the fact that the church’s ambition to control education was purely self-aggrandising, partly in their desire to create more priests, and that its ambition was also governed by avarice—charging school fees and opposing the nation-state policy of free education—rather than any altruistic wish for the good of Irish society. O’Donnell suggested that the European Catholic experience demonstrated that the reason why Catholic involvement in state universities had been discouraged for the past century, ever since the rise of Napoleon, was that it had always stifled productive critical analyses and creative thinking for laymen, if not for theologians, in the social science departments.63 Owing to Archbishop Walsh’s prominence on the National Education Board, these arguments were considered as too polemical for virtually any Irish political commentator to touch. Reflecting this, Griffith would not embrace such a polemical viewpoint, while O’Donnell, who was formerly close to T.P. O’Connor, was reputedly in the pay of London Tories.64 The counter arguments being put forward by UCD students were not particularly persuasive either, however.
Tom Kettle was a celebrated figure among UCD academics and students because, as an essayist, he was perceived to have considerable literary skill in defending that idea to which each of them were necessarily wedded in a career sense; namely, that Catholic theories of social justice had an all-embracing applicability and the ethics of a Christian humanism was inherently more beneficial to society than a political rationalism.65 This gave Kettle an appeal in contemporary Ireland comparable to that of the Englishman G.K. Chesterton, who considered the independent Irish clericalist politician T.M. Healy to be ‘the most serious intellect in the present House of Commons’.66 In his contributions to Griffith’s and other journals, Kettle mirrored Chesterton’s defence of Christian ethics in literature, albeit in a less inspired and humourless way.67 On being appointed to a professorship of economics at Maynooth College by Archbishop Walsh, Kettle would reject the relevance of Griffith’s analyses of the Irish Party’s support of unionist taxation practices on the grounds that statistics were mere ‘bloodless actualities’ that meant nothing to the heart.68 In an attempt to justify Catholic social theory as being more valuable to society than economic analyses, Kettle would also argue (to the delight of ambitious UCD students such as Kevin O’Higgins) that, ultimately, a government meant nothing more than the compassionate hearts of ‘you and me and the man around the corner’ and that ‘the wise custom of scholasticism’, inspired by St Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas’ philosophies of education, was intellectually superior to statistical analyses.69
Accused by Griffith of being tongue-tied by his political loyalty to the Irish Party (for which he became the party’s official finance spokesman),70 Kettle’s celebrated career in Irish Catholic academia was actually honour bound to Archbishop Walsh, whose patronage extended to allowing Kettle to become the sole layman to attend secret monthly Dublin diocesan convocations on how to increase the temporal power of the church in politics.71 Kettle’s literary role as a dilettante perhaps reflected the extent to which he was expected as a Catholic university academic to act more as a lay defender of the church’s interests than as a purely independent professional. An essential context to his circle’s grievances, however, was the belief that a long-term legacy of historic British discrimination against Catholics up until shortly before the British state effectively became secularist was that those Catholics who now wished to enter the professions were ill equipped to capitalise fully upon the rise of a modern professional society to a central place in British political and economic life in the wake of the UK educational reforms of 1880 and the resulting expansion of the civil service.72 The Catholic University student who protested this point most eloquently during 1903 was Edward (later Eamon) DeValera,73 who was destined to replace Kettle as the chief lay-confidant of Archbishop Walsh. Reflecting the logic of O’Donnell’s critique, however, DeValera initially felt that he had no career options except to move to England to teach in a Benedictine school as a stepping-stone to becoming a priest. This ambition of DeValera’s was partly shaped by his belief that priests ‘are the natural leaders of the people and are looked up to as such’,74 as if the professional leaders of Catholic society were inherently the clergy themselves. Being denied this opportunity due to his illegitimacy, DeValera became but one of many well-educated Irish Catholic youths who combined part-time school teaching in Ireland with voluntary activism within the Gaelic League while acting under close priestly supervision. As the editor of a small review, Griffith himself was able to sidestep this need for church patronage to a significant degree and so hold tenaciously to his storybook Young Ireland ideal, while political developments that occurred during 1903 helped him to capitalise upon growing anti-royalist sentiment within the Gaelic League.
Griffith’s republican protests against Queen Victoria’s visit had failed to find an audience because the Irish Party, which favoured the visit, was focused on the challenge of reunifying their party. However, the British government’s decision to send Edward VII to Ireland as a patron of the 1903 Irish land act coincided with a period of division in Irish Party circles that was represented by a rural–urban divide within the UIL. The UIL leader William O’Brien, who had inspired the land act through his negotiations with the Tory landed aristocracy, was driven out of the UIL and the Irish Party by John Dillon, the former Irish Party leader who always remained a far more significant figure than John Redmond, a former Parnellite with Tory connections, in shaping party discipline and policy (hence, many contemporaries’ perception that Dillon was still the real party leader). In an attempt to capitalise upon this, Griffith defended O’Brien against Irish Party critiques and stormed a UIL meeting in Dublin in an attempt to force the Lord Mayor of Dublin to express opposition to the royal visit. Thereafter, with the support of Seamus MacManus and Maud Gonne, a new body (‘The People’s Protection Association’) was formed that Griffith soon titled as the ‘National Council’. This, he argued, existed to unite home rulers and nationalists upon the ‘one purpose on which both can agree—the stamping out of flunkeyism and toadyism in this land’.75
Griffith’s initiative won the support of Edward Martyn’s new Abbey Theatre, various republicans as well as a couple of newspaper editors in rural Ireland, while John T. Keating (formerly of the Cork City IRB but now chairman of the American Clan na Gael) came to Ireland in support of their efforts.76 A couple of days after Keating’s return to the United States, Dublin City Council voted against issuing of a welcoming address to the King by a narrow margin (forty votes to thirty-seven). While Griffith claimed this as a victory for the National Council, it was J.P. Nannetti MP (who was elected as the new mayor the following year) who actually played the decisive role in defeating the motion by persuading many figures in the Dublin UIL to vote accordingly.77
Although this opposition to the royal visit did not spread elsewhere, these surprising events in Dublin led many to conclude that the Gaelic League and most young Irish nationalists were not supportive of the Irish Party. Meanwhile, with Clan na Gael support, a ‘Keating Branch’ of the Gaelic League was formed in Dublin and became a recruiting ground for the new IRB.78 Catholic university students led by Tom Kettle responded by forming a new ‘Young Ireland Branch’ of the UIL in defence of the Irish Party. Meanwhile, sensing opportunities, Griffith noted gleefully that among the many dissenters from the Irish Party’s politics there were ‘many law bachelors who are Gaelic Leaguers … these are the stuff of which politicians are made ... their influence could permeate every phase of Irish life.’79 The deep reservations that Griffith had expressed hitherto about the cultural connotations of the Irish-Ireland movement now became far less important to him than his declared belief that it presented a far more potent means of overthrowing the established political order than a republican rebellion:
The taking of the Bastille was an upheaval. A revolution is not an upheaval. A revolution is the silent, impalpable working of forces for the most part undiscerned in their action … That nationalists feel the working of a new order of things in Ireland at the present day, no-one will be prepared to doubt.80
Seeking to capitalise upon this trend, Griffith would soon commit himself to drafting a comprehensive critique of the established political order in Ireland. As he was the editor of a review rather than a newspaper, however, it was fellow writers rather than politicians who generally took most notice of his efforts. Another reason for politicians to be dismissive of Griffith’s
