was closely connected to Dublin Castle, the Irish Party and the Catholic Church according to the consensus established during 1886. Dublin Castle’s National Education Board accepted the league’s exclusive identification with the principle of voluntary rather than state-run schools. The leader of its industrial committee Tom Finlay S.J., who unusually for a UCD Jesuit was the son of a Scottish Presbyterian, was also the vice-president of the recently established Irish Agricultural Organisation Society that worked with Dublin Castle’s new Congested District Board and Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction.54 Some historians have typified the establishment of these bodies (inspired by Lord Dunsany’s son, Sir Horace Plunkett, and led by Lord Monteagle) as marking a shift in British government policy regarding Ireland because they supposedly favoured interventionist activity in the economy.55 However, their administrative lynchpin Sir George Fottrell, the secretary of the Irish Land Commission, was a Catholic administrator at Dublin Castle who, alongside E.G. Jenkinson, was knighted for his role in negotiating the secret Anglo-Irish security consensus of 1884–6.56 This had involved a total Irish political acceptance of Gladstone’s longstanding imperial fiscal plan for Ireland. The Tories professed willingness to invest a higher percentage of Irish revenue in the Dublin Castle administration did not overrule or alter this consensus in the slightest. Reflecting this, Fr Finlay, with the moral support of George Russell and the enthusiastic support of D.P. Moran (who would continue to make no secret of his detestation for all Griffith’s ideas),57 accepted the judgment of the Congested Districts Board that the chief dynamic of both emigration and economic stagnation in Ireland was the absence of economically viable land holdings in the west of the country. The solution was deemed to be the creation of a rural economy that was more self-sufficient and that would not continue to be burdened by a surplus population.
At the inception of the United Irish League (1898), both William O’Brien and Michael Davitt had denounced this idea of labelling the west of Ireland as a ‘congested district’. Laurence Ginnell, a passive sympathiser with Griffith’s writings,58 would soon attempt to revive a political agitation on behalf of the rural poor.59 This agrarian tradition in Irish politics had always lacked power however.60 Ever since the reunification of the Irish Party (1900), it was being labelled as reactionary in its response to supposedly progressive governmental reforms. In his capacity as a UCD professor of economics (formerly, he was a professor of moral philosophy), Finlay would shape the thinking of many future Irish political leaders. In doing so, he has been described as a conservative rather than a reactionary in his thinking.61 However, Finlay was temperamentally inclined to judge all political matters far more from an ethical rather than a practical standpoint. Therefore, he was ill suited to conceiving of any potential initiatives and was content to let decision-making rest with Whitehall.62
Land law reform was a UK wide and in no sense specifically Irish phenomenon. Ever since the 1880s, the chief divergence between the British and Irish application of this reform was that the British reforms were designed to facilitate a prioritisation of the municipal authorities’ capacity for promoting business over that of the traditional ruling landowning class. No such provisions were made for the development of an infrastructure for business within Ireland, however.63 This made the Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898 an insignificant reform. As an extension of this, current UIL branch leaders, which included many local government officials as well as parish priests, owned extensive grazing land themselves and had no interest in promoting Irish business. They conveniently forgot, or rather deliberately ignored, that the original ideal of the Irish National Land League (its ‘Irish National’ title had already been permanently erased from history books) was to conceive of the rural and urban Irish economies as one entity and to launch an Irish nationalist political agitation upon precisely that basis.64 This had reflected the input of republican radicals into that agitation. Griffith’s attitude towards both emigration and the general economy was rooted in this tradition. This made him reject the British government’s policy that agriculture was inherently the basis of the economy of Ireland. Instead, Griffith focused on the indisputable fact that the union of the British and Irish exchequers was inherently the central dynamic of all economic developments on the island, both rural and urban. Therefore, this development combined with the imperial taxation regime launched by Gladstone was unquestionably ‘at the root of the question of emigration and lack of employment in Ireland’.65 Although entirely logical, this was a deeply unpopular stance. This was because it did not fit with the material interests of Catholic Ireland as they had developed. It also made Griffith the odd-man out on the Gaelic League’s industrial committee (although, in time, Sweetman would succeed in getting himself nominated onto that body).66
During 1904–1905, the only member of the Gaelic League’s Industrial Committee with similar attitudes to Griffith was Robert Lindsay Crawford of Lisburn, Co. Antrim. Together with Thomas Sloan, a Belfast Methodist street preacher, and Belfast trade unionist Alex Boyd, Crawford favoured a labour-led political uprising against the existing leaderships of both the Ulster Party and the Irish Party, each of which were deemed to be cowardly reactionaries and mindless clericalists in politics.67 Crawford, however, was not a popular figure. The Ulster Party would soon work to have him removed as editor of the Irish Protestant. Crawford created an Independent Orange Order in opposition to the landed-gentry led Orange Order but his organisation never acquired a large membership. This reflected his powerlessness to overcome the legacy of the British government’s handling of the Irish land question.68 Dublin Castle officials typified the political consensus established during 1886 as serving the purpose of ‘making Castle rule popular’. This was made possible because the Irish Party and its support bodies were henceforth allowed to ‘know almost as soon as the Law Officers themselves everything which transpires in the secret councils of Dublin Castle’.69 If this could be typified as a government by consensus, it had the result of making the Irish Party—not just the historic governing gentry class (who now concentrated on the new Ulster Party)—an instrument of clientelism. Priding itself on being a supposed government party with special insider political knowledge, the Irish Party now exacerbated a tradition in Ireland (common to all British imperial colonies)70 of turning politics into a mere dispensary for private patronage networks, even within the civil service.71 This was not an example of plutocracy at work so much as a deliberate curtailment of the potential relevance of party politics as an instrument of change. This made the establishment of effective platforms for demanding reforms of any kind almost impossible. This was particularly debilitating for those like Griffith who were attempting to establish such platforms.
Specifically in the Dublin area, in common with Griffith’s two business allies Cole and Sweetman, William Field and James McCann had demanded fundamental fiscal and banking reforms in Ireland. They failed, however, to establish an effective platform for the Irish Financial Reform League (1897– 1901); a movement that was also supported by Thomas Lough, the owner of the leading Ulster cooperative, and Ned (later Sir Edward) Carson of Dublin. This body was forced to disband soon after the reunification of the Irish Party and upon nominally joining that party, Field and McCann were requested to simply keep quiet.72 A similar dynamic ensured that the chances of Griffith or Crawford using the Industrial Committee of the Gaelic League as a basis for establishing a platform for fiscal reform were negated.
J.P. Boland, owner of Boland’s Mills in Dublin, and Tom O’Donnell, an Oxford-educated Kerry politician who, with encouragement from Maurice Moynihan (now electoral registrar for Tralee), toyed with the idea of promoting abstention from the imperial parliament,73 professed sympathy for the Gaelic League’s industrial committee. Their attempts to promote such ideals in the west of Ireland failed, however, due to the unwillingness of banks to fund their ideas. Indeed, the only recent companies whose formation was assisted by Dublin Castle’s Congested Districts Board and its associated English banker J.H. Tuke (who also promoted all assisted emigration schemes in Ireland) was a handful of woollen mills that were run by the Catholic religious orders for their own private gain.74 As a result, Field, McCann, Boland and O’Donnell were left in the position of standing still politically and grew increasingly isolated. A similar fate was to await Griffith’s proposed Hungarian Policy.
Thanks to Sweetman, Griffith found a prestigious candidate to launch his Hungarian Policy in Dublin City Hall. Sir Thomas Henry Grattan Esmonde, MP for Wexford, was a former whip
