of abstention from excisable commodities…causing her to lose involuntarily the money she will not voluntarily refund’110 was not likely to find any support. This was because although it was true that ‘all the productive capacity of Ireland [for business] is made barren by this inverted form of protectionism’ by Britain,111 the modernisation of the monetary, transport and commercial worlds had followed precisely this dynamic ever since the 1820s (and would continue to do so until at least the 1970s).112 Therefore, no living figure within the monetary or business world, as well as the civil administration, of Ireland had ever been accustomed to anything different. This may well have been an unjust situation, but it was one that Irish people had been so long accustomed to accepting as a fact of life there was no evident wish to change it.
In economic terms, the Irish Party represented a primarily grazing farming-community that had developed since the famine because of the rapid industrialisation of England and the resulting creation of a British market for Irish cattle. Its support from the business community was confined mostly to small enterprises of shopkeepers and publicans whose business revolved around a localised economy based on market towns and a handful of successful distilleries (excluding Sweetman’s and one or two others, these distilleries were usually owned by Tories, including James Craig’s Dunvilles Distillery).113 Even if the sons of such families studied to be barristers, politicians or priests (as they frequently did), they still had no say or, indeed, any great reason to be concerned with international trading or imperial taxation practices. These matters remained the interest, if no longer a prerogative, of the members of the chambers of commerce of Dublin, Cork and Belfast. From the 1850s onwards, however, such men generally did not stand for political election. Usually Tory in sympathy, they had silently consented to Gladstonian imperial fiscal trends.114 Meanwhile, the birth of an Irish Catholic middle class at this time was intrinsically linked to a willingness to derive whatever personal profits were to be had by supporting the development of London as Ireland’s business capital and, in turn, letting all those whose livelihoods depended entirely on local Irish circumstances go to the wall. It was not for nothing that the Irish people developed the reputation internationally at this time as the least patriotic and most slavish, or peasant-like, of political communities.
In Belfast, men who were likeminded to Griffith could hardly risk supporting his desire ‘to place England in the dock’ on economic grounds. For instance, the Ulster Unionist Party shared Griffith’s preoccupation with the findings of Tory government’s Financial Relations Commission of 1896. They would never support the idea of financial redress to the degree that Griffith suggested, however. As this would have been tantamount to declaring an economic war on the Imperial Treasury, it was feared that any attempt to do so would result in punitive economic measures that, potentially, would undo those financial arrangements by which London had recently turned the small town of Belfast into a new city. Such punitive economic measures could also cripple southern Ireland’s food and meat-producing firms for larger British traders. Indeed, it was hardly coincidental that Griffith’s chief business allies, Walter Cole (a fruit merchant between Dublin and Liverpool) and James O’Mara (a bacon factory owner, with his business headquarters in Limerick and London), supported his idea of abstention from the imperial parliament but, like the Irish Party or (in practice) the Irish Tories, resisted supporting his taxation arguments.115 This was because an economic war against Britain was a struggle that Irishmen could not possibly win. Why, therefore, did Griffith continue in pursuing such a seemingly futile course?
It would be hard to exaggerate the extent to which Griffith’s political outlook was shaped by his status as a poor and lifelong Dubliner. The careers of his longest supporters in City Hall, Alderman Tom Kelly and the ex-Land Leaguer Jennie Wyse Power PLG,116 would be defined by an attack of the city’s housing and poverty problems.117 These issues also preoccupied some ex-mayors of the city and budding economic analysts who likewise favoured major reforms of the Irish workhouse system.118 Griffith was proud of them for producing credible Sinn Féin policy documents on these matters during the late 1900s.119 Griffith himself, however, attributed the root of the existence of these Dublin socio-economic problems, which had shaped his whole life, directly to the imperial treasury’s government of Ireland.
As a historical proof, Griffith argued that the Irish quit and crown rent which had been collected for the city’s upkeep ‘and had been used to provide Dublin with fine streets and sweep away the slums etc.’ was misappropriated by the imperial treasury and ‘used for the beautification of the English metropolis [London]’ instead. This had frustrated, for example, a scheme of the Dublin Corporation during the early 1850s ‘for the sweeping away of the Dublin slums, and their replacement by great streets and avenues’, ‘drawn up by Engineers and Architects of the Corporation … [and] unanimously adopted by the Dublin Corporation, then largely Conservative [Tory]’. This plan failed because when the corporation ‘claimed from the English Government of the day the money due to Ireland for the Quit and Crown rents for this purpose’, ‘the Government refused to give it back’. Lacking any means of appealing this decision, the corporation’s members not only abandoned such schemes for improvement but the corporation as well,120 letting the city itself go to ruin. These monies were still technically the property of Dublin citizens each and every year, but the corporation ceased demanding its right to such funds from about 1858 onwards and, by now, they were almost completely forgotten about:
This is the cause of the present state of affairs … It is owing to this that Dublin housing for the poor is in such a condition … The people should know this. The World [my italics] should know this, for England in her propaganda pointed to the Dublin slums [compared by some contemporaries to the situation in Calcutta or Saint Petersburg] as a proof of Irish incapacity and corruption. The tables should be turned on her … The corporation again should put this matter forward, claiming that stolen money … showing that Dublin slumdom is the creation of English robbery.121
Griffith’s distaste for the Irish Party was certainly partly inspired by its predominantly rural representation. If an Irish parliament ever came into being, Griffith desired that its urban representation would be increased at the expense of its rural.122 Although not a political woman,123 Griffith’s fiancé Maud Sheehan, a fellow Dubliner, also resented the fact that the tenor of Irish politics under the Irish Party’s electoral hegemony was often designed to ‘make one think how dreadful we [Dubliners] were not country people’ and so were somehow not deserving of consideration or perhaps even be considered as being truly Irish.124
By the beginning of 1908, Griffith had spent four years addressing the heart of Anglo-Irish relations in a direct and—at least during the Irish Council Bill controversy—particularly relevant way. R.M. Henry, an Ulster Tory academic in Queen’s University Belfast and an associate through the Gaelic League, credited Griffith for having ‘stamped upon every column he wrote his intense and vivid sense of truth’ as well as a ‘great gift of discerning what was essential and of holding to it without faltering’.125 However, within months of the fading of the Irish Council Bill controversy, which had seemingly guaranteed that Sinn Féin would win many parliamentary supporters, the material dynamics underlying all existing forms of Irish party political networking (or ostracisms, as the case may be) had provided Griffith with no new supporters, or political associates, other than a few dozen IRB conspirators who liked to attend public nationalist lectures and who congregated around a tobacconist shop in Dublin city centre that had been newly opened by Tom Clarke, an ex-political prisoner (and former manager of the Gaelic American) who had recently returned from America.
Sinn Féin was being used for some ulterior motives. For instance, F.H. O’Donnell used the existence of the Dungannon Clubs within Sinn Féin as a cover for approaching the Austro-Hungarian government, falsely claiming to represent Irish revolutionaries while under the watchful eyes of the British Foreign Office.126 Meanwhile, Sir Roger Casement’s friend Bulmer Hobson was writing pamphlets which argued in direct opposition to Griffith’s programme that the Sinn Féin Policy ‘is in reality war’ that necessitated physical violence and a ‘simultaneous application in Ireland, India and Egypt’.127 It would have been difficult to imagine a more absurd hypothesis.
Griffith did acquire a couple of notable new associates from the revolutionary underground at this time. These were Sean Milroy, who became a fellow student of the economic basis of Anglo-Irish relations, and Sean MacDermott, an ex-school teacher who replaced P.T. Daly as Sinn Féin’s national organiser. MacDermott was a very energetic organiser who did all he could to network Sinn Féin’s supporters into new party branches.128
During 1908, Griffith hoped to make his mark on the Irish university debate. He desired ‘that a faculty of Irish studies be established in the university’ and ‘that degrees be instituted in agriculture and economics’. Most of all, he hoped that a single national university under strictly non-denominational management could be established to prevent north–south and religious polarisations from dominating Irish life. For this reason, Griffith welcomed the British government’s idea of creating a national university under non-denominational management, but felt that the university bill would create problems by separating the management of the universities of Dublin and Belfast.129 Understanding that the Catholic hierarchy’s extant loyalty to the Irish Party had led to C.J. Dolan’s defeat, Griffith also realised that the Sinn Féin Party needed a more effective president than the indifferent figure of Edward Martyn. He was glad, therefore, that John Sweetman, a man who knew the hierarchy intimately, agreed to become the new Sinn Féin president during 1908. Sweetman, however, reacted to the university debate in a manner directly contrary to Griffith.
Sweetman warned Griffith that he must not under any circumstances make arguments in the press that criticised the principle of denominational education.130 Griffith wished that Sweetman would see that there were broader issues at stake with regards to university education, noting for example that ‘Archbishop Walsh, I hear, disapproves of the Bill, but will not oppose it.’131 These appeals fell upon deaf ears, however, because, unfortunately for Griffith, Sweetman was a lay Catholic obsessed with ideas of orthodoxy.132 Equally, in deference to the bishops, Sweetman was highly fearful of taking any step that might shatter the unity of Ireland’s Catholic political representatives. In warning Griffith that ‘no party can succeed in Ireland to which the priests are actively hostile’ and that ‘anti-clericalism would destroy the Sinn Féin Party’,133 Sweetman clearly equated criticism of the principle of denominational education upon any grounds to be tantamount to an intolerable anticlericalism. Aside from suppressing James McCann’s Peasant, Sweetman once even considered using his influence to have An Claidheamh Solus shut down when its editor Patrick Pearse (himself something of a religious fanatic)134 passed a comment about Daniel Mannix, the president of Maynooth College, that Sweetman considered to be possibly non-deferential in its implications regarding the church’s unquestionable right to have complete control of education.135 For this very reason, Sweetman was no doubt being deadly serious when he warned Griffith that Sinn Féin’s days would be numbered ‘if you make your paper, like Mr. [W.P.] Ryan’s Peasant, an organ of anti-religious education’.136
As soon as the university question entered the limelight, Griffith received many appeals from a section of the Gaelic League, including some UCD students, to turn Sinn Féin into a daily paper that would support their call to make knowledge of the Irish language obligatory for entrants to the new university.137 Although a sincere demand, this development was partly a mere political by-product of the Liberal government’s past withdrawal of the National Education Board’s support for the Gaelic League. Fr O’Hickey, the professor of Irish at Maynooth College, instigated this compulsory Irish demand, making him a temporary icon for many young Gaelic Leaguers. While his highly publicised adherence to this stance in defiance of his ecclesiastical superiors may have ultimately cost him his professorship, it served a different purpose politically. In particular, by causing debate on the implications of the exclusion of Queen’s College Belfast and Trinity College Dublin from the proposed National University of Ireland to be silenced, it focused the public eye instead upon a man whose only public responsibility was to teach Irish to young Catholic seminarians. Considering that the Irish Party ‘will do nothing unless a public opinion is moved in this matter’ and that its inaction could augment divisions between the Dublin and Belfast universities by denying to the former the right ‘of fixing its own courses and subjects of study’,138 Griffith took up the compulsory Irish demand to increase Sinn Féin’s popularity with the Gaelic League. More fundamentally, however, Griffith saw this as a means of attracting ‘Irish-American capital’ to Sinn Féin in the light of the prior promises that were made to Hyde by the American universities.139 This particularly annoyed Hyde, who wrote to John Redmond that ‘I wish very much I could disabuse people’s minds of the false impression that the Gaelic League is connected with Sinn Féin.’140
Seamus MacManus of Notre Dame University would soon bring the president of the American AOH to Ireland in an attempt to make a Sinn Féin sympathiser the new president of the Irish AOH in place of Joseph Devlin, the young Irish Party whip. Both Maynooth College and Archbishop Logue of Armagh, the Catholic primate of Ireland, were evidently quite sympathetic to the Americans.141 Be that as it may, realising that the Catholic hierarchy were not enthusiastic about the compulsory Irish idea, Sweetman warned Griffith that the future of Sinn Féin would become ‘precarious’ if he adopted this stance. Sweetman also pointed out sound political reasons why the idea of founding a daily paper was misjudged, aside from the obvious fact (with which Griffith agreed)142 that he would be unable to raise the necessary capital (£8,000):
People largely take a daily paper for its general news and don’t mind much about its politics. A sprightly weekly paper would have more political influence than a daily paper with a small circulation. A body of men who could get letters into the ordinary daily papers, read by everyone [a tactic favoured by Sweetman himself],143 would have more influence than a special daily organ which would only be read by the converted.144
Nevertheless, Griffith persisted with the idea of founding a daily paper. He launched a daily edition of Sinn Féin in August 1909 with the financial support of Seamus MacManus, despite the fact that the National Council was already in debt of £200.145 It would only last for five months and caused Griffith to fall into personal debt.146
Griffith’s motive in taking this gamble was the seeming convergence of several political opportunities. First, in the wake of the Dolan campaign, Griffith desired to appeal to Sinn Féin’s potential new followers among supporters of the cooperative movement in the Connacht–South Ulster region. To this end, Sean MacDermott formed several Sinn Féin branches in this territory while the daily edition of Sinn Féin (which did not adopt a propagandist tone) published market news relevant to the sale of immediate consumables, such as dairy products, on the Irish market. This was the first time such material appeared in one of Griffith’s journals and reflected the daily edition’s status as an actual newspaper. It was sometimes printed in as much as 60,000 copies (hitherto Griffith’s weekly journals generally had a circulation of only one or two thousand copies). Although this circulation figure had dropped to about half by the time the daily folded, the weekly edition of Sinn Féin, which continued, managed to increase its circulation to about three or four thousand copies and to thereafter sustain this readership.147 This was an unprecedented level of exposure for Griffith’s arguments.
A second reason why Griffith gambled in launching a Sinn Féin daily was that William O’Brien’s political supporters in Munster, who were independent of the UIL and had won the support of Terence MacSwiney’s Cork IDA, were making a direct appeal to Sinn Féin to amalgamate with their ranks. This raised the prospect of Cork and Dublin municipal politicians allying themselves to form a new political party.148 Griffith sensed a real political opportunity in the fact that O’Brien’s group were being equally critical of Redmond for failing to oppose a proposed Liberal government budget that, potentially, would increase existing levels of over-taxation in Ireland by as much as £2 million a year.149 A third reason for Griffith’s gamble in launching the daily edition of Sinn Féin was that the future of the National University of Ireland was still far from certain and both the general membership of the Gaelic League and much of the student population of the country were far from pleased about this fact. This was a readership that Griffith acquired through the burst of publicity surrounding the launch of the daily edition and which he managed to retain thereafter, more or less, for his weekly edition of Sinn Féin. While this weekly edition of Sinn Féin retained its propagandist tone, its contents changed slightly. In the manner of established commercial newspapers, it now contained more regular news items as well as popular features such as political cartoons and even photographs to broaden its appeal.
To a significant extent the stated editorial policy of the Sinn Féin daily, which identified itself as a national rather than a party organ,150 reflected Griffith’s temperamental unsuitability for party political journalism. It also betrayed a degree of naivety. To Griffith, witnessing individuals who were ‘admitting in private conversation that I am right whilst in public they are alleging the contrary’ was not an inevitable feature of the rat-race contest that is political life. Instead, it was a ‘kind of dishonesty I had thought was confined to a dying form of Irish politics’.151 The Sinn Féin daily collapsed at the time of the January 1910 general election. This occurred because the eleven independent Irish MPs led by William O’Brien, by joining with Redmond and the Irish Party, were able to hold the balance of powers in the House of Commons by opting to keep the Liberals in power in return for a promise to introduce another ‘home rule bill’. As a result, O’Brienite and, to a lesser extent,152 AOH interest in Sinn Féin virtually disappeared. Recently established small Sinn Féin branches in the provinces opted to join William O’Brien’s new All-for-Ireland League instead when that body was established in March 1910.153 Along with his sudden misfortune in being struck down with polio,154 this played a very significant part in decreasing Sean MacDermott’s interest in attempting to sustain a Sinn Féin party organisation.
After the plug was pulled on the Sinn Féin daily edition, Griffith was fortunate that some assistance was offered to help him deal with the resulting liabilities by both William O’Brien’s political supporters and appreciative Gaelic Leaguers. This assistance also had a personal dimension. In November 1910, a testimonial was collected for Griffith to enable him to buy a new home in Clontarf (costing £300) and to marry Maud Sheehan after a six-year engagement.155 Not all contemporaries appreciated this, however. Mary Kettle (wife of Tom, the finance spokesman of the Irish Party) claimed that many people (although not her own husband) felt that Griffith did not deserve a penny, as he had formerly written that ‘there is not a member of the Irish Party who would not sell his father’s bones or his mother’s honour for place or pelf’.156 Indeed, on the balance, Griffith’s caustic pen probably won him a lot more enemies than friends.
Griffith considered himself very fortunate to have been able to marry the woman he loved.157 It was evidently an appropriate match. Frequently referring to Arthur as ‘my boy’ with ‘the sweetest disposition’, Maud was a woman with a temperament that was as equally self-possessed and forthright, as well as difficult and unworldly, as her husband’s.158 They also had a mutual fondness for quiet and private, rather than gregarious or public, social habits, such as playing chess, listening to music, planting flowers and going for long walks.159 Their union would be blessed with the birth of two children. If Griffith had little personal reason to complain by the end of 1910, however, he had still much to do to find greater acceptance in the Irish political world.
Hitherto, Sinn Féin was essentially a stillborn party because its policy had been virtually impossible to implement and so existed only on the level of propaganda. Be that as it may, Griffith’s principal protest since 1904—that Irish politicians were being dangerously cavalier in ignoring the centrality of financial issues to the question of Irish self-government—became particularly relevant to political debate after 1910. This was because the demand for a new Government of Ireland Bill converged with a fiscal crisis. The framework of home rule was about to receive an unprecedented level of public exposure and definition. If there were any chance that Griffith would be able to make his voice heard in the resulting debate, it would undoubtedly rest in his capacity to highlight the devil in the details of Anglo-Irish relations and, in turn, win the appreciation of more established politicians for his arguments.
