During the late 1880s, following a collapse of the Young Ireland Society arising from quarrels surrounding the management of the GAA, Griffith became a leader of the Leinster Debating Society. This was composed entirely of ‘hardworking young men of humble circumstances’ who in their determination to unmask social injustices typified themselves as ‘strangers to cant and hypocrisy’.30 Although it met at a venue that housed small republican and socialist clubs, its membership intentionally had a mixed political profile: as its leader Griffith would place advertisements for its meetings in opposing Tory and Parnellite newspapers.31
Griffith’s attitudes towards Parnell and his party were not sympathetic. Although he chaired a meeting that denounced the British government for imprisoning William O’Brien MP (the most popular Irish Party politician and journalist of the day), Griffith wrote a scathing satire of Parnellite journalism. Meanwhile, the society’s journal denounced Parnell and his followers as ‘professional swindlers’ who ‘connive at blackmailing the Irish people’ into supporting their party alone so they could become ‘a well-fed, well-housed, “aristocratic” if you please, corps of professional agitators’ while ordinary Irish people were left to face ‘the poor house, the jail—a hand to mouth existence in this country or emigration’.32 Such attitudes reflected a belief that Parnell and his Irish Party had betrayed the promises made by republican Land Leaguers earlier that decade to prioritise the welfare of the urban working class. Due to this failure, the society expressed sympathy with the Social Democratic Federation, a British socialist body then seeking to establish itself in Dublin. Griffith himself supported the argument that the remedy for strikes was the nationalisation of all means of production under a system of state socialism.33 Strikes were actually quite common in Dublin at this time. Notwithstanding the formation of the first permanent Dublin Trades Council in 1886, the city’s working class experienced a great economic depression with unemployment rising to high levels and slum tenements becoming more numerous than ever.34 Such issues never surfaced in the columns of the Irish Party’s press, however. It was therefore quite natural for Griffith to find himself at home within a republican or socialist culture of protest.
Griffith’s interest in working-class protest politics was combined with a preoccupation with personal self-development. Reflecting his interest in journalism, Griffith gave papers about past political pamphleteers like Jonathan Swift as well as Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, two pioneering newspaper figures of early-eighteenth century England whose writings were still considered by Victorians as providing templates in style for any prospective journalist.35 Reflecting his interest in literature, Griffith spoke on modern and early-modern Irish writers, English and American poets from Elizabethan times up until his own day and the classics.36 His lack of formal education, however, was betrayed by his writing style at this time, which used vernacular language and no punctuation.37 Most tellingly, he drew a contrast between the life that he felt he deserved and that which he had in reality. In poor verse Griffith depicted the privileged lifestyle of a university student, living a life of scholarship and dissipation without having to worry about any material concerns, before cutting abruptly to a description of the reality of his life, being almost penniless and performing solitary pub crawls in the early hours of the morning after ‘every honest man was gone to sleep’.38 In later life, Griffith championed the right of the working classes to receive state grants to enable them to attend university. This was an almost unheard of idea in contemporary Britain or Ireland but, reflecting a legacy of the Napoleonic Empire, it had many supporters in continental Europe.39 Griffith generally impressed whatever company he was ever in as being extraordinarily well read. This was partly because he had a photographic memory.40
The power of Griffith’s pen was suited best for satirical or insightful political analyses rather than literary or artistic creations. His almost religious preoccupation with notions of social justice perhaps made him a good candidate to become a persuasive journalist while he was certainly not a poet. In his youth, he expressed appreciation for the tradition of political street ballads. This viewpoint reflected his passing interest in writing such material. This was something he would do infrequently, however, confining himself to a few protest ballads at the time of Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) as well as some bawdy doggerel to entertain fellow political prisoners during the post-1916 period.41
In 1890 Griffith renamed his club as the Leinster Literary Society and proposed that it should establish branches throughout the province, with a central executive in Dublin.42 This plan for expansion failed because its members lacked means. The only successful literary society in Dublin at this time was the Pan-Celtic Literary Society. Formed by alumni of Blackrock College, it was associated with the Rathmines branch of the Irish Party’s Irish National League and included several barristers and arts graduates.43 The Pan-Celtic represented a suburban and comfortable Dublin Catholic middle class that was very distant from Griffith’s social world.44 Its members viewed the contemporary history of Irish writers and artists living in London, as well as the existence of Parnell’s party at Westminster, as a national success story. By contrast, Griffith and his friends viewed Irish culture and politics through the prism of their socially disadvantaged experience. These two social worlds began to commingle, however, when Parnell’s fall had the affect of shattering the unity of the Irish National League, the Irish Party’s authoritarian support body. This led the minority pro-Parnell wing to appeal directly for working-class support; a development that was unprecedented and would also prove very short lived.45 Nevertheless, this presented Griffith and his associates with a brief window of opportunity to play a part in formulating a political programme in conjunction with various middle-class activists. In turn, they were led to view Parnell, as distinct from the Irish Party’s political machine (to which they remained intensely hostile), with a newfound sympathy.
Later, at a key turning point in the history of early-twentieth-century Ireland, Griffith would cite the former example of Parnell as a means of criticising the contemporary leadership of the Irish Party.46 From this premise, future historians of twentieth-century Ireland mistakenly assumed that Griffith had idolised Parnell in his youth.47 The reality, however, was quite different. Although, like most Dubliners (including Tories), he denounced those who were prepared to ‘betray the country by voting against Mr. Parnell’ at the request of the British Liberal Party, he insisted that his society’s minute book would record that ‘Mr. Griffith spoke as one who never was a supporter of Mr. Parnell but was an independent nationalist.’48 This was also the stance taken by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) during this controversy.
Griffith was drawn into the controversy through the National Club Literary Society. This met in the same venue and under the same management as a new Parnell Leadership Committee; namely, John Clancy, a city councillor, the electoral registrar of Dublin and an old republican.49 When Parnell announced his intention to pit his own candidate against that of the Irish Party at a Kilkenny by-election, virtually all contemporaries expected that the outcome would be decisive in settling the controversy. Parnell’s candidate lacked any organisational support, however, except for that provided by P.N. Fitzgerald, the chief travelling organiser of the IRB and a personal friend of William O’Brien MP who was then wavering in his support of Parnell.50 Griffith’s society published an ‘address to the men of north Kilkenny’ in support of the Parnellite candidate (Vincent Scully) that was sent to various newspapers, politicians and a workingmen’s club in Kilkenny City that was run by P.J. O’Keefe, the local IRB leader. James J. O’Kelly, a former IRB leader who became a founder of the Irish Party during 1880, was the only politician to take notice of Griffith’s address, however. This was signed by Griffith using