than the local (friendly or unfriendly) DMP or RIC detectives who were standing on Irish street corners. In conjunction with various activities of the Foreign Office, War Office and the Admiralty, it was financed by the Secretary of State’s secret service fund to promote and protect British strategic or diplomatic interests worldwide, including the financing of both national and international security concerns.83 Griffith claimed to have expected a negative result in MacBride’s parliamentary campaign, but nevertheless attempted to use MacBride’s defeat repeatedly thereafter as a means to criticise the Irish Party’s supposed lack of patriotism.84
Griffith’s next attack upon the Irish Party was equally indirect. Maud Gonne and Mark Ryan funded him to attempt to negate the political influence within Dublin of Fred Allan. As the former manager of the Irish Daily Independent, Allan was considered to be too personally sympathetic towards John Redmond, who was now chosen as a new leader for the Irish Party partly because it was considered that his political lineage (his family had been in politics since the 1850s) made him a good potential successor to Parnell as a man who could at least pose as an individual that was above ‘mere’ party politics and thus assume the standing of a prospective national leader. Allan had recently accepted the job as secretary to the lord mayor of Dublin to strengthen the hand of the Wolfe Tone memorial movement but was then embarrassed by the mayor’s announcement that he intended organising a large welcoming celebration for Queen Victoria and so decided to offer his resignation to City Hall. However, John O’Leary dissuaded Allan from doing so (he deemed the Queen’s visit to be politically insignificant). This prompted Gonne to fund Griffith to blacklist all corporation officials who took part in the royalist demonstration.85 As a result, Allan lost his position as the leader of the Wolfe Tone Clubs in June 1900 in the same week as the United Irish League set up a central executive in Dublin and officially declared itself to be the supporting body of John Redmond and the Irish Party. Thereafter, Griffith also broke up a meeting in the Rotunda and gathered about 2,000 people to break up a relatively small rally in the Phoenix Park in an attempt to prevent the UIL from establishing branches in Dublin.86
These activities, funded by Gonne, reflected a peculiar and longstanding dynamic to the revolutionary underground in Ireland. In acting as a thorn in the side to moderate nationalist politicians, it frequently served unionists by diverting attention away from the manner in which they were being politically protected the most in the manner of oligarchs by the exercise of the golden rule in society. During the Queen’s visit, Griffith published bitter United Irishman editorials against the Irish Party’s willingness to pledge their allegiance to ‘The Famine Queen’, took part in Irish Socialist Republican Party street brawls with the police (Griffith was a skilled boxer)87 and succeeded in getting himself arrested twice and his journal prosecuted.88 Griffith’s willingness to engage in street brawls was probably influenced by deep frustration in his personal life at this time. The previous winter, he was unable to save his father from the shame of being forced to enter the workhouse while his beloved older sister had just died from tuberculosis.89
T.D. Sullivan MP, a mayor of Dublin during the Land League days, knew the Griffith family slightly during the mid-1880s but he had recently announced his intention to retire from politics. He responded to the prosecution of the United Irishman by pointing out that it was an insignificant cultural nationalist organ of Maud Gonne’s that did not represent a dangerous political movement. Therefore, it was absolutely ridiculous for Dublin Castle to have treated it, or, indeed, to have drawn great political attention to it, in the way that it did.90 The political context of these developments was essentially the scheming of John Clancy, a key figure in Dublin republican circles for many years despite the fact that he was the electoral registrar and sub-sheriff of the city from 1885–99. He was now a representative of the new municipal ward of Clontarf.91 Clancy supported Gonne and Griffith’s failed efforts to get City Hall to confer the freedom of Dublin upon the president of the Boer Republic and to get released convict Tom Clarke appointed to a clerical position in the corporation (Clarke subsequently became the New York agent for the United Irishman). Acting on the advice of J.P. Nannetti, a printing-firm owner previously associated with the IRB but who now joined the Irish Party, that winter Clancy committed himself to the UIL and helped to establish it in Dublin by making it vocally supportive of a policy of removing all loyalists from the corporation.92 This set the tone for subsequent developments.
Griffith had called previously in the United Irishman for the formation of a new movement that would commit itself primarily to removing all royalist flunkeys from Irish municipal politics.93 These campaigns reflected a desire to undo a legacy of the 1892 general election, the first post-1886 general election to be held. This was a widespread tendency to abandon the old pledge of the Irish National League, set during 1882 and partly sustained by the Plan of Campaign of 1886–90, that nationalists should not take government offices.94 The revival of the sectarian Ancient Order of Hibernians among the beleaguered Ulster Catholic population after 1904 would see this idea re-emerge as a factor in political debate.95 It essentially remained a minority position, however, that, in the meantime, was championed mostly by Griffith’s nascent political movement in Dublin. This was also the context for the launch of an anti-enlistment movement, for which Gonne financed the printing of 40,000 circulars and Fr Kavanagh declared the Boer War to be an unjust war according to the teachings of the Catholic Church.
Gonne also financed the creation of two new cultural nationalist organisations that were founded at the Celtic Literary Society meeting rooms in Dublin. The first was the Daughters of Erin, a small women’s nationalist organisation, and the second was ‘Cumann na nGaedhael (Confederation of the Gaels)’, which expressed support for promoting the Irish language and held joint social functions with the Daughters of Erin. Only a few dozen people were present at its initial meeting, at which Griffith was appointed its provisional leader.96 When its first convention was held, however, Griffith was not elected to any position. Instead, its executive consisted mostly of individuals who were elected in absentia due to their status as figureheads in the pro-Boer agitation, namely John O’Leary (president) and Fr Kavanagh, John MacBride, Robert Johnston and James Egan (vice-presidents).97
With Gonne’s support, Fr Kavanagh also formed a branch of the Celtic Literary Society in Cork and subsequently wrote to the United Irishman stressing that the new movement must not be allowed to fall under the influence of men who held ‘un-Catholic doctrines’.98 In the light of his previous quarrel with Griffith, Fr Kavanagh may have used his influence to exclude him from its executive. This stance was motivated primarily, however, by a desire to marginalise all political activists of John Daly’s generation who, through their association with surviving 1798 centenary clubs or trade and labour associations, were either sympathetic to the early radicalism of the United Irish League or the old school of fenian political anticlericalism. To marginalise all such men, Cumann na nGaedhael sought recruits exclusively among young members of the Gaelic League. Early adherents such as Terence MacSwiney and Liam de Róiste of Fr Kavanagh’s Celtic Literary Society in Cork, as well as Bulmer Hobson and Denis McCullough in Belfast, made no secret of their distaste for political activities of the preceding generation. It was not a coincidence that this formation of Cumann na nGaedhael coincided with the establishment of D.P. Moran’s Leader. This was a new Catholic newspaper that, although nominally an independent organ, existed to propagate a self-confident cultural nationalism that sought to undo, or screen over, all the divisions that had erupted in Irish Party circles after 1890.99
During the height of the pro-Boer campaign in the summer of 1900, Griffith had enjoyed the excitement of being brought by Robert Johnston, a wealthy Belfast republican, to Paris to meet Maud Gonne and her war-mongering French political associates.100 A year later, however, Griffith was writing to John MacBride that there was ‘not the ghost of a chance of my being able to go over’ to Paris again and that he was ‘all alone in Dublin now and half-dead’.101 In March 1901, Rooney had fallen terminally ill due to a slum-contracted disease. He died three months later. Coming very shortly after the death of his own sister from the same cause and his father’s incarceration in a workhouse, this hit Griffith particularly hard. Meanwhile, if Griffith’s enthusiasm for the pro-Boer campaign had declined, this was only natural as the centre of the political controversy had shifted far away from Griffith’s
