with egalitarian Protestant dissenter than Protestant Episcopalian or Catholic social attitudes. The possibility of continuing to promote such an idea had been undermined, however, by the fact that the Gaelic League’s official organ, An Claidheamh Solus (edited by Eoin MacNeill, a militant supporter of the Catholic hierarchy’s stance on education ever since the 1892 controversy), was using Trinity College’s lack of support for the language movement as a basis for a political onslaught on that college, claiming that in the struggle for control of the future direction of Irish education ‘the combatants are Trinity College and the Irish people’.46 The sectarian divisions in Irish education were also an extension of the sectarian divisions that existed in the Irish business community, but it would be some time before Griffith came to understand the significance of this fact.
So long as Griffith defied the stance of Archbishop Walsh in the politics of education, both the Leader and An Claidheamh Solus were highly dismissive of the right of the United Irishman to have a voice in the debate on Irish education. Although Rooney had been co-opted as a member of the league’s committee for organising Oireachtas meetings, he was always denied membership of its executive council.47 Meanwhile, Griffith’s relationship with the Gaelic League was often less than cordial. This is hardly surprising, as Griffith had initially made no secret of the fact that he wished ‘a speedy extinction’ upon all those who ‘babbled of the Gael’ while claiming that ‘nationality is not a thing of rights, arms, freedom, franchises, brotherhood, duties’.48 Griffith was a firm believer in the republican idea that a man was either a citizen or a slave, ‘for there is no middle term’,49 and that patriotic citizenship was essential to the nation-state. By contrast, in keeping with papal encyclicals, Catholic educators throughout Europe and America defined both patriotism and the nation in purely cultural terms in order to minimise the power of state to control education. This was in keeping with a mainstream European trend whereby many writers and artists (including, perhaps most potently of all, musicians and composers; a trend admired by Griffith)50 were simultaneously celebrating indigenous folk cultures while attempting to portray the progressive appeal of a cultural patriotism in an essentially modernist or didactic way. In central Europe, for instance, the Czechs succeeded particularly well in creating a new national theatre in their minority-spoken language, with Catholic clergymen’s support, as part of a broader campaign in resistance to exclusive control of education by a central imperial parliament.51 This was why, with the moral support of London Gaelic Leaguers, An Claidheamh Solus maintained that Irish writers would have to do the same and expressed a disappointment with contemporary Irish productions.52 Griffith, whose own knowledge of the Irish language was limited,53 disagreed, however. He cited the example of the United States and Switzerland as evidence of the fallacy of Schlegel’s oft-quoted maxim ‘no language, no nation’ while, like many working-class figures, he also regarded the purely cultural definition of nationality embodied in the ‘new patriotism’ as a deliberate attempt to ignore political and economic realities.54
Griffith was not without prejudices of his own, of course, and it is clear that he was particularly annoyed that many Gaelic Leaguers questioned the capacity of fans of contemporary English literature to be Irish patriots. For example, he was not above typifying as ‘ignoramuses’ those pious Gaelic Leaguers who celebrated the fact that all surviving Irish language texts, dating mostly from early-modern times, were on religious rather than literary themes (a reality that motivated many priests’ zealous support for the league):
Years ago an ignoramus would have sneered at the language. Now the ignoramus yells out in bad English that all who do not speak it are mere Englishmen. This is a sure sign that the Gaelic League is going to achieve its object. A movement that at the same time is supported by the man of intellect and the profound jackass cannot fail … [When the Gaelic League] tells us in its funny way that Emmet and Tone and Davis are not Irish, and that O’Grady and Yeats will never write a line that will touch the heart of a single Irish ignoramus, one feels compassion for the Gaelic League and trusts it may be saved from its illiterate friends … The cause of the Irish language is a noble and national one, but it can be injured by allowing fools and hypocrites to pose as its champions.55
Thus spoke Griffith in 1901, but his ascribed role within the Gaelic League after 1902—to deal with the question of Irish industrial resources on a subcommittee that was headed by Fr Tom Finlay S.J.—potentially placed him in a subordinate role to that which was being played by the Jesuits.
The Jesuits viewed the Gaelic League as providing a forum whereby economic debate within Ireland could be made a vehicle for propagating Catholic ideas of social justice (creating a more caring and homogenous society without disturbing the Gladstonian fiscal consensus established during 1886) and whereby cultural debate within Ireland could be accommodated with what might be described as a Catholic variation of modernism. In particular, it was desired to counter critiques (popular with republicans and British nationalists) of Catholics’ alleged failure to acknowledge progressive tendencies within the modern nation-state by arguing that Catholicism had inherent progressive tendencies that were compatible with any true programme of modernisation. As the intellectual cult of modernism, itself an anti-individualist philosophy, was frequently wedded to the cause of the nation-state, propagating a Catholic variation of modernism was seen as a necessary counter in the intellectual debates of the new (twentieth) century.56 Meanwhile, to reflect the Jesuits’ view that the British state was intrinsically Protestant and that a modern nation-state should not be defined without reference to religion,57 D.P. Moran deliberately twisted republicans’ traditional propaganda against any manifestations of royalist flunkeyism by maintaining that such flunkeyism was something that could only be expected from a Protestant.58 His ‘philosophy of Irish Ireland’ also attempted to imbue the Gaelic League with a brash self-confidence that generally manifested itself as a refusal to listen to any claim that Catholics were capable of anything other than the most progressive or modernist of political tendencies.
While this was not essentially a popular Catholic position,59 the success of the Jesuits in equating ‘Irish ideas’ with a Christian–democratic conception of church–state relations was made clear by the birth of a tradition whereby politicians who declared their support for the Irish language generally did so only as a means of indicating, or reaffirming, their support for the churches’ educational interests without running the risk of openly saying so and thereby providing an avenue for ideologues (be they nationalists or socialists) to mount an effective political criticism of the Christian–democratic position. Meanwhile, in William Martin Murphy, a very successful business entrepreneur, dedicated financier of Catholic projects and political associate of T.M. Healy and John Sweetman (Griffith’s new patron), the Jesuits found an ideal role model for presenting their vision of Irish economic development. Although never a popular man, Murphy was a highly professional figure whose success in establishing the Irish Independent as a non-party organ during 1904 and making it a far more popular newspaper in Catholic Ireland than the Irish Party’s Freeman’s Journal (whose sales perpetually dropped thereafter) marked a significant new departure;60 one that actually provided an avenue for Griffith to find an audience of his own. Although Murphy’s followers supported the existing British imperial economy, they had a more urban appeal than the Irish Party, whose members notoriously combined farmers’ interests with a slavish identification with the culture of the British state. The role of Murphy’s followers in encouraging a real element of social consciousness to Gaelic League propaganda could also make it appealing to young urban intellectuals. It was essentially the latter dynamic, however, that ultimately created a significant counter reaction from within the Gaelic League’s own ranks.61
The first substantial critique of this trend in Irish politics came from Frank Hugh O’Donnell, the former United Irishman patron who later became a historical lecturer for the Gaelic League of London.62 In The Ruin of Education in Ireland, O’Donnell argued that the Catholic education system was producing lay graduates who were ill equipped for entering various modern professions and civil services, being better suited to entering religious orders or else acting as teachers in schools where they had to surrender all personal and intellectual freedoms to the local bishop as much as any Catholic curate. Claiming to speak on behalf of dissatisfied Irish national-school teachers and unemployed Catholic university
