Griffith had called previously in the United Irishman for the formation of a new movement that would commit itself primarily to removing all royalist flunkeys from Irish municipal politics.93 These campaigns reflected a desire to undo a legacy of the 1892 general election, the first post-1886 general election to be held. This was a widespread tendency to abandon the old pledge of the Irish National League, set during 1882 and partly sustained by the Plan of Campaign of 1886–90, that nationalists should not take government offices.94 The revival of the sectarian Ancient Order of Hibernians among the beleaguered Ulster Catholic population after 1904 would see this idea re-emerge as a factor in political debate.95 It essentially remained a minority position, however, that, in the meantime, was championed mostly by Griffith’s nascent political movement in Dublin. This was also the context for the launch of an anti-enlistment movement, for which Gonne financed the printing of 40,000 circulars and Fr Kavanagh declared the Boer War to be an unjust war according to the teachings of the Catholic Church.
Gonne also financed the creation of two new cultural nationalist organisations that were founded at the Celtic Literary Society meeting rooms in Dublin. The first was the Daughters of Erin, a small women’s nationalist organisation, and the second was ‘Cumann na nGaedhael (Confederation of the Gaels)’, which expressed support for promoting the Irish language and held joint social functions with the Daughters of Erin. Only a few dozen people were present at its initial meeting, at which Griffith was appointed its provisional leader.96 When its first convention was held, however, Griffith was not elected to any position. Instead, its executive consisted mostly of individuals who were elected in absentia due to their status as figureheads in the pro-Boer agitation, namely John O’Leary (president) and Fr Kavanagh, John MacBride, Robert Johnston and James Egan (vice-presidents).97
With Gonne’s support, Fr Kavanagh also formed a branch of the Celtic Literary Society in Cork and subsequently wrote to the United Irishman stressing that the new movement must not be allowed to fall under the influence of men who held ‘un-Catholic doctrines’.98 In the light of his previous quarrel with Griffith, Fr Kavanagh may have used his influence to exclude him from its executive. This stance was motivated primarily, however, by a desire to marginalise all political activists of John Daly’s generation who, through their association with surviving 1798 centenary clubs or trade and labour associations, were either sympathetic to the early radicalism of the United Irish League or the old school of fenian political anticlericalism. To marginalise all such men, Cumann na nGaedhael sought recruits exclusively among young members of the Gaelic League. Early adherents such as Terence MacSwiney and Liam de Róiste of Fr Kavanagh’s Celtic Literary Society in Cork, as well as Bulmer Hobson and Denis McCullough in Belfast, made no secret of their distaste for political activities of the preceding generation. It was not a coincidence that this formation of Cumann na nGaedhael coincided with the establishment of D.P. Moran’s Leader. This was a new Catholic newspaper that, although nominally an independent organ, existed to propagate a self-confident cultural nationalism that sought to undo, or screen over, all the divisions that had erupted in Irish Party circles after 1890.99
During the height of the pro-Boer campaign in the summer of 1900, Griffith had enjoyed the excitement of being brought by Robert Johnston, a wealthy Belfast republican, to Paris to meet Maud Gonne and her war-mongering French political associates.100 A year later, however, Griffith was writing to John MacBride that there was ‘not the ghost of a chance of my being able to go over’ to Paris again and that he was ‘all alone in Dublin now and half-dead’.101 In March 1901, Rooney had fallen terminally ill due to a slum-contracted disease. He died three months later. Coming very shortly after the death of his own sister from the same cause and his father’s incarceration in a workhouse, this hit Griffith particularly hard. Meanwhile, if Griffith’s enthusiasm for the pro-Boer campaign had declined, this was only natural as the centre of the political controversy had shifted far away from Griffith’s orbit, namely to Irish-America.
After expelling T.M. Healy and his clericalist followers from the party, the Irish Party discovered that the UIL, whose branches consisted of many parish priests, was not very willing to contribute to its funds. To counteract this trend, it was decided to send men to the United States to establish an American fund-raising wing of the UIL. Maud Gonne and John MacBride, who had fled from South Africa, went to America on Mark Ryan’s orders. While Griffith believed they were opposing the Irish Party’s mission, they actually worked for the American allies of Michael Davitt. Essentially acting as the Irish Party’s fifth columnist, Davitt had resigned from parliament purely to supervise the development of the Pro-Boer movement. He went to the United States to attempt to shut down the old Clan na Gael organisation of John Devoy, which was currently promoting an American lecture tour for John Daly and no longer supporting John Redmond (the chief ‘independent nationalist’ after 1891) after he rejoined the Irish Party. Devoy complained to MacBride about this situation but the later justified this course of events by stating that Cumann na nGaedhael had been decided upon as the movement of the future, not the old republican networks. Reflecting Maud Gonne’s strategy, he also wrote to the United Irishman that he believed that the public organisations identified with the new Irish-Ireland movement within Ireland itself, such as Cumann na nGaedhael, the Gaelic League and (increasingly) the GAA, were bringing ‘a new soul into Erin’ and he suggested that they adopt a new motto of ‘Sinn Féin’ to describe their objectives.102 At the time, with Gonne’s support, Mark Ryan was proposing to form a new international organisation, under MacBride’s presidency, that would link Irish-American contacts with his own circle in London and Cumann na nGaedhael in Dublin.103 It was intended that this would replace the old Clan na Gael-IRB networks and create a new movement that was more in line with mainstream Irish nationalism.
Not surprisingly, the political outcome of the Pro-Boer movement did not become evident until the Anglo-Boer War ceased in October 1902. That month, the Irish Party’s fortunes were partly secured by the formal establishment of the United Irish League of America while the success of Davitt’s mission meant that the Clan na Gael nearly disbanded altogether. The cessation of the Boer War also brought an end to the funding that had sustained the O’Donnell– Ryan–Gonne–MacBride network and, in turn, the United Irishman. Griffith was therefore left once again in the position of needing financial backers: due to its very limited advertising and sales revenue, the United Irishman had to rely on private donations from shareholders to keep afloat.
Mark Ryan still had sufficient funds to impose his will upon the old IRB organisation and attempt to create a new executive and strategy for that movement. Since the 1901 funeral of James Stephens, he had pressed for uniting his movement with the IRB on the condition that the latter would rebuild itself totally from scratch exclusively among young Cumann na nGaedhael or Gaelic League activists. As a result, P.T. Daly, an active Dublin trade unionist, was simultaneously appointed the first full-time travelling organiser for Cumann na nGaedhael, which soon developed branches in each major Irish and British city, and the secretary, or ‘chief travelling organiser’, of a new IRB organisation in October 1902.104
MacBride would soon call upon Devoy to fund both Griffith’s journal and P.T. Daly’s organisation through the medium of Mark Ryan in London.105 However, Cumann na nGaedhael’s status as a public organisation connected with the new Irish-Ireland movement meant that the necessary funding was more likely to be attained from entirely different quarters. This was a reality that was appreciated most by Maud Gonne. These trends would soon enable Griffith to take his first steps out of the police-supervised world of street protest politics and find a niche for himself in mainstream politics, thereby slowly but surely distancing