from the Irish Party that they become justices of the peace because of the required oath of allegiance to the British crown.52 In Limerick, the released convict John Daly was elected as mayor and acted nominally in republicans’ interests by removing the royal coat of arms from City Hall and granting the freedom of the city to his fellow released convict Tom Clarke. Meanwhile, immediately upon the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War in October 1899, resolutions of sympathy with the Boers were passed by six of the thirty-two county councils in Ireland (Limerick, Kilkenny, Mayo, Kings County, Sligo and Cork) as well as about two-dozen urban and district councils, town commissions and board of guardians (mostly in the counties Monaghan, Tipperary, Clare and Galway).53
This was a somewhat startling development. It reflected a motive of the secret compact behind the Anglo-Irish security negotiations of 1884–7 and the purpose of the recently established Resident Magistrate System, which was launched during 1881. During the mid-1880s the idea of creating elective local government bodies in Ireland was deemed ‘unsound and dangerous’ purely for security reasons.54 The decision to withhold from the municipal authorities established in Ireland during 1899 the same financial autonomies as their British counterparts possessed since 1888 was a continuation of this legacy.
Griffith helped to found a small Pro-Boer movement in Dublin during June 1899 once it became clear that Britain was going to invade the Boer Republic. With the support of the Celtic Literary Society, local 1798 centenary clubs and Mark Ryan’s recently established Irish National Club in London, Griffith formed the Irish-Transvaal Committee under John O’Leary’s presidency. Three Irish Party members made a subscription to the Irish-Transvaal Committee, but the Boer War presented some problems for the Irish Party in promoting its nationalist reputation. This was because the Irish Party was expected in all British political circles, including South African ones, to celebrate the Empire.55 Disingenuously or not, Griffith sought to capitalise upon this chink in the Irish Party’s armour. The possibilities of doing so were limited, however, by republicans’ lack of a viable political organisation of their own.
During 1899, IRB leaders in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Limerick, Kerry and Mayo made efforts to keep the 1798 centenary clubs in existence. Their purpose in doing so was reflected in the political columns of Griffith’s United Irishman, which called for the creation a new ‘republican association’ in the country that would be entirely public and based around the centenary clubs. Griffith’s friend G.A. Lyons even made an exaggerated claim that ‘if we had a ’98 club in every town in Ireland, working as I know at least one to be working in Dublin, we would not fear for the future of an Irish republic’.56 In Dublin, the IRB leader Fred Allan operated a body known as the Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee to which these centenary clubs were supposed to send subscriptions, just as they had previously done to the now defunct 1798 Centenary Committee. It was evidently intended that Griffith’s United Irishman would act as the organ of this new movement. At the June 1899 Bodenstown demonstration chaired by P.N. Fitzgerald, Maurice Moynihan of Tralee, the new Munster IRB leader (and father of a future leader of the Irish civil service of the same name), called upon all nationalists to support ‘that sturdy and patriotic little sheet, the United Irishman’. Moynihan advocated the establishment of ‘an open organisation’ because ‘political opinion in Ireland at this time is in too unsettled, too chaotic, a state to start a real revolutionary movement’. Moynihan declared that the proposed new public organisation should have nothing to do with the Irish Party and its press but it need not ‘decry any existing organisation, whether connected with land or labour’, such as William O’Brien’s United Irish League. Reflecting republicans’ prejudice against land agitations, however, Moynihan felt certain that it was ‘to the young men of the cities and towns we must look for the formation of a national organisation’.57
About 8,000 people, primarily from Dublin, were present at this Bodenstown demonstration. This may well have seemed as evidence to Griffith that his journal was about to become a significant seller. However, many centenary clubs disbanded soon after and whatever funds that were subscribed to the central Wolfe Tone Clubs of Dublin seem to have been financially mismanaged. Nominally, these funds were supposed to be used to erect a monument to Wolfe Tone (an idea that Dublin City Hall would reject in favour of the idea of a Parnell or a Gladstone monument) but instead they became funds of the IRB that were deliberately misappropriated by J.P. Dunne, the first secretary of the Wolfe Tone Clubs and a former admirer of John Redmond. Indeed, it is doubtful that the United Irishman received regular funding from this quarter. Although the United Irishman expanded to an eight-page journal after the 1899 Bodenstown demonstration, John Devoy, the IRB’s American ally, recalled that Griffith considered the IRB as ‘too stingy’ in their support and so he looked elsewhere.58 His alternative backers would prove to be no more reliable.
Historians have sometimes attributed to Griffith the political opinions voiced in ‘Over the Border’. This was a front-page commentary on international affairs that appeared in the United Irishman during its first year of publication.59 However, these articles were actually written by Frank Hugh O’Donnell, a London-Irish figure and associate of Mark Ryan upon whom the United Irishman became financially dependent. A graduate of Queens College Galway who had been expelled from the Irish Party in 1885 (Parnell had considered both O’Donnell and John O’Connor Power as too much of a personal rival),60 O’Donnell had the reputation of being a controversial propagandist because of his tendency to overstate his arguments. By now, he had few admirers apart from Mark Ryan and some London-Irish Tories.
During the period of the Boer War, Irish Catholics’ great hostility to the French Republic’s state-controlled education programme (it would soon expel the Jesuits from France) encouraged the Irish Party’s press to adopt a very pro-British treatment of current Anglo-French relations. These were strained due to Britain and France’s rival colonial interests on the African continent. Acting partly on John O’Leary’s advice,61 the United Irishman chose to reflect an opposing viewpoint. To this end, O’Donnell, adopting the pseudonym ‘the foreign secretary’, wrote unquestioning defences of the French government from all international criticisms, including intensely anti-Semitic defences of the Parisian government’s handling of the Dreyfus affair. Some historians have cited this as evidence of a strong anti-Semitic streak in Griffith, although this is an exaggerated claim.62 O’Donnell was actually receiving funds from the French government to write this propaganda. He had used his connection with Mark Ryan’s London-Irish circle as a cover for claiming to be an Irish revolutionary leader and had approached both French and Dutch embassies looking for financial support for an anti-British propaganda campaign. In this, he outmanoeuvred American agents of John Devoy’s Clan na Gael (who attempted a similar objective, nominally on behalf of the IRB) and succeeded in acquiring funds to launch an Irish pro-Boer movement, his efforts in Paris having succeeded partly due to the assistance of Maud Gonne and her war-mongering French imperialist (ex-Boulangerist) associates on the Parisian city council. In this way, O’Donnell, Ryan and Gonne effectively financed the Irish Pro-Boer movement from London and Paris. It appears, however, that their circle was not above passing information to the British Foreign Office on French attitudes towards international affairs.63
In some Irish Party quarters (which were privy to what was taking place at Dublin Castle), it was rumoured not entirely without reason that the pro-Boer movement was also connected with more dangerous British secret service plots.64 Whatever the case, Maud Gonne, who grew up in Dublin Castle social circles and took after her military father, clearly attempted to endear herself to Griffith at this time. She sent him a large signed photograph of herself and a copy of a novel The Mountain Lovers, both bearing an inscription pledging her friendship to him.65 Reputedly, Griffith thereafter entertained serious romantic illusions about Gonne,66 who had attained celebrity status as supposedly one of the most beautiful women of the day. If so, these hopes were no doubt short-lived: she was not known as Ireland’s Joan of Arc for nothing. A political association remained, however, for at least the length of the Anglo-Boer War. Griffith even horsewhipped a newspaper editor for claiming to have proof that Gonne was a Parisian agent of the British Foreign Office.67 This action led to Griffith’s arrest and his violent action was very probably motivated by self-defence: it was well known that the United Irishman was financially dependent upon Gonne’s
