Having taken part in the negotiations surrounding the 1893 Government of Ireland bill, Sweetman realised that the politics of home rule was a meaningless charade that was deliberately launched by Gladstone only to mislead the Irish public regarding how the country was really being governed. Disgusted by the fact that the Irish Party was now subsidised largely by the British Liberal Party, after failing to persuade the Irish Party to withdraw from Westminster, Sweetman resigned from parliament in 1895 and helped W.M. Murphy to establish his first newspaper, the Daily Nation. This championed the Healyite policy of decentralising authority within the Irish Party’s support body and placing more power in its branches, which were governed mostly by priests.28 During the Boer War controversy, Sweetman had formed the Irish Financial Reform League and the General Council of County Councils to protest against the over-taxation of Ireland and to encourage business activism in local government.29 When Griffith was publishing his initial Hungarian articles in the United Irishman, Sweetman wrote to the Freeman’s Journal calling upon all Irish Party supporters to pay very close attention to the series. Reflecting Sweetman’s influence as one of the richest Irish Catholics (he was an estate and brewery owner as well as a major railway shareholder), Griffith was glad to note that the initial response to Sweetman’s suggestion ‘seems to indicate that the Parliamentary Party is not prepared to oppose the Hungarian policy very strongly. It does not commit them to any opposition.’30
Sweetman’s London Catholic friends were the first group to support Griffith’s Hungarian Policy. They had organised themselves into the Irish National Society of London. This was a small breakaway body from the United Irish League of Great Britain (the Irish Party’s fund collection body in Britain, led by T.P. O’Connor) and it was also associated with the Gaelic League of London. The Irish National Society received a special blessing from Pope Leo XIII after it opposed the Irish Party on the grounds of the latter’s failure (at the insistence of Liberal Party) to support a Tory bill at Westminster providing for state support for denominational education, including all Catholic schools.31 Led by a wealthy architect Thomas Martin, the Irish National Society was closely associated with the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster who, for a time, ordered that the United Irish League of Great Britain be no longer permitted to use Catholic halls and schools as venues for its meetings.32 Through this channel, various historic letters of Monsignor Persico of Rome to Cardinal Manning of Westminster were leaked to Griffith’s United Irishman. The publication of these letters was meant to show that Irish Party figures were wrong to have criticised the church at the time of a papal rescript against an Irish agrarian agitation that demanded rent reductions during the late 1880s because this decision was (supposedly) not popular in Vatican circles. These letters were later republished in Catholic newspapers throughout the continent in order to present the Catholic Church as having democratic sympathies, thereby echoing the thrust of a notable papal encyclical of 1891. Griffith himself characterised them as proof that the Irish Party had always been a ‘Castle Catholic’ party whose pro-British leanings had caused them to become divorced from a true sense of social justice.33
During the summer of 1904, Martin’s London society appealed to John Daly, the most well known republican politician in Ireland, and to T.M. Healy to help them organise an opposition movement to the Irish Party. This initiative won Healy’s sympathy. Reflecting his ambiguous relationship with the Irish Party, however, Healy felt that he could not come out openly in support of a rival party as, rather like the bishops, ‘my own share in politics must I fear be individual’ or, at least, appear to the general Irish public to be so.34 In August, Martin’s friends travelled to Dublin to meet Griffith, Edward Martyn and aldermen Thomas Kelly and Walter Cole of Cumann na nGaedhael. Cole had recently worked with Sweetman and Charles Dawson, an ex-mayor of Dublin, in promoting the idea of holding an Irish national industrial exhibition as a riposte to Dublin Castle’s international exhibition of British industry.35 As the Dublin representative of the Irish National Society, Cole now convened a conference to discuss the idea of calling for the withdrawal of all Irish MPs from Westminster. In preparation for this, Griffith himself travelled to London to organise the visit of thirty local Gaelic Leaguers to this Dublin meeting. This was done with the cooperation of Art O’Brien and Michael MacWhite, two well-educated associates of Martin’s in London who were also growing dissatisfied with the Irish Party.36
This circle evidently felt hopeful that if Griffith’s articles were publicised more widely through being republished as a pamphlet, they could win the cooperation of known political allies of the Catholic hierarchy such as Michael Davitt, Eoin MacNeill and D.P. Moran.37 To this end, John Sweetman purchased the vast majority of the United Irishman shares that winter and financed the publication of Griffith’s articles as a pamphlet.38 Due to Sweetman’s close association with Daniel Mannix, the president of Maynooth College (who would encourage further publications of Griffith’s writings),39 much of Catholic Ireland, lay and clerical, were inclined to examine its contents and The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland became a top-selling publication, selling tens-of-thousands of copies in a very short space of time.
Griffith was not blind to what political interests he now represented. While he had directly opposed the stance of Archbishop Walsh on education and criticised Maynooth College for promoting royalist attitudes in the not too distant past,40 he would not do so again. He also understood, with delight, the political significance of Redmond’s concern at Maynooth College’s acceptance of the Hungarian Policy:
Another fact, and one fraught with significance for the future of Ireland, is that the students of Maynooth, a few days ago, after a prolonged debate, decided in favour of the Hungarian Policy as the policy for Ireland. The future is with us and we face it with confidence.41
As early as December 1904, Griffith was writing to Sweetman that the Catholic clergy in Dublin and Leinster were ‘all strongly advocating the policy in private’; that the Irish News (Belfast), associated with the new West Belfast MP Joseph Devlin (who was also president of the revived AOH), was becoming sympathetic; as was the Scottish section of the United Irish League. In addition, he felt that the expected victory by the National Council of ‘the most compact and intelligent party’ in Dublin City Hall combined with Sweetman’s intention to promote Griffith’s policy at the General Council of County Councils would give them a strong platform to build upon. This led Griffith to view the overall course of current affairs as ‘foreshadowing the general adoption of the Hungarian policy’.42 Banking on this expectation, Griffith finally mustered the courage to propose to Maud Sheehan (she accepted). It would be several more years, however, before Griffith could afford to marry, not least because his proposed programme would fail to find as many supporters as he had hoped. This was due to a fundamental paradox that it embodied.
Griffith’s Hungarian Policy was attuned to Catholic disaffection with Westminster and the fact that Catholic Church diplomacy in the English-speaking, or Anglo-American, world was now of much more significance to Ireland’s future than whatever preoccupation still existed amongst continental European powers regarding any potential strategic significance of Ireland.43 However, its argument still had little or no relevance to the dynamics of Irish party politics. This was because of its retrospective focus and emphasis on an idea that nobody except the Tories, the self-styled ‘unionists’ of contemporary Irish party politics, was essentially prepared to support. This was that the Irish Party had led itself into a political ‘cul-de-sac’ in 1886 through committing itself to Gladstone’s programme and that the ‘vanity and selfishness’ of its leaders was ‘preventing them from admitting the truth and retracing their steps’.44 It was all very well for Griffith to emphasise that the Irish public had spent over £600,000 to keep the Irish Party in Westminster ever since 1886 only to see a commensurate increase in the imperial over-taxation of Ireland.45 This had indeed been Gladstone’s intention. In itself, however, this did not offer a solution, only a critique. Likewise,