While this was not essentially a popular Catholic position,59 the success of the Jesuits in equating ‘Irish ideas’ with a Christian–democratic conception of church–state relations was made clear by the birth of a tradition whereby politicians who declared their support for the Irish language generally did so only as a means of indicating, or reaffirming, their support for the churches’ educational interests without running the risk of openly saying so and thereby providing an avenue for ideologues (be they nationalists or socialists) to mount an effective political criticism of the Christian–democratic position. Meanwhile, in William Martin Murphy, a very successful business entrepreneur, dedicated financier of Catholic projects and political associate of T.M. Healy and John Sweetman (Griffith’s new patron), the Jesuits found an ideal role model for presenting their vision of Irish economic development. Although never a popular man, Murphy was a highly professional figure whose success in establishing the Irish Independent as a non-party organ during 1904 and making it a far more popular newspaper in Catholic Ireland than the Irish Party’s Freeman’s Journal (whose sales perpetually dropped thereafter) marked a significant new departure;60 one that actually provided an avenue for Griffith to find an audience of his own. Although Murphy’s followers supported the existing British imperial economy, they had a more urban appeal than the Irish Party, whose members notoriously combined farmers’ interests with a slavish identification with the culture of the British state. The role of Murphy’s followers in encouraging a real element of social consciousness to Gaelic League propaganda could also make it appealing to young urban intellectuals. It was essentially the latter dynamic, however, that ultimately created a significant counter reaction from within the Gaelic League’s own ranks.61
The first substantial critique of this trend in Irish politics came from Frank Hugh O’Donnell, the former United Irishman patron who later became a historical lecturer for the Gaelic League of London.62 In The Ruin of Education in Ireland, O’Donnell argued that the Catholic education system was producing lay graduates who were ill equipped for entering various modern professions and civil services, being better suited to entering religious orders or else acting as teachers in schools where they had to surrender all personal and intellectual freedoms to the local bishop as much as any Catholic curate. Claiming to speak on behalf of dissatisfied Irish national-school teachers and unemployed Catholic university graduates everywhere, O’Donnell argued that the Jesuits who were directing the Irish educational movement were masking the fact that the church’s ambition to control education was purely self-aggrandising, partly in their desire to create more priests, and that its ambition was also governed by avarice—charging school fees and opposing the nation-state policy of free education—rather than any altruistic wish for the good of Irish society. O’Donnell suggested that the European Catholic experience demonstrated that the reason why Catholic involvement in state universities had been discouraged for the past century, ever since the rise of Napoleon, was that it had always stifled productive critical analyses and creative thinking for laymen, if not for theologians, in the social science departments.63 Owing to Archbishop Walsh’s prominence on the National Education Board, these arguments were considered as too polemical for virtually any Irish political commentator to touch. Reflecting this, Griffith would not embrace such a polemical viewpoint, while O’Donnell, who was formerly close to T.P. O’Connor, was reputedly in the pay of London Tories.64 The counter arguments being put forward by UCD students were not particularly persuasive either, however.
Tom Kettle was a celebrated figure among UCD academics and students because, as an essayist, he was perceived to have considerable literary skill in defending that idea to which each of them were necessarily wedded in a career sense; namely, that Catholic theories of social justice had an all-embracing applicability and the ethics of a Christian humanism was inherently more beneficial to society than a political rationalism.65 This gave Kettle an appeal in contemporary Ireland comparable to that of the Englishman G.K. Chesterton, who considered the independent Irish clericalist politician T.M. Healy to be ‘the most serious intellect in the present House of Commons’.66 In his contributions to Griffith’s and other journals, Kettle mirrored Chesterton’s defence of Christian ethics in literature, albeit in a less inspired and humourless way.67 On being appointed to a professorship of economics at Maynooth College by Archbishop Walsh, Kettle would reject the relevance of Griffith’s analyses of the Irish Party’s support of unionist taxation practices on the grounds that statistics were mere ‘bloodless actualities’ that meant nothing to the heart.68 In an attempt to justify Catholic social theory as being more valuable to society than economic analyses, Kettle would also argue (to the delight of ambitious UCD students such as Kevin O’Higgins) that, ultimately, a government meant nothing more than the compassionate hearts of ‘you and me and the man around the corner’ and that ‘the wise custom of scholasticism’, inspired by St Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas’ philosophies of education, was intellectually superior to statistical analyses.69
Accused by Griffith of being tongue-tied by his political loyalty to the Irish Party (for which he became the party’s official finance spokesman),70 Kettle’s celebrated career in Irish Catholic academia was actually honour bound to Archbishop Walsh, whose patronage extended to allowing Kettle to become the sole layman to attend secret monthly Dublin diocesan convocations on how to increase the temporal power of the church in politics.71 Kettle’s literary role as a dilettante perhaps reflected the extent to which he was expected as a Catholic university academic to act more as a lay defender of the church’s interests than as a purely independent professional. An essential context to his circle’s grievances, however, was the belief that a long-term legacy of historic British discrimination against Catholics up until shortly before the British state effectively became secularist was that those Catholics who now wished to enter the professions were ill equipped to capitalise fully upon the rise of a modern professional society to a central place in British political and economic life in the wake of the UK educational reforms of 1880 and the resulting expansion of the civil service.72 The Catholic University student who protested this point most eloquently during 1903 was Edward (later Eamon) DeValera,73 who was destined to replace Kettle as the chief lay-confidant of Archbishop Walsh. Reflecting the logic of O’Donnell’s critique, however, DeValera initially felt that he had no career options except to move to England to teach in a Benedictine school as a stepping-stone to becoming a priest. This ambition of DeValera’s was partly shaped by his belief that priests ‘are the natural leaders of the people and are looked up to as such’,74 as if the professional leaders of Catholic society were inherently the clergy themselves. Being denied this opportunity due to his illegitimacy, DeValera became but one of many well-educated Irish Catholic youths who combined part-time school teaching in Ireland with voluntary activism within the Gaelic League while acting under close priestly supervision. As the editor of a small review, Griffith himself was able to sidestep this need for church patronage to a significant degree and so hold tenaciously to his storybook Young Ireland ideal, while political developments