equated with poor political judgment. Reflecting this, if Griffith had entertained hopes of finding a political platform for himself after the fiasco of the YIL’s education and Irish language campaigns, he did himself no favours during 1894 by appearing on various republican platforms (including one addressed by Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa of New York) where all contemporary Irish politicians were denounced as royalist flunkeys.125
After delivering the annual IRB ‘Robert Emmet lecture’, Griffith began working closely with C.J. O’Farrell of Enniscorthy, an aging Francophile bookworm and Leinster IRB leader who was notoriously anticlerical.126 Griffith’s friends typified O’Farrell as ‘a tall, dignified, grey-haired, handsome man, with a period moustache’ who though ‘normally retiring and gentlemanly only, periodically went on a spree and on these occasions he was volubly agnostic but always polite’.127 As soon as the YIL began working with O’Farrell, however, a Wexford priest denounced them as young men with ‘no more beards than brains’ that were attempting ‘to blacken and besmirch the character of the Irish priesthood’.128 The Irish Party’s press took up this accusation. At O’Farrell’s Vinegar Hill demonstration, Griffith expressed strong approval for speakers’ praise of the French Revolution. It was argued that the only hope for the nationalist cause in Ireland was if the youth were taught ‘the true duties of citizenship … to think for themselves regardless of the opinion of anyone else’ and became prepared to demand ‘the establishment in this country of a senate responsible to the people, and, if the country was so disposed, a government on republican lines’.129 After a similar speech was made in New Ross, however, the Irish Party’s press denounced the YIL as ‘traitors’. This claim was rationalised because the YIL attempted to ‘separate faith and fatherland’ not only in their understanding of the history of Irish nationality but also in their attitudes towards Irish education: it was ‘revolting’, according to the Irish Party, that any body purporting to be Irish nationalists could think themselves entitled to criticise the Catholic hierarchy’s stance on education.130 Similarly, the following year, William Rooney was labelled by the Irish Party’s press as a juvenile delinquent who had the ‘cheek’ to praise republicanism and the French Revolution and to ‘read out a diatribe against the priests’.131
On a motion of William Field MP and George Coffey of the Royal Irish Academy, Griffith was re-elected as a member of the YIL Executive during 1895. However, Griffith declined the invitation to be the chief speaker at the 1895 Bodenstown demonstration (an event that attracted 5,000 people) and his attendance at meetings grew rare.132 Indeed, with the exception of a few events (including a massive public funeral for James Boland that was organised by Field),133 Griffith appears to have made very little public appearances for the best part of two years.134 Why exactly this was the case is unclear. Although a pencil annotation in the YIL minute book read ‘Griffith has been in France at Irish war and hurt himself’,135 this was evidently an addition made at a later date. The most probable explanation for Griffith’s sudden reticence lay in problems in his personal life.
During the summer of 1891 Griffith’s father was made unemployed again after T.D. Sullivan, a clericalist MP, characteristically folded the historic Nation, which was first founded by the Young Irelanders, and sold its franchise to the recently established Irish Catholic, which now became known as the Irish Catholic and Nation. Although he found some work with the Parnellite Irish Daily Independent, acute respiratory problems soon forced the father to take early retirement. This put real pressure on his son to compensate for the loss in family income. Griffith took on extra work as a copyreader and joined the Dublin printers’ union in February 1894.
One acquaintance recalled that the Griffith family established a small shop at this time on Parliament Street, just opposite Dublin Castle.136 This was possibly an investment made from a lump sum received by the father on his retirement. ‘Griffith’s For Bargains’, a small market-stall selling discount household goods, existed in ‘Parliament Street General Stores’ during 1892,137 while a reference exists to a ‘Griffith Hardware and General Stores’ at 16–17 Parliament Street as late as November 1895.138 This shop was short lived, however, and its failure created a debt. Griffith’s younger brother Frank, who was described by one family friend as a ‘most attractive if somewhat feckless’ character, also entered the workforce around this time, but his work as an usher in the Gaiety Theatre (a job that he stuck with for very many years) did little to supplement the family income.139
Griffith’s withdrawal from public meetings in November 1894 coincided with the dismissal by the Irish Daily Independent of many of its staff. It is probable that he lost his job at this time and could not find another. Indeed, it seems that the Griffith family had to give up a rented home near Mountjoy Square, which had been acquired during the mid-to-late 1880s, during 1895 or 1896 and resettle in an unsanitary and crowded tenement flat such as they had lived in during the 1870s.140
Friends later recalled that Griffith fell into a serious depression at this time. George A. Lyons, a young Protestant evangelical clerk of republican sympathies who befriended Griffith in the Celtic Literary Society, recalled how the usually reticent Griffith admitted to him that he felt there was ‘no prospects for him, either as an individual or as a nationalist’. Lyons also noted that ‘some of his old friends suspected a disappointment in love’ as an additional cause of his depression.141
Griffith had only one real girlfriend in his life, namely Maud Sheehan, the daughter of a Catholic middle-class and leisured family (one of her brothers was a keen amateur photographer)142 that lived near Mountjoy Square. Griffith first met Maud during 1892 after he ruled that membership of the Leinster Literary Society should be open to women.143 Later, she often played the piano to accompany singers at Celtic Literary Society social events and music became one of their common interests.144 Like several YIL activists, Griffith was a supporter of women’s suffrage and educational rights for women; the latter campaign being led in Ireland by Edith Oldham, a sister of C.H. Oldham. Maud had attended secondary school, was a devout attendant at Mass and suspected that Griffith suffered from acute ill health during 1895 and 1896 as, like everyone else, she saw very little of him at this time.145 While they would fall in love (ultimately they married, fifteen years later), they rarely met during the mid-1890s as Griffith seemingly deliberately avoided her out of shame at his desperate material circumstances. While associates frequently attributed to Griffith ‘an innate shyness’,146 poverty certainly limited his social self-confidence. In addition, it may well have been that the Sheehan family never approved of the Griffiths.
Lyons suspected that Griffith’s withdrawal from public activities was also influenced by the fact that the IRB, ‘to which in all probability he already belonged, was in a hopeless condition’.147 Maud recalled that John MacBride was disgusted by the fact that the Dublin IRB organisation had become embroiled in dynamiting conspiracies involving agent provocateurs that were designed only to discredit Irish nationalism. She understood that this persuaded MacBride to leave the IRB and to follow Mark Ryan, a London doctor who set up a rival organisation that would concentrate exclusively on the cultural nationalist movement.148 It is likely that Griffith felt similarly to MacBride. Ryan, the leader of the Parnellite National League in London, was notable for having friends in Irish Party circles as well as some secret contacts in various British colonies (Irish republican social networks often overlapped with those of British navy or army personnel). These networks included South Africa,149 where two Irish Party members had recently gone to try gold prospecting. Utilising Ryan’s contacts, MacBride left for South Africa where he found work as the foreman of a goldmine. In turn, word reached Griffith in Dublin that work was available and that a small Irish community existed in South Africa. In the autumn of 1896, Griffith as well as his cousin John R. Whelan made the decision to leave for the proverbial ‘dark continent’.
Griffith’s decision to emigrate coincided with the publication of a significant report by Hugh Childers, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and cousin of Erskine Childers. Based on a Tory government commission of 1893–4, this report on the financial relations between Britain and Ireland showed Ireland to have been a victim of past economic mismanagement and to be deserving of ‘a distinct position and separate consideration’.150 After his return
