On the question of nationalising financial institutions, Griffith realised that to speak of state ownership when there was no separate Irish government was contrary to his own definition of the potential benefits of nationalisation. He viewed nationalisation as a principle of government that was not inherently a good thing but merely a matter that suited current Irish needs, to resist the process of British centralisation.45 The many impasses the Sinn Féin Policy faced on the railways question essentially paled into insignificance, however, compared to the obstacles facing the Sinn Féin Policy of nationalising the banks. Griffith’s approach to this question reflected a major weakness in his reasoning. Griffith usually spoke of nationalisation not as a policy that began at the apex of the Irish commercial world, namely the banks. Instead, he spoke of it as a policy that began at the lowest levels of municipal or county council government and could somehow, in time, be impressed upon commercial elites.46 This was unreasonable, however, because of the nature of party politics and local government bodies as they operated within Ireland. In addition, his National Council was subsidised by as little as £500 a year (or sometimes far less). On such a budget, the best the National Council could do was to issue propaganda or—as would be attempted in the wake of the 1907 exhibition—publish yearbooks of relevant statistical information while patronising small-scale Christmas exhibitions of Irish-made goods.47 The very small scale of such enterprises made Sinn Féin seem ridiculous to many people.
While Griffith ridiculed ‘Irish conservatism’ as the ‘ostrich policy’, supposedly shared equally by Irish Tories and the Irish Party,48 Sweetman’s advice to Griffith that it was not their responsibility as Sinn Féiners to present any direct party political opposition to the Irish Party was an idea that Griffith accepted in practice, even if the tone of his propaganda very often indicated otherwise.49 Meanwhile, Sweetman’s deeply conservative Catholicism and his shareholding in the United Irishman certainly made it an increasingly conservative organ on social issues at least.50 Often, there was little positive for Griffith to focus on politically. This prompted the publication of editorials on minor subjects such as single products as part of the ‘buy Irish’ campaign of the IDA or localised quarrels at Gaelic League events that were chaired by priests unsympathetic to the UIL. Any time potential supporters were elected to local government, Griffith would simply repeat the idea of establishing a national council of 300 representatives and present the UIL rather cynically (owing to the knighting of some of its local government officials) as an organisation whose chief function was to save British loyalists from political extinction.51
Griffith renamed his journal Sinn Féin in April 1906 in an attempt to capitalise upon Douglas Hyde’s successful US fund-raising tour for the Gaelic League and the fact that one of the promoters of Hyde’s tour thereafter expressed a desire to invite a Sinn Féin speaker to America.52 Griffith expected to be invited. Instead, he was bypassed because of some of those same dubious associations that repulsed Alfred Webb from Sinn Féin and that Sweetman simply did not understand.
Griffith continued to promote the anti-enlistment campaign as part of the Sinn Féin Policy. He now justified this campaign primarily on economic grounds, noting that Britain’s imperial wars during the nineteenth century—on the continent, in the Crimea, in Sebastopol, in Afghanistan, in Egypt and in the Transvaal—had never been a direct concern of Ireland, yet the country was forced to contribute many millions of pounds to these war efforts despite the fact that ‘every pound of that Irish gold could have been better spent in Ireland’.53 Simultaneously, Griffith protested that while the police forces in Britain were subject, both administratively and financially, to the control of municipal governments, the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) and the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) were governed directly by Dublin Castle, which was not responsible to Irish municipal authorities, yet these same municipal authorities were forced to issue, collect and pay the taxes for the upkeep of these police forces.54 These were effective criticisms of the dynamics of the highly centralised and unaccountable nature of the imperial administration at Dublin Castle. However, other men promoted the anti-enlistment cause in a very different manner.
In October 1902, to mark the end of the Boer War, obscure Trinity College students founded a new ‘Dungannon Club’ of the IRB. It called openly for the formation of an international alliance of secret revolutionary organisations along anti-British lines in supporting anti-enlistment: ‘a section of Russia, Ireland, India and China have partly together struck on this new policy’, which ‘must be applied … outside Ireland’.55 This propaganda essentially reflected the survival of the Victorian tradition of an overlap between the worlds of Irish imperial war-correspondent journalism, Fenian propaganda and British intelligence programmes. Mirroring developments during the mid-1880s,56 it also led an Indian politician to call upon Griffith, ironically with a request for an introduction to the leadership of the Irish Party.57
The Dungannon Club had recently been extended beyond the confines of Trinity College. With some passive support from George Gavan Duffy, a prominent London barrister who was curious about Sinn Féin, P.S. O’Hegarty, a Cork-born clerk, launched this initiative. Acting on P.T. Daly’s orders, O’Hegarty replaced the elderly figure of Mark Ryan as the London IRB lynchpin and demanded that P.N. Fitzgerald retire in favour of his own brother Sean O’Hegarty.58 O’Hegarty’s instrument to spread the Dungannon Clubs was Bulmer Hobson, a young Protestant Gaelic Leaguer from Belfast who was popular with local cultural nationalists and also maintained an association with Sir Roger Casement, a British Foreign Office official of Irish Party sympathies who acted as his political mentor.59 Hobson was chosen in New York instead of Griffith to represent Sinn Féin in America partly because Patrick MacCartan, the Dublin correspondent of John Devoy’s New York Gaelic American, noted that Griffith was a relatively poor public speaker.60 For the most part, however, it was motivated by Clan na Gael’s need to establish new intermediaries with the IRB.61 Acting under P.T. Daly’s direction, the IRB officially declared itself a supporter of the Sinn Féin Policy in April 1906 to facilitate Hobson’s tour, yet it rejected Griffith’s emphasis on the significance of the precedent of the Renunciation Act of 1783, whereby the imperial parliament was denied the right to legislate for Ireland.62 This was an inconsistent position.
The fallout of Hobson’s American tour was the establishment of The Republic (Belfast). This short-lived journal of the Dungannon Clubs maintained that Irish nationalists’ battle should be ‘not with England, but with the people of Ireland— it is the battle of self-respect … against the moral cowardice, the slavishness, the veneration for any authority however and by whoever assumed—that have marked the people of this country for generations.’63 Behind this republican moralising and revolutionary posturing, however, was a practical refusal to support Griffith in his desire to win Irish Party defectors over to the National Council (The Republic declared the Sinn Féin Policy’s emphasis on local government representation to be futile).
One legacy of the Anglo-Irish consensus of 1884–6 was the rapprochement between the Irish Party and Dublin Castle actually coincided or perhaps even led to a rapprochement between the Irish Party and the IRB.64 The latter moribund organisation had operated on an essentially caretaker executive since October 1902. This was financed on Mark Ryan’s behalf by the equally elderly figure of Robert Johnston of Belfast. On the suggestion of Seamus MacManus (Johnston’s son-in-law) in America, Johnston and his followers had tried to mobilise the Irish AOH organisation behind the Sinn Féin Policy instead of the Irish Party, but P.T. Daly responded by expelling Johnston and his followers from the IRB and also misappropriated American funding rather than let it reach Griffith’s hands.65 John Redmond, while keeping a close watch on Daly, employed F.B. Dineen, a controversial leader of anti-enlistment movement within the GAA,66 to act as a Sinn Féin mole on behalf of the Irish Party.67 This IRB obstructionism helped to ensure that Griffith was not able to capitalise upon the greatest political opportunity that came his way at this time, namely the possibility of many defections from the Irish Party to the Sinn Féin Policy after Redmond and Dillon gave their support to Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell’s deeply unpopular Irish Council Bill of May 1907.
As a permanent settlement of the question of Irish self-government, Birrell proposed making the heads