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.