due to his uncanny ability to convince newspaper editors that he was ‘the grandest liar that the Lord ever breathed into’ and so was unquestionably the right man for the job.1 Many of Griffith’s contemporaries pondered the significance of the trade. This was because the enfranchisement of sections of the working class during the mid-1880s coincided with the rise of the journalist to a position of political significance for the first time. Furthermore, as was demonstrated by T.P. O’Connor’s burgeoning literary world in Britain, young writers such as George Bernard Shaw and other self-consciously ‘modern’ figures were not ashamed to have begun as ‘lowly’ journalists, even if it would take a couple of decades before O’Connor’s journals were widely accepted.2 In his teens, Griffith drew a contrast between revered past pamphleteers, such as Jonathan Swift, and contemporary writers for newspapers in order to defend the credibility of the latter. As an adult he would draw a different analogy; namely, between the journalistic profession and that of the barrister, claiming that this was the root of a prospective problem.
Griffith emphasised that ‘most people in this country live under the impression that those who write the leading articles in the daily papers believe in what they write’. This, of course, was ‘generally untrue’. It was the proprietor of a newspaper who sets and upholds ‘a policy’ for his own private business interests. Journalists were expected to be merely a pen for hire. Although, as Griffith noted, many journalists privately maintain that ‘their position … is similar to that of the lawyer who indifferently accepts a brief’, the fact remained that to most of his readers ‘he is not … speaking from a brief, but a tribune speaking from conviction’ as if he were a passionate advocate upon their behalf. Unlike the impartial barrister, therefore, the journalist was potentially ‘a man of superior knowledge or education who uses his superiority to mislead’.3
Griffith preferred to consider himself as a man who could never be guilty of playing such a dirty trick. He likened himself to his literary idol John Mitchel, a barrister turned journalist whose United Irishman publication was the model for Griffith’s own. To Griffith, Mitchel’s capacity to be an independent thinker came from his indifference to intellectual fashions: ‘he was a sane Nietzsche in his view of man, but his sanity was a century out of date back and forward.’ This was the reason why ‘he never wrote a paragraph which there is not an intellectual pleasure in reading’ and why, even in his ‘fiercest polemics’, he was capable of being a remarkably perceptive writer on the relationship between the narrow world of politics and the broader question of human nature. To Griffith, however, Mitchel was ‘a man of superior knowledge or education’ whom the Irish public failed to appreciate not because he had failed society but because society had failed him: ‘Ireland failed Mitchel because it failed in manhood.’4 This literary justification of extreme individualism, if a little perverse, was essentially a reflection of each man’s shared temperamental incapacity of being a common party-political animal that subscribed to popular shibboleths. Republican in philosophy, they actually thought more like monarchs from behind their editorial chairs in defence of their conception of citizenship. This was why Griffith was better suited to being a review editor rather than an actual journalist. He insisted on being his own boss.
Griffith was fortunate that review editors still enjoyed an exalted reputation during his lifetime. This was because of a lingering prejudice within British and Irish society against the journalistic world of commercial newspapers, which was frequently typified as ‘more a disease than a profession’.5 Griffith sought to capitalise upon this cultural phenomenon in a disingenuous manner. He perpetually pointed an accusing finger at all contemporary Irish newspapers for operating equally out of London and Dublin commercial offices and accommodating themselves to business and political norms as if this was proof not only of their lowly and anti-intellectual opportunism but also their conscious betrayal of Irish interests. This stance essentially fooled nobody as Griffith could only operate his review publications under a protective immunity from the commercial pressures that governed regular newspapers. Indeed, it was no secret to most contemporaries that Griffith was using his status as a review editor as a cover for issuing what was often considered to be a suspect political journalism of his own. Be that as it may, although Griffith’s journal was never printed in more than a thousand copies, had an even smaller readership and rarely broke even, the very fact that it was a weekly review rather than a newspaper meant that its capacity to influence bookish opinion in the country was significant.
The cessation of the Anglo-Boer War might have led to the permanent cessation of the United Irishman were it not for the ongoing political conflict over the financing of Irish education. In particular, the challenge that the Jesuits’ university, University College Dublin (UCD), was posing to the state’s universities, principally Trinity College Dublin (TCD), had become a very pivotal one because the Tory government had promised to establish a completely new ‘national university of Ireland’. This stimulated a significant market for creating and perpetuating review publications, perhaps most notably UCD’s New Ireland Review. Griffith would tackle the politics of the university question on a fairly regular basis but his readership was not generally an academic one.
The United Irishman’s popular front-page feature ‘All Ireland’ covered new publications and cultural events to make it a useful calendar for all who were interested in Irish literary life. This feature was compiled by William Rooney, up until he fell terminally ill in March 1901, and subsequently by Máire Butler, a Catholic fiction writer who was closely related to the propertied Galway family of Edward Martyn, the chief patron of Catholic sacred music in Ireland and a playwright.6 This literary side to the review was enhanced by its weekly ‘Ireland in London’ feature, which was designed to keep writers in Ireland and London informed of each other’s activities. Henry Egan Kenny (‘Sean Ghall’), Griffith’s closest friend, compiled this feature. Kenny now worked in London for the customs and excise office and also wrote (alongside Tomas Cuffe, a historian of Dublin) most of the Irish historical articles in the United Irishman (later, he was commissioned by historian Alice Stopford Green to do research for her publications).7 The veteran journalist Michael Cusack, who turned Griffith into a particularly enthusiastic fan of ‘the fine art’ of GAA hurling, was the author of all of its sporting columns.8
Later, a myth developed that Griffith wrote virtually everything that appeared in his publications. This occurred because during a pivotal period of Irish political debate (the early 1910s) Griffith was forced to do so for a time and, all things considered, he shouldered this burden extraordinarily well. This was the exception rather than the norm, however. Particularly during the early years, aside from writing occasional book reviews under pseudonyms, Griffith’s only personal contribution was to make political commentaries in brief editorials and to choose what Celtic Literary Society lectures to republish (the United Irishman was effectively the organ of this society). The latter practice ceased during 1902, as the Celtic began to crumble after Rooney, its founder, passed away. Ultimately, Griffith came to view his earliest days as a participant in debating societies as a youthful irrelevance; a viewpoint that reflected his sense that he had now moved on to more rewarding activities.
The formative stages of the United Irishman were commemorated by the publication of Rooney’s historical ballads and essays as books. This initiative of Griffith’s was supported by Seamus MacManus, a Donegal-born writer and frequent United Irishman contributor (he later became associated with Notre Dame University in Ohio), who also published in book format the poems of his recently deceased wife Anna Johnston (‘Ethna Carbery’ and daughter of Robert), the former co-editor of the Belfast Shan Van Vocht.9 Griffith paid tribute to Rooney’s memory by attributing to him an iconic image comparable to that which surrounded Thomas Davis, who had been Rooney’s literary role model.10 The United Irishman, however, had not been notable for containing original literature. Indeed, its declared intention to promote the ideals of long-deceased figures such as Davis and Wolfe Tone reflected a tendency to rely upon a simple historicism. Other writers, who were no less sincere than Griffith in their admiration of Rooney, lamented that he literally ‘burnt himself out’ through his futile attempt to repeat the example of Thomas Davis (a man who died equally young) as a historian who attempted to be an all-embracing essayist on Irish cultural matters.11
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