By the beginning of 1908, Griffith had spent four years addressing the heart of Anglo-Irish relations in a direct and—at least during the Irish Council Bill controversy—particularly relevant way. R.M. Henry, an Ulster Tory academic in Queen’s University Belfast and an associate through the Gaelic League, credited Griffith for having ‘stamped upon every column he wrote his intense and vivid sense of truth’ as well as a ‘great gift of discerning what was essential and of holding to it without faltering’.125 However, within months of the fading of the Irish Council Bill controversy, which had seemingly guaranteed that Sinn Féin would win many parliamentary supporters, the material dynamics underlying all existing forms of Irish party political networking (or ostracisms, as the case may be) had provided Griffith with no new supporters, or political associates, other than a few dozen IRB conspirators who liked to attend public nationalist lectures and who congregated around a tobacconist shop in Dublin city centre that had been newly opened by Tom Clarke, an ex-political prisoner (and former manager of the Gaelic American) who had recently returned from America.
Sinn Féin was being used for some ulterior motives. For instance, F.H. O’Donnell used the existence of the Dungannon Clubs within Sinn Féin as a cover for approaching the Austro-Hungarian government, falsely claiming to represent Irish revolutionaries while under the watchful eyes of the British Foreign Office.126 Meanwhile, Sir Roger Casement’s friend Bulmer Hobson was writing pamphlets which argued in direct opposition to Griffith’s programme that the Sinn Féin Policy ‘is in reality war’ that necessitated physical violence and a ‘simultaneous application in Ireland, India and Egypt’.127 It would have been difficult to imagine a more absurd hypothesis.
Griffith did acquire a couple of notable new associates from the revolutionary underground at this time. These were Sean Milroy, who became a fellow student of the economic basis of Anglo-Irish relations, and Sean MacDermott, an ex-school teacher who replaced P.T. Daly as Sinn Féin’s national organiser. MacDermott was a very energetic organiser who did all he could to network Sinn Féin’s supporters into new party branches.128
During 1908, Griffith hoped to make his mark on the Irish university debate. He desired ‘that a faculty of Irish studies be established in the university’ and ‘that degrees be instituted in agriculture and economics’. Most of all, he hoped that a single national university under strictly non-denominational management could be established to prevent north–south and religious polarisations from dominating Irish life. For this reason, Griffith welcomed the British government’s idea of creating a national university under non-denominational management, but felt that the university bill would create problems by separating the management of the universities of Dublin and Belfast.129 Understanding that the Catholic hierarchy’s extant loyalty to the Irish Party had led to C.J. Dolan’s defeat, Griffith also realised that the Sinn Féin Party needed a more effective president than the indifferent figure of Edward Martyn. He was glad, therefore, that John Sweetman, a man who knew the hierarchy intimately, agreed to become the new Sinn Féin president during 1908. Sweetman, however, reacted to the university debate in a manner directly contrary to Griffith.
Sweetman warned Griffith that he must not under any circumstances make arguments in the press that criticised the principle of denominational education.130 Griffith wished that Sweetman would see that there were broader issues at stake with regards to university education, noting for example that ‘Archbishop Walsh, I hear, disapproves of the Bill, but will not oppose it.’131 These appeals fell upon deaf ears, however, because, unfortunately for Griffith, Sweetman was a lay Catholic obsessed with ideas of orthodoxy.132 Equally, in deference to the bishops, Sweetman was highly fearful of taking any step that might shatter the unity of Ireland’s Catholic political representatives. In warning Griffith that ‘no party can succeed in Ireland to which the priests are actively hostile’ and that ‘anti-clericalism would destroy the Sinn Féin Party’,133 Sweetman clearly equated criticism of the principle of denominational education upon any grounds to be tantamount to an intolerable anticlericalism. Aside from suppressing James McCann’s Peasant, Sweetman once even considered using his influence to have An Claidheamh Solus shut down when its editor Patrick Pearse (himself something of a religious fanatic)134 passed a comment about Daniel Mannix, the president of Maynooth College, that Sweetman considered to be possibly non-deferential in its implications regarding the church’s unquestionable right to have complete control of education.135 For this very reason, Sweetman was no doubt being deadly serious when he warned Griffith that Sinn Féin’s days would be numbered ‘if you make your paper, like Mr. [W.P.] Ryan’s Peasant, an organ of anti-religious education’.136
As soon as the university question entered the limelight, Griffith received many appeals from a section of the Gaelic League, including some UCD students, to turn Sinn Féin into a daily paper that would support their call to make knowledge of the Irish language obligatory for entrants to the new university.137 Although a sincere demand, this development was partly a mere political by-product of the Liberal government’s past withdrawal of the National Education Board’s support for the Gaelic League. Fr O’Hickey, the professor of Irish at Maynooth College, instigated this compulsory Irish demand, making him a temporary icon for many young Gaelic Leaguers. While his highly publicised adherence to this stance in defiance of his ecclesiastical superiors may have ultimately cost him his professorship, it served a different purpose politically. In particular, by causing debate on the implications of the exclusion of Queen’s College Belfast and Trinity College Dublin from the proposed National University of Ireland to be silenced, it focused the public eye instead upon a man whose only public responsibility was to teach Irish to young Catholic seminarians. Considering that the Irish Party ‘will do nothing unless a public opinion is moved in this matter’ and that its inaction could augment divisions between the Dublin and Belfast universities by denying to the former the right ‘of fixing its own courses and subjects of study’,138 Griffith took up the compulsory Irish demand to increase Sinn Féin’s popularity with the Gaelic League. More fundamentally, however, Griffith saw this as a means of attracting ‘Irish-American capital’ to Sinn Féin in the light of the prior promises that were made to Hyde by the American universities.139 This particularly annoyed Hyde, who wrote to John Redmond that ‘I wish very much I could disabuse people’s minds of the false impression that the Gaelic League is connected with Sinn Féin.’140
Seamus MacManus of Notre Dame University would soon bring the president of the American AOH to Ireland in an attempt to make a Sinn Féin sympathiser the new president of the Irish AOH in place of Joseph Devlin, the young Irish Party whip. Both Maynooth College and Archbishop Logue of Armagh, the Catholic primate of Ireland, were evidently quite sympathetic to the Americans.141 Be that as it may, realising that the Catholic hierarchy were not enthusiastic about the compulsory Irish idea, Sweetman warned Griffith that the future of Sinn Féin would become ‘precarious’ if he adopted this stance. Sweetman also pointed out sound political reasons why the idea of founding a daily paper was misjudged, aside from the obvious fact (with which Griffith agreed)142 that he would be unable to raise the necessary capital (£8,000):
People largely take a daily paper for its general news and don’t mind much about its politics. A sprightly weekly paper would have more political influence than a daily paper with a small circulation. A body of men who could get letters into the ordinary daily papers, read by everyone [a tactic favoured by Sweetman himself],143 would have more influence than a special daily organ which would only be read by the converted.144
Nevertheless, Griffith persisted with the idea of founding a daily paper. He launched a daily edition of Sinn Féin in August 1909 with the financial support of Seamus MacManus, despite the fact that the National Council was already in debt of £200.145 It would only last for five months and caused Griffith to fall into personal debt.146
Griffith’s motive in taking this gamble was the seeming convergence of several political opportunities. First, in the wake of the Dolan campaign, Griffith desired to appeal to Sinn Féin’s potential new followers among supporters of the cooperative movement in the Connacht–South Ulster region. To this end, Sean MacDermott formed several Sinn Féin branches in this territory while the daily edition of Sinn Féin (which