Arthur Griffith

Owen McGee

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781785370090
• eBook ISBN: 9781785370113
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

As a working-class Dubliner who played a crucial role in inspiring and leading Dáil Éireann in its formative stages, Arthur Griffith's life and world is one of the greatest windows into understanding the dynamics of the Irish revolution. Owen McGee's authoritative biography is based on fascinating original research and presents a fresh analysis and interpretation of Griffith's life and the economic basis of the political history of the era.

Griffith has been typified as 'the last Young Irelander' and Owen McGee's masterly account reflects on this by examining the very different conceptions of Irish nationalism that existed before and after the formation of the Irish state. It also suggests that Griffith's belief in the importance of economic freedoms and the ability of an independent Ireland to provide for its own people, was an ideal that inspired the subsequent evolution of the Irish state.

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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Plates
• Introduction
• 1. The Dubliner and Independent Nationalist (1871–96)
• 2. The Pro-Boer Republican (1897–1902)
• 3. The Review Editor
• 4. The Resurrection of Hungary and the Birth of Sinn Féin (1904–5)
• 5. The Stillborn Party: Sinn Féin (1906–10)
• 6. The Framework of Home Rule (1910–14)
• 7. The First World War and the Reinvention of Sinn Féin (1914–18)
• 8. The Launch of Dáil Eireann (1918–19)
• 9. Dáil Eireann as an Underground Organisation (1919–20)
• 10. The Search for a Negotiable Settlement (1921)
• 11. Securing an Anglo-Irish Agreement? (1922)
• 12. The Survival of Dáil Eireann (1922)
• 13. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates