The fact that Sinn Féin prioritised local government representation as its political platform led Redmond to blame the rate-collecting county councils for all Ireland’s economic woes, including a failure to address the question of over taxation. Griffith retorted that 90 per cent of the taxes collected in Ireland stemmed from the Imperial Parliament’s indirect taxation on goods and services rather than county council rates. He also emphasised that the revenue collected from indirect taxation in England was necessarily granted by law to the local authorities every year in order to improve the services of municipal authorities and to promote local business enterprises, but in Ireland this revenue went directly into the imperial exchequer with no legal provision for any return to Ireland. The local government bodies had no authority or say in this matter. As a result,
The British tax gatherer sits in every dining room in Ireland and stands behind the counter of every public-house, grocery and tobacconists in the land…This has been done and is carried on under the direction and superintendence of an old gentleman living at Rathfarnham, outside Dublin, and known as Sir Robert Holmes. This man is the British Treasury Remembrancer in Ireland and the real governor of the country.74 The Aberdeens and Birrells [the Lord Lieutenant and Chief Secretary at Dublin Castle] who loom so large in the public eye are merely the screen behind which men like Holmes carry on the financial plunder of Ireland, as are the three Englishmen, Pittar, Parry and Crawford, who rule the Custom House interdict upon direct trade between Ireland and the Continent. Ireland has got to realise who her real governors are and direct her blows at them.75
Griffith was here highlighting the often only nominal powers of the ‘Irish’ executive, as well as its departments, at Dublin Castle. This was due to extent of its subordination to the Imperial Treasury in London in all matters of governance; a situation launched by Gladstone’s civil service reforms of the mid-nineteenth century.76
Redmond responded by ridiculing the idea that the Dublin Castle administration’s policy was ‘the financial plunder of Ireland’ on the grounds that the British government had generously granted Ireland with various monies. Griffith pointed out, however, that ‘every penny expended by the British Treasury in Ireland is raised out of Irish taxation’ and that the land annuities were issued as long-term loans at significant interest rates, not as grants, despite the fact that these loans were only small fractions of the Irish revenue that should have been expended annually in Ireland regardless.77 As a genuine example of a British grant, Griffith cited Gladstone’s granting of £4,000,000 to the Dublin Castle administration during 1854 to offset the imposition of a special spirit tax he had introduced to define the parameters of the Irish liquor trade, but in return for this one-off payment Ireland had since paid to Britain £109,250,000 in spirit taxes.78 The reason why business and banking practices in Ireland were doing absolutely nothing to improve the material welfare of the Irish people, Griffith emphasised, was that ‘Irish capital is locked up in English savings banks and there is no movement [of that capital] to keep the people in Ireland.’ He emphasised that ‘if that money were brought into play in the country it would mean the revivification of Ireland, industrially and commercially’,79 but Britain simply did not want Ireland to ever have the slightest capacity to become a financial competitor.
Sinn Féin made its strongest political showing during 1907 in north Wexford, where Sean Etchingham’s Enniscorthy Echo newspaper and Sir Thomas Henry Grattan Esmonde, the local MP, declared their support for Sinn Féin. Griffith responded by speaking in support of Esmonde’s re-election at a rally in Enniscorthy that was attended by 5,000 people. Although he had given lectures in private halls, this was probably Griffith’s first-ever experience of open-air public speaking. Esmonde himself did not attend. He sent a letter to Griffith, however, in which he stated that although ‘how far … my opinions coincide with yours I do not know’, he believed ‘we are back to our position of 1885’ because ‘parliamentary agitation, as now conducted, has spent its force’ and, in the process, ‘freed the hands’ of Irish politicians to adopt a different course. He declared himself in favour of the repeal of the Union, as did the local leader of the UIL, who wrote to Griffith that ‘I hope sincerely that Sinn Féin as a rallying cry will have more reality and more tangible results’ than the Irish Party’s rally cry of ‘home rule’.80
The speeches of the Sinn Féin speakers present reflected the nature of the nascent party’s support. The local activist Robert Brennan focused upon the significance of Esmonde’s statement ‘as striking testimony from the inside’ of the political bankruptcy of the Irish Party’s position. Alderman Walter Cole emphasised that ‘in putting forward a policy different from that which had been generally accepted as the policy of the Irish nation [the Irish Party] for the last generation [since 1885] they did not presume to claim for themselves any monopoly of patriotism’. Together with Sean T. O’Kelly (who spoke in Irish), Alderman Tom Kelly defined the purpose of Sinn Féin as being a more stalwart defender of Catholic interests than Redmond’s party could possibly be at Westminster. The most significant speaker was C.J. Dolan MP, who stated that he could affirm from direct personal experience of the imperial parliament the absolute truth of what Griffith had been arguing for years in his journals. Dolan noted that if the Irish public ‘believed the Freeman’s Journal they would believe that the British Parliament hung attentive on the lips of the Irish members, but what really occurred was this’:
They would be given one day to discuss Irish business … but when the expected day arrived they found the English and Scotch benches were empty … [Westminster treats] Ireland’s affairs and Ireland’s representatives with contempt … I will not continue to be a party to a policy which can do nothing for Ireland, but which prevents her, by raising false hopes in her breast, from doing something for herself.81
Griffith himself emphasised that, contrary to popular belief, Parnell’s years of significant activity in Westminster were confined to just ‘3 or 4 years … [c.1877-1881 when] he found the weak spot in parliament and used that spot. That weak spot is now removed’. Even when Parnell was at his most effective, however, the Irish Party was ‘as powerless to prevent England passing evil legislation for Ireland as they were to compel her to pass good legislature’. This was why the Irish Party could not point to a single piece of legislation over the previous thirty-five years as its own creation. Indeed, bills introduced by Irish MPs at Westminster almost never reached a second reading. Emphasising that Parnell was as unpopular with the Freeman’s Journal and the rest of the Irish press during his obstructionist days as Sinn Féin was during the present, Griffith argued that ‘the flowing tide’ was now with Sinn Féin as it was with Parnell in the maiden years of his political career:
The evicted tenants carried out the Sinn Féin policy in the Land League days … The idea about the necessity of sending men to parliament to force concessions from the English parliament is contradicted by history. When O’Connell started his movement