Arthur Griffith. Owen McGee

also spoke of the underground nature of the early Christian church and argued that the modern church had lost its sense of perspective in these matters, thereby frequently becoming a bastion of aristocratic conservatism.75 Griffith himself came to the realisation that there were many dubious features to the history of Irish revolutionary organisations, not least because he knew from his own youth in Dublin of horrific episodes that pointed to unsavoury conclusions regarding the true nature of all revolutionary undergrounds.76 Overall, he evidently viewed the broad question of the relationship between agencies of social control and the activities of revolutionary organisations from a practical standpoint. He knew that secret machinations involving the police’s political intelligence forces were an inherent feature of this environment. However, he also acknowledged that, in the pre-democratic age and semi-colonial political context in which he lived, such organisations often provided the only ladder available for men of his social background to gain an entry point into the power game that defined the world of politics.

      If Griffith was willing to defend the history of Irish revolutionary organisations, his own activities at this time were less an underground conspiracy than a form of protest politics that was shaped by specific Dublin circumstances. The Irish Party was beginning to eclipse the Tories in Dublin parliamentary representation.77 As Griffith would note, however, the city’s politics was still governed by a unique partition that stemmed from the legacy of the imperial treasury’s deliberate withholding, not long after the admission of Catholics to municipal office in 1840, of the city’s quit and crown rents that were paid annually for the city’s upkeep. Dublin was now the only city in the world where the suburbs, which were invariably the home of a city’s labour force, housed its wealthiest inhabitants and contributed nothing to the upkeep of a city that was left to subsist if that were possible (generally it was not) only on the taxation of the city’s labouring population.78 It was not for nothing that Griffith typified Dublin city’s completely unparalleled housing and sanitation problems as a totally avoidable ‘Viceregal microbe’. The Dublin Chamber of Commerce had become a moribund body that, more often than not, maintained a deliberate and embarrassed silence, while contemporaries invariably associated wealthy Dublin society exclusively with royal court society, or the suburbs, and the poor with City Hall, i.e. the city’s actual government, which was deprived of resources and then accused of incompetence.79

      An additional factor that uniquely coloured Dublin life was peculiarities that existed on the level of political organisation and journalism. Although the Irish Party had progressively abandoned its association with Land League radicalism after 1881, continuities existed on the simplistic level of personnel. Reflecting this, ex-Land League officials from the provinces lacked influence equally with the Irish Party and the British government but nevertheless maintained a proud tradition of moving to Dublin in an attempt to act as behind-the-scenes party administrators or nationalist journalists. Although the age of the by-line had not yet arrived, men of this social background played a significant part in colouring political debate in Ireland, while unionist opinion generally took perpetual comfort from the British government’s effective guarantee that ‘Dublin does not lead Ireland as Paris leads France.’80 Like many a nationalist journalist, Griffith wrote his columns as if this simply should not be the case. Unlike various ex-Land Leaguers, he had the additional vantage point, or motive, of being a native of Dublin; the home of many ‘statesmen on the street corners’.81 Although many fellow journalists typified Griffith’s understandable attacks on the Irish Party as either counter productive or downright unfair, they nevertheless generally understood and respected his place in the world of Dublin letters.

      Griffith’s determination to act as a thorn in the Irish Party’s side manifested itself several times during 1900. First, to coincide with the nominal reunification of the Irish Party under John Redmond’s leadership, Griffith supported Mark Ryan in proposing that John MacBride be put forward for a south Mayo parliamentary by-election as a means of protesting against British rule. In doing so, they publicised the fact that MacBride had recently formed a small commando unit on the Boer side in the Anglo-Boer War. There was another context to this election, however, about which Griffith may well have been unaware. Under Dublin Castle’s supervision, Ryan had recently met up with MacBride’s Castlebar associates and spoke publicly of initiating arms importations along the Mayo coast. This action enabled Dublin Castle to achieve its longstanding ambition to persuade the British Admiralty to begin placing Royal Navy gunboats in Clew Bay.82 This reflected a peculiar context of the social world of republican activists. This was always characterised by engagement with nationalist debating clubs, working-class political organisations (urban and, to a lesser extent, agrarian) and popular cultural nationalist organisations (most notably the GAA) within Ireland itself. This prompted most activists, including Griffith, to view themselves as engaged in a nationalist challenge to the authority of Dublin Castle. However, the latter’s political intelligence work always had much broader ramifications than the local (friendly or unfriendly) DMP or RIC detectives who were standing on Irish street corners. In conjunction with various activities of the Foreign Office, War Office and the Admiralty, it was financed by the Secretary of State’s secret service fund to promote and protect British strategic or diplomatic interests worldwide, including the financing of both national and international security concerns.83 Griffith claimed to have expected a negative result in MacBride’s parliamentary campaign, but nevertheless attempted to use MacBride’s defeat repeatedly thereafter as a means to criticise the Irish Party’s supposed lack of patriotism.84

      Griffith’s next attack upon the Irish Party was equally indirect. Maud Gonne and Mark Ryan funded him to attempt to negate the political influence within Dublin of Fred Allan. As the former manager of the Irish Daily Independent, Allan was considered to be too personally sympathetic towards John Redmond, who was now chosen as a new leader for the Irish Party partly because it was considered that his political lineage (his family had been in politics since the 1850s) made him a good potential successor to Parnell as a man who could at least pose as an individual that was above ‘mere’ party politics and thus assume the standing of a prospective national leader. Allan had recently accepted the job as secretary to the lord mayor of Dublin to strengthen the hand of the Wolfe Tone memorial movement but was then embarrassed by the mayor’s announcement that he intended organising a large welcoming celebration for Queen Victoria and so decided to offer his resignation to City Hall. However, John O’Leary dissuaded Allan from doing so (he deemed the Queen’s visit to be politically insignificant). This prompted Gonne to fund Griffith to blacklist all corporation officials who took part in the royalist demonstration.85 As a result, Allan lost his position as the leader of the Wolfe Tone Clubs in June 1900 in the same week as the United Irish League set up a central executive in Dublin and officially declared itself to be the supporting body of John Redmond and the Irish Party. Thereafter, Griffith also broke up a meeting in the Rotunda and gathered about 2,000 people to break up a relatively small rally in the Phoenix Park in an attempt to prevent the UIL from establishing branches in Dublin.86

      These activities, funded by Gonne, reflected a peculiar and longstanding dynamic to the revolutionary underground in Ireland. In acting as a thorn in the side to moderate nationalist politicians, it frequently served unionists by diverting attention away from the manner in which they were being politically protected the most in the manner of oligarchs by the exercise of the golden rule in society. During the Queen’s visit, Griffith published bitter United Irishman editorials against the Irish Party’s willingness to pledge their allegiance to ‘The Famine Queen’, took part in Irish Socialist Republican Party street brawls with the police (Griffith was a skilled boxer)87 and succeeded in getting himself arrested twice and his journal prosecuted.88 Griffith’s willingness to engage in street brawls was probably influenced by deep frustration in his personal life at this time. The previous winter, he was unable to save his father from the shame of being forced to enter the workhouse while his beloved older sister had just died from tuberculosis.89

      T.D. Sullivan MP, a mayor of Dublin during the Land League days, knew the Griffith family slightly during the mid-1880s but he had recently announced his intention to retire from politics. He responded to the prosecution of the United Irishman by pointing out that it was an insignificant cultural nationalist organ of Maud Gonne’s that did not represent a dangerous political movement. Therefore, it was absolutely ridiculous for Dublin Castle to have treated it, or, indeed, to have drawn great political attention to it, in the way that