About 8,000 people, primarily from Dublin, were present at this Bodenstown demonstration. This may well have seemed as evidence to Griffith that his journal was about to become a significant seller. However, many centenary clubs disbanded soon after and whatever funds that were subscribed to the central Wolfe Tone Clubs of Dublin seem to have been financially mismanaged. Nominally, these funds were supposed to be used to erect a monument to Wolfe Tone (an idea that Dublin City Hall would reject in favour of the idea of a Parnell or a Gladstone monument) but instead they became funds of the IRB that were deliberately misappropriated by J.P. Dunne, the first secretary of the Wolfe Tone Clubs and a former admirer of John Redmond. Indeed, it is doubtful that the United Irishman received regular funding from this quarter. Although the United Irishman expanded to an eight-page journal after the 1899 Bodenstown demonstration, John Devoy, the IRB’s American ally, recalled that Griffith considered the IRB as ‘too stingy’ in their support and so he looked elsewhere.58 His alternative backers would prove to be no more reliable.
Historians have sometimes attributed to Griffith the political opinions voiced in ‘Over the Border’. This was a front-page commentary on international affairs that appeared in the United Irishman during its first year of publication.59 However, these articles were actually written by Frank Hugh O’Donnell, a London-Irish figure and associate of Mark Ryan upon whom the United Irishman became financially dependent. A graduate of Queens College Galway who had been expelled from the Irish Party in 1885 (Parnell had considered both O’Donnell and John O’Connor Power as too much of a personal rival),60 O’Donnell had the reputation of being a controversial propagandist because of his tendency to overstate his arguments. By now, he had few admirers apart from Mark Ryan and some London-Irish Tories.
During the period of the Boer War, Irish Catholics’ great hostility to the French Republic’s state-controlled education programme (it would soon expel the Jesuits from France) encouraged the Irish Party’s press to adopt a very pro-British treatment of current Anglo-French relations. These were strained due to Britain and France’s rival colonial interests on the African continent. Acting partly on John O’Leary’s advice,61 the United Irishman chose to reflect an opposing viewpoint. To this end, O’Donnell, adopting the pseudonym ‘the foreign secretary’, wrote unquestioning defences of the French government from all international criticisms, including intensely anti-Semitic defences of the Parisian government’s handling of the Dreyfus affair. Some historians have cited this as evidence of a strong anti-Semitic streak in Griffith, although this is an exaggerated claim.62 O’Donnell was actually receiving funds from the French government to write this propaganda. He had used his connection with Mark Ryan’s London-Irish circle as a cover for claiming to be an Irish revolutionary leader and had approached both French and Dutch embassies looking for financial support for an anti-British propaganda campaign. In this, he outmanoeuvred American agents of John Devoy’s Clan na Gael (who attempted a similar objective, nominally on behalf of the IRB) and succeeded in acquiring funds to launch an Irish pro-Boer movement, his efforts in Paris having succeeded partly due to the assistance of Maud Gonne and her war-mongering French imperialist (ex-Boulangerist) associates on the Parisian city council. In this way, O’Donnell, Ryan and Gonne effectively financed the Irish Pro-Boer movement from London and Paris. It appears, however, that their circle was not above passing information to the British Foreign Office on French attitudes towards international affairs.63
In some Irish Party quarters (which were privy to what was taking place at Dublin Castle), it was rumoured not entirely without reason that the pro-Boer movement was also connected with more dangerous British secret service plots.64 Whatever the case, Maud Gonne, who grew up in Dublin Castle social circles and took after her military father, clearly attempted to endear herself to Griffith at this time. She sent him a large signed photograph of herself and a copy of a novel The Mountain Lovers, both bearing an inscription pledging her friendship to him.65 Reputedly, Griffith thereafter entertained serious romantic illusions about Gonne,66 who had attained celebrity status as supposedly one of the most beautiful women of the day. If so, these hopes were no doubt short-lived: she was not known as Ireland’s Joan of Arc for nothing. A political association remained, however, for at least the length of the Anglo-Boer War. Griffith even horsewhipped a newspaper editor for claiming to have proof that Gonne was a Parisian agent of the British Foreign Office.67 This action led to Griffith’s arrest and his violent action was very probably motivated by self-defence: it was well known that the United Irishman was financially dependent upon Gonne’s circle. However, even if Griffith was in receipt of some monies that came from suspect sources—this being an almost inevitable feature of being associated with revolutionary organisations—this did not have a great bearing upon his own work.
Griffith’s opposition to the Irish Party, which was more intense than that of any Irish Tory member of parliament, would become a defining feature of his political editorials. As had been the case since the late 1880s, it continued to be expressed primarily as a sense of outrage at the party’s indifference to the urban working class. Griffith continued to believe in the idea of a state-sponsored socialism while opposing all notions of politically engineered class conflicts. He argued that the establishment of more state institutes of technical education for the working classes was the most pressing educational need facing the country and that state grants should be created to enable the working classes attend university, as was the case in France and Germany.68 As a result of its decision to allow the Catholic hierarchy determine its policy on education, the Irish Party was understood by Griffith to have equated Irish educational needs with the question of denominational education alone.69 He typified Irish Party politicians and journalists as royalist flunkeys for two reasons. First, they took part in loyalist social events. Second, there was an inevitably close working relationship between all the country’s elected politicians and its police forces. This reality was presented by Griffith as a symbolic representation of parliamentarians’ indifference to the urban working class.70
Griffith frequently gave voice to this quintessentially working-class perspective of police forces being inherently oppressive tools of social control for so long as he lived in poor circumstances himself. It underpinned his fascination with the history of the Fenian movement—regarding which he knew very intricate details 71 —as well as his fondness for attending republican commemorative events. For example, in expressing praise for P.N. Fitzgerald’s 1901 Bodenstown speech against middle-class political opportunism Griffith drew the personal conclusion that police harassment of workers on their way home to Dublin from Bodenstown demonstrated what motives underpinned both middle-class political attitudes and all the activities of the police.72 Catholic clergymen often attempted to dissuade working-class figures like Griffith from holding such attitudes. This was done by pointing out that secret revolutionary movements, in Ireland as much as in the rest of Europe, were invariably established by police forces as a tool to detect and manage sources of discontent among the poor. Old fenians like Fitzgerald sometimes attempted to counter this argument by telling their followers, in the same breath as they espoused the value of bearing firearms, that priests were, consciously or unconsciously, an ally of the police in oppressing the poor.73
Fr P.F. Kavanagh, a Franciscan monk and popular historian of the 1798 rising, gave valuable support to the pro-Boer movement by launching an anti-enlistment campaign. He challenged Griffith directly on the issue of secret societies in the pages of the United Irishman.74 To refute Fr Kavanagh’s arguments, Griffith argued that secret societies were very often a necessary evil in overthrowing tyrannical powers. His belief in this idea appears to have been rooted primarily in his appreciation for the fact that members of such organisations, by espousing a republican dichotomy between the concepts of citizenship and slavery, had often helped to sustain a sense of self-reliant patriotism in Irish political debate: ‘we owe what national self-respect we still retain mainly to the secret society of the United Irishmen and the secret society of the Fenian Brotherhood … They made men out of slaves.’ Meanwhile,