CHAPTER FOUR
The Resurrection of Hungary and the Birth of Sinn Féin (1904–5)
Tom Kettle of University College Dublin considered The Resurrection of Hungary to be the publication that gave a policy to the Irish revolutionary underground for the first time.1 This was because its unilateral definition of Anglo-Irish relations without reference to British requirements was informed by trends in Catholic diplomacy that also shaped the Irish Party’s politics.
Hitherto, the clandestine activities of Ireland’s self-styled republican conspirators had always reflected British foreign policy interests regarding the republics of the United States and France. This situation had changed by 1904 when an Anglo-French diplomatic alliance ended centuries of Anglo-French conflict: hence the sudden political retirement of Maud Gonne, amongst others. By 1904, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was effectively the last great Catholic power, or explicitly Catholic state, on the European continent. Since the days of the Congress of Berlin (1878) its significance in British foreign policy rested on its role as a key intermediary for Britain between Germany and Russia in all matters, as well as between Britain and Russia regarding the perpetual disputes over the Balkans. There was no actual link between Ireland and Britain’s new principal enemy, Germany, aside from links between the Irish and German Catholic immigrant communities in the United States, both of whom now maintained that ‘Europe, not England, is the mother country of Europe.’2 This trend of opinion reflected the growth of a greater diplomatic role for the Catholic Church in the United States. This in turn made it a factor in Anglo-American relations.
There was nothing new about suggesting a parallel between the Anglo-Irish and Austro-Hungarian political relationship. It had occurred to several political leaders—British as well as Irish—during the mid-Victorian era and it still exercised an influence over political opinion during the mid-1880s.3 Reviving this idea after 1904 could serve to remind politicians that the Catholic Church had been the key player in the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1885–86. Both the President of Maynooth College and the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster supported Griffith’s publication. This development reminded the Irish Party that Catholic support was inherently conditional precisely because Griffith’s book included a stinging criticism of the Irish Party in its conclusion. Reflecting this, John Redmond paid a personal visit to the Vatican shortly after Griffith’s book became a top-selling publication to reassure the Pope that the Irish Party would again faithfully represent the Catholic interest in the British imperial parliament for both Ireland and Britain.4 An essential context to Griffith’s publication, therefore, was the church’s ambiguous relationship with the Irish Party, which had connotations not only for Anglo-Irish relations but also the general tenor of Irish political debate.
Along with John MacBride, Griffith had essentially been the chief spokesman for the republican underground ever since his return from South Africa. They had maintained that ‘there is no constitution in Ireland’ because a constitution is something ‘founded by the people and for the people’ and that for any political community not to act upon this reality ‘daily enfeebles the oppressed whilst it more than in the same proportion strengthens the usurper’.5 In common with T.M. Healy’s clericalist wing of the home rule movement and some Irish Tories, they also maintained that the obsessive emphasis of the Irish Party upon maintaining a monolithic political platform within Ireland had become deeply debilitating and unproductive, cultivating ‘the habits of servitude’, political idleness and lack of critical thinking among the Irish populace at large.6
The key general election of 1885 was preceded by preparatory actions by political elites in an attempt to manipulate the outcome within Ireland of the enfranchisement of half of adult British males. Parnell decided during the summer of 1884 to alter the financial management of Irish Party support bodies in both Ireland and America by placing them in Catholic clergymen’s hands,7 while Dublin Castle’s security department simultaneously rounded up and imprisoned the IRB’s leadership, leading to the implosion of the revolutionary underground on both sides of the Atlantic.8 These developments formed the backdrop for several things: Parnell’s decision to grant Catholic clergymen the right to be ex-officio members of all National League committees, the Irish Catholic hierarchy’s decision to make a public statement in October 1884 that it was prepared to rely on Parnell’s party to represent the Catholic interest in the British imperial parliament and the launching of secret negotiations between Dublin Castle, the Irish Party and the Catholic hierarchy through the medium of Sir George Fottrell and the Freeman’s Journal.9 The results of these negotiations was that the Irish Party not only committed itself to trust in a slow, conservative evolution of the British political system but, at Dublin Castle’s request, nationalist propaganda was also toned down in the press, men of seditious or nationalistic tendencies were removed from all the Irish Party’s support bodies and the National League’s more radical or democratic ideas were simply abandoned, hence the Special Commission of 1888.10 This had been the price for allowing the question of home rule to be even raised in British politics. All accepted this consensus not least because the Irish Party, notwithstanding its being prised to win majority political representation with the church’s support, represented neither the propertied interests nor the wealth of Ireland.
In the past, IRB and Land League revolutionaries had cited the Hungarian example of the 1860s in defence of the idea that Parnell’s party should abstain from Westminster and unilaterally establish a parliament in Dublin in an attempt to dictate Irish nationalist terms to the British imperial parliament.11 If the Irish Party had ever taken this option, however, it would have faced total opposition from the Irish banks, the Irish business community, the Irish legal profession and the country’s principal property owners (who directed the militias of Ireland),12 placing it in a completely powerless and self-defeating position. Twenty years later, nothing had essentially changed in this regard. Nevertheless, Griffith revived the idea. Michael Davitt’s career partly explains why this was done.
The concordat established during the mid-1880s between the British government and the Catholic Church regarding the government of Ireland and the preservation of the Union later encouraged twentieth-century British government officials to look back fondly upon this time as marking the birth of ‘the Ireland that we made’.13 However, Michael Davitt’s success, as an accredited lay representative of Archbishop Walsh, in convincing Pope Leo XIII to grant the leader of the Irish College in Rome official diplomatic status as the sole intermediary between the Irish Catholic hierarchy and the Vatican, independent of any British political arrangement or the status of the Catholic Church in the rest of the United Kingdom (a situation which lasted from 1886 up until 1929),14 meant that the international organisation of the Catholic Church, especially the religious orders, had provided Irishmen with a diplomatic outlet outside the confines of the British Empire for the very first time in modern history. This was a significant development because irrespective of the church’s great conservatism and the papacy’s relative lack of clout in international affairs, Catholic diplomacy was naturally very well informed about the international political order as well as highly professional and securely independent in nature. It did not exist in a world of revolutionary make-believe or cloak-and-dagger conspiracies. Conterminous developments within Irish-America reflected this reality.
From the 1884 American presidential election onwards, Irish-American politicians (political friends of Davitt) emphasised the potentially great contribution to be made to the American Republic specifically by the Roman Catholic Church and Catholic schools. In turn, they abandoned their previous focus of acting as critical ‘fenian’ spokesmen on Anglo-American relations.15 Reflecting the positive state of Anglo-American relations, over one hundred US congressmen of Irish descent expressed appreciation for Gladstone during 1886 for announcing his willingness to introduce a Government of Ireland bill in parliament.16 Simultaneously, John Devoy lost his career as a newspaper editor and relative significance as an Irish-American public figure. By 1903, the American AOH, without formally expressing opposition to the Irish Party,
