had founded a body known as the General Council of the County Councils during 1899 in an attempt to compensate for the complete lack of directive powers that were granted to the new county councils by the imperial parliament. Esmonde, a descendant of Henry Grattan, convened a meeting of this body to adopt a historic resolution of the Irish Volunteers in Dungannon in 1782 as its own. This stated that ‘no parliament is competent to make laws for Ireland except an Irish parliament sitting in Ireland’ and that ‘the claim of any other body of men to make laws for or to govern Ireland is illegal and unconstitutional’. It also argued that the Irish constitution of 1783, denying the right of the imperial parliament to overrule Irish legislation, should still have some jurisdictional relevance. However, no follow-up meeting could be held (representatives of four Ulster counties had also refused to attend this initial gathering). This was because the General Council of County Councils, which consisted mostly of UIL representation and legally had no jurisdictional powers, did not declare itself in favour of politicians withdrawing from the Imperial Parliament.76
Griffith attributed this development to the baneful influence of the UIL Directory, the executive of the Irish Party’s political machine, and its associated newspaper the Freeman’s Journal. He typified both as the political heirs to Leonard MacNally, a former Freeman editor who had worked covertly with Dublin Castle to bring about the Act of Union through underhand methods.77 Although Griffith was also able to acknowledge the Freeman’s history of quality newspaper reportage,78 over the next decade, he would repeatedly equate the politics of the Freeman’s Journal (whose former proprietor had been, with Fottrell, the central figure in the secret Anglo-Irish negotiations of 1884–6) with MacNally’s historic legacy.79 This was provocative and essentially foolhardy: Archbishop Walsh certainly had been and probably still was one of the Freeman’s company directors.80 To some extent it reflected Griffith’s sincerity regarding his own political stance. According to two associates, Griffith turned down the offer of a very well paid position with the Freeman, as well as an offer to become a member of the Irish Party, because he viewed this as an attempt to bribe him into a political silence.81 His willingness to attack the Freeman was also tactical. Sweetman and several Catholic bishops had already transferred their allegiance from the Freeman to W.M. Murphy’s new Irish Independent. This led Griffith to typify the latter as a quality newspaper and even as a fellow traveller with his own journal in championing progressive political ideas:
Every sound idea, every logical item, on the programme of the parliamentarians has been filched from the columns of the United Irishman. We don’t grudge them these stolen ideas since they shall be ultimately of some service to Ireland—we merely invite them to come and steal ore.82
Such boastful claims to political relevance were always Griffith’s favourite tactic in attempting to popularise his ideas. This may not have been an effective gambit, however. Fellow writers, who liked nothing better than a persuasive turn of phrase, generally admired Griffith’s journalism, whether they agreed with him or not. Much of the contemporary middle class reacted to Griffith’s affronts, however, by speaking about him with derisive contempt: why should a nonentity amongst Ireland’s professional classes feel entitled to not only claim to understand the political situation much better than they did, but also claim a right to perpetually pass damning and blanket judgments upon them all? The Irish Party hated Griffith for precisely this reason and so labelled him as ‘a factionist in the pay of the unionists to smash home rule’, which was their means of saying that they feared that if his ideas became popular this could undermine the basis of their own personal wealth as a newly-arrived middle class by destroying that political consensus upon which that wealth was based. On this level, Griffith was certainly a poor politician. He once typified the entire Irish reading public as ‘human ostriches’ because the political programme of his book was not being discussed, even though it had sold six times more than any publication of the previous five years.83
The Irish Party consciously attempted to confine debate on Griffith’s programme to Tom Kettle’s Young Ireland (i.e. UCD) Branch of the United Irish League. Kettle did point out some real flaws in Griffith’s programme. Rather than appealing for the creation of a new Irish constitution, Griffith had referred back to the Irish constitution of 1782 and the Renunciation Act of 1783, which recognised the legislative independence of the historic (and exclusively Protestant) Irish parliament. Griffith maintained that if all Irish MPs united in declaring themselves in favour of this legal precedent and in demanding fiscal reform on the basis of the Financial Relations Report of 1896 then existing nationalist and unionist divisions would disappear and a united Irish nation would begin to emerge politically. By contrast, Kettle emphasised that a historic Irish constitution from over a century ago could have absolutely no material connotations or popular appeal in the present. In addition, the very existence of the Irish county councils, upon which Griffith placed so much emphasis, were subject to the law of the imperial parliament.84 Griffith retorted that the non-requirement of taking an oath of allegiance upon entering local government office meant that Irish county councils could pledge their loyalty to the 1783 constitution without breaking the existing law.85 He also claimed that
No Irish movement can be constitutional unless it be based on the Irish Constitution, which the volunteers won for Ireland and which Ireland intends to retain, even though it may cause as much trouble in London as the retention of its constitution by Hungary caused in Vienna.86
Griffith’s repeated justification of this policy by claiming that the Act of Union was actually illegal essentially explains why this was not done, however. The existence of a legal precedent of Irish legislative independence was an academic curiosity. In the present, however, it could not be the basis of a political policy that was anything other than seditious. Another reason for the deafening silence of Ireland’s professional classes in response to Griffith’s writings was a deep distrust of his association with the IRB. Reflecting this, Kettle suggested that ‘this pamphlet [the Resurrection of Hungary] will have justified its existence if only it leads up to a working alliance between the two sections of nationalism, now standing deplorably apart’. As far as Kettle was concerned, ‘there is nothing in the nature of things to prevent our separatists and “constitutionalists”, our nationalists and nationists87—if I may invent a word—from cooperating’ in support of the ‘nationist’ Irish Party in the British Imperial Parliament.88
A weakness in Kettle’s critique was his deliberate decision to ignore Griffith’s point about the Irish Party’s support for both Gladstone’s imperial fiscal policy and the over-taxation of Ireland. Instead, he focused purely upon Griffith’s treatment of Hungarian history. Kettle emphasised that the Hungarians’ decision to abstain from the Austrian parliament during the 1860s was the result of a process of constitutional experimentation (namely, the possibility of creating new representative assemblies) that had been taking place in central Europe ever since 1848, whereas ‘the parliament we have to confront is not precisely a novice’. Kettle also repeated an argument against abstention that the Irish Party had made after Parnell’s death. He argued that Bohemia was a closer parallel to Ireland’s case than that of Hungary and yet the Czechs, after having tried the abstentionist policy for a number of years, decided that they were better off materially in the Imperial Parliament.89 Griffith did not agree with this assessment, however. He typified Kettle’s critique as being motivated by the simple fact that he ‘writes from the parliamentarian side’. Although he agreed with Kettle that the policy required to be thought out ‘clearly and exhaustively in terms of Irish politics’ if it was to be of any benefit, he comforted himself with the idea that ‘even if the people did fail it, there is consolation in the thought that it could not possibly leave the country worse off than it found it’.90
Griffith’s intended trump card in defence of his programme was his claim that the contemporary home rule movement was slowly but surely disintegrating by becoming divorced from its political roots, having abandoned its initial nationalist radicalism, at Gladstone’s request, during 1885–6.91 Griffith could only really justify this claim, however, by emphasising the potency of IRB–Land League radicalism during 1879–1882. For example, John Morley’s Life of Gladstone was quoted to show that Britain’s temporary abandonment of the Transvaal to the Boers in 1881
