In the past, IRB and Land League revolutionaries had cited the Hungarian example of the 1860s in defence of the idea that Parnell’s party should abstain from Westminster and unilaterally establish a parliament in Dublin in an attempt to dictate Irish nationalist terms to the British imperial parliament.11 If the Irish Party had ever taken this option, however, it would have faced total opposition from the Irish banks, the Irish business community, the Irish legal profession and the country’s principal property owners (who directed the militias of Ireland),12 placing it in a completely powerless and self-defeating position. Twenty years later, nothing had essentially changed in this regard. Nevertheless, Griffith revived the idea. Michael Davitt’s career partly explains why this was done.
The concordat established during the mid-1880s between the British government and the Catholic Church regarding the government of Ireland and the preservation of the Union later encouraged twentieth-century British government officials to look back fondly upon this time as marking the birth of ‘the Ireland that we made’.13 However, Michael Davitt’s success, as an accredited lay representative of Archbishop Walsh, in convincing Pope Leo XIII to grant the leader of the Irish College in Rome official diplomatic status as the sole intermediary between the Irish Catholic hierarchy and the Vatican, independent of any British political arrangement or the status of the Catholic Church in the rest of the United Kingdom (a situation which lasted from 1886 up until 1929),14 meant that the international organisation of the Catholic Church, especially the religious orders, had provided Irishmen with a diplomatic outlet outside the confines of the British Empire for the very first time in modern history. This was a significant development because irrespective of the church’s great conservatism and the papacy’s relative lack of clout in international affairs, Catholic diplomacy was naturally very well informed about the international political order as well as highly professional and securely independent in nature. It did not exist in a world of revolutionary make-believe or cloak-and-dagger conspiracies. Conterminous developments within Irish-America reflected this reality.
From the 1884 American presidential election onwards, Irish-American politicians (political friends of Davitt) emphasised the potentially great contribution to be made to the American Republic specifically by the Roman Catholic Church and Catholic schools. In turn, they abandoned their previous focus of acting as critical ‘fenian’ spokesmen on Anglo-American relations.15 Reflecting the positive state of Anglo-American relations, over one hundred US congressmen of Irish descent expressed appreciation for Gladstone during 1886 for announcing his willingness to introduce a Government of Ireland bill in parliament.16 Simultaneously, John Devoy lost his career as a newspaper editor and relative significance as an Irish-American public figure. By 1903, the American AOH, without formally expressing opposition to the Irish Party, was deliberately distinguishing itself from the United Irish League of America because the latter body had grown closer to the British business community in New York than to the American Catholic hierarchy (needless to say, all non-naturalised Irishmen in the United States were still British citizens). By targeting this Catholic AOH readership, Devoy was able to launch a very successful newspaper in September 1903, the Gaelic American (New York). Together with Davitt, Devoy expressed appreciation for Griffith’s Hungarian Policy and, more or less, called for an end to the old Fenian tradition of political anti-Catholicism.17 As Devoy was still its paymaster, the IRB in Ireland followed suit. In a sense, this brought the revolutionary underground on both sides of the Atlantic into line with the Catholic Church’s diplomatic role in Anglo-American relations as it had developed since the mid-1880s.
Just prior to beginning his Hungarian series, Griffith had argued that nationalist revolutionaries should aim to ‘capture the municipal administration of all Ireland’ as a means of putting pressure upon the Irish Party to abstain from the imperial parliament and make a stand for Irish independence.18 Griffith’s idea of turning local government office into a platform for promoting this idea was one that failed to impress Michael Davitt, Mark Ryan and John O’Leary when he discussed it with them, however.19 All bar the last few of Griffith’s articles on the Hungarian theme dealt exclusively with recounting the Hungarian struggle for independence after 1848 involving parliamentarians and republican rebels. This was done primarily to influence the IRB and ex-Land League readership. Regarding this body of opinion, Griffith judged that ‘it is the parallel rather than the logic which I think will most powerfully affect’ them.20 In particular, he hoped that this historical narrative would help to remind ‘his compatriots’ in the IRB that there was a practical ‘alternative to armed resistance’ that could bring about political freedom.21 This was a fairly reasonable hope.
Since its inception, the IRB was nominally committed to creating a volunteer force for Irish nationalist purposes. However, it had never been a movement led by the landed gentry; the traditional creators of such volunteer corps. Instead, it was a movement of obscure lower-class political activists whose secret social networks frequently overlapped with British military figures, who owned much property in Ireland, as well as the country’s police forces. Although the IRB had nominally been the most numerous Irish political organisation prior to the 1880s, like the British Chartist phenomenon which preceded it, its lack of control over public opinion, or impact on political elites, usually relegated it an insignificant position beyond having acted as ‘a political school’ for some notable individuals who went on to achieve more significant careers in other directions.22 Those who left the organisation frequently justified their decision on the grounds of having grown ‘weary to death of playing roles and striving to roll impossible balls up impossible hills’.23 Some who remained spoke sadly of their frustrated determination ‘to get in a blow at the power which has been banging me about the head—in common with my brethren—since I was born’.24
The political bankruptcy of the IRB’s position hitherto lay in its response to British state centralisation. A brief debate in Chartist circles during the early 1840s as to whether or not ‘physical force’ was needed to back up the ‘moral force’ of their ignored petitions for reform had been elevated by British political leaders into an ideological standpoint to counter any verbal challenges to the constitution.25 As a result, the IRB, in perpetually speaking of the moral justice of a rebellion, was essentially playing the same political game as those British elites that it professed to oppose. This made its existence a product of British security considerations as much as it was a genuine vehicle for sincere young Irish nationalists to attempt to come more fully to terms with the political society that they inhabited and, in particular, the ready-made debates that had been prepared for them. As both participants and auxiliaries to public Irish movements, members of the IRB frequently displayed considerable talent in initiating significant new departures, at least on the level of political debate. This was often done as a preliminary step to embarking on different careers. Griffith essentially stepped into this role during 1904 just as Davitt had done twenty-three years previously. There was good reason to expect that the IRB would follow Griffith’s lead. The almost entirely new and slim-line IRB organisation established in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War was based entirely around the Gaelic League. Although some republicans disliked the Gaelic League’s very conservative and avowedly non-political leadership, they nevertheless accepted it as their principal forum. The thought of engaging in conspiratorial work was neither entertained nor suggested. Over 50 per cent of the Gaelic League’s membership were civil servants or national school teachers who worked for British state institutions, while its IRB membership was drawn mostly from that 25 per cent who worked as clerks or shop-assistants.26
At the time, Davitt was arguing that the vote of Catholic politicians of Irish descent in America had much more importance in the context of British international relations than Irish politicians’ vote in Westminster. Griffith cited Davitt’s argument to defend the idea that international Catholic diplomacy could aid the ‘Hungarian Policy’.27 This ignored the fact, however,