from suspect sources—this being an almost inevitable feature of being associated with revolutionary organisations—this did not have a great bearing upon his own work.
Griffith’s opposition to the Irish Party, which was more intense than that of any Irish Tory member of parliament, would become a defining feature of his political editorials. As had been the case since the late 1880s, it continued to be expressed primarily as a sense of outrage at the party’s indifference to the urban working class. Griffith continued to believe in the idea of a state-sponsored socialism while opposing all notions of politically engineered class conflicts. He argued that the establishment of more state institutes of technical education for the working classes was the most pressing educational need facing the country and that state grants should be created to enable the working classes attend university, as was the case in France and Germany.68 As a result of its decision to allow the Catholic hierarchy determine its policy on education, the Irish Party was understood by Griffith to have equated Irish educational needs with the question of denominational education alone.69 He typified Irish Party politicians and journalists as royalist flunkeys for two reasons. First, they took part in loyalist social events. Second, there was an inevitably close working relationship between all the country’s elected politicians and its police forces. This reality was presented by Griffith as a symbolic representation of parliamentarians’ indifference to the urban working class.70
Griffith frequently gave voice to this quintessentially working-class perspective of police forces being inherently oppressive tools of social control for so long as he lived in poor circumstances himself. It underpinned his fascination with the history of the Fenian movement—regarding which he knew very intricate details 71 —as well as his fondness for attending republican commemorative events. For example, in expressing praise for P.N. Fitzgerald’s 1901 Bodenstown speech against middle-class political opportunism Griffith drew the personal conclusion that police harassment of workers on their way home to Dublin from Bodenstown demonstrated what motives underpinned both middle-class political attitudes and all the activities of the police.72 Catholic clergymen often attempted to dissuade working-class figures like Griffith from holding such attitudes. This was done by pointing out that secret revolutionary movements, in Ireland as much as in the rest of Europe, were invariably established by police forces as a tool to detect and manage sources of discontent among the poor. Old fenians like Fitzgerald sometimes attempted to counter this argument by telling their followers, in the same breath as they espoused the value of bearing firearms, that priests were, consciously or unconsciously, an ally of the police in oppressing the poor.73
Fr P.F. Kavanagh, a Franciscan monk and popular historian of the 1798 rising, gave valuable support to the pro-Boer movement by launching an anti-enlistment campaign. He challenged Griffith directly on the issue of secret societies in the pages of the United Irishman.74 To refute Fr Kavanagh’s arguments, Griffith argued that secret societies were very often a necessary evil in overthrowing tyrannical powers. His belief in this idea appears to have been rooted primarily in his appreciation for the fact that members of such organisations, by espousing a republican dichotomy between the concepts of citizenship and slavery, had often helped to sustain a sense of self-reliant patriotism in Irish political debate: ‘we owe what national self-respect we still retain mainly to the secret society of the United Irishmen and the secret society of the Fenian Brotherhood … They made men out of slaves.’ Meanwhile, in an attempt to speak in defence of the existence of secret societies, Griffith also spoke of the underground nature of the early Christian church and argued that the modern church had lost its sense of perspective in these matters, thereby frequently becoming a bastion of aristocratic conservatism.75 Griffith himself came to the realisation that there were many dubious features to the history of Irish revolutionary organisations, not least because he knew from his own youth in Dublin of horrific episodes that pointed to unsavoury conclusions regarding the true nature of all revolutionary undergrounds.76 Overall, he evidently viewed the broad question of the relationship between agencies of social control and the activities of revolutionary organisations from a practical standpoint. He knew that secret machinations involving the police’s political intelligence forces were an inherent feature of this environment. However, he also acknowledged that, in the pre-democratic age and semi-colonial political context in which he lived, such organisations often provided the only ladder available for men of his social background to gain an entry point into the power game that defined the world of politics.
If Griffith was willing to defend the history of Irish revolutionary organisations, his own activities at this time were less an underground conspiracy than a form of protest politics that was shaped by specific Dublin circumstances. The Irish Party was beginning to eclipse the Tories in Dublin parliamentary representation.77 As Griffith would note, however, the city’s politics was still governed by a unique partition that stemmed from the legacy of the imperial treasury’s deliberate withholding, not long after the admission of Catholics to municipal office in 1840, of the city’s quit and crown rents that were paid annually for the city’s upkeep. Dublin was now the only city in the world where the suburbs, which were invariably the home of a city’s labour force, housed its wealthiest inhabitants and contributed nothing to the upkeep of a city that was left to subsist if that were possible (generally it was not) only on the taxation of the city’s labouring population.78 It was not for nothing that Griffith typified Dublin city’s completely unparalleled housing and sanitation problems as a totally avoidable ‘Viceregal microbe’. The Dublin Chamber of Commerce had become a moribund body that, more often than not, maintained a deliberate and embarrassed silence, while contemporaries invariably associated wealthy Dublin society exclusively with royal court society, or the suburbs, and the poor with City Hall, i.e. the city’s actual government, which was deprived of resources and then accused of incompetence.79
An additional factor that uniquely coloured Dublin life was peculiarities that existed on the level of political organisation and journalism. Although the Irish Party had progressively abandoned its association with Land League radicalism after 1881, continuities existed on the simplistic level of personnel. Reflecting this, ex-Land League officials from the provinces lacked influence equally with the Irish Party and the British government but nevertheless maintained a proud tradition of moving to Dublin in an attempt to act as behind-the-scenes party administrators or nationalist journalists. Although the age of the by-line had not yet arrived, men of this social background played a significant part in colouring political debate in Ireland, while unionist opinion generally took perpetual comfort from the British government’s effective guarantee that ‘Dublin does not lead Ireland as Paris leads France.’80 Like many a nationalist journalist, Griffith wrote his columns as if this simply should not be the case. Unlike various ex-Land Leaguers, he had the additional vantage point, or motive, of being a native of Dublin; the home of many ‘statesmen on the street corners’.81 Although many fellow journalists typified Griffith’s understandable attacks on the Irish Party as either counter productive or downright unfair, they nevertheless generally understood and respected his place in the world of Dublin letters.
Griffith’s determination to act as a thorn in the Irish Party’s side manifested itself several times during 1900. First, to coincide with the nominal reunification of the Irish Party under John Redmond’s leadership, Griffith supported Mark Ryan in proposing that John MacBride be put forward for a south Mayo parliamentary by-election as a means of protesting against British rule. In doing so, they publicised the fact that MacBride had recently formed a small commando unit on the Boer side in the Anglo-Boer War. There was another context to this election, however, about which Griffith may well have been unaware. Under Dublin Castle’s supervision, Ryan had recently met up with MacBride’s Castlebar associates and spoke publicly of initiating arms importations along the Mayo coast. This action enabled Dublin Castle to achieve its longstanding ambition to persuade the British Admiralty to begin placing Royal Navy gunboats in Clew Bay.82 This reflected a peculiar context of the social world of republican activists. This was always characterised by engagement with nationalist debating clubs, working-class political organisations (urban and, to a lesser extent, agrarian) and popular cultural nationalist organisations (most notably the GAA) within Ireland itself. This prompted most activists, including Griffith, to view themselves as engaged in a nationalist challenge to the authority of Dublin Castle.
