to Pretoria, Griffith joined an Irish workers-benefit society named after John Daly, an imprisoned IRB leader who had recently been returned unopposed to parliament for Limerick city as a protest vote (his candidacy was immediately disqualified). Together with John MacBride, Griffith depended upon Solomon Gillingham, a successful baker of Irish descent and secret correspondent of Mark Ryan in London, to help him settle in the Dutch city. Through this channel, funds were forwarded to London for a fenian-amnesty agitation while an address was made to that wing of the American Clan na Gael that funded Ryan’s London activities.29 In this address, which was reprinted by W.M. Murphy’s Dublin newspaper, Griffith expressed a desire that Irishmen worldwide would use the centenary of the 1798 rising as an opportunity to ‘repudiate forever … the sham miscalled “constitutional action”’,30 which was the description that the Irish Party gave to their appeals to the British imperial parliament to better manage Irish affairs. Mark Ryan’s American contacts, secretly known as the Irish National Brotherhood (INB), were not reliable. Their propaganda was valued, however: as early as 1894 Griffith had persuaded the Celtic Literary Society to become subscribers to the Irish Republic (New York).31
It has been rumoured that Griffith was involved in a secret conspiracy in South Africa that planned to rob a local goldmine in order to finance an Irish revolutionary organisation.32 This seems unlikely, although the clear connection of his South African circle with a trans-Atlantic ‘Fenian’ communications network (this, as Griffith knew, had also existed during the first Anglo-Boer War)33 does at least explain the existence of a rumour. Griffith did work for a time as an overseer in a gold mine near Johannesburg where he nearly had a fatal accident. He later told the orphaned Dublin Protestant writer James Stephens that ‘I could have been a fairly wealthy man if I had the luck in those days to want to be dishonest’ because many individuals doing the work he was doing ‘were able to retire after a few years and buy theatres’ due to their subtle larceny.34
In Johannesburg Griffith occasionally received letters from William Rooney,35 which no doubt related to the activities of the 1798 centenary movement. Within weeks of Griffith’s departure, a 1798 Centenary Committee, led by John O’Leary, Henry Dixon and Fred Allan, was established by the YIL. Shortly thereafter, at a YIL convention chaired by P.N. Fitzgerald, it was proposed that centenary clubs should be established nationwide with a view to creating a new nationalist organisation.36 This 1798 centenary movement quickly grew large, but the Irish Party and the Catholic clergy launched a concerted campaign to wrestle control of the movement out of the IRB’s hands.37
The first circular distributed by the Centenary Committee argued that if the celebrations were to have ‘permanent beneficial results’ they would need to encompass equally the viewpoints of ‘the three great sects’ in Ireland. It was also argued that the United Irishmen’s greatest chance of attaining a fair constitution for Ireland had not been in the 1798 rebellion but rather in those political developments that had occurred prior to the government’s suppression of the Irish Volunteers during 1794 and the driving of the reformist United Irish movement underground.38 This argument was one that Griffith himself would repeat in later years.39 It was based on the understanding that the rebellion had been provoked by Britain to do away with the Irish constitution and facilitate a political and economic union between Britain and Ireland in order to maximise the former’s resources in fighting the Anglo-French War (1793–1815). Ireland, it would seem, could never quite escape from the demands of the British imperial economy. Griffith pointed out in 1911 that the existence of ‘international’ Irish republican conspiracies ever since that time was merely a cover to enable British consulates abroad to gather useful foreign policy information in their host countries.40 This was an additional paradox in Irish political nomenclatures, which was perhaps best reflected by the fact that the author of the famous nineteenth-century Irish nationalist ballad ‘who fears to speak of ’98’ was actually a leading unionist economist.41 It was also the reason why most contemporaries judged that no greater revolution could possibly take place in Ireland than the development, for the first time in history, of a political community that was truly determined to revolve on its own axis.
Virtually all those who had been present at Griffith’s farewell gathering at Dublin were prominent members of the 1798 Centenary Committee. A surprising exception was William Rooney, who was delegated instead to join Alice Milligan, the co-editor of the Belfast Shan van Vocht (which was partly funded, via Robert Johnston, by the New York Irish Republic), in doing insignificant propaganda work, such as organising small-scale historical lectures and exhibitions.42 This may be explained by the fact that Rooney was now concentrating primarily upon the Irish language movement, having helped the Gaelic League to organise its first of many Feis Ceoil Irish music events.43 Indeed, aside from contributing a ballad (as did Griffith) to Douglas Hyde’s Songs and Ballads of ’98, Rooney’s only direct contribution to the 1798 centenary movement was to propose that all memorials erected in honour of the United Irishmen should bear Irish language inscriptions only.44
Griffith and other Irish immigrants were able to hold their own 1798 centenary demonstration in Johannesburg on 30 August 1898.45 By that time, however, the centenary movement in Ireland had grown weak and two of Griffith’s closest associates in the movement, Henry Dixon and G.A. Lyons, blamed John O’Leary and, to a lesser extent, Fred Allan, for this, owing to their eventual capitulation to the Irish Party’s demand to have greater control over the movement.46 Furthermore, as the YIL had been converted into the 1798 Centenary Committee (each of which, like the IRB, had been nominally under O’Leary’s presidency), this meant that Griffith’s friends in Dublin had lost their only available political forum.
It was sometime during the autumn of 1898 when Griffith made the decision to return to Dublin. By January 1899, he was working as a compositor in the City Hall office of Thom’s Dublin Gazette and again attending meetings of the Celtic Literary Society.47 Well-founded rumours existed in Dublin that the ‘Parnellite’ Independent Newspaper Company, which had promoted the YIL, was about to be liquidated. In addition, the Shan van Vocht, which had been established to eclipse the influence of John Clarke’s Northern Patriot in the 1798 centenary movement (a task it accomplished), was ready to fold. This journal had been closely associated with the Celtic Literary Society and it was partly funded by Mark Ryan’s London-Irish circle. Upon receiving word in late 1898 that it would cease publication, Ryan proposed that Rooney should become the editor of a new journal to replace it. As Rooney had no previous editorial experience, however, Griffith landed the job. An additional factor that worked in Griffith’s favour here was that this enterprise was funded by capital previously forwarded to Ryan from South Africa.48
The United Irishman was founded in Dublin in March 1899 with Rooney and Griffith as its joint editors. It was expected by the IRB to be an organ for the surviving centenary clubs. Mark Ryan, by contrast, wanted it to promote a non-political cultural nationalism. In the face of these competing desires, Rooney and Griffith chose a similar stance as had Alice Milligan by adopting a middle course, declaring that ‘here are opinions to suit all classes. You pay your penny and you take your choice.’49 Up until a couple of months before his premature death in May 1901, William Rooney acted as the literary editor of the United Irishman, which was subtitled as a weekly review. Griffith took on the responsibility of tackling political subjects. These included the recent establishment of elective local government bodies and the role that the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War had in influencing the whole question of where Irish political allegiances should lie in the wake of the 1798 centenary celebrations. Reflecting his antipathy to contemporary party politics, Griffith wrote regarding the creation of new county and urban district councils that he hoped voters would ‘reject with equal contempt the slavish home ruler and the knavish unionist and vote for representatives, regardless of their party politics, who are honest men’.50 Men of professed nationalist sympathies but not necessarily of any specific party allegiance won 75 per cent of all seats, including many individuals who had once been connected with the republican underground.51
The outcome of these elections highlighted significant undercurrents within Irish political society. New county and town councillors erected dozens of memorials to Irish rebellions in the wake of the 1798 centenary, while some old republican
