Griffith took local politics seriously, as was reflected by his perpetual anger at Dublin city council’s failure to deal with housing and sanitation problems. He firmly believed that municipal authorities had the responsibility to act strictly in every tax payer’s interest as much as any national government, without distinguishing between sectional interest groups, and that they should be made accountable to the public upon that financial basis alone. Griffith would argue that the town councils should not only have supported the education act in defiance of the Catholic Church but should also have appointed representatives of trade unions and women’s groups to the proposed school attendance committees.76 The Catholic Church justified its opposition to the act on the grounds that it supposedly constituted state encroachment upon families’ freedom of choice. By contrast, Griffith’s YIL maintained that the real problem was that the church was using the question of education as a political football, refusing to encourage support of any government measure until its political desire to have a state-funded Catholic university was first achieved; a purely selfish decision which was typified as an ongoing betrayal of the masses for the sake of the upper classes that had been going on in Catholic Ireland for the best part of fifty years.77 In taking this stance, Griffith’s circle claimed to be giving a voice to an underclass that had long understood that recognised leaders of Irish public opinion were failing to address vital needs of Irish society in matters of education.78 In doing so, however, they discovered that ambitious individuals who were committed to political networking generally chose to remain silent rather than espouse any cause that might hurt their career prospects. In Catholic Ireland, this meant never questioning the right of the church alone to determine education policy.
The YIL Council, of which Griffith was an active member, drafted a bill calling for the establishment of elective county councils in Ireland such as existed in England since 1888 but that Parnell (with financial persuasion from Gladstone and Sir Cecil Rhodes of South Africa) had refused to demand for Ireland.79 The YIL’s one parliamentary supporter introduced this bill at Westminster but it never reached a second reading.80 The MP in question was William Field, a pro-labour independent nationalist and patron of Irish technical schools. The son of a republican rebel of 1848, Field was currently GAA treasurer and a leader of the Irish cattle traders’ association. The fact that he made his entry into politics as a supporter of the Amnesty Association meant that he was often associated in the public mind with the IRB. The real source of Field’s influence, however, was the Tories who sided with him against Catholic businessman W.M. Murphy during the 1892 general election.81 Over the next twenty-five years, Field and Murphy essentially represented two rival stances on matters relating to the economy of Ireland from their Dublin political support base. In addition to the YIL arguments regarding education, Field supported its demand that local government bodies collect new rates to establish public libraries in Ireland for the first time; another campaign that met a dead end.82 In support of Field, Griffith himself petitioned the Lord Mayor of Dublin to call a public meeting on the compulsory education question. He also drew up a twelve-point resolution of the YIL in support of the act that was distributed to all members of Dublin City Hall, chaired a debate on the Chief Secretary’s attitudes to the question and protested about the mayor’s seeming subservience to church leaders in the matter.83
Griffith’s embroilment in the politics of Irish education from the tender age of twenty-one highlighted a central dynamic of his career. Notwithstanding the fact that he had received some valued schooling from the Christian Brothers, Griffith would often find himself espousing a patriotism that was at odds with prevailing Catholic attitudes towards Irish nationalism. A key determinant of this situation was Parnell’s decision in October 1884 to surrender control of the Irish Party’s education policy to the Catholic hierarchy to enable his party’s subsequent triumph at the election polls. This had led the idea of Irish nationalism to become wedded politically to the cause of Catholic education. To a very significant extent, this had the affect of divorcing the Irish Party from the broader economic realities that faced the general business community within Ireland. Furthermore, as the Irish Party would never reverse this stance, the business community generally remained sympathetic to the Tory party. This was reflected by the composition of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, which had a good political relationship with William Field, and the composition of Trinity College’s Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, which was Ireland’s top forum for economic debate.84
These trends led many educated contemporaries to the conclusion after 1886 that an Irish nationalism could only ever be a cultural construct and thus never become a meaningful political reality. Disputes in Dublin City Hall between Protestant Tory commercial elites and Catholic businessmen caused bigoted journalism (on both sides) to appear in those Tory and Irish Party weekly newspapers that were aimed directly at the lower classes. During 1886, this stimulated street violence in Dublin city centre on a much smaller scale, albeit according to the exact same dynamic, as had occurred in Belfast (the largest ever riots in the history of that city occurred during 1886), while Cork City Council was similarly divided.85 Griffith’s debating societies had reacted to this trend by forbidding any religious viewpoints to be raised at their meetings.86 The fall of Parnell five years later simply amplified this same dynamic. A much more central dynamic at work than any religious factor, however, was the role of Gladstonian fiscal doctrine regarding the management of the British Empire in dictating government policy regarding Ireland.
In restructuring the British economy in the wake of the Anglo-French wars (1793–1815), London abandoned cherished promises that had been made to Irish politicians at the time of the Union of 1801 (enshrined in Article Six of that Act) by merging the Irish with the Imperial Exchequer. As a result, the Bank of England now banked all Irish customs and excise; the former national bank, the Bank of Ireland, began investing solely in British imperial defence stock in London; a parity was enforced between the Irish and English pound; and the formation of new Irish banks was encouraged, each of which tailored themselves not only to the new imperial economy (represented by the abolishment of all Irish customs houses) but also, in their search for customers, to the existence of strictly segregated religious communities within Ireland.87 This was the political precursor to granting Catholics the right to parliamentary representation in 1829 and the ineffective Young Ireland protests, partly supported by an elderly Daniel O’Connell, against W.E. Gladstone, the president of the Imperial Board of Trade during the mid-to-late 1840s. Gladstone subsequently managed to ‘permeate the thinking not only of treasury officials but of a generation of civil servants in virtually all departments of administration’ by prioritising increasing England’s economic control over all British territories while simultaneously appearing to address their desires for more autonomy in public. The much lauded mid-Victorian age of prosperity (1851–75) was actually a period defined by a largely unnoticed establishment of a complete English monopoly over all imperial markets, very often at the direct expense of the rest of the United Kingdom, while simultaneously cutting expenditure for all colonial governments or administrations.88
The relevance of this Gladstonian fiscal doctrine to Irish circumstances was highlighted during Gladstone’s own tenures as Prime Minister. In the wake of the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (a purely symbolical measure that nevertheless convinced some clericalist Catholic politicians that Gladstone favoured ‘justice for Ireland’), Gladstone abolished the office of Vice-Treasurer of Ireland that had been established on the merging of the exchequers to guarantee there would be some regulatory measures in place to ensure financial fair play for Ireland. As a result, even those Irish businessmen who enthused over annual return figures for trade as an indication that they were operating within a prosperous economy admitted that