to present the Catholic Church as having democratic sympathies, thereby echoing the thrust of a notable papal encyclical of 1891. Griffith himself characterised them as proof that the Irish Party had always been a ‘Castle Catholic’ party whose pro-British leanings had caused them to become divorced from a true sense of social justice.33
During the summer of 1904, Martin’s London society appealed to John Daly, the most well known republican politician in Ireland, and to T.M. Healy to help them organise an opposition movement to the Irish Party. This initiative won Healy’s sympathy. Reflecting his ambiguous relationship with the Irish Party, however, Healy felt that he could not come out openly in support of a rival party as, rather like the bishops, ‘my own share in politics must I fear be individual’ or, at least, appear to the general Irish public to be so.34 In August, Martin’s friends travelled to Dublin to meet Griffith, Edward Martyn and aldermen Thomas Kelly and Walter Cole of Cumann na nGaedhael. Cole had recently worked with Sweetman and Charles Dawson, an ex-mayor of Dublin, in promoting the idea of holding an Irish national industrial exhibition as a riposte to Dublin Castle’s international exhibition of British industry.35 As the Dublin representative of the Irish National Society, Cole now convened a conference to discuss the idea of calling for the withdrawal of all Irish MPs from Westminster. In preparation for this, Griffith himself travelled to London to organise the visit of thirty local Gaelic Leaguers to this Dublin meeting. This was done with the cooperation of Art O’Brien and Michael MacWhite, two well-educated associates of Martin’s in London who were also growing dissatisfied with the Irish Party.36
This circle evidently felt hopeful that if Griffith’s articles were publicised more widely through being republished as a pamphlet, they could win the cooperation of known political allies of the Catholic hierarchy such as Michael Davitt, Eoin MacNeill and D.P. Moran.37 To this end, John Sweetman purchased the vast majority of the United Irishman shares that winter and financed the publication of Griffith’s articles as a pamphlet.38 Due to Sweetman’s close association with Daniel Mannix, the president of Maynooth College (who would encourage further publications of Griffith’s writings),39 much of Catholic Ireland, lay and clerical, were inclined to examine its contents and The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland became a top-selling publication, selling tens-of-thousands of copies in a very short space of time.
Griffith was not blind to what political interests he now represented. While he had directly opposed the stance of Archbishop Walsh on education and criticised Maynooth College for promoting royalist attitudes in the not too distant past,40 he would not do so again. He also understood, with delight, the political significance of Redmond’s concern at Maynooth College’s acceptance of the Hungarian Policy:
Another fact, and one fraught with significance for the future of Ireland, is that the students of Maynooth, a few days ago, after a prolonged debate, decided in favour of the Hungarian Policy as the policy for Ireland. The future is with us and we face it with confidence.41
As early as December 1904, Griffith was writing to Sweetman that the Catholic clergy in Dublin and Leinster were ‘all strongly advocating the policy in private’; that the Irish News (Belfast), associated with the new West Belfast MP Joseph Devlin (who was also president of the revived AOH), was becoming sympathetic; as was the Scottish section of the United Irish League. In addition, he felt that the expected victory by the National Council of ‘the most compact and intelligent party’ in Dublin City Hall combined with Sweetman’s intention to promote Griffith’s policy at the General Council of County Councils would give them a strong platform to build upon. This led Griffith to view the overall course of current affairs as ‘foreshadowing the general adoption of the Hungarian policy’.42 Banking on this expectation, Griffith finally mustered the courage to propose to Maud Sheehan (she accepted). It would be several more years, however, before Griffith could afford to marry, not least because his proposed programme would fail to find as many supporters as he had hoped. This was due to a fundamental paradox that it embodied.
Griffith’s Hungarian Policy was attuned to Catholic disaffection with Westminster and the fact that Catholic Church diplomacy in the English-speaking, or Anglo-American, world was now of much more significance to Ireland’s future than whatever preoccupation still existed amongst continental European powers regarding any potential strategic significance of Ireland.43 However, its argument still had little or no relevance to the dynamics of Irish party politics. This was because of its retrospective focus and emphasis on an idea that nobody except the Tories, the self-styled ‘unionists’ of contemporary Irish party politics, was essentially prepared to support. This was that the Irish Party had led itself into a political ‘cul-de-sac’ in 1886 through committing itself to Gladstone’s programme and that the ‘vanity and selfishness’ of its leaders was ‘preventing them from admitting the truth and retracing their steps’.44 It was all very well for Griffith to emphasise that the Irish public had spent over £600,000 to keep the Irish Party in Westminster ever since 1886 only to see a commensurate increase in the imperial over-taxation of Ireland.45 This had indeed been Gladstone’s intention. In itself, however, this did not offer a solution, only a critique. Likewise, Griffith’s subsequent effort to justify the Hungarian Policy by using the Financial Relations Report of 1896 to show that ‘in the memory of living man … no more excessive taxer of the Irish people has ever been known than William Ewart Gladstone’46 was ineffective in a party-political sense precisely because Gladstone (who died in 1898) had already been retired for over a decade.
In the Resurrection of Hungary, Griffith suggested that the Irish Party revert to its independent political stance prior to 1884 and accept the ‘one statesmanlike idea’ that the elderly Daniel O’Connell had been tempted to follow, alongside the Young Irelanders, during the mid-1840s. This was to set up in Ireland a national council of three hundred representatives that would act unilaterally as an Irish parliament, establish their own arbitration courts (which Griffith believed could now be supported by the new local government bodies) and force the British government to abandon the unequal relationship that had come to define the Union by recognising Irishmen’s right to political self-determination.47 Looking back even further in time, Griffith suggested that those Gaelic Leaguers who declared themselves willing to promote Irish economic development should follow the example of the Irish Volunteers of 1779. This volunteer movement instigated a boycott of British goods in an attempt to force the British government to surrender its control of the Irish economy; the event that prefigured the establishment of Irish legislative independence in 1782–3.48 Griffith cited this historic case study and the Irish Party’s current toleration of the over-taxation of Ireland in order to drive home his argument that the Irish Party had completely surrendered all political direction to the imperial parliament, in the process ensuring that the Irish nation was becoming a defunct concept: ‘a man who runs his business on such lines ends up in the bankruptcy court. A nation that runs its business on such lines must inevitably go smash.’49
As Sweetman had not been an MP since 1895 and Healy had refused to come out in favour of the Hungarian Policy, Griffith had no allies among Ireland’s parliamentary representatives. Meanwhile, his sole claim to credibility as a spokesman on economic matters stemmed from his membership of the five-man executive of the Industrial Committee of the Gaelic League. However, together with Douglas Hyde, two of its members had been in favour of the British government’s international industrial exhibition of 1903.50 In addition, while Sweetman and the Catholic Church desired that Irish-America would henceforth fund the Gaelic League rather than the Irish Party,51 in practice this ambition related primarily to the financing of Irish education, not the state of the nation. As an avowedly non-political body, the Gaelic League could not support Griffith’s Hungarian Policy. Furthermore, while its Industrial Committee had declared its intention to draw on the advice of independent economic experts, its circulars requesting suitable nominations of personnel had received no names in return.52 This reflected the fact that Gaelic League activities were primarily social, such as summer schools and dances that were run by travelling teachers and supervised by the clergy. Meanwhile, despite its nominally non-sectarian platform, its membership would soon become religiously segregated.53 This was not a promising development.
Douglas Hyde’s
