They invariably encompassed newspaper-column length digressions on political or cultural matters by various contributors that appeared alongside random commentaries by Griffith himself upon a potpourri of politicians, as well as other publications’, activities. These commentaries were often delivered with a Mitchelite verbal punch and were presented as highly topical and political, but frequently they read as mere exercises in criticism.33 This was because they originated in Griffith’s own selection each week of whatever seemed to him as symbolic of how political events were developing.
This trait of Griffith’s publications reflected the fact that he was more often than not a critic, including a comically satirical one,34 rather than a preacher of original ideas. Even after he launched significant political initiatives of his own, their limited promise led him to write editorials that continued to focus primarily on other quarters, such as internal debates within the Ulster and Irish Parties. In doing so, Griffith invariably sided with William O’Brien’s wing of the Irish Party as well as the dissenting ‘Independent Orange Order’ wing of the Ulster Party against their respective party leaderships. Often, this material was printed alongside articles of historical research that sometimes hinted at contemporary parallels. Griffith himself was probably much more familiar with intimate details of the history of both the Irish Party and the Orange Order than were many members of those organisations in his own day. Like Mitchel, he tended to subscribe to a cyclical conception of the course of history and, therefore, believed that quoting the past against the present could see similar fault lines emerge in society once again.
Often the logic of Griffith’s prose was to assail all quarters in the expectation that this would prompt readers to follow his line of reasoning instead. However, as most of his readers were confined to subscribers to his publication rather than part of the fluctuating and larger demographic of newspaper consumers, he was effectively preaching to the converted, or whatever readers ‘never tired as from week to week he reiterated his thesis in all the varied tones of appeal, denunciation, mockery and argument’, utilising ‘all the powers of a singularly clear, serene and forcible mind’. While Mitchel had acquired fame through adopting such tactics for about fifteen months, Griffith would do so ‘when no other Irishman did it’ for about fifteen years, and ‘there hardly exists in the history of journalism another instance of such patient, passionate and consistent propaganda’, as one of Griffith’s more critical Ulster unionist readers noted:
Very few men in such a task would not have made themselves tiresome and ridiculous and have brought upon their principles either hatred or contempt. What saved Arthur Griffith was his personality [as reflected in print] … It was not that he was always wise and right, for he was often wrong and unwise: it was not that he was always just and fair, he was often hard and sometimes curiously obstinate when most manifestly in the wrong; but he had the faculty of convincing his readers of his personal honesty and sincerity. His style was most marvellously adapted to his purpose: it was clear and sinewy and flexible, never rising to any great height of eloquence or passion but never slovenly or vague or weak. It was the direct expression of his character.35
Similarly, the mutual dislike between Griffith and George Moore did not prevent the latter from crediting Griffith with having ‘the power of putting life into the worn-out English language’.36 As many simply disliked Griffith, however, and equated him with an alien presence in the world of politics and literature because he did not always play the role that he was expected by his peers to play within what became known as ‘the Irish Ireland movement’.
Rooney had been much more prepared than Griffith to overlook differences in politics among the membership of the Gaelic League, befriending, for example, J.J. O’Kelly (a.k.a. ‘Sceilg’), a conservative and clericalist editor with the Freeman’s Journal, the organ of the Irish Party and the favoured newspaper of the Catholic hierarchy. Although O’Kelly greatly admired Rooney’s tolerant personality, he was never fond of Griffith who detested anyone connected with the Freeman’s Journal,37 which indeed was a semi-governmental organ that was closely connected with Dublin Castle. The manner by which the membership of the Celtic was absorbed into various Gaelic League subcommittees by October 1902 determined what role Griffith was expected by his peers to play as a review editor. As had been the case since 1892, the politics of Irish education continued to be the subject that polarised opinion.
The Celtic had lost the support of Trinity public intellectuals for opposing the Boer War. This prompted Catholic businessmen associated with the Freeman to step into this breach, assuming the status of the Celtic’s patrons and discouraging it from continuing to champion non-denominational education. This occurred while a debate, dormant since the early 1880s, upon the possibility of Irish industrial development was revived in response to the establishment of new local government councils. Hitherto, socialists had joined Griffith and Rooney in arguing in favour of a state-controlled economy but disagreed with their ideal of Irish independence, which they deemed to be retrogressive.38 Griffith was now persuaded to join a Gaelic League subcommittee set up to examine the Irish industrial question.39 This became Griffith’s connection with the Gaelic League, while his old anticlerical mentor Henry Dixon was persuaded to join a Gaelic League subcommittee on the question of public libraries, in the process disappearing from the public eye.
By 1902, the Gaelic League had the support of the leaders of Clonglowes College, Blackrock College, Rockwell College, Saint Patrick’s Catholic teacher-training college in Drumcondra and Archbishop Walsh. It also had trans-Atlantic support from the recently revived Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) whose American wing succeeded in encouraging American Catholic universities to support the Gaelic League’s mission in Ireland while priests as far as Argentina collected funds for the same purpose.40 In Ireland itself, Catholic bishops began chairing most Gaelic League feiseanna while the AOH, a militant supporter of the Irish Party, was responsible for creating a demand to make Irish the nation’s first ‘official language’.41 The politics of ‘home rule’ had taken on a definite new tinge, as if it was seeking to establish a separate cultural identity for that subordinate imperial parliament that had been envisioned by Gladstone. At the same time, however, Catholic support for the Gaelic League was undoubtedly motivated by a simple determination to use the absence of a linguistic nationalism in the state’s education system as a means of bolstering the church’s argument for a religiously-controlled education system and putting more pressure on the Irish Party to stand by that Christian–democratic principle in the face of any potential British governmental opposition.42
Notwithstanding the Gaelic League’s anti-Trinity bias, the Irish-Ireland movement’s creation of an alliance between the cause of the language and religious education also made the Church of Ireland’s national magazine sympathetic towards the Gaelic League, which could only be accused of being sectarian in so far as Archbishop Walsh and Douglas Hyde were being sectarian in maintaining that nationalist ideologues were mistaken in their Napoleonic equation of state control of education with the existence of the nation state.43 Hitherto, Griffith had made no secret of his opposition to this anti-statist position. Just as he argued in favour of state grants to enable the working classes attend university and the establishment of more state institutes of technical education, he was particularly adamant that no education system, or university, could possibly be national if it was under denominational rather than purely state management:
We do not believe with those who would keep the present Protestant University in College Green, establish one for Catholics at Saint Stephens Green or elsewhere, and one for Presbyterians somewhere in Belfast. If three such universities were in existence tomorrow, we would regard them merely as part of the system whose chief object is to keep the people of Ireland in two or three opposing camps—such a system, in whatever guise it comes, we will continue to oppose, however strong the influences that support it.44
In opposition to Archbishop Walsh, Griffith expressed support for the stance of the Presbyterian Church in Belfast, which declared that non-denominational schools and universities were not detrimental to religion and were also more conducive to the progress of the nation-state and the material wellbeing of its citizens.45 This reflected the fact that the YIL’s call for the conversion of Trinity
