10.The ‘Sinn Féin People’s Bank Limited’ at 6 Harcourt Street had a twelve-year history before its suppression in March 1921. Reflecting the unpopularity of Griffith’s ideal of an Irish takeover of the country’s financial institutions, no effort was ever made to revive it. Irish Independent (1921)
11.Griffith being celebrated after the end of nine-months imprisonment (November 1920–July 1921) he received for leading Dáil Eireann. The summer of 1921 marked the peak of Sinn Féin’s popularity. Daily Mirror (1921)
12.In London with Mark Ryan, Eamon Duggan and Bishop Joseph MacRory while preparing to negotiate an unpopular and virtually preordained Anglo-Irish agreement (October 1921). Daily Sketch (1921)
13.Waiting in vain for the train to start: a frustrated Griffith on his way to Sligo (April 1922). Nationalisation of the railways was one of Griffith’s plans to combat general poverty by promoting an infrastructure for business and employment in Ireland. Irish Independent (1922)
14.This contemporary political cartoon represented the common perception that the treaty agreement was an arrangement with an insufficient grounding, thus making it a potential death trap for Irish politicians. UCC Multi-text
15.Shots fired over Griffith’s grave following his burial (August 1922). On the left looking pensively into the grave is Michael Collins, Griffith’s former finance minister. The last leader of the IRB alongside Harry Boland, Collins seems to have been the only National Army officer at the graveside to keep his head uncovered as a mark of respect. In Boland’s opinion, ‘Griffith made us all’. (National Library of Ireland, Griffith papers)
16.Ida Griffith and Nevin Griffith (a future barrister) photographed around the time of their father’s death. (National Library of Ireland, Griffith papers)
17.A Dublin Opinion cartoon representing the difficulties that Griffith faced during April 1922. W.T. Cosgrave would express the opinion that Griffith died primarily due to overwork and stress. Dublin Opinion (1922)
18.A portrait of Griffith by Leo Whelan R.H.A. that was unveiled in Leinster House on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the formation of Dáil Eireann (21 January 1944) by Bishop Fogarty, the former Sinn Féin Party treasurer. This was one of three portraits of ‘Founders of the Dáil’ that was commissioned by a committee that consisted of W.T. Cosgrave, Joseph McGrath, Richard Mulcahy, James Montgomery, T.F. O’Sullivan and Senator Barniville. The other portraits were of Michael Collins and Kevin O’Higgins.
Introduction
I first became interested in the subject of Arthur Griffith when researching an undergraduate, social history dissertation on crime in Dublin during the mid-to-late Victorian period. Whether due to the phenomenon of unreported crime or inadequacies of contemporary statisticians, I found that records actually indicated that there was little or no crime in Dublin city during the 1870s (if that can be believed). Therefore, my initial immature vision of analysing Victorian Dublin life with a Charles Dickens’ style social consciousness could not be pursued much further. What I did find, however, were cartons of Dublin police reports about nationalist protest demonstrations and the like. These records excited my historical imagination into addressing the subject of the Fenian movement, as they presented a very different and much more interesting picture of its world to what I had already acquired from the standard historical textbooks. In among these decaying police records, covering the period 1872–92, were reports of the movements of a teenage Arthur Griffith, while he was still in proverbial short pants or not long beyond that stage of personal development. He was engaged in debates relating to the Land League and a nascent British socialist movement. This was the world of Michael Davitt and William Morris, not that of Eamon DeValera or Winston Churchill, yet this was evidently Griffith’s proverbial world at the outset of his political career.
The subject of the undergraduate dissertation was later expanded into a postgraduate thesis and this became a basis for a study entitled The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood From the Land League to Sinn Féin (Dublin, 2005), which I wrote to get my PhD thesis out of my system, hopefully for good. However, it was then suggested to me that I should examine a later time period, from the beginnings of Sinn Féin up to the early years of the Irish state and, again, make the IRB the focus; in other words, start examining the world of Michael Collins and company. I was still hankering for the idea of pursuing more studies of the Victorian period, especially debates on church-state relations and how this impacted on the diverse political careers of men such as George Henry Moore, Thomas D’Arcy McGee (within the Irish diaspora) and the young John Dillon. It then occurred to me, however, that I had already found an interesting and little known link between these two time periods in history. That link was the life of Arthur Griffith. A specialist on the nineteenth century could also potentially tackle that subject in a manner that many historians of the twentieth-century Irish state may have been a little less equipped to address. I was already familiar with the history of Dublin in 1871, into which Arthur Griffith was born, and thus I felt had a good grounding for analysing the subject. In addition, I had much experience studying debates within the nationalist community in Dublin up until the formation of Sinn Féin by this same Mr Griffith in 1905. A logical progression from my past research, therefore, would be to examine the evolution of that Victorian world in the light of Griffith’s career up until 1922. This seemed like a worthwhile exercise, even if my conception of international relations in history was still rooted more in examining the worlds of Napoleon and Gladstone than that of the various statesmen of what twentieth-century historians not inaccurately refer to as ‘the interwar years’.
It may be a cliché but it is also true to note that Europe was generally perceived to be a very different, as well as more ‘democratic’, place after the First World War than it had been before. If one abiding lesson was learnt from my past research on the Parnell era it was the reality that one cannot speak of concepts such as ‘democracy’, ‘liberalism’, ‘nationalism’, ‘republicanism’ or ‘socialism’ during the nineteenth century as having the same meaning, or currency, as they may be said to have had ever since the First World War. That is partly why the political history of the nineteenth century is so interesting. Aldous Huxley may have coined the catchphrase ‘brave new world’ in 1932 but people a century earlier—when the very concept of modernity was in the process of being born—felt themselves to be living in precisely such a world without the aid of hallucinatory drugs. This may explain why historians of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries frequently seem to be speaking a different language: the period of the First World War stands between them as a bridge that remains uncertain how to cross. When applied to Ireland, this historical conundrum can have peculiar results.
A common perception of Arthur Griffith has been voiced by the premier historian of the post-1917 Sinn Féin Party, when he suggested that ‘among Irish nationalists who fought against British rule he was unusual, if not unique, in one respect: by the time of his death he had achieved most of his objectives.’1 Griffith probably remains best known to the reading public for signing an Anglo-Irish agreement in December 1921. However, he did not live to see the actual implementation of that agreement, a year later, with the establishment in December 1922 of the Irish Free State; the precursor to the current Irish state known as Éire. Within many accounts of Irish nationalism during the twentieth century is the idea that Griffith ‘achieved most of his objectives’ precisely because a ‘long revolution’ began in Ireland during the First World War, but Griffith actually represented a compromise upon the ideals of that ‘revolution’ because he accepted the terms of the Anglo-Irish agreement of December 1921. Supposedly, this not only made Griffith an unusual man but also a ‘counter-revolutionary’ figure.2 A revolution is inherently a dubious historical concept, however, because it implies the complete destruction of a past and the invention of a new future; in other words, a complete end to a sense of chronological time. When in human history can such a development be said to have truly come about?
The sense was certainly alive among Griffith’s own contemporaries that his career fell between two stools—namely, those who are acknowledged leaders of society and those who do not