avowedly republican National Club Literary Society with John MacBride (an IRB activist with links to the British naval port of Castlebar), launched the tradition of Bodenstown demonstrations and later became a business manager for one of Griffith’s journals.99 Indeed, Dixon was one of several YIL activists who later re-emerged as ‘Sinn Féiners’.100 These included Walter Cole (a future leader of Sinn Féin in Dublin City Hall), Peter White (the first secretary of Sinn Féin), Patrick Lavelle (Griffith’s future solicitor) and Denis Devereux, a printer who tried to establish a journal for the YIL during 1894 and ultimately became the printer and manager of Griffith’s first journal.101 Reflecting the National Club’s past attempt to mobilise support for Parnell specifically among town councillors nationwide, Dixon’s circle combined a practical conception of the importance of promoting local government reform with a bookworm-style conception of Irish nationalism. Reflecting Dixon’s friendship with leading Irish cultural nationalists like the republican-radical John Wyse Power and the great George Sigerson, the YIL also attempted to revive a partly successful, albeit short-lived, campaign from the early 1880s that appealed to church and school leaders to appoint more teachers of the Irish language.102 This was a cause that the YIL first took up, partly on Griffith’s suggestion, in May 1893.103
Griffith sent copies of a British government report on Wales, which became the basis of Westminster legislation that recognised that country’s bilingual status, to members of all Irish education and local government boards with a request that they demand the same for Ireland.104 As a member of the YIL’s Irish Language Congress Committee, Griffith also issued flyers that claimed the present educational system in Ireland was ‘indefensible’ on the grounds that it did not make allowance for the existence of an Irish-speaking population.105 Questionnaires to ascertain where and how much Irish was spoken and taught were sent not only to schools and colleges across the United Kingdom but also to a few in Europe and the United States.106 Only the Catholic Irish College in Rome (which had an Irish language department) responded enthusiastically to this questionnaire, however.107 In addition, the general results of the YIL survey were not encouraging: of approximately 8,500 national schools in Ireland, only forty-five taught Irish and this was only as an extra-curricular subject.108 The YIL received negative replies from all Irish teacher-training colleges, the National Education Board at Dublin Castle as well as ex-officio members of that body, such as Chief Secretary Morley and William Walsh, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin. Archbishop Walsh maintained that although he sympathised with the language movement, ‘what you suggest is, at all events for the present, quite out of the question’.109 At the YIL’s Easter Week conference of March 1894, Griffith proposed that all local government bodies should be requested by the General Post Office in Dublin to ‘have the names of some of the chief thoroughfares painted in Irish as well as in English’. Meanwhile, George Noble Plunkett (a Parnellite candidate for parliament who later became a papal count) and Michael Cusack of the GAA proposed that the electorate should vote only for those MPs who agreed to support the language movement.110 Neither of these proposals had any effect, however.
Although it won the sympathy of a handful of significant individuals,111 the YIL language campaign was essentially doomed because it had no organised body of support. With the British government’s support, the churches had already established much control over Irish schools and the nominal existence of a ‘national education board’ for Ireland was meant to reflect this Irish divergence from the British and, indeed, European, as well as North American, trend of state-controlled education. This was great value of the Union to the Roman Catholic Church and the reason why the church encouraged the strengthening of that union after 1886. Full cooperation with the churches’ educational policies was an essential prerequisite if any practical steps for educational reform were to be taken in Ireland. Douglas Hyde, who worked with the YIL through his membership of Yeats’ National Literary Society, nominally founded the Gaelic League in July 1893 but he did not come to realise the necessity of working with the churches until late in 1896. Consequently, it was only from that time onwards that the Gaelic League began to emerge as a public body. By mid-1897, half of its executive consisted of senior Catholic clergymen and the remainder consisted of politicians and newspaper editors who first made it clear that they accepted the church’s education programme.112 By contrast, in championing the Irish language purely on its own merits the YIL had won no support whatsoever. In effect, it had refused to play the political game and so no bargain could be struck.
An additional reason for the YIL’s failure was its attempt to emulate the original Young Irelanders of the 1840s by championing the non-denominational Queen’s Colleges and calling for the conversion of Trinity College into a new, non-denominational, national university. Some Trinity graduates, although obviously not the Church of Ireland itself, favoured this idea. In opposition to this idea, Archbishop Walsh and the Catholic hierarchy never wavered in their conviction that non-denominational schools and universities were responsible for the growth of religious indifference (a reality that, at least when addressing the general Irish public, Walsh alleged to believe the British governing classes were incapable of appreciating) and that each Christian denomination in Ireland was therefore entitled to its own university.113 By contrast, the YIL maintained that this policy would be very wasteful of the limited financial resources available for Irish education. It was openly critical of the idea of Irishmen seeking state funding for a Catholic university, claiming that if, instead, Trinity College was converted into a totally non-denominational and national university religious segregations would not continue to dominate Irish life.114 This stance of the YIL encouraged Trinity-educated public intellectuals such as T.W. Rolleston and C.H. Oldham to offer their support to the Celtic Literary Society, which affiliated itself with the YIL during 1894, but it led Archbishop Walsh to request that the YIL cease to communicate with him under any circumstances, as ‘I cannot undertake to answer questions put to me ... by unrepresentative and irresponsible bodies, such as that on behalf of which you have written.’115
Although this claim regarding the ‘unrepresentative’ and ‘irresponsible’ stance of the YIL was motivated by its political stance on education, to contemporaries it frequently had a cultural connotation as well.116 This occurred because the YIL’s citing of the legacy of the Young Irelanders of the 1840s could make debate upon Ireland historicist in tone. For instance, ever since the British-Catholic pact of 1886,117 T.W. Rolleston (a Tory confrere of John O’Leary) and many others began repeating Thomas Davis’ old example of celebrating the defunct eighteenth-century Irish parliament whilst denigrating Ireland’s current representation in the imperial parliament.118 Griffith was influenced strongly by this trend. Although this historic Irish parliament had been exclusively Protestant, the fact that control of the wealth of Ireland was still largely in the hands of its members’ descendants convinced Griffith that many Irish Party supporters’ simple equation of Irish nationalism with attempting to undo all existing manifestations of the historic Protestant ascendancy could only be politically self defeating. Reflecting this, Griffith’s first-ever publication was a series of eight articles on notable eighteenth-century Irish personalities.119 Although Griffith suggested that several of the figures examined presented ‘somewhat of a paradox’ (‘whilst constantly asserting the right of Ireland to political freedom they were mostly at the same time inveterate and determined bigots’),120 he suggested that the eighteenth century was a ‘brilliant page in our history’ that produced ‘some of the ablest and a few of the greatest minds Ireland has produced’.121 With regards to politics, Griffith believed that had Henry Grattan not ‘played the generous fool, prating of Ireland’s trust in English generosity’, and instead listened to John Flood’s economic nationalist arguments, the Act of Union would never have been passed and ‘the misery of the last ninety years would have been impossible’.122 He also believed that Ireland had become a prosperous country for the first time prior to the Union and that this act was motivated partly by a covert desire to undo this trend.123
Unlike Griffith, comparatively few contemporaries could blind themselves to the fact that the Young Ireland citation of the ideal of an Irish nationalism unaffected by religious divisions had only ever been a storybook ideal. It reflected neither the British government’s fiscal management of Ireland since the 1820s (or indeed before) nor the Irish public’s general acceptance of the equation of competing denominations with competing political interest groups
