Virtually all those who had been present at Griffith’s farewell gathering at Dublin were prominent members of the 1798 Centenary Committee. A surprising exception was William Rooney, who was delegated instead to join Alice Milligan, the co-editor of the Belfast Shan van Vocht (which was partly funded, via Robert Johnston, by the New York Irish Republic), in doing insignificant propaganda work, such as organising small-scale historical lectures and exhibitions.42 This may be explained by the fact that Rooney was now concentrating primarily upon the Irish language movement, having helped the Gaelic League to organise its first of many Feis Ceoil Irish music events.43 Indeed, aside from contributing a ballad (as did Griffith) to Douglas Hyde’s Songs and Ballads of ’98, Rooney’s only direct contribution to the 1798 centenary movement was to propose that all memorials erected in honour of the United Irishmen should bear Irish language inscriptions only.44
Griffith and other Irish immigrants were able to hold their own 1798 centenary demonstration in Johannesburg on 30 August 1898.45 By that time, however, the centenary movement in Ireland had grown weak and two of Griffith’s closest associates in the movement, Henry Dixon and G.A. Lyons, blamed John O’Leary and, to a lesser extent, Fred Allan, for this, owing to their eventual capitulation to the Irish Party’s demand to have greater control over the movement.46 Furthermore, as the YIL had been converted into the 1798 Centenary Committee (each of which, like the IRB, had been nominally under O’Leary’s presidency), this meant that Griffith’s friends in Dublin had lost their only available political forum.
It was sometime during the autumn of 1898 when Griffith made the decision to return to Dublin. By January 1899, he was working as a compositor in the City Hall office of Thom’s Dublin Gazette and again attending meetings of the Celtic Literary Society.47 Well-founded rumours existed in Dublin that the ‘Parnellite’ Independent Newspaper Company, which had promoted the YIL, was about to be liquidated. In addition, the Shan van Vocht, which had been established to eclipse the influence of John Clarke’s Northern Patriot in the 1798 centenary movement (a task it accomplished), was ready to fold. This journal had been closely associated with the Celtic Literary Society and it was partly funded by Mark Ryan’s London-Irish circle. Upon receiving word in late 1898 that it would cease publication, Ryan proposed that Rooney should become the editor of a new journal to replace it. As Rooney had no previous editorial experience, however, Griffith landed the job. An additional factor that worked in Griffith’s favour here was that this enterprise was funded by capital previously forwarded to Ryan from South Africa.48
The United Irishman was founded in Dublin in March 1899 with Rooney and Griffith as its joint editors. It was expected by the IRB to be an organ for the surviving centenary clubs. Mark Ryan, by contrast, wanted it to promote a non-political cultural nationalism. In the face of these competing desires, Rooney and Griffith chose a similar stance as had Alice Milligan by adopting a middle course, declaring that ‘here are opinions to suit all classes. You pay your penny and you take your choice.’49 Up until a couple of months before his premature death in May 1901, William Rooney acted as the literary editor of the United Irishman, which was subtitled as a weekly review. Griffith took on the responsibility of tackling political subjects. These included the recent establishment of elective local government bodies and the role that the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War had in influencing the whole question of where Irish political allegiances should lie in the wake of the 1798 centenary celebrations. Reflecting his antipathy to contemporary party politics, Griffith wrote regarding the creation of new county and urban district councils that he hoped voters would ‘reject with equal contempt the slavish home ruler and the knavish unionist and vote for representatives, regardless of their party politics, who are honest men’.50 Men of professed nationalist sympathies but not necessarily of any specific party allegiance won 75 per cent of all seats, including many individuals who had once been connected with the republican underground.51
The outcome of these elections highlighted significant undercurrents within Irish political society. New county and town councillors erected dozens of memorials to Irish rebellions in the wake of the 1798 centenary, while some old republican figures as well as many members of William O’Brien’s new agrarian United Irish League (UIL) refused to follow requests from the Irish Party that they become justices of the peace because of the required oath of allegiance to the British crown.52 In Limerick, the released convict John Daly was elected as mayor and acted nominally in republicans’ interests by removing the royal coat of arms from City Hall and granting the freedom of the city to his fellow released convict Tom Clarke. Meanwhile, immediately upon the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War in October 1899, resolutions of sympathy with the Boers were passed by six of the thirty-two county councils in Ireland (Limerick, Kilkenny, Mayo, Kings County, Sligo and Cork) as well as about two-dozen urban and district councils, town commissions and board of guardians (mostly in the counties Monaghan, Tipperary, Clare and Galway).53
This was a somewhat startling development. It reflected a motive of the secret compact behind the Anglo-Irish security negotiations of 1884–7 and the purpose of the recently established Resident Magistrate System, which was launched during 1881. During the mid-1880s the idea of creating elective local government bodies in Ireland was deemed ‘unsound and dangerous’ purely for security reasons.54 The decision to withhold from the municipal authorities established in Ireland during 1899 the same financial autonomies as their British counterparts possessed since 1888 was a continuation of this legacy.
Griffith helped to found a small Pro-Boer movement in Dublin during June 1899 once it became clear that Britain was going to invade the Boer Republic. With the support of the Celtic Literary Society, local 1798 centenary clubs and Mark Ryan’s recently established Irish National Club in London, Griffith formed the Irish-Transvaal Committee under John O’Leary’s presidency. Three Irish Party members made a subscription to the Irish-Transvaal Committee, but the Boer War presented some problems for the Irish Party in promoting its nationalist reputation. This was because the Irish Party was expected in all British political circles, including South African ones, to celebrate the Empire.55 Disingenuously or not, Griffith sought to capitalise upon this chink in the Irish Party’s armour. The possibilities of doing so were limited, however, by republicans’ lack of a viable political organisation of their own.
During 1899, IRB leaders in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Limerick, Kerry and Mayo made efforts to keep the 1798 centenary clubs in existence. Their purpose in doing so was reflected in the political columns of Griffith’s United Irishman, which called for the creation a new ‘republican association’ in the country that would be entirely public and based around the centenary clubs. Griffith’s friend G.A. Lyons even made an exaggerated claim that ‘if we had a ’98 club in every town in Ireland, working as I know at least one to be working in Dublin, we would not fear for the future of an Irish republic’.56 In Dublin, the IRB leader Fred Allan operated a body known as the Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee to which these centenary clubs were supposed to send subscriptions, just as they had previously done to the now defunct 1798 Centenary Committee. It was evidently intended that Griffith’s United Irishman would act as the organ of this new movement. At the June 1899 Bodenstown demonstration chaired by P.N. Fitzgerald, Maurice Moynihan of Tralee, the new Munster IRB leader (and father of a future leader of the Irish civil service of the same name), called upon all nationalists to support ‘that sturdy and patriotic little sheet, the United Irishman’. Moynihan advocated the establishment of ‘an open organisation’