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CHAPTER ONE

The Dubliner and Independent Nationalist (1871–96)

Arthur Griffith was a proud Dubliner all his life. He was born on 31 March 1871 into a working-class family in the city centre. In his youth, he rejoiced in learning intricate details of the city’s history and its most colourful characters.1 He also desired ‘the cultivation of a Dublin literature’.2 Ireland’s deposed capital was once known as the second city of the British Empire. To Griffith’s dismay, however, it lost its eighteenth-century grandeur under the Union. Deserted by its wealthiest inhabitants, by the 1870s Dublin city centre had become notorious for slums that were inhabited by a poor and unhealthy work force. The Griffiths were well aware of the peculiar reasons for this development and the decline of numerous city businesses and trades.3 Nevertheless, they were one of very many Dublin families that remained locked into a downward economic spiral. During Griffith’s childhood, his parents and grandparents lived in slum districts where disease and prostitution were rampant, while some close relatives spent much time in the dreaded workhouses.4 Arthur was the third of five children in a family where the first had to emigrate in his mid teens and the second would die as a young adult from a poverty-induced disease.5 Arthur, known as ‘Dan’ to his closest friends, was the next in line and had no greater prospects. With this socially insecure background, Griffith grew up as a very shy and private man. The reserved demeanour and caustic pen he would exhibit frequently in adulthood was undoubtedly shaped partly by the wounded pride and social frustration of his family.

Griffith’s father, Arthur Griffith senior, was ‘a well-read craftsman’ and akin to ‘a typical tradesman of the old Dublin school … in his craft reposed his first personal interest and pride’.6 He was a trade unionist who was active in the local printers’ union, but this did not prevent him from suffering many bouts of unemployment.7 Traditionally, printers were a proud and envied guild among the working class because of their higher levels of literacy. In Dublin, however, they were a deeply frustrated group. Since the 1850s old firms were struggling and new firms were not being established. This was partly due to English competition but it was also because available work for printers was now confined mostly to acting as compositors for the newly burgeoning newspaper trade. Working as a compositor was a messy job that required over-night work and it was frequently paid less than an unskilled labourer’s wage.8 Whenever the printers’ union attempted to strike in protest against these circumstances it backfired badly against its own members, leading to the dismissal of staff.9

One of Griffith’s earliest memories was no doubt his father’s involvement in the printers’ union strike during the industrial recession of the late 1870s. A journal published by one of the union’s members, The Citizen and Irish Artisan (Dublin), reflected the political outlook of the Griffith family as well as attitudes towards both labour disputes and municipal politics that Griffith would express frequently in adulthood. Adopting the slogan ‘the wealth of a nation lies in the intelligence and handicraft of its sons’, it maintained that ‘socialism is the natural desire of men to improve their lot in life’ and valued contemporary Irish nationalism, including its more radical varieties, only in so far as it was rooted in an understanding of socio-economic realities. It opposed any effort made by churches to introduce religious segregations into workers’ unions or benevolent societies and, in doing so, professed to speak exclusively on behalf of the material interests of the ‘working class’.10 In keeping with the norms of contemporary labour politics, however, it did not include unskilled labourers within that definition.11 Having no intrinsic sympathy with unskilled labourers, it was prepared to defend the lockout of striking labourers if the firms in question were deemed to be trustworthy and genuinely promoting the welfare of the city’s inhabitants. Indeed, The Citizen perpetually distinguished between ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’ employers. The latter were compared occasionally to ‘mercenary London Jews’ who speculated on London Stock Exchange markets on the shares of all the (predominantly British) companies in Ireland and cared nothing for the economic welfare of the citizens of Dublin. Their principal sin was considered to be the importation of cheap labour, which was reducing the city’s skilled artisans to pauperdom.12 City landlords were denounced for charging exorbitant rents for unsanitary tenement flats, while municipal authorities were demonised for failing to address the problem that Dublin had double the mortality rate of any other British city.13

Griffith would repeat these arguments forcibly in early-twentieth-century Dublin. He inherited from both Victorian labour politics and his own family a purely materialistic nationalism. From this premise, Griffith considered that ‘the poor have been left to rot in slum tenements because vested interests of both green and orange do benefit thereby’.14 He was at odds with the manner by which the British imperial economy was defining both political allegiances and economic norms within Ireland.15 As he was indifferent to Ireland’s politico-religious divide, he refused to judge the validity of political arguments from that vantage point. He would draw extensively from the arguments of economists at Trinity College Dublin who, at various times, called for a radical overhaul of the existing financial basis of the Union. The fact that these arguments were made by men who held sympathies with an Anglican-biased Tory party did not matter to Griffith: if their points seemed to him reasonable and patriotic in their defence of Irish interests he would readily adapt them to his own perspective.16

Like his father, Griffith grew up to be a bookish young man. Though he liked to exercise, poor vision and a slightly deformed leg, which necessitated that he wear high-heeled orthopaedic boots throughout his life, militated against strenuous athletic pursuits.17 By his mid-teens he was a voracious reader and accustomed to smoking tobacco and drinking spirits.18 He had very little formal schooling. At the age of thirteen, after attending three different primary schools, his father arranged for him a seven-year apprenticeship with a mercantile printing firm that was run by a Protestant family who were enthusiastic about the history of Irish literature.19 The printing trade, in common with the contemporary Irish revolutionary underground, had a very mixed religious composition in terms of its members’ social background. This factor combined with the Griffiths’ ancestry (a Catholic family offshoot from an established Ulster Presbyterian farming family) encouraged his anti-sectarian attitudes.20 Through the patronage of his father’s employer, Griffith was allowed the chance to prepare for an intermediate (secondary school) examination as an extramural student but he did not take this opportunity.21 Instead, his apprenticeship prompted him to revel in a social world consisting of youths of similar backgrounds whose favoured medium for self-development was participating in literary and debating societies.

At the tender age of fourteen, Griffith was made the secretary of the ‘junior branch’ of the Young Ireland Society after winning an Irish history competition. Founded in Dublin in March 1881, this society was notable for encouraging serious political debate. Past members had included John Dillon (the future Irish Party leader), Thomas Brennan (chief organiser of the Land League), John Wyse Power (a future leading journalist) and Fred J. Allan (a future newspaper manager, secretary of City Hall and revolutionary activist). During the mid-1880s, its membership included C.H. Oldham and T.W. Rolleston, the founders of the Dublin University Review, as well as significant literary figures such as George Sigerson and W.B. Yeats.22 At an event hosted by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Griffith received as his prize from John O’Leary, an old Tory turned Fenian, books by John Mitchel, Charles Gavan Duffy and Thomas Davis; the editors of the original Nation newspaper of the 1840s.23 In these books, the teenage Griffith believed that he had found a revelatory explanation for the world that he inhabited. These Trinity-educated authors styled themselves as all that was left of an Irish intelligentsia. They protested that ever since the economic reforms of the 1820s, British state centralisation was causing Irish leaders to abandon any sense of duty towards their own people.24 The motive for Griffith’s future Irish nationalism would be the belief that reversing this process of British state centralisation was essential to the survival of specifically Irish economic interests and, in turn, an Irish intelligentsia that was capable of sound political judgment. Reading these Young Ireland authors also convinced the young Griffith that being an adult was entirely a matter of ‘having convictions’.25

Griffith’s formative convictions were both individualist and antisocial. He believed that personal virtue was not something that could ever be learnt at school or from the example of political and religious leaders. Rather, it was something that could only be developed within. Distrust of all communal leaders and vigilant self-reliance was necessary to counter the reality that the exercise of powers of dominance in society was never based upon moral justice. To illustrate this point, Griffith drew up precepts such as ‘do not scorn the beggar in the street … he is nobler than your masters’; ‘do not believe that a man who wears a tall hat and trousers is necessarily civilised’; and ‘do not talk about “the dignity of labour” [a favoured subject of contemporary religious epistles]. Look up from the mud and behold the poorhouses [the fate of many rural migrants to the city].’ As ‘the only unforgivable sin is the sin of hypocrisy’, Griffith believed that it would be better to be associated with ‘honest scoundrels’ than ‘mix with dishonest swindlers’. Expressing negative emotions such as pity, anger and scorn should never be avoided if they were justified. Above all, it was essential ‘to be frank’.26 The political savvy adage that was favoured by John O’Leary—that the world is his who knows when to hold his tongue—was not part of Griffith’s mindset. As a result, Griffith was often considered to be a cantankerous man who was incapable of doing anything to either to his own advantage or that of anyone else. According to the social norms of politics, such a man was quite simply best left alone.

Griffith did not view his youthful convictions to be a matter of inherently rooting for the underdog or the oppressed. Rather they reflected a belief that society was fundamentally dishonest and, therefore, the honest man would inevitably suffer and be punished by his peers.27 Not surprisingly, he would grow up to recognise that he too had the capacity to offend ‘honest as well as dishonest quarters’.28 Nevertheless, his almost misanthropic belief that it was possible to counter dishonesty in society with the written word remained. This self-righteousness reflected not so much naivety as his basic temperament, which was that of a writer. Possessing the air of a man who was psychologically apart, his few friends never attempted to probe into his personal life out of an instinctive respect. It was simply clear that ‘he is very sensitive’ and was incapable of appealing to others for help.29 Griffith’s personal code of strict self-reliance was not only a quintessentially Victorian work ethic: it was also a psychological defence mechanism to maintain a determined resolve in the face of demoralising life circumstances. Respect, rather than personal intimacy, would be the touchstone of what he sought in his social relations. His private life and family was virtually a taboo subject. Even allowing for the norms of Victorian reticence, it was perhaps inevitable that Griffith’s primary role in public life would be that of a maverick and frequently unpopular critic rather than a truly communal figure.

During the late 1880s, following a collapse of the Young Ireland Society arising from quarrels surrounding the management of the GAA, Griffith became a leader of the Leinster Debating Society. This was composed entirely of ‘hardworking young men of humble circumstances’ who in their determination to unmask social injustices typified themselves as ‘strangers to cant and hypocrisy’.30 Although it met at a venue that housed small republican and socialist clubs, its membership intentionally had a mixed political profile: as its leader Griffith would place advertisements for its meetings in opposing Tory and Parnellite newspapers.31

Griffith’s attitudes towards Parnell and his party were not sympathetic. Although he chaired a meeting that denounced the British government for imprisoning William O’Brien MP (the most popular Irish Party politician and journalist of the day), Griffith wrote a scathing satire of Parnellite journalism. Meanwhile, the society’s journal denounced Parnell and his followers as ‘professional swindlers’ who ‘connive at blackmailing the Irish people’ into supporting their party alone so they could become ‘a well-fed, well-housed, “aristocratic” if you please, corps of professional agitators’ while ordinary Irish people were left to face ‘the poor house, the jail—a hand to mouth existence in this country or emigration’.32 Such attitudes reflected a belief that Parnell and his Irish Party had betrayed the promises made by republican Land Leaguers earlier that decade to prioritise the welfare of the urban working class. Due to this failure, the society expressed sympathy with the Social Democratic Federation, a British socialist body then seeking to establish itself in Dublin. Griffith himself supported the argument that the remedy for strikes was the nationalisation of all means of production under a system of state socialism.33 Strikes were actually quite common in Dublin at this time. Notwithstanding the formation of the first permanent Dublin Trades Council in 1886, the city’s working class experienced a great economic depression with unemployment rising to high levels and slum tenements becoming more numerous than ever.34 Such issues never surfaced in the columns of the Irish Party’s press, however. It was therefore quite natural for Griffith to find himself at home within a republican or socialist culture of protest.

Griffith’s interest in working-class protest politics was combined with a preoccupation with personal self-development. Reflecting his interest in journalism, Griffith gave papers about past political pamphleteers like Jonathan Swift as well as Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, two pioneering newspaper figures of early-eighteenth century England whose writings were still considered by Victorians as providing templates in style for any prospective journalist.35 Reflecting his interest in literature, Griffith spoke on modern and early-modern Irish writers, English and American poets from Elizabethan times up until his own day and the classics.36 His lack of formal education, however, was betrayed by his writing style at this time, which used vernacular language and no punctuation.37 Most tellingly, he drew a contrast between the life that he felt he deserved and that which he had in reality. In poor verse Griffith depicted the privileged lifestyle of a university student, living a life of scholarship and dissipation without having to worry about any material concerns, before cutting abruptly to a description of the reality of his life, being almost penniless and performing solitary pub crawls in the early hours of the morning after ‘every honest man was gone to sleep’.38 In later life, Griffith championed the right of the working classes to receive state grants to enable them to attend university. This was an almost unheard of idea in contemporary Britain or Ireland but, reflecting a legacy of the Napoleonic Empire, it had many supporters in continental Europe.39 Griffith generally impressed whatever company he was ever in as being extraordinarily well read. This was partly because he had a photographic memory.40

The power of Griffith’s pen was suited best for satirical or insightful political analyses rather than literary or artistic creations. His almost religious preoccupation with notions of social justice perhaps made him a good candidate to become a persuasive journalist while he was certainly not a poet. In his youth, he expressed appreciation for the tradition of political street ballads. This viewpoint reflected his passing interest in writing such material. This was something he would do infrequently, however, confining himself to a few protest ballads at the time of Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) as well as some bawdy doggerel to entertain fellow political prisoners during the post-1916 period.41

In 1890 Griffith renamed his club as the Leinster Literary Society and proposed that it should establish branches throughout the province, with a central executive in Dublin.42 This plan for expansion failed because its members lacked means. The only successful literary society in Dublin at this time was the Pan-Celtic Literary Society. Formed by alumni of Blackrock College, it was associated with the Rathmines branch of the Irish Party’s Irish National League and included several barristers and arts graduates.43 The Pan-Celtic represented a suburban and comfortable Dublin Catholic middle class that was very distant from Griffith’s social world.44 Its members viewed the contemporary history of Irish writers and artists living in London, as well as the existence of Parnell’s party at Westminster, as a national success story. By contrast, Griffith and his friends viewed Irish culture and politics through the prism of their socially disadvantaged experience. These two social worlds began to commingle, however, when Parnell’s fall had the affect of shattering the unity of the Irish National League, the Irish Party’s authoritarian support body. This led the minority pro-Parnell wing to appeal directly for working-class support; a development that was unprecedented and would also prove very short lived.45 Nevertheless, this presented Griffith and his associates with a brief window of opportunity to play a part in formulating a political programme in conjunction with various middle-class activists. In turn, they were led to view Parnell, as distinct from the Irish Party’s political machine (to which they remained intensely hostile), with a newfound sympathy.

Later, at a key turning point in the history of early-twentieth-century Ireland, Griffith would cite the former example of Parnell as a means of criticising the contemporary leadership of the Irish Party.46 From this premise, future historians of twentieth-century Ireland mistakenly assumed that Griffith had idolised Parnell in his youth.47 The reality, however, was quite different. Although, like most Dubliners (including Tories), he denounced those who were prepared to ‘betray the country by voting against Mr. Parnell’ at the request of the British Liberal Party, he insisted that his society’s minute book would record that ‘Mr. Griffith spoke as one who never was a supporter of Mr. Parnell but was an independent nationalist.’48 This was also the stance taken by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) during this controversy.

Griffith was drawn into the controversy through the National Club Literary Society. This met in the same venue and under the same management as a new Parnell Leadership Committee; namely, John Clancy, a city councillor, the electoral registrar of Dublin and an old republican.49 When Parnell announced his intention to pit his own candidate against that of the Irish Party at a Kilkenny by-election, virtually all contemporaries expected that the outcome would be decisive in settling the controversy. Parnell’s candidate lacked any organisational support, however, except for that provided by P.N. Fitzgerald, the chief travelling organiser of the IRB and a personal friend of William O’Brien MP who was then wavering in his support of Parnell.50 Griffith’s society published an ‘address to the men of north Kilkenny’ in support of the Parnellite candidate (Vincent Scully) that was sent to various newspapers, politicians and a workingmen’s club in Kilkenny City that was run by P.J. O’Keefe, the local IRB leader. James J. O’Kelly, a former IRB leader who became a founder of the Irish Party during 1880, was the only politician to take notice of Griffith’s address, however. This was signed by Griffith using the pseudonym ‘J.P. Ruhart’; ‘Ruhart’ being an anagram of Arthur, and J.P. standing for Justice of the Peace.51

Why Griffith, an unknown youth, chose to use this false name is unclear. He may have been aware that the police were watching his Leinster Literary Society’s meeting place on Marlborough Street.52 It is more likely, however, that he understood that his father’s fortunate current status as the foreman-printer with the stridently anti-Parnell Nation meant that any public address in which ‘Arthur Griffith of Dublin’ denounced all opponents of Parnell could have led to the only bread-winner in the Griffith family losing his job. Griffith’s willingness to support Parnell was partly motivated by the Catholic hierarchy’s statement that no Catholic could support him any longer. Prior to the outbreak of the controversy, Griffith had given voice to anticlerical viewpoints and the clergy’s critical role in overthrowing Parnell would encourage him to embrace an IRB-style anticlericalism, claiming that the continued presence of priests and bishops in politics would be ‘fatal’ to the development of Irish political society.53 Many Irish Tory cultural nationalists, who naturally sided with Parnell against the Liberal Party, shared this perspective if only because they lamented the partial eclipse of the prestige of the disestablished Church of Ireland.

The Parnellite defeat at Kilkenny came as quite a shock to much of Dublin society. Griffith and his friends vented their spleen through a series of private debates in which various historical episodes were turned into platforms for giving voice to anticlerical viewpoints.54 In Griffith’s case, this was done primarily in the context of a debate on the French Revolution (1789–93). He described this event as a justifiable ‘outburst of popular feeling against the corrupt and debauched nobility and clergy who governed the land’ before he proceeded to defend the excesses of the French revolutionists in executing their perceived enemies.55 Griffith’s youthful tendency towards extremism, which certainly separated him from the Tory brand of contemporary nationalists, would also be reflected by a ballad he wrote on the Europe-wide 1848 revolutions. This depicted all established authorities as enemies of liberty that deserved to be ‘stricken, in the anger of the people, to the dust’.56

By May 1891, Griffith was attending meetings that were organised by the IRB with the purpose of forming an executive for a new organisation that would create an alliance between all nationalist debating societies in the country. He represented the Leinster Literary Society at such a private convention, held at the National Club.57 That summer, Griffith also worked with the National Club Literary Society in launching a tradition of holding annual Bodenstown demonstrations in honour of Wolfe Tone and began attending meetings of amnesty clubs. These clubs had been formed by James Boland, the Dublin IRB leader (and father of Harry Boland), to campaign for the release of John Daly and P.W. Nally, two IRB leaders who had received terms of life imprisonment several years before.58

Many years later, a newspaper contributor claimed that during 1891 Griffith addressed a rally of university students and ‘old Fenians’ outside of University College Dublin and made a direct personal appeal to T.C. Harrington, a lawyer and future mayor, to resign his Dublin parliamentary seat so that Parnell could contest it.59 This seems unlikely, however, because Griffith never held a position in the new Parnellite Irish National League (the Irish Party’s support body had renamed itself as the Irish National Federation). In July 1891 the National League rejected calls that representatives of debating and trade societies be admitted to its executive. By contrast, reflecting contemporary class dynamics, several wealthy Tories who represented business interests in Cork and Dublin cities were allowed admittance to its executive.60 John R. Whelan, one of Griffith’s maternal cousins, did read an address to Parnell at Kingsbridge (Heuston) Station on behalf of the Leinster Literary Society; an event at which Griffith was no doubt present.61 This address was signed and quite possibly written by ‘J.P. Ruhart’ (Griffith). It began by expressing praise for Parnell’s past use of obstructionist tactics in Westminster before emphasising that the true concerns of Irish nationalists had always far surpassed such considerations:

To us, it matters not whether most or any of those representatives desert that policy and seek fusion with any English party. To us, it matters not whether ecclesiastical domination on the one side or Dublin Castle influence on the other prevail; our duty is imperative. The path of independence is before us. Independent of English politicians, and without Irish traitors and cowards, we will seek for freedom; or failing to obtain it, we will, like the Carthaginians of old, retire behind the embattlements of our rights and refuse to obey the dictates of any leader of an alien people. And we hereby emphasise that resolve by declaring in the words of John Mitchel: ‘all Whig [Liberal] professions about conciliatory and impartial government in Ireland are as false as the father of Whiggery himself’.62

It is unlikely that Parnell was impressed with this somewhat self-righteous address. Shortly thereafter, Griffith was re-elected as president of the Leinster Literary Society. In this capacity he attended Parnell’s funeral and expressed condolences with the relatives of P.W. Nally, who died very suddenly in Mountjoy jail just prior to a date set for his early release.63 Griffith also distributed circulars across the country with a view to creating a federation of nationalist debating societies.64 This had led to the creation of the Young Ireland League (YIL) at the Dublin Rotunda that September under the presidency of John O’Leary.65 The most prestigious club to become affiliated with the YIL was W.B. Yeats’ new National Literary Society, which was popular with Tory cultural nationalists. Fearing the consequences of the bitter passions that Parnell’s fall had aroused, Yeats’ society forbade the discussion of party politics at its meetings.66 This was an example that Griffith’s lesser-known society chose not to follow, ultimately to its own detriment.

Griffith resigned as president of the Leinster Literary Society in December 1891 when he took up his first salaried job, which was as a compositor with the Irish Daily Independent. This was a recently established Parnellite newspaper that was partly funded by the Tories and managed by Fred Allan, a Dublin IRB leader who married into a Royal Navy family.67 During 1892, the Leinster Literary Society expressed unanimous support for republican governments: Griffith even styled himself as the representative of ‘the Republic of Ringsend and the Coombe’.68 In the autumn of 1892, however, a Cork Irish Party supporter was admitted to its meetings and taunted its members by arguing that ‘you are Parnellites here in Dublin but you would be anti-Parnellites if you were down in Mallow [the hometown of William O’Brien MP, whose decision to turn against Parnell had been pivotal in deciding the dispute]’. This incensed Griffith, who accused the Corkman of having made ‘a charge of hypocrisy and an insult to the intelligence of the members’. Griffith’s friend William Rooney, who had joined the Leinster Literary Society in February 1891 and was now its leader, did not agree with this assessment, however.69 When the society voted to make the Corkman a member, Griffith immediately resigned from the society as a protest. The following week, when more ‘Parnellite’ sympathisers were deliberately taunted, most other members decided to resign as well. Rooney had now no choice but to dissolve the club that December.70 Two months later, Rooney created a new society known as the Celtic Literary Society, which wisely resolved not to allow contemporary party politics to be discussed at its meetings. The disgruntled Griffith and his cousin Edward Whelan would not join Rooney’s Celtic for some time, however. Instead, they took the opportunity to become members of the executive of the Young Ireland League (YIL), which was a far more influential body that campaigned for changes in the Irish education system.71

From the autumn of 1892 until late 1894 Griffith chaired many meetings of the YIL, the membership of which nominally included a few Parnellite MPs and many influential public intellectuals.72 However, attendance at its meetings soon grew small and appeals by Griffith’s circle to the society’s more influential members to pay their subscriptions to the organisation and to attend meetings were invariably ignored. This occurred because the YIL insisted on championing the Irish Education Act (1892) despite the fact that the Irish Party, acting on the insistence of the Catholic hierarchy, refused to support the implementation of this measure; a fact that would ultimately cause this legislation to be dropped. Even prior to the introduction of the education bill, Griffith had expressed enthusiasm for the British government’s proposal to abolish fees in all national schools and to make school attendance compulsory for children up until the age of fourteen.73 Together with the rest of the YIL executive, Griffith was annoyed that Irish political and church leaders, with the exception of the Church of Ireland and (privately) some individuals within the Christian Brothers, refused to support the British government’s proposal.74 The refusal of local government bodies to use the authority vested in them to implement the measure without first securing the approval of a Catholic bishop (an approval which was not given), as well as the refusal of the recently-established Irish National Teachers Organisation to support the measure (again due to the Catholic bishops, who had founded the teachers’ organisation), particularly outraged the YIL, which pondered whether or not it was intended to ‘appoint the Bishop [Archbishop Walsh of Dublin] to carry out all the functions of the Corporation’. It also pointed out a great inconsistency in such public representatives claiming to represent a desire for an independent Ireland: ‘The people sought the right of self-government, yet here was a body refusing to exercise the powers of self-government unless the Bishop so approved.’75

Griffith took local politics seriously, as was reflected by his perpetual anger at Dublin city council’s failure to deal with housing and sanitation problems. He firmly believed that municipal authorities had the responsibility to act strictly in every tax payer’s interest as much as any national government, without distinguishing between sectional interest groups, and that they should be made accountable to the public upon that financial basis alone. Griffith would argue that the town councils should not only have supported the education act in defiance of the Catholic Church but should also have appointed representatives of trade unions and women’s groups to the proposed school attendance committees.76 The Catholic Church justified its opposition to the act on the grounds that it supposedly constituted state encroachment upon families’ freedom of choice. By contrast, Griffith’s YIL maintained that the real problem was that the church was using the question of education as a political football, refusing to encourage support of any government measure until its political desire to have a state-funded Catholic university was first achieved; a purely selfish decision which was typified as an ongoing betrayal of the masses for the sake of the upper classes that had been going on in Catholic Ireland for the best part of fifty years.77 In taking this stance, Griffith’s circle claimed to be giving a voice to an underclass that had long understood that recognised leaders of Irish public opinion were failing to address vital needs of Irish society in matters of education.78 In doing so, however, they discovered that ambitious individuals who were committed to political networking generally chose to remain silent rather than espouse any cause that might hurt their career prospects. In Catholic Ireland, this meant never questioning the right of the church alone to determine education policy.

The YIL Council, of which Griffith was an active member, drafted a bill calling for the establishment of elective county councils in Ireland such as existed in England since 1888 but that Parnell (with financial persuasion from Gladstone and Sir Cecil Rhodes of South Africa) had refused to demand for Ireland.79 The YIL’s one parliamentary supporter introduced this bill at Westminster but it never reached a second reading.80 The MP in question was William Field, a pro-labour independent nationalist and patron of Irish technical schools. The son of a republican rebel of 1848, Field was currently GAA treasurer and a leader of the Irish cattle traders’ association. The fact that he made his entry into politics as a supporter of the Amnesty Association meant that he was often associated in the public mind with the IRB. The real source of Field’s influence, however, was the Tories who sided with him against Catholic businessman W.M. Murphy during the 1892 general election.81 Over the next twenty-five years, Field and Murphy essentially represented two rival stances on matters relating to the economy of Ireland from their Dublin political support base. In addition to the YIL arguments regarding education, Field supported its demand that local government bodies collect new rates to establish public libraries in Ireland for the first time; another campaign that met a dead end.82 In support of Field, Griffith himself petitioned the Lord Mayor of Dublin to call a public meeting on the compulsory education question. He also drew up a twelve-point resolution of the YIL in support of the act that was distributed to all members of Dublin City Hall, chaired a debate on the Chief Secretary’s attitudes to the question and protested about the mayor’s seeming subservience to church leaders in the matter.83

Griffith’s embroilment in the politics of Irish education from the tender age of twenty-one highlighted a central dynamic of his career. Notwithstanding the fact that he had received some valued schooling from the Christian Brothers, Griffith would often find himself espousing a patriotism that was at odds with prevailing Catholic attitudes towards Irish nationalism. A key determinant of this situation was Parnell’s decision in October 1884 to surrender control of the Irish Party’s education policy to the Catholic hierarchy to enable his party’s subsequent triumph at the election polls. This had led the idea of Irish nationalism to become wedded politically to the cause of Catholic education. To a very significant extent, this had the affect of divorcing the Irish Party from the broader economic realities that faced the general business community within Ireland. Furthermore, as the Irish Party would never reverse this stance, the business community generally remained sympathetic to the Tory party. This was reflected by the composition of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, which had a good political relationship with William Field, and the composition of Trinity College’s Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, which was Ireland’s top forum for economic debate.84

These trends led many educated contemporaries to the conclusion after 1886 that an Irish nationalism could only ever be a cultural construct and thus never become a meaningful political reality. Disputes in Dublin City Hall between Protestant Tory commercial elites and Catholic businessmen caused bigoted journalism (on both sides) to appear in those Tory and Irish Party weekly newspapers that were aimed directly at the lower classes. During 1886, this stimulated street violence in Dublin city centre on a much smaller scale, albeit according to the exact same dynamic, as had occurred in Belfast (the largest ever riots in the history of that city occurred during 1886), while Cork City Council was similarly divided.85 Griffith’s debating societies had reacted to this trend by forbidding any religious viewpoints to be raised at their meetings.86 The fall of Parnell five years later simply amplified this same dynamic. A much more central dynamic at work than any religious factor, however, was the role of Gladstonian fiscal doctrine regarding the management of the British Empire in dictating government policy regarding Ireland.

In restructuring the British economy in the wake of the Anglo-French wars (1793–1815), London abandoned cherished promises that had been made to Irish politicians at the time of the Union of 1801 (enshrined in Article Six of that Act) by merging the Irish with the Imperial Exchequer. As a result, the Bank of England now banked all Irish customs and excise; the former national bank, the Bank of Ireland, began investing solely in British imperial defence stock in London; a parity was enforced between the Irish and English pound; and the formation of new Irish banks was encouraged, each of which tailored themselves not only to the new imperial economy (represented by the abolishment of all Irish customs houses) but also, in their search for customers, to the existence of strictly segregated religious communities within Ireland.87 This was the political precursor to granting Catholics the right to parliamentary representation in 1829 and the ineffective Young Ireland protests, partly supported by an elderly Daniel O’Connell, against W.E. Gladstone, the president of the Imperial Board of Trade during the mid-to-late 1840s. Gladstone subsequently managed to ‘permeate the thinking not only of treasury officials but of a generation of civil servants in virtually all departments of administration’ by prioritising increasing England’s economic control over all British territories while simultaneously appearing to address their desires for more autonomy in public. The much lauded mid-Victorian age of prosperity (1851–75) was actually a period defined by a largely unnoticed establishment of a complete English monopoly over all imperial markets, very often at the direct expense of the rest of the United Kingdom, while simultaneously cutting expenditure for all colonial governments or administrations.88

The relevance of this Gladstonian fiscal doctrine to Irish circumstances was highlighted during Gladstone’s own tenures as Prime Minister. In the wake of the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (a purely symbolical measure that nevertheless convinced some clericalist Catholic politicians that Gladstone favoured ‘justice for Ireland’), Gladstone abolished the office of Vice-Treasurer of Ireland that had been established on the merging of the exchequers to guarantee there would be some regulatory measures in place to ensure financial fair play for Ireland. As a result, even those Irish businessmen who enthused over annual return figures for trade as an indication that they were operating within a prosperous economy admitted that they had no means of ever knowing either what these figures meant in practice for Ireland or what financial returns were ever being made to Ireland because of the arbitrary manner in which London was determining its figures and the fact that these figures only gave statistics for the United Kingdom as a whole.89 In effect, Gladstone had succeeded in making all Irish politicians economically blind. This exacerbated a trend whereby Irish businessmen literally had to make London their headquarters if they were to be sufficiently well attuned to market trends to be able to survive in business at all.

Gladstone’s masterstroke in forwarding this policy occurred during the 1880s. He abandoned his recent coercive policy in Ireland (imprisoning over 1,000 Land League officials without trial and establishing, for the first time in history, a permanent secret service in Ireland)90 and suddenly announced his willingness to embrace the idea of ‘home rule’ for Ireland. Irish Tories, under Isaac Butt, had actually initiated an idea of home rule for Ireland during the early 1870s in protest against Gladstone’s abolishment of the office of Vice Treasurer for Ireland. Now, however, Gladstone saw an embrace of the home rule slogan as a means of increasing existing levels of over-taxation in Ireland, which he had first established during the 1850s, while simultaneously cutting back on government expenditure in Ireland. In particular, by forcing Irish political representatives to sit in a completely powerless and subordinate assembly in Dublin with no fiscal autonomies, he intended to deny Irish political representatives any means of ever counteracting his policy.91 Even though it was fully understood that ‘Gladstone’s proposed contribution from Ireland to England under the Home Rule Bill is more than Ireland could possibly continue to pay’, Parnell’s party went along with Gladstone’s policy,92 in the process tearing the Irish political community apart. Many former supporters of the Liberal party in Ireland, particularly within Ulster, now defected permanently to the Tories in opposition to Gladstone’s initiative.

After 1886, Irish Tories protested that Ireland was legally supposed to be an equal part of the United Kingdom but it was now being governed in a purely exploitative manner in keeping with trends in Gladstonian foreign policy in third-world countries. This was why Parnell’s willingness to depend on a Catholic Church that was completely indifferent to the economic well being of Ireland, except in so far as it affected its own private concerns, was equated with being willing to risk letting the country be economically ruined purely for the sake of a short-term electoral expediency. Irish Tory opponents of Parnell and Gladstone now described themselves as ‘unionist’, a political term they invented to denote their preoccupation with the terms of the original Union of 1801, but Gladstone’s dismissal of their politics by noting that ‘we are all unionists’ was one to which Irish political commentators could offer no effective retort.93 Indeed, after 1886 both Irish ‘nationalist’ and ‘unionist’ political organisations not only grew increasingly confessional but they were also frequently subject to ridicule because Irish politicians had neither the authority nor the means to ever establish a tribunal on the fiscal relations between Britain and Ireland. This meant they were inherently impotent in championing Irish economic interests.

The economic backdrop to the political operations of Griffith’s YIL was that the fall of Parnell coincided with a shift in Tory economic policy in England. The exclusion of Britain from European free-trade markets around 1891 led English Tories to attack Gladstone’s policy in that regard,94 and this provided Irish Tories with an opportunity to step up their own criticisms of Gladstone. This was done by attempting to link the question of the financing of Irish education, which alone preoccupied the Catholic Church, with intellectual and cultural nationalist debate within Ireland in an attempt to highlight the existence of other political alternatives. However, the proverbial Irish nationalist response, as represented by the Irish Party, was simply to label the Tory-minded Parnellite press and the YIL that it publicised as an anti-Catholic faction. This reflected a central dynamic and deep paradox to the history of the Irish Party. From 1886 onwards it espoused a Liberal Party alliance for the sake of retaining support for the idea of home rule but in doing so it was actually defending a party that supported neither the economic interests of Ireland nor the principle of denominational education. Instead, the Liberal Party was simply prepared to allow for the greater promotion of Irish Catholic professionals within the British imperial civil service in order to further implement Gladstone’s principles of fiscal administration.95 The Catholic Church welcomed this development purely because it assisted it in promoting its missionary work throughout the British Empire; a key issue as far as the Vatican was concerned. As far as Griffith was concerned, however, the only real defence that could be offered in favour of this policy was the opportunities it presented for individuals’ professional development at the expense of Ireland itself. This was essentially true.96

Politically, Griffith’s YIL occupied the position of being independent to such a degree that it fitted into no particular camp but instead found its audience primarily within the republic of letters. This was not necessarily a guarantee of obscurity during the 1890s. Many could identify with the protests of Griffith and his YIL friends that, judging from contemporary trends, the ideals of Irish nationalism had been completely forgotten in a race for civil service employments and that this was being masked and justified in public by disingenuous attempts by politicians to promote sectarian animosities purely in an attempt to hide their own personal, or careerist, ambitions.97 Therefore, even if it was ineffective in a purely party-political sense, the fact that the YIL refused to obey MPs’ request that it engage in electioneering and distributed copies of its resolutions to all parties, irrespective of whether or not they identified themselves as ‘nationalist’ or ‘unionist’ (according to the post 1886 party-political definitions) or whether or not they held government offices, was respected by all who disliked the tenor of Irish party politics ever since 1886.98 In reviving debate on the ideals of the Young Irelanders of the 1840s, Griffith and his friends were also consciously echoing the green-white-and-orange symbolism of T.F. Meagher’s republican tricolour of 1848.

Griffith’s mentor in the YIL was Henry Dixon, a legal secretary at the Dublin Four Courts and former member of the Rathmines branch of the Irish National League. Now a professed admirer of both the Fabian Society in Britain and the Irish republican tradition, Dixon ran the avowedly republican National Club Literary Society with John MacBride (an IRB activist with links to the British naval port of Castlebar), launched the tradition of Bodenstown demonstrations and later became a business manager for one of Griffith’s journals.99 Indeed, Dixon was one of several YIL activists who later re-emerged as ‘Sinn Féiners’.100 These included Walter Cole (a future leader of Sinn Féin in Dublin City Hall), Peter White (the first secretary of Sinn Féin), Patrick Lavelle (Griffith’s future solicitor) and Denis Devereux, a printer who tried to establish a journal for the YIL during 1894 and ultimately became the printer and manager of Griffith’s first journal.101 Reflecting the National Club’s past attempt to mobilise support for Parnell specifically among town councillors nationwide, Dixon’s circle combined a practical conception of the importance of promoting local government reform with a bookworm-style conception of Irish nationalism. Reflecting Dixon’s friendship with leading Irish cultural nationalists like the republican-radical John Wyse Power and the great George Sigerson, the YIL also attempted to revive a partly successful, albeit short-lived, campaign from the early 1880s that appealed to church and school leaders to appoint more teachers of the Irish language.102 This was a cause that the YIL first took up, partly on Griffith’s suggestion, in May 1893.103

Griffith sent copies of a British government report on Wales, which became the basis of Westminster legislation that recognised that country’s bilingual status, to members of all Irish education and local government boards with a request that they demand the same for Ireland.104 As a member of the YIL’s Irish Language Congress Committee, Griffith also issued flyers that claimed the present educational system in Ireland was ‘indefensible’ on the grounds that it did not make allowance for the existence of an Irish-speaking population.105 Questionnaires to ascertain where and how much Irish was spoken and taught were sent not only to schools and colleges across the United Kingdom but also to a few in Europe and the United States.106 Only the Catholic Irish College in Rome (which had an Irish language department) responded enthusiastically to this questionnaire, however.107 In addition, the general results of the YIL survey were not encouraging: of approximately 8,500 national schools in Ireland, only forty-five taught Irish and this was only as an extra-curricular subject.108 The YIL received negative replies from all Irish teacher-training colleges, the National Education Board at Dublin Castle as well as ex-officio members of that body, such as Chief Secretary Morley and William Walsh, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin. Archbishop Walsh maintained that although he sympathised with the language movement, ‘what you suggest is, at all events for the present, quite out of the question’.109 At the YIL’s Easter Week conference of March 1894, Griffith proposed that all local government bodies should be requested by the General Post Office in Dublin to ‘have the names of some of the chief thoroughfares painted in Irish as well as in English’. Meanwhile, George Noble Plunkett (a Parnellite candidate for parliament who later became a papal count) and Michael Cusack of the GAA proposed that the electorate should vote only for those MPs who agreed to support the language movement.110 Neither of these proposals had any effect, however.

Although it won the sympathy of a handful of significant individuals,111 the YIL language campaign was essentially doomed because it had no organised body of support. With the British government’s support, the churches had already established much control over Irish schools and the nominal existence of a ‘national education board’ for Ireland was meant to reflect this Irish divergence from the British and, indeed, European, as well as North American, trend of state-controlled education. This was great value of the Union to the Roman Catholic Church and the reason why the church encouraged the strengthening of that union after 1886. Full cooperation with the churches’ educational policies was an essential prerequisite if any practical steps for educational reform were to be taken in Ireland. Douglas Hyde, who worked with the YIL through his membership of Yeats’ National Literary Society, nominally founded the Gaelic League in July 1893 but he did not come to realise the necessity of working with the churches until late in 1896. Consequently, it was only from that time onwards that the Gaelic League began to emerge as a public body. By mid-1897, half of its executive consisted of senior Catholic clergymen and the remainder consisted of politicians and newspaper editors who first made it clear that they accepted the church’s education programme.112 By contrast, in championing the Irish language purely on its own merits the YIL had won no support whatsoever. In effect, it had refused to play the political game and so no bargain could be struck.

An additional reason for the YIL’s failure was its attempt to emulate the original Young Irelanders of the 1840s by championing the non-denominational Queen’s Colleges and calling for the conversion of Trinity College into a new, non-denominational, national university. Some Trinity graduates, although obviously not the Church of Ireland itself, favoured this idea. In opposition to this idea, Archbishop Walsh and the Catholic hierarchy never wavered in their conviction that non-denominational schools and universities were responsible for the growth of religious indifference (a reality that, at least when addressing the general Irish public, Walsh alleged to believe the British governing classes were incapable of appreciating) and that each Christian denomination in Ireland was therefore entitled to its own university.113 By contrast, the YIL maintained that this policy would be very wasteful of the limited financial resources available for Irish education. It was openly critical of the idea of Irishmen seeking state funding for a Catholic university, claiming that if, instead, Trinity College was converted into a totally non-denominational and national university religious segregations would not continue to dominate Irish life.114 This stance of the YIL encouraged Trinity-educated public intellectuals such as T.W. Rolleston and C.H. Oldham to offer their support to the Celtic Literary Society, which affiliated itself with the YIL during 1894, but it led Archbishop Walsh to request that the YIL cease to communicate with him under any circumstances, as ‘I cannot undertake to answer questions put to me ... by unrepresentative and irresponsible bodies, such as that on behalf of which you have written.’115

Although this claim regarding the ‘unrepresentative’ and ‘irresponsible’ stance of the YIL was motivated by its political stance on education, to contemporaries it frequently had a cultural connotation as well.116 This occurred because the YIL’s citing of the legacy of the Young Irelanders of the 1840s could make debate upon Ireland historicist in tone. For instance, ever since the British-Catholic pact of 1886,117 T.W. Rolleston (a Tory confrere of John O’Leary) and many others began repeating Thomas Davis’ old example of celebrating the defunct eighteenth-century Irish parliament whilst denigrating Ireland’s current representation in the imperial parliament.118 Griffith was influenced strongly by this trend. Although this historic Irish parliament had been exclusively Protestant, the fact that control of the wealth of Ireland was still largely in the hands of its members’ descendants convinced Griffith that many Irish Party supporters’ simple equation of Irish nationalism with attempting to undo all existing manifestations of the historic Protestant ascendancy could only be politically self defeating. Reflecting this, Griffith’s first-ever publication was a series of eight articles on notable eighteenth-century Irish personalities.119 Although Griffith suggested that several of the figures examined presented ‘somewhat of a paradox’ (‘whilst constantly asserting the right of Ireland to political freedom they were mostly at the same time inveterate and determined bigots’),120 he suggested that the eighteenth century was a ‘brilliant page in our history’ that produced ‘some of the ablest and a few of the greatest minds Ireland has produced’.121 With regards to politics, Griffith believed that had Henry Grattan not ‘played the generous fool, prating of Ireland’s trust in English generosity’, and instead listened to John Flood’s economic nationalist arguments, the Act of Union would never have been passed and ‘the misery of the last ninety years would have been impossible’.122 He also believed that Ireland had become a prosperous country for the first time prior to the Union and that this act was motivated partly by a covert desire to undo this trend.123

Unlike Griffith, comparatively few contemporaries could blind themselves to the fact that the Young Ireland citation of the ideal of an Irish nationalism unaffected by religious divisions had only ever been a storybook ideal. It reflected neither the British government’s fiscal management of Ireland since the 1820s (or indeed before) nor the Irish public’s general acceptance of the equation of competing denominations with competing political interest groups on a fundamental, financial level.124 This was a political actuality and to cite an ideal rather than dealing with existing realities was generally equated with poor political judgment. Reflecting this, if Griffith had entertained hopes of finding a political platform for himself after the fiasco of the YIL’s education and Irish language campaigns, he did himself no favours during 1894 by appearing on various republican platforms (including one addressed by Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa of New York) where all contemporary Irish politicians were denounced as royalist flunkeys.125

After delivering the annual IRB ‘Robert Emmet lecture’, Griffith began working closely with C.J. O’Farrell of Enniscorthy, an aging Francophile bookworm and Leinster IRB leader who was notoriously anticlerical.126 Griffith’s friends typified O’Farrell as ‘a tall, dignified, grey-haired, handsome man, with a period moustache’ who though ‘normally retiring and gentlemanly only, periodically went on a spree and on these occasions he was volubly agnostic but always polite’.127 As soon as the YIL began working with O’Farrell, however, a Wexford priest denounced them as young men with ‘no more beards than brains’ that were attempting ‘to blacken and besmirch the character of the Irish priesthood’.128 The Irish Party’s press took up this accusation. At O’Farrell’s Vinegar Hill demonstration, Griffith expressed strong approval for speakers’ praise of the French Revolution. It was argued that the only hope for the nationalist cause in Ireland was if the youth were taught ‘the true duties of citizenship … to think for themselves regardless of the opinion of anyone else’ and became prepared to demand ‘the establishment in this country of a senate responsible to the people, and, if the country was so disposed, a government on republican lines’.129 After a similar speech was made in New Ross, however, the Irish Party’s press denounced the YIL as ‘traitors’. This claim was rationalised because the YIL attempted to ‘separate faith and fatherland’ not only in their understanding of the history of Irish nationality but also in their attitudes towards Irish education: it was ‘revolting’, according to the Irish Party, that any body purporting to be Irish nationalists could think themselves entitled to criticise the Catholic hierarchy’s stance on education.130 Similarly, the following year, William Rooney was labelled by the Irish Party’s press as a juvenile delinquent who had the ‘cheek’ to praise republicanism and the French Revolution and to ‘read out a diatribe against the priests’.131

On a motion of William Field MP and George Coffey of the Royal Irish Academy, Griffith was re-elected as a member of the YIL Executive during 1895. However, Griffith declined the invitation to be the chief speaker at the 1895 Bodenstown demonstration (an event that attracted 5,000 people) and his attendance at meetings grew rare.132 Indeed, with the exception of a few events (including a massive public funeral for James Boland that was organised by Field),133 Griffith appears to have made very little public appearances for the best part of two years.134 Why exactly this was the case is unclear. Although a pencil annotation in the YIL minute book read ‘Griffith has been in France at Irish war and hurt himself’,135 this was evidently an addition made at a later date. The most probable explanation for Griffith’s sudden reticence lay in problems in his personal life.

During the summer of 1891 Griffith’s father was made unemployed again after T.D. Sullivan, a clericalist MP, characteristically folded the historic Nation, which was first founded by the Young Irelanders, and sold its franchise to the recently established Irish Catholic, which now became known as the Irish Catholic and Nation. Although he found some work with the Parnellite Irish Daily Independent, acute respiratory problems soon forced the father to take early retirement. This put real pressure on his son to compensate for the loss in family income. Griffith took on extra work as a copyreader and joined the Dublin printers’ union in February 1894.

One acquaintance recalled that the Griffith family established a small shop at this time on Parliament Street, just opposite Dublin Castle.136 This was possibly an investment made from a lump sum received by the father on his retirement. ‘Griffith’s For Bargains’, a small market-stall selling discount household goods, existed in ‘Parliament Street General Stores’ during 1892,137 while a reference exists to a ‘Griffith Hardware and General Stores’ at 16–17 Parliament Street as late as November 1895.138 This shop was short lived, however, and its failure created a debt. Griffith’s younger brother Frank, who was described by one family friend as a ‘most attractive if somewhat feckless’ character, also entered the workforce around this time, but his work as an usher in the Gaiety Theatre (a job that he stuck with for very many years) did little to supplement the family income.139

Griffith’s withdrawal from public meetings in November 1894 coincided with the dismissal by the Irish Daily Independent of many of its staff. It is probable that he lost his job at this time and could not find another. Indeed, it seems that the Griffith family had to give up a rented home near Mountjoy Square, which had been acquired during the mid-to-late 1880s, during 1895 or 1896 and resettle in an unsanitary and crowded tenement flat such as they had lived in during the 1870s.140

Friends later recalled that Griffith fell into a serious depression at this time. George A. Lyons, a young Protestant evangelical clerk of republican sympathies who befriended Griffith in the Celtic Literary Society, recalled how the usually reticent Griffith admitted to him that he felt there was ‘no prospects for him, either as an individual or as a nationalist’. Lyons also noted that ‘some of his old friends suspected a disappointment in love’ as an additional cause of his depression.141

Griffith had only one real girlfriend in his life, namely Maud Sheehan, the daughter of a Catholic middle-class and leisured family (one of her brothers was a keen amateur photographer)142 that lived near Mountjoy Square. Griffith first met Maud during 1892 after he ruled that membership of the Leinster Literary Society should be open to women.143 Later, she often played the piano to accompany singers at Celtic Literary Society social events and music became one of their common interests.144 Like several YIL activists, Griffith was a supporter of women’s suffrage and educational rights for women; the latter campaign being led in Ireland by Edith Oldham, a sister of C.H. Oldham. Maud had attended secondary school, was a devout attendant at Mass and suspected that Griffith suffered from acute ill health during 1895 and 1896 as, like everyone else, she saw very little of him at this time.145 While they would fall in love (ultimately they married, fifteen years later), they rarely met during the mid-1890s as Griffith seemingly deliberately avoided her out of shame at his desperate material circumstances. While associates frequently attributed to Griffith ‘an innate shyness’,146 poverty certainly limited his social self-confidence. In addition, it may well have been that the Sheehan family never approved of the Griffiths.

Lyons suspected that Griffith’s withdrawal from public activities was also influenced by the fact that the IRB, ‘to which in all probability he already belonged, was in a hopeless condition’.147 Maud recalled that John MacBride was disgusted by the fact that the Dublin IRB organisation had become embroiled in dynamiting conspiracies involving agent provocateurs that were designed only to discredit Irish nationalism. She understood that this persuaded MacBride to leave the IRB and to follow Mark Ryan, a London doctor who set up a rival organisation that would concentrate exclusively on the cultural nationalist movement.148 It is likely that Griffith felt similarly to MacBride. Ryan, the leader of the Parnellite National League in London, was notable for having friends in Irish Party circles as well as some secret contacts in various British colonies (Irish republican social networks often overlapped with those of British navy or army personnel). These networks included South Africa,149 where two Irish Party members had recently gone to try gold prospecting. Utilising Ryan’s contacts, MacBride left for South Africa where he found work as the foreman of a goldmine. In turn, word reached Griffith in Dublin that work was available and that a small Irish community existed in South Africa. In the autumn of 1896, Griffith as well as his cousin John R. Whelan made the decision to leave for the proverbial ‘dark continent’.

Griffith’s decision to emigrate coincided with the publication of a significant report by Hugh Childers, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and cousin of Erskine Childers. Based on a Tory government commission of 1893–4, this report on the financial relations between Britain and Ireland showed Ireland to have been a victim of past economic mismanagement and to be deserving of ‘a distinct position and separate consideration’.150 After his return to Ireland, Griffith would use these findings to make a case in favour of an Irish economic nationalism. In time, this would prompt Andrew Kettle, a former Land League treasurer, to credit Griffith with being the only Irishman since Parnell’s very brief flirtation with economic nationalist ideas during the early 1880s to have ever bothered making a rational effort to examine whether or not the idea of an independent Irish state could possibly make the slightest political sense.151 This would do little, however, to reverse the firmly established trend of debate on Irish nationalism being confined largely to the non-political sphere—a supposedly purely cultural ‘separatism’—as if it could inherently have no practical, economic connotation.

During the winter of 1896, Griffith took part in some Celtic Literary Society activities and an event occurred that must have been cheering.152 On 29 December 1896, just before he was due to leave the country, a surprise party was held in his honour and a testimonial was presented to him.153 No testimonial was collected for fellow immigrant John Whelan (until recently, the secretary of the Celtic Literary Society), which probably indicates that Griffith’s poverty was better known than he wished.154 Some public figures attended to wish Griffith well. These included John Clarke, the curator of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast and editor of the Northern Patriot, James Casey, the secretary of the Gaelic League, as well as sub editors with the Daily and Weekly Independent (J.W. O’Beirne and John Murphy) who had recently joined the IRB. Murphy, Patrick Lavelle B.L. and Edward Whelan spoke in Griffith’s honour before Rooney concluded with a speech, noting ‘how much the existence of many national organisations have owed to your support’ and that ‘associated with you as most of us have been for years in national work, we cannot but feel grieved that your counsel and your assistance, valuable and ever ready, are about to be withdrawn.’ The Celtic Literary Society expressed a hope that they would be able to welcome Griffith home again one day.155 Maud Sheehan was evidently impressed by this little event as she recalled, by way of comparison, that when MacBride left for South Africa nobody was there to say goodbye to him.156

Although still completely unknown to the Irish public at large, by the age of twenty-five Griffith had acquired a few notable contacts in the worlds of politics and journalism. He was also sufficiently well informed of intricate dynamics of political developments in recent times to be able to later draw upon this knowledge for various critiques.157 He had not, however, acquired a livelihood or any degree of personal security. The combination of poverty and his individuality, as well as his refusal to abide by Archbishop Walsh’s Christian-democratic shibboleths, may explain his failure to find a career, or a niche in politics, through existing patronage networks. This brought him closer to the revolutionary underground. Like many IRB men, Griffith was both a product of British imperialism, as would be demonstrated by his South African adventure, as well as a declared opponent of British imperialism, as would be demonstrated by his continued intellectual attraction towards nationalist ideologies. His self-definition at this time was that of a rebel but he was very much a rebel without a cause. The outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War would change this situation, however. It would allow Griffith to find patronage from both revolutionary and political circles that would, in time, enable him to embark on a definite career path as a journalist.