A weakness in Kettle’s critique was his deliberate decision to ignore Griffith’s point about the Irish Party’s support for both Gladstone’s imperial fiscal policy and the over-taxation of Ireland. Instead, he focused purely upon Griffith’s treatment of Hungarian history. Kettle emphasised that the Hungarians’ decision to abstain from the Austrian parliament during the 1860s was the result of a process of constitutional experimentation (namely, the possibility of creating new representative assemblies) that had been taking place in central Europe ever since 1848, whereas ‘the parliament we have to confront is not precisely a novice’. Kettle also repeated an argument against abstention that the Irish Party had made after Parnell’s death. He argued that Bohemia was a closer parallel to Ireland’s case than that of Hungary and yet the Czechs, after having tried the abstentionist policy for a number of years, decided that they were better off materially in the Imperial Parliament.89 Griffith did not agree with this assessment, however. He typified Kettle’s critique as being motivated by the simple fact that he ‘writes from the parliamentarian side’. Although he agreed with Kettle that the policy required to be thought out ‘clearly and exhaustively in terms of Irish politics’ if it was to be of any benefit, he comforted himself with the idea that ‘even if the people did fail it, there is consolation in the thought that it could not possibly leave the country worse off than it found it’.90
Griffith’s intended trump card in defence of his programme was his claim that the contemporary home rule movement was slowly but surely disintegrating by becoming divorced from its political roots, having abandoned its initial nationalist radicalism, at Gladstone’s request, during 1885–6.91 Griffith could only really justify this claim, however, by emphasising the potency of IRB–Land League radicalism during 1879–1882. For example, John Morley’s Life of Gladstone was quoted to show that Britain’s temporary abandonment of the Transvaal to the Boers in 1881 had been justified on the grounds of a felt need to keep sufficient troops in Ireland to prevent the possibility of Britain losing control of the country to the Irish National Land League.92 The reality of the time, however, was that this British political insecurity reflected little more than a fear of the potential political consequences of an eclipse of the power of landed gentry in Ireland, if not in Britain. A real security danger to the state can hardly be said to have existed during 1881. The IRB had been at its absolute all-time peak in terms of its financial, numerical and military strength at this time (curiously, the southern landed gentry, mostly Tory in politics, were simultaneously arming themselves), but neither a pitched republican battle with the aristocracy nor a nationalist rebellion had been contemplated, notwithstanding the imprisonment without trial of over one thousand Land League officials that winter.93
The most significant aspect of the political consensus established during the 1880s was that the Irish Party wholly agreed with the British cabinet that any changes in government personnel in Ireland should only ever be done very slowly, cautiously and gradually in order to prevent the risk of any possibility of disorder or sedition.94 For this very reason, there was really no question of Irish local government bodies ever being used as a revolutionary platform in the manner that Griffith suggested. Furthermore, there was also the unavoidable professional reality that, from 1886 onwards, it was virtually a career necessity for members of all British and Irish political parties, as well as all lawyers and academics (including historians) within the universities (who were themselves civil servants), to accept the consensus established during 1886. Its provenance was no longer of any significance with the passage of time compared to its actual establishment and, in turn, its increasing hold over the public imagination. Essentially realising this, Griffith soon modified his Hungarian Policy. Instead, he launched on behalf of the National Council, a nominal organisation that was still Griffith’s only platform, what he typified as ‘the Sinn Féin Policy’. This was deliberately done to coincide with the launch of the Irish ‘Industrial Development Association’ (IDA) in November 1905. As a counter offensive, Dublin Castle and the Irish Party soon persuaded the National Board of Education to withdraw state funding from the Gaelic League.95
In launching the Sinn Féin Policy, Griffith explicitly sought to capitalise upon the existence of the Gaelic League. He argued that although ‘the end of education is to make men patriots’ such values did not exist in Ireland outside of a British state context and, therefore, it was essential to support the programme of ‘a friend of mine in London’ (Thomas Martin) to make voluntary schools in Ireland the basis for an Irish national education system. Such a goal, Griffith maintained, could be supported ‘by the Irish people throughout the world’,96 or, in other words, those Catholics of Irish birth or descent within the English-speaking Catholic diaspora who gave their money to the church to promote Catholic schools. Upon this basis, Douglas Hyde would soon visit the United States to collect funds for the Gaelic League.
As he was an ideological nationalist at heart, Griffith was certainly not the most suitable Irish candidate to promote this ideal of education. His motive was reflected by a series of articles on various small nations in Europe that were written in an attempt to highlight ‘what can little Ireland do’. In this series, Griffith presented most contemporary European nations as having more progressive attitude towards education than Britain due to their having a broader conception of the non-denominational basis of the Christian-democratic tradition. For instance, from this premise, Griffith suggested that ‘Holland breeds Protestants and Catholics but she breeds no bigots’ while, by inference, British secularism was a comparatively divisive and restrictive influence upon the development of political societies.97 Following Sweetman’s orders never to treat religion as a problematic political question, by 1905 Griffith was essentially giving implicit support to the idea that the churches could not possibly be at fault in politics. This led W.B. Yeats and George Moore to typify Griffith as having shifted his position under the new Sinn Féin banner to one analogous to that of the Christian Scientists, which was a contemporary Protestant reaction against secularist rationalism in Britain.98 For Griffith, however, the essential question was simply to first acquire a political platform from his Catholic patrons on the question of education from which he could then begin to champion his vision of a political (i.e. economic) Irish nationalism. Without doing so, Griffith could have no patrons or platform whatsoever.
W.M. Murphy’s Irish Independent once typified the establishment of the IDA as a direct outgrowth of the work of the Gaelic League’s Industrial Committee. Reflecting this, Griffith’s motive in launching the Sinn Féin Policy was evidently a desire to acquire a seniority of influence over that body. Noting that ‘agriculture in Ireland is resolving itself into the cattle trade’ alone, Griffith highlighted that the post-famine Irish economy had been so manipulated by the British government that the rural economy existed almost entirely to provide meat for the English market, while the urban Irish population was, in turn, being fed entirely by consumable English imports. At both levels, England alone was deriving full economic benefit from this,99 but Griffith believed that ‘there is no reason whatever’ that this system should be made permanent. In particular, Griffith believed that it could be undone if Irish businessmen accepted the ideals of the American economist Henry Carey, the German economist Frederich List and several others on ‘the national system of political economy’. These writers ‘brushed aside the fallacies of Adam Smith and his tribe’ by positing that the prerogatives of an imperial economy should not be allowed to dictate all government policies. As the economic history of Europe ever since 1860 had proved, this economic philosophy suited Britain but no other European nation.100
Griffith’s essential concern here