body had grown closer to the British business community in New York than to the American Catholic hierarchy (needless to say, all non-naturalised Irishmen in the United States were still British citizens). By targeting this Catholic AOH readership, Devoy was able to launch a very successful newspaper in September 1903, the Gaelic American (New York). Together with Davitt, Devoy expressed appreciation for Griffith’s Hungarian Policy and, more or less, called for an end to the old Fenian tradition of political anti-Catholicism.17 As Devoy was still its paymaster, the IRB in Ireland followed suit. In a sense, this brought the revolutionary underground on both sides of the Atlantic into line with the Catholic Church’s diplomatic role in Anglo-American relations as it had developed since the mid-1880s.
Just prior to beginning his Hungarian series, Griffith had argued that nationalist revolutionaries should aim to ‘capture the municipal administration of all Ireland’ as a means of putting pressure upon the Irish Party to abstain from the imperial parliament and make a stand for Irish independence.18 Griffith’s idea of turning local government office into a platform for promoting this idea was one that failed to impress Michael Davitt, Mark Ryan and John O’Leary when he discussed it with them, however.19 All bar the last few of Griffith’s articles on the Hungarian theme dealt exclusively with recounting the Hungarian struggle for independence after 1848 involving parliamentarians and republican rebels. This was done primarily to influence the IRB and ex-Land League readership. Regarding this body of opinion, Griffith judged that ‘it is the parallel rather than the logic which I think will most powerfully affect’ them.20 In particular, he hoped that this historical narrative would help to remind ‘his compatriots’ in the IRB that there was a practical ‘alternative to armed resistance’ that could bring about political freedom.21 This was a fairly reasonable hope.
Since its inception, the IRB was nominally committed to creating a volunteer force for Irish nationalist purposes. However, it had never been a movement led by the landed gentry; the traditional creators of such volunteer corps. Instead, it was a movement of obscure lower-class political activists whose secret social networks frequently overlapped with British military figures, who owned much property in Ireland, as well as the country’s police forces. Although the IRB had nominally been the most numerous Irish political organisation prior to the 1880s, like the British Chartist phenomenon which preceded it, its lack of control over public opinion, or impact on political elites, usually relegated it an insignificant position beyond having acted as ‘a political school’ for some notable individuals who went on to achieve more significant careers in other directions.22 Those who left the organisation frequently justified their decision on the grounds of having grown ‘weary to death of playing roles and striving to roll impossible balls up impossible hills’.23 Some who remained spoke sadly of their frustrated determination ‘to get in a blow at the power which has been banging me about the head—in common with my brethren—since I was born’.24
The political bankruptcy of the IRB’s position hitherto lay in its response to British state centralisation. A brief debate in Chartist circles during the early 1840s as to whether or not ‘physical force’ was needed to back up the ‘moral force’ of their ignored petitions for reform had been elevated by British political leaders into an ideological standpoint to counter any verbal challenges to the constitution.25 As a result, the IRB, in perpetually speaking of the moral justice of a rebellion, was essentially playing the same political game as those British elites that it professed to oppose. This made its existence a product of British security considerations as much as it was a genuine vehicle for sincere young Irish nationalists to attempt to come more fully to terms with the political society that they inhabited and, in particular, the ready-made debates that had been prepared for them. As both participants and auxiliaries to public Irish movements, members of the IRB frequently displayed considerable talent in initiating significant new departures, at least on the level of political debate. This was often done as a preliminary step to embarking on different careers. Griffith essentially stepped into this role during 1904 just as Davitt had done twenty-three years previously. There was good reason to expect that the IRB would follow Griffith’s lead. The almost entirely new and slim-line IRB organisation established in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War was based entirely around the Gaelic League. Although some republicans disliked the Gaelic League’s very conservative and avowedly non-political leadership, they nevertheless accepted it as their principal forum. The thought of engaging in conspiratorial work was neither entertained nor suggested. Over 50 per cent of the Gaelic League’s membership were civil servants or national school teachers who worked for British state institutions, while its IRB membership was drawn mostly from that 25 per cent who worked as clerks or shop-assistants.26
At the time, Davitt was arguing that the vote of Catholic politicians of Irish descent in America had much more importance in the context of British international relations than Irish politicians’ vote in Westminster. Griffith cited Davitt’s argument to defend the idea that international Catholic diplomacy could aid the ‘Hungarian Policy’.27 This ignored the fact, however, that the potential of an Irish-American vote to influence the American government’s attitude towards Anglo-American relations had no bearing whatsoever on the Anglo-Irish relationship itself, which was an entirely separate and purely British matter. Its very suggestion nevertheless reflected Griffith’s growing political indebtedness to John Sweetman. The latter had long been a regular financial supporter of Catholic interests in the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy but had had no interest in Irish nationalism prior to its becoming wedded to Catholic interests during 1884. Sweetman was now a firm believer that the Irish Party’s presence in Westminster was of no advantage to anybody.
Having taken part in the negotiations surrounding the 1893 Government of Ireland bill, Sweetman realised that the politics of home rule was a meaningless charade that was deliberately launched by Gladstone only to mislead the Irish public regarding how the country was really being governed. Disgusted by the fact that the Irish Party was now subsidised largely by the British Liberal Party, after failing to persuade the Irish Party to withdraw from Westminster, Sweetman resigned from parliament in 1895 and helped W.M. Murphy to establish his first newspaper, the Daily Nation. This championed the Healyite policy of decentralising authority within the Irish Party’s support body and placing more power in its branches, which were governed mostly by priests.28 During the Boer War controversy, Sweetman had formed the Irish Financial Reform League and the General Council of County Councils to protest against the over-taxation of Ireland and to encourage business activism in local government.29 When Griffith was publishing his initial Hungarian articles in the United Irishman, Sweetman wrote to the Freeman’s Journal calling upon all Irish Party supporters to pay very close attention to the series. Reflecting Sweetman’s influence as one of the richest Irish Catholics (he was an estate and brewery owner as well as a major railway shareholder), Griffith was glad to note that the initial response to Sweetman’s suggestion ‘seems to indicate that the Parliamentary Party is not prepared to oppose the Hungarian policy very strongly. It does not commit them to any opposition.’30
Sweetman’s London Catholic friends were the first group to support Griffith’s Hungarian Policy. They had organised themselves into the Irish National Society of London. This was a small breakaway body from the United Irish League of Great Britain (the Irish Party’s fund collection body in Britain, led by T.P. O’Connor) and it was also associated with the Gaelic League of London. The Irish National Society received a special blessing from Pope Leo XIII after it opposed the Irish Party on the grounds of the latter’s failure (at the insistence of Liberal Party) to support a Tory bill at Westminster providing for state support for denominational education, including all Catholic schools.31 Led by a wealthy architect Thomas Martin, the Irish National Society was closely associated with the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster who, for a time, ordered that the United Irish League of Great Britain be no longer permitted to use Catholic halls and schools as venues for its meetings.32 Through this channel, various historic letters of Monsignor Persico of Rome to Cardinal Manning of Westminster were leaked to Griffith’s United Irishman. The publication of these letters was meant to show that Irish Party figures were wrong to have criticised the church at the time of a papal rescript against an Irish agrarian agitation that demanded rent reductions during the late 1880s because this decision was (supposedly) not popular in Vatican
