Griffith absolutely hated this trend, believing (with good reason) that it was serving to deprive the Irish public of any true sense of the realities of British and Irish politics or, indeed, recent history. The extent to which Griffith kept returning to citing Gladstone’s career (he suggested that Gladstone’s only actual legacy was that ‘every man, woman and child in Ireland is owed at the present moment £90 by the British Exchequer—money fraudulently taken from you and your parents since 1853’)107 was motivated by his felt need to provide a wake-up call to Irish Party supporters. It was also motivated by his idealistic dream that both Irish Tories and the Irish Party could come together under the umbrella of the National Council if they simply accepted the fact that ‘there is one platform on which Ireland ought to and should unite … the platform of financial redress’. Maintaining that ‘so long as Ireland sends representatives to Westminster’ it was giving assent to its own economic exploitation, he suggested that ‘our policy—to stop the plunder of Ireland’ was one upon which ‘the Irish unionists still profess their willingness to combine with Irish nationalists … but only a United Ireland can win it an early and complete victory.’108
Once again, however, Griffith was essentially talking about launching an economic war against Britain that nobody was prepared to support in practice. For instance, it was technically true that, by law, no article could cost any more in Ireland than it did in Britain under the Union of 1801. British customs had simply ignored this law ever since Whitehall abolished Irish customs in the 1820s. As a result, every single Irish consumer was being subtly and illegally exploited financially on a daily basis for the past eighty-five years.109 Griffith’s idea, however, of ‘a united Ireland—unionist and nationalist—responding to England’s refusal to do elementary financial justice to this country by a policy of abstention from excisable commodities…causing her to lose involuntarily the money she will not voluntarily refund’110 was not likely to find any support. This was because although it was true that ‘all the productive capacity of Ireland [for business] is made barren by this inverted form of protectionism’ by Britain,111 the modernisation of the monetary, transport and commercial worlds had followed precisely this dynamic ever since the 1820s (and would continue to do so until at least the 1970s).112 Therefore, no living figure within the monetary or business world, as well as the civil administration, of Ireland had ever been accustomed to anything different. This may well have been an unjust situation, but it was one that Irish people had been so long accustomed to accepting as a fact of life there was no evident wish to change it.
In economic terms, the Irish Party represented a primarily grazing farming-community that had developed since the famine because of the rapid industrialisation of England and the resulting creation of a British market for Irish cattle. Its support from the business community was confined mostly to small enterprises of shopkeepers and publicans whose business revolved around a localised economy based on market towns and a handful of successful distilleries (excluding Sweetman’s and one or two others, these distilleries were usually owned by Tories, including James Craig’s Dunvilles Distillery).113 Even if the sons of such families studied to be barristers, politicians or priests (as they frequently did), they still had no say or, indeed, any great reason to be concerned with international trading or imperial taxation practices. These matters remained the interest, if no longer a prerogative, of the members of the chambers of commerce of Dublin, Cork and Belfast. From the 1850s onwards, however, such men generally did not stand for political election. Usually Tory in sympathy, they had silently consented to Gladstonian imperial fiscal trends.114 Meanwhile, the birth of an Irish Catholic middle class at this time was intrinsically linked to a willingness to derive whatever personal profits were to be had by supporting the development of London as Ireland’s business capital and, in turn, letting all those whose livelihoods depended entirely on local Irish circumstances go to the wall. It was not for nothing that the Irish people developed the reputation internationally at this time as the least patriotic and most slavish, or peasant-like, of political communities.
In Belfast, men who were likeminded to Griffith could hardly risk supporting his desire ‘to place England in the dock’ on economic grounds. For instance, the Ulster Unionist Party shared Griffith’s preoccupation with the findings of Tory government’s Financial Relations Commission of 1896. They would never support the idea of financial redress to the degree that Griffith suggested, however. As this would have been tantamount to declaring an economic war on the Imperial Treasury, it was feared that any attempt to do so would result in punitive economic measures that, potentially, would undo those financial arrangements by which London had recently turned the small town of Belfast into a new city. Such punitive economic measures could also cripple southern Ireland’s food and meat-producing firms for larger British traders. Indeed, it was hardly coincidental that Griffith’s chief business allies, Walter Cole (a fruit merchant between Dublin and Liverpool) and James O’Mara (a bacon factory owner, with his business headquarters in Limerick and London), supported his idea of abstention from the imperial parliament but, like the Irish Party or (in practice) the Irish Tories, resisted supporting his taxation arguments.115 This was because an economic war against Britain was a struggle that Irishmen could not possibly win. Why, therefore, did Griffith continue in pursuing such a seemingly futile course?
It would be hard to exaggerate the extent to which Griffith’s political outlook was shaped by his status as a poor and lifelong Dubliner. The careers of his longest supporters in City Hall, Alderman Tom Kelly and the ex-Land Leaguer Jennie Wyse Power PLG,116 would be defined by an attack of the city’s housing and poverty problems.117 These issues also preoccupied some ex-mayors of the city and budding economic analysts who likewise favoured major reforms of the Irish workhouse system.118 Griffith was proud of them for producing credible Sinn Féin policy documents on these matters during the late 1900s.119 Griffith himself, however, attributed the root of the existence of these Dublin socio-economic problems, which had shaped his whole life, directly to the imperial treasury’s government of Ireland.
As a historical proof, Griffith argued that the Irish quit and crown rent which had been collected for the city’s upkeep ‘and had been used to provide Dublin with fine streets and sweep away the slums etc.’ was misappropriated by the imperial treasury and ‘used for the beautification of the English metropolis [London]’ instead. This had frustrated, for example, a scheme of the Dublin Corporation during the early 1850s ‘for the sweeping away of the Dublin slums, and their replacement by great streets and avenues’, ‘drawn up by Engineers and Architects of the Corporation … [and] unanimously adopted by the Dublin Corporation, then largely Conservative [Tory]’. This plan failed because when the corporation ‘claimed from the English Government of the day the money due to Ireland for the Quit and Crown rents for this purpose’, ‘the Government refused to give it back’. Lacking any means of appealing this decision, the corporation’s members not only abandoned such schemes for improvement but the corporation as well,120 letting the city itself go to ruin. These monies were still technically the property of Dublin citizens each and every year, but the corporation ceased demanding its right to such funds from about 1858 onwards and, by now, they were almost completely forgotten about:
This is the cause of the present state of affairs … It is owing to this that Dublin housing for the poor is in such a condition … The people should know this. The World [my italics] should know this, for England in her propaganda pointed to the Dublin slums [compared by some contemporaries to the situation in Calcutta or Saint Petersburg] as a proof of Irish incapacity and corruption. The tables should be turned on her … The corporation again should put this matter forward, claiming that stolen money … showing that Dublin slumdom is the creation of English robbery.121
Griffith’s distaste for the Irish Party was certainly partly inspired by its predominantly rural representation. If an Irish parliament ever came into being, Griffith desired that its urban representation would be increased at the expense of its rural.122 Although not a political woman,123 Griffith’s fiancé Maud Sheehan,