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CHAPTER SIX

The Framework of Home Rule (1910–14)

The two principal British political parties—the Liberals and the Conservatives (Tories)—naturally espoused two different fiscal policies. This played a part in creating two different party-political attitudes regarding Ireland. In keeping with Gladstone’s ideal, the Liberals desired that Ireland would be governed strictly in the financial interests of the British mainland by creating a colonial administration akin to that in Jamaica or New Zealand.1 This was in keeping with treasury policy and so had virtually become an aspect of state that was necessarily accepted by all parties. At the request of Irish Tories, however, the Tories in Britain nominally espoused the greater investment of imperial funds in the government of Ireland to emphasise Ireland’s formal status as an equal part of the United Kingdom.2 Griffith considered the Tory policy as superior in principle but was also keen to point out that it was of no real benefit to Ireland because, on the whole, the Tories were regulated more by English than Irish considerations.3 Tom Kettle, the finance spokesman of the Irish Party, agreed. Hence he claimed that ‘there is one thing dazzlingly certain: in Irish finance, salvation is not of the Tories’.4 The Irish Party’s inability to shape a fiscal policy for Ireland was becoming a greater problem, however. As Griffith emphasised every week during the first half of 1910, the party’s recent achievement of the balance of power in the House of Commons only served to highlight this fact. To keep the Liberals in power, the Irish Party accepted a budget that increased existing levels of over-taxation in Ireland (approximately £3 million a year) by a further two million pounds. This led to political condemnation not only from the (Tory) Dublin Chamber of Commerce but also from various potential Irish Party support bases such as all the commercial Irish farmer, licensed trader and hotelier associations in the country.5 As a result, the exploitative elements to the fiscal management of Ireland could no longer be ignored by Irish politicians.

In reaction to this situation, some Ulster unionists pointed to the status of Tom Kettle as ‘a marionette’ of the Catholic hierarchy as proof that ‘our Catholic countrymen do not really understand patriotism—that, in fact, the Catholic Irishman’s idea of patriotism is simply the apotheosis not of his country but his Church’.6 The status of the Catholic Church as an institution that was inherently independent from all states naturally made it completely indifferent to all economic matters except in so far as how it affected itself and, in particular, its independent communal responsibilities, such as the financial management of schools and hospitals. William O’Brien’s willingness to give voice to the business community’s criticisms of Redmond for refusing to acknowledge this fact was important because the Irish Party could not deny its relevance (hence Griffith’s typification of O’Brien as ‘Mr. Redmond’s conscience’).7 However, the Irish Party itself simply rebuked these criticisms by arguing that it was totally unfair that ‘The Party’ (and according to its rhetoric there could only be one ‘Irish’ party) was being asked to conceive of ideas regarding finance or to ‘make provisions for the future’ because this was ‘an error … which casts the onus on the wrong shoulders. Not we, but the [Liberal] Asquith Ministry, are the Governors of Ireland.’ Although temporarily an ally of the party, O’Brien was also ridiculed as an ‘inconsequential man’ for questioning whether or not the Irish Party was right in ‘entrusting the whole financial future of Ireland to a secret treasury tribunal’.8

Erskine Childers, a Liberal Party imperial theorist, not only supported this Irish Party stance but also offered his assistance in defining it; a move that the party welcomed. Redmond was currently promoting the idea that Ireland’s great destiny in the new twentieth century was to work with the diplomatic channels of the Catholic Church to assist in the better development of Anglo-American relations for the greater good of the British Empire worldwide.9 Reflecting this, Childers championed what he described as ‘the political Liberalism of the Church’. This was not a reference to liberalism, but rather the extent to which Rome was prepared to support this thrust of British foreign policy.10 Childers admitted that the Irish Party’s politics did not allow for any strategic economic thinking or planning specifically for Ireland, as the ‘Irish members [of parliament] have not the elementary motives for advocating economy or even sufficient motive for far-seeing and constructive statesmanship on Irish matters’. Furthermore, ‘the large majority are conscious of this fact…The mental habit of Ireland is to look outside her own borders for financial doles and grants and to completely disassociate expenditure from revenue.’11 From the British point of view, this was the inevitable positive result of Liberal government policy regarding Ireland ever since Gladstone’s imperial treasury reforms of the mid-nineteenth century.12

Ignoring the original terms of the Act of Union between the Three Kingdoms, Childers was absolutely categorical in defining Ireland as a colony (‘we must build on trust or we must build on sand’) and maintained that this was why the Irish Party must be supported.13 He also noted that the justification for the idea of colonial home rule was ‘a very old one and a very well-tried one in the history of the Empire’; namely ‘to throw on a people the responsibility for their own fortunes’ to help them ‘understand the extent of its own powers and limitations’. Childers believed that this was the best way to encourage the Irish, of their own accord, to eventually mature from their present status as a colonised inferior race into becoming true imperialists that realised that the economic interests of Ireland’s ‘mother country’, Great Britain, were the greatest safeguards of liberty in the modern world.14

Griffith’s differences with Childers were fundamental on an economic level. He believed that not unless Irishmen had the power to formulate an economic policy purely in Ireland’s interests, even if this was sometimes contrary to Britain’s, ‘we must remain poor and powerless’:

This condition of affairs renders our position unique in Europe. The study of economics with a view to their application to our needs and wants has never been encouraged in the Ireland which gave a father to modern political economy in Cantillon15 … Since Isaac Butt was Professor of Economics in Trinity College seventy years ago the national application of this half-science has been neglected in Ireland.16

All MPs accepted equally that the impact of British foreign policy developments on the imperial treasury’s policy regarding Ireland must necessarily be accepted perpetually. This meant that for all intents and purposes (public posturing notwithstanding) all Irish Protestant ‘loyalists’ essentially held the exact same political perspective as the Catholic Irish Party. This was reflected by the fact that Irish Tories were now abandoning the Buttite idea that Ireland was still technically a distinct political and economic entity under the original terms of the Act of Union.17 Tom Kettle generally emphasised the significance of the fact that David Lloyd George, the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, was envisioning creating a costly new social welfare system and was even prepared to consider limiting the vetoing power of the opposing House of Lords to facilitate this. The Tories were unenthusiastic about this idea. However, both the Liberals and the Tories were naturally wholly united regarding the long-feared threat of German naval supremacy; a threat which had now become a reality and needed to be provided against financially. As a result, from the winter of 1910 onwards, the sole determinant of British governmental policy regarding Ireland became to maximise the potential Irish contribution to the costs of British imperial defence and, in particular, the exigencies of a seemingly necessary (and covert) British war mobilisation (a development that Griffith would later claim had already been underway, in the expectation of an Anglo-German War, as early as 1907).18

The disputes regarding Lloyd George’s proposed budget led to the holding of a second British general election during 1910, which saw the balance of power virtually unchanged in the House of Commons. It resulted in a significant shift in political debate regarding Ireland, however. Earlier that year, Griffith had judged that Sinn Féin had no need to contest the elections and that Redmond’s unwillingness to support William O’Brien in opposing a budget that clearly could cripple Ireland financially must be politically damning for the Irish Party. In turn, Griffith expected the birth of a tradition among Irish politicians of engaging in strategic economic thinking or planning specifically for Ireland.19 However, that winter the British treasury claimed—in a complete turnaround from figures revealed earlier that year 20—that a very serious deficit now existed in the Irish contribution to the Imperial Exchequer which needed to be remedied and that this alone had to become the basis of all considerations of future political initiatives regarding Ireland. This announcement was made simultaneously with Prime Minister Asquith’s sudden declaration than he intended to introduce a ‘Government of Ireland Bill’ a year hence based entirely upon this principle of fiscal management.

To Griffith’s dismay, the Irish Party accepted these claims uncritically. In turn, the idea was touted to create Irish volunteer forces for the sake of the British war effort. Hobson’s creation of a new IRB journal Irish Freedom was one response to this trend.21 Its most significant manifestation, however, was Childers’ recommendation to the British government the raising of Irish Volunteers, such as were already being publicly advocated in Ulster, precisely because the treasury had now supposedly proven beyond doubt that Ireland was ‘costing more to govern than it subscribes in revenue and therefore contributing nothing in money to the expenses of the army, navy and national debt’ at a most critical time. Childers also suggested that such Irish Volunteers should be maintained perpetually until such time as ‘the return of Ireland to the position of a contributing member of the Imperial partnership’ was made feasible, however long that may take.22

To justify the Liberal Party’s stance on Irish finances, Childers was highly critical of past Irish Tory calls for increasing public expenditure in Ireland. He argued that it was an intolerable disgrace that the extraordinary poverty of Ireland was forcing Britain to pay out more money on insurance and old-age pension benefits than could reasonably be expected, as well as to subsidise by means of what he typified as a kind of ‘state socialism’ bodies such as the Congested Districts Board.23 To put an end to this waste of British money, Childers, who had an invincible faith in Gladstonian fiscal doctrine, claimed that it was self-evident truth that ‘the growth of the Liberal [Party] principle of government as applied to the outlying portions of the British Empire…support the principle of home rule for Ireland’ along a definitely colonial line, akin to South Africa, Malta, Jamaica, Newfoundland or New Zealand. A federal solution akin to the dominion constitutions of Canada or Australia must necessarily be ruled out for all time because Ireland’s close proximity to Britain would mean creating a new United Kingdom federation of parliaments purely for the benefit of the Irish, which was an absurd notion. Therefore, a colonial government linked to the United Kingdom by means of a form of external association was, in his view, the best solution for the Empire.24

In response to this British debate, Griffith was alive to the seeming impossibility of creating federal parliaments for the United Kingdom.25 This was why he had argued in favour of a return to a debate on the original terms of the Union and, in particular, the principle of Anglo-Irish equality, stemming from the Irish constitution of 1783, that it embodied.26 Hitherto, this had been an aspect of Irish Tory debate. A.W. Samuels K.C., who held an unofficial status as the finance spokesman for Irish Tories since the mid-1890s, continued to protest very strongly against Liberal fiscal policy regarding Ireland up until November 1910. Now, however, he suddenly changed his views. This occurred because Edward Carson, Samuels’ successor in TCD politics, had just assumed the parliamentary leadership of the Irish Tories at Westminster and demanded that Samuels abandon his prior emphasis on economic matters.27 Instead, at the request of the English Tory party, Carson deliberately diverted debate on the framework of home rule completely away from the essence of the issue, which was finance, onto questions of religion or even a supposed inherent threat of Irish lawlessness.

This initiative of Carson’s was facilitated partly by a UK-wide debate at this time upon the cultural legacy of the British Empire. As Sweetman noted, within this debate, the Irish Party was being ‘openly imperialistic’ but ‘the people do not seem to mind’.28 Griffith’s response to this debate was to argue that the Empire was a culturally alien concept in Ireland—a perspective then championed by many Irish Freedom contributors—but nevertheless the central role of British foreign policy in shaping Irish politics, both past and present, could not be ignored.29

Griffith argued that the brief period in history when Ireland exercised some real political and fiscal autonomy (1783–5) had been made possible only because developments in British foreign policy had made England temporarily powerless to combat an Irish determination to resist an English economic absolutism over the British Isles. According to Griffith, British foreign policy had impacted on Ireland since 1794 not in the manner of colonial evolution posited by Childers. Instead, Britain had sought to scare Irish politicians into surrendering more completely to English economic absolutism through political subterfuge. Frequently, this was done by forming and sustaining revolutionary undergrounds in Ireland to assist Whitehall gather foreign policy intelligence abroad and, occasionally, to cause uprisings in Ireland itself so that the public would look to Britain for protection. Notwithstanding his own republican background, Griffith maintained that this was a central dynamic to British governmental policy regarding Ireland ever since the days of William Pitt and was still the role of Ireland in British foreign policy in the present day.30 This meant that Irish politicians could be absolutely certain that, as the next major European war approached, the British government would again promote sectarian disturbances in Ulster, in order to polarise Ireland’s political representatives along religious lines, and use so-called revolutionaries during wartime to both cause a self-defeating rebellion in Ireland and to perform espionage work among Britain’s continental and north American enemies. If history was not to repeat itself endlessly, Griffith argued, it was absolutely essential that those politicians who wielded most control over the wealth of Ireland made a definitive stand against English economic absolutism now. For this reason, Griffith appealed primarily to Ireland’s self-styled ‘unionists’ to call for the creation of a coequal ‘Anglo-Hibernian Empire’ (an idea influenced by Samuels’ TCD predecessor W.E. Lecky)31 under a dual monarchy as the price for Ireland’s support of England in the forthcoming European war with Germany.32 Only if Irish Tories accepted the Sinn Féin Policy of an Irish economic nationalism, Griffith argued, could the ever-repeating cycle in Irish history of the exercise of English economic absolutism over the British Isles and the inevitable result of constant Irish political instability, perpetuated cheaply by Britain by means of revolutionary undergrounds, be finally and definitely broken.33

Griffith’s provocative thesis was unique and it was meant to justify his claim that the Sinn Féin Policy provided the only possible means of ever advancing the ideal of Irish independence. Instead, however, it merely provoked a response from C.H. Oldham, a stalwart of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland. In the recent past, while president of the Rathmines School of Commerce (1900–8), Oldham had been a stern critic of Irish-Ireland attitudes towards industrial revival but on subsequently becoming professor of commerce at UCD he was generally considered to be a passive sympathiser with Sinn Féin.34 Oldham rejected Griffith’s provocative thesis on the grounds that the English Privy Council actually controlled all Irish legislation from 1495 until 1793. He emphasised that no English government had ever compelled Ireland to pay it taxes or to contribute to imperial expenditure prior to the Union of 1801, but the Irish parliament of the day, which Griffith had falsely presented as nationalistic, had always volunteered to do so anyway. According to Oldham, it was not William Pitt and the French War of 1793–1815 that had led Ireland into such a damaging position financially, but rather the fact that England’s own system of financial regulation during that period was slightly chaotic. This had prompted fiscal miscalculations, such as that Ireland could afford to contribute a higher percentage of all British revenue each year than it actually could. This frequently bankrupted the country. This was why ‘the Articles of Union’ were ‘waste paper so far as finance is concerned’ but Britain had been content with these arrangements ‘for at least as long as Ireland has yielded a net profit’.35

Although he had a different perspective on history, Oldham agreed with Griffith regarding the present. He supported Griffith in arguing that nobody could realistically claim there was a deficit in Ireland’s contribution to British imperial treasury.36 Oldham emphasised that while Britain was now complaining of a loss of £1.5 million over the past year, Ireland was still paying £3 million more every year than it could afford. He estimated that, to date, Ireland’s true revenue paid into a common British treasury under the Union had exceeded what was expended locally by about £330 million, ‘which I call the British profit out of the Union’. Therefore, ‘the Irish nation must be incapable of learning any lesson from its past history’ if it was not prepared to demand a comprehensive financial tribunal now to establish a regime of strict fiscal justice in the government’s management of Irish finances. In a remarkable expression of optimism, Oldham even argued that the current situation could have ‘no element of permanence more than any other swindle can have’. Without seeking to provoke the Irish Party, he also intimated that any debate upon the idea of home rule must be made by Irish political representatives to reflect that fact.37

This necessitated a response from Tom Kettle. In the light of Oldham’s argument, Kettle now admitted that the Union, as it has developed, had led to the financial plunder of Ireland in violation of the original terms of the Union;38 that no audit of the sources of British treasury claims regarding Ireland was possible and thus its claims regarding deficits could never be trusted;39 and that Parnell and the Irish Party, in ‘an offence to national dignity’, had accepted Government of Ireland Bills by which an Irish parliament would hold no fiscal autonomy, thereby ensuring that ‘our position will be merely that of an employee, doubtless not without remuneration … [which] may be irresistible’.40 Nevertheless, Kettle still maintained that the only stance possible of Ireland on fiscal affairs was that of John Redmond. This was three-fold: to seek recognition that the only question raised by financial matters was a purely ethical or moral one; to raise the question of whether existing provisions for the financing of education in Ireland was morally justifiable on a politico-religious level compared to the situation that existed in England; and to see what might arise in the future from Lloyd George’s recent suggestion to establish an Irish Development Fund.41

Griffith had recently called for ‘a council on finance’ to be established in Ireland.42 Unlike Oldham, Griffith argued that a root of Irish financial problems was that banking practices in Ireland were doing absolutely nothing to improve the material welfare of the Irish people.43 As a solution, Griffith had called for the establishment of a proto-national bank in Ireland, or else for ‘the public bodies in Ireland’ (such as the county councils) to persuade ‘the existing banks … [to] play the part of national banks’ by threatening to otherwise withdraw their accounts. In this way, without necessarily breaking with the (sterling) gold standard based on the gold reserves of the Bank of England, the liquidity of Irish banks could become localised within Ireland, rather than tied up in investments in British government stock, in turn encouraging the banks in Ireland to cease their longstanding practice of being ‘willing to lend the money of the Irish people for British [business] purposes but not for Irish ones’.44 To promote this idea, Griffith had launched the Sinn Féin People’s Bank Limited during 1909 with some moral support from Terence MacSwiney’s Cork IDA. Griffith promoted this bank by suggesting that it ‘is successfully combating usury and offering equal inducements to depositors with those offered by the British Post Office Banks [a government-owned bank and the main holder of most ordinary Irish citizens’ private savings] with the distinct advantage … that Irish money is available for Irish purposes only.’45 Subsequent efforts to promote debate on banking in Ireland were quickly silenced, however.

During January 1910, an attempt was made to revive the Irish Financial Reform League that had been suppressed on the reunification of the Irish Party ten years previously but this initiative was crushed within a month.46 That summer, to coincide with the relocation of the Sinn Féin Bank from Lower O’Connell Street to a new party headquarters at 6 Harcourt Street,47 anonymously published articles that sternly criticised the Irish banking situation appeared in the Statist, a London economic journal. These raised a few eyebrows in high political circles and consequently John Dillon, the Irish Party leader, was determined to discover and silence the culprit. It appears to have been Griffith.48 Meanwhile, the suppression of the Irish Financial Reform League, combined with the proposed Liberal Party budgets, led the Dublin Chamber of Commerce to argue that ‘the Chancellorship of the Exchequer has fallen into evil hands’.49 As some Irish bank directors were members of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, Oldham and Griffith’s idea of establishing a financial tribunal might have provoked a political response at this time if the will was present. However, the attention of the Irish Party, representing the majority of Irish politicians, was focused elsewhere.

In addition to its continued commitment to the Anglo-Irish security consensus of 1884–6, the Irish Party’s determination to boost its profile specifically among voters in Britain resurfaced at this time. This was attempted by the publication of a highly publicised biography of John Redmond (written by his own cousin and publicised by Childers) to celebrate the supposed arrival of the Irish Party leader as a central figure in British political life. This book did not question Redmond’s standing as the political representative of nationalist Ireland even though it quoted him proudly boasting that Irishmen could not survive economically for even a month if the country’s politicians did not rely entirely on Britain for direction.50 Combined with most Irish politicians’ reliance on the church, this trend was why Childers celebrated that ‘the strength and beauty’ of ‘the idea of home rule’, as well as ‘the vital energy on which its fruition depends’, was both ‘impossible to kill’ and would soon ‘place Mr. Redmond among the number of those who have saved the Empire from the consequences of its own errors’.51

Despite Griffith’s best efforts, the Sinn Féin People’s Bank had little more than a nominal existence as a cooperative bank. His concern with usury was in line with a broader trend within the Irish cooperative movement. This was the prevalence within rural Irish society of corrupt ‘gombeen men’ who acted as exploitative moneylenders; a trend made possible due to the comparative unwillingness of the Irish joint-stock banks to issue loans of Irish money to Irish people. As an ethical solution, Fr Finlay of UCD and Sir Horace Plunkett’s Irish Agricultural Organisation Society had invited some English agricultural bankers to set up their businesses in Ireland. In turn, these Englishmen won the support of the Congested Districts Board for their businesses. This resulted in the creation of a federation of agricultural credit societies in Ireland after 1900, but these had already begun to disintegrate by 1909.52 Griffith’s hope to apply the principle of cooperative banking to both a rural and urban community environment was connected to his idea of establishing a joint ‘agricultural and manufacturing union’ in Ireland;53 a goal which had been attempted, in vain, by republican Land Leaguers such as Thomas Brennan, Matthew Harris and Michael Davitt during the 1880s. This idea floundered once again after 1909 because William O’Brien’s Munster-centred attempt to prioritise the business interests of market towns was little more than an effort to heal a longstanding Tory–Irish Party divide in Cork city council that had developed during the mid-1880s and which had governed his actions, as well as that of his old Cork fenian friends, ever since that time.54

Along with his ongoing efforts to establish contacts with Irish businessmen living abroad,55 Griffith deemed the Sinn Féin Bank to be an initiative that was worth sustaining, no matter how disappointed he was at its results. Co-managed by Alderman Tom Kelly and his brother, the Sinn Féin Bank had a very small clientele that consisted almost exclusively of poor Dublin workers that were attempting to survive a contemporary housing crisis.56 With minimal capital it could not be a competitive threat to well-established financial institutions, let alone a proto-national bank, although the establishment of new financial bodies could serve to challenge existing business practices of older institutions. Reflecting this, late in 1910, Griffith would add to his proposed Sinn Féin programme the idea of ‘the foundation of a National Land Bank, subsidised to complete land purchase’ agreements. His idea here was to ensure that the British government would not have exclusive regulatory authority over this process and to encourage the Irish banks to look more sympathetically upon the demands of tenants for favourable terms.57

Griffith’s idea that the Irish county councils could promote the Sinn Féin Policy by threatening to transfer their accounts from the existing banks if the latter did not begin investing in Irish concerns did not win support from such quarters. The only cooperation with Sinn Féin (in the broadest possible sense) offered by the county councils related to the Gaelic League. This was the county councils’ decision to promote the idea of compulsory Irish for matriculation to the National University of Ireland (NUI) by subscribing funds to the NUI to persuade it to accept this principle. This decision was made in June 1910, to take effect three years hence, during the same week as Sinn Féin (inspired by Alderman Kelly’s opposition to the anti-Catholicism of the British coronation oath) worked to ensure Dublin city council would not pass a resolution expressing sympathy with the British Royal Family upon the death of King Edward VII.58

There was little or no appreciation for Sinn Féin within the NUI. Although Oldham, a distinguished graduate of TCD who was now at UCD, had been bold enough to express Sinn Féin-like dissatisfaction with Irish economic circumstances, Griffith was very disappointed by the general lack of initiative of NUI staff in such matters:

When the National University was founded we hoped for something from that institution. It has a professor of political economy and a professor of national economics and a number of lesser instructors of the popular mind. Is it premature to ask when these gentlemen will begin to realise that there is a relation between economics in a university and the people outside?59

Griffith believed that the root of this lack of initiative was that the NUI’s staff, reflecting Archbishop Walsh’s chancellorship, were too concerned with trying to assume a personal social status to rival that of the employees of the historically more prestigious (and Church of Ireland owned) Trinity College. This was leading to appointments being chosen more on the basis of personal friendships, clericalism and party political influence rather than actual academic vision or merit. Although Griffith fully agreed that the NUI needed to aim to become ‘a popular university’, he deemed its manner of attempting to achieve this goal as fundamentally mistaken.60 In turn, he judged that the mental outlook of the university and its staff was far too inward looking and self-congratulatory to be truly benefiting Irish society; hence, most of its graduates were still choosing to emigrate.61 The NUI was only a nominally non-denominational university. The Catholic hierarchy, reflecting Archbishop Walsh’s chancellorship, were generally allowed to act as significant political players behind the scenes, while both Trinity College Dublin (which remained in Church of Ireland hands) and Queen’s University Belfast (which was governed largely by Presbyterians) remained separate institutions, thereby helping to cement north–south and religious political divisions on the island with the full support of Ireland’s political and religious representatives and, of course, the British government, which funded the universities.62 This was why the British government’s decision, acting on the advice of Edward Carson, to treat the Irish question after 1911 purely in terms of religious demographics was a tactic that it could assume to have had an inherent Irish approval.

If Griffith’s ideas were often interesting, they still disqualified him from being accepted by Ireland’s professional classes. Gaelic League stalwarts Eoin MacNeill and Douglas Hyde not only considered Sinn Féin to be a complete non-player but had also acquired NUI professorships by playing ball politically through maintaining a working political relationship with both the Irish Party and the Catholic hierarchy. By contrast, Griffith, rather like Patrick Pearse of An Claidheamh Solus, had been left in a very precarious position, both financially and in terms of his career prospects. Reflecting this, John Sweetman decided to resign as president of Sinn Féin early in 1911 because Griffith had intimated his intention to do the unmentionable; namely, to begin criticising the religious communities in Ireland for ignoring the economic consequences of their purely selfish actions.63 The withdrawal of Sweetman’s support increased Griffith’s financial difficulties in sustaining Sinn Féin. Griffith appealed in vain to Sweetman to reconsider his decision to resign,64 while by the summer of 1912 it would become necessary for Griffith to consider mortgaging his newly acquired home solely to keep the paper alive.65 Nevertheless, he stuck to his guns in promoting his Irish nationalist ideas.

While a party still nominally met under Griffith’s presidency, the new Sinn Féin Party headquarters now served as little more than a lecture theatre for a rapidly declining party membership. Reports of branches dissolving were received regularly, although those who remained took some interest in Griffith’s exploration of the theoretical possibilities of an Irish meat trade opening with the European continent, amongst other ideas.66 However, even Griffith’s principal supporters at this time, M.J. O’Rahilly (managing director of An Claidheamh Solus) and Eamon Ceannt (a fellow senior Gaelic Leaguer), did not actually make Sinn Féin their vehicle for holding public demonstrations. Instead, they chose to work with Sean MacDermott’s new United National Societies Committee.67 Although it did not involve an actual political opposition, this reflected a seemingly deliberate IRB boycott of the Sinn Féin organisation at this time. Around the same time as Sweetman decided to resign, the Dublin IRB distanced itself from Sinn Féin while the Cork IRB leader Sean O’Hegarty officially resigned as the local leader of Sinn Féin.68 It is likely that IRB as much as Irish Party activists did not appreciate the arguments that Griffith had made recently regarding the role of the British Foreign Office in Irish history.