expelling T.M. Healy and his clericalist followers from the party, the Irish Party discovered that the UIL, whose branches consisted of many parish priests, was not very willing to contribute to its funds. To counteract this trend, it was decided to send men to the United States to establish an American fund-raising wing of the UIL. Maud Gonne and John MacBride, who had fled from South Africa, went to America on Mark Ryan’s orders. While Griffith believed they were opposing the Irish Party’s mission, they actually worked for the American allies of Michael Davitt. Essentially acting as the Irish Party’s fifth columnist, Davitt had resigned from parliament purely to supervise the development of the Pro-Boer movement. He went to the United States to attempt to shut down the old Clan na Gael organisation of John Devoy, which was currently promoting an American lecture tour for John Daly and no longer supporting John Redmond (the chief ‘independent nationalist’ after 1891) after he rejoined the Irish Party. Devoy complained to MacBride about this situation but the later justified this course of events by stating that Cumann na nGaedhael had been decided upon as the movement of the future, not the old republican networks. Reflecting Maud Gonne’s strategy, he also wrote to the United Irishman that he believed that the public organisations identified with the new Irish-Ireland movement within Ireland itself, such as Cumann na nGaedhael, the Gaelic League and (increasingly) the GAA, were bringing ‘a new soul into Erin’ and he suggested that they adopt a new motto of ‘Sinn Féin’ to describe their objectives.102 At the time, with Gonne’s support, Mark Ryan was proposing to form a new international organisation, under MacBride’s presidency, that would link Irish-American contacts with his own circle in London and Cumann na nGaedhael in Dublin.103 It was intended that this would replace the old Clan na Gael-IRB networks and create a new movement that was more in line with mainstream Irish nationalism.
Not surprisingly, the political outcome of the Pro-Boer movement did not become evident until the Anglo-Boer War ceased in October 1902. That month, the Irish Party’s fortunes were partly secured by the formal establishment of the United Irish League of America while the success of Davitt’s mission meant that the Clan na Gael nearly disbanded altogether. The cessation of the Boer War also brought an end to the funding that had sustained the O’Donnell– Ryan–Gonne–MacBride network and, in turn, the United Irishman. Griffith was therefore left once again in the position of needing financial backers: due to its very limited advertising and sales revenue, the United Irishman had to rely on private donations from shareholders to keep afloat.
Mark Ryan still had sufficient funds to impose his will upon the old IRB organisation and attempt to create a new executive and strategy for that movement. Since the 1901 funeral of James Stephens, he had pressed for uniting his movement with the IRB on the condition that the latter would rebuild itself totally from scratch exclusively among young Cumann na nGaedhael or Gaelic League activists. As a result, P.T. Daly, an active Dublin trade unionist, was simultaneously appointed the first full-time travelling organiser for Cumann na nGaedhael, which soon developed branches in each major Irish and British city, and the secretary, or ‘chief travelling organiser’, of a new IRB organisation in October 1902.104
MacBride would soon call upon Devoy to fund both Griffith’s journal and P.T. Daly’s organisation through the medium of Mark Ryan in London.105 However, Cumann na nGaedhael’s status as a public organisation connected with the new Irish-Ireland movement meant that the necessary funding was more likely to be attained from entirely different quarters. This was a reality that was appreciated most by Maud Gonne. These trends would soon enable Griffith to take his first steps out of the police-supervised world of street protest politics and find a niche for himself in mainstream politics, thereby slowly but surely distancing himself from the revolutionary underground that had embroiled him in its dark secrets since 1894.
The clericalist wing of the Irish home rule movement led by T.M. Healy, W.M. Murphy, John Sweetman and their followers remained in favour of decentralising authority within the United Irish League. Unlike T.M. Healy and his followers, the Irish Party had failed during 1902 to support an English education act that was supported by the Catholic hierarchy because of the boost that it gave to denominational schools in England. This created a backlash against the Irish Party in Catholic circles in both Ireland and Britain. D.P. Moran’s Irish-Ireland movement had already been established as a tool for putting pressure upon the Irish Party to obey the Catholic bishops, not the intellectual fashions of British public life or the Liberal Party, in the politics of education. Soon, Maud Gonne would take it upon herself to contact John Sweetman, a very wealthy former Healyite MP, looking for financial support for the United Irishman, noting that ‘the editor Mr. Griffith is not aware that I am writing to you and to one or two more’.106Sweetman admitted to being a constant reader of Griffith’s journal despite the fact that ‘sometimes it annoyed me very much by some of its writers sneering at religion’. If this practice ceased entirely, however, he would agree to become its principal shareholder. Gonne let Griffith know the terms of Sweetman’s offer and then informed the latter that ‘I quite agree with you that all attacks on religion should be avoided … I am sure they will be.’107 Soon afterwards, on Griffith’s behalf, she persuaded Sweetman to increase his shareholding in the company further, as ‘Mr. Griffith feels confident if things go on as they are going at present, in about 3 months the paper will be paying its way.’108
In addition to Sweetman, another valuable patron Griffith found at this time was Walter Cole. He was a successful Liverpool-born fruit merchant and Catholic community activist who served on Dublin city council as an alderman. A former Healyite within the YIL, Cole also admired Michael Davitt’s politics. Upon joining Cumann na nGaedhael, Cole not only established a close friendship with Griffith but also offered him much needed personal financial assistance. This certainly did not go unappreciated. Henry Egan Kenny, Arthur’s closest friend, once recalled that Griffith told him that ‘Walter has been Mother, Father and ideal friend to me. I could not have lived through those days of stress without his unexampled care and princely hospitality.’109 While Griffith’s family had fallen completely apart due to poverty several years previously, after the cessation of the Boer War the support Griffith received from his new Catholic patrons allowed him to rescue his ailing father from the workhouse and the Griffith family were able to resettle in a small family home of their own, based in Summerhill, for the first time in almost a decade.110
At the relatively late age of thirty-two, Griffith’s life began to undergo a significant change due to the fact that he had finally found a career. Thanks to Maud Gonne’s initiative, he had found a means of leaving the very insecure life of poverty he had known behind him and to embark on a journalistic career with a degree of confidence because he had found stable financial backing from well-to-do individuals. After years of troubling ill health from living in slum conditions, he was certainly lucky to escape the same fatal fate of Rooney and his older sister Marcella, and to not have to follow the same path as had been taken by his brothers, most of his youthful friends (including former United Irishman contributors) and other former pro-Boer activists (including James Connolly), which was emigration to perform menial labouring jobs. Not surprisingly, he was not prepared to throw away his recent good fortune.
Arthur Griffith’s days of working overnight for a minimum wage, dressed in the ink-stained overalls of a compositor or the sweat-soaked clothes of a South African miner, were now over. Instead, he would begin to revel in his newfound role as a respectable and well-dressed, if far from well off, editor of a ‘national review’. If the stylish pince-nez that now adorned Griffith’s face betrayed a degree of personal affectation, however, it was his already well-developed and incisive intelligence that would ultimately allow him to catch the public eye.
CHAPTER THREE
The Review Editor
Arthur Griffith’s relationship with the journalistic profession might be typified as lifelong: his own father had a thirty-year association with the newspaper business. As a teenager, Griffith both satirised and celebrated the profession by writing fictional tales of
