East Down. Craig identified far more with the empire as a purely commercial entity than with the British state, advocated tariff reform and, with the assistance of Belfast city council (first established in 1888), had attempted in vain to establish a Belfast Stock Exchange to prioritise local Irish economic interests.104 Griffith claimed that the Sinn Féin Policy’s ‘hope lies in the future attitude of the Protestant democracy of Ulster’. He expressed a hope that it would soon reject ‘the bloated plutocrats and hungry lawyers whose Protestantism was confined to beating the Orange drum once a year’ and join with his National Council and Crawford’s party in realising that all Irish workers ‘have been sold by English parties without any material gain to the country’.105 In making these arguments, he was clearly hoping to make some inroads upon Craig’s political support base.
Robert Lynd, a popular Belfast writer and essayist from a Presbyterian background, agreed with Griffith’s perspective. He wrote a pamphlet for the National Council in which he cited Griffith as the best possible political guide for northern workers. Lynd noted that while many Ulster Protestants were being encouraged to point to the rapid growth of Belfast from a small town into a major city as an indication that Ireland was well governed, ‘no true Orangeman, I am sure, will consider a thriving Belfast anything but a small compensation for a dwindling and decaying Ireland’. Furthermore, as recent developments had shown (namely, Craig’s failure to establish a viable Stock Exchange in Belfast), Belfast’s commercial success was not at all dependent upon local entrepreneurial ability but rather a total servitude to more powerful London-based firms, thereby potentially bringing about Belfast’s ultimate economic decline.106 The Dublin Tory author Standish O’Grady similarly suggested that Griffith’s policy should encourage all Irish Tories to ‘shift their ground’: ‘they can only oppose the Constitution of 1783 by proclaiming themselves a foreign garrison. They cannot oppose it as Irishmen.’107
Griffith placed much emphasis upon the question of Ireland’s harbour, port and dock boards. He noted that these port authorities were currently refusing to publish annual returns of goods imported solely because London firms’ shipping agents governed them. However, he suggested that it was potentially in their power to work with the county councils in calling for the restoration of Irish customs authorities.108 ‘To bring Ireland out of the corner and make her assert her existence in the world’, Griffith also argued that an effort should be made to encourage the Dublin Stock Exchange and the banks of the country (principally, the former ‘national bank’, the Bank of Ireland) to end their unionist policy of directing all Irish capital to be invested in British stock rather than in industries within Ireland.109 Griffith also protested that of the £250,000 subscribed to the Irish Party over the past decade ‘not a shilling of that money was expended during all those years by the Parliamentary Party in explaining to the Irish people how they were overtaxed, in outlining any policy for them to follow in the matter, or even in assembling them to consider the question’.110
Some of Griffith’s concerns were echoed by A.W. Samuels K.C., the successor of W.E. Lecky and predecessor of Edward Carson as the MP for Trinity College Dublin. He was also president of that college’s Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland. This society’s journal had subscribers in universities throughout Europe and North America. Samuels similarly maintained that the question of the management of Irish finances ‘require earnest consideration on the part not only of those who interest themselves in economic problems or take part in the administration of Ireland, but also of every person who, as public man or private citizen, dwells in or has to do with this country’.111
Samuels maintained that ‘the system of subvention of the local needs of Ireland and Scotland, inaugurated in 1888 [in conjunction with the English local government act of that year], is neither constitutional nor financially sound’. This was because ‘the basis upon which the percentages of 80 per cent for England, 11 per cent for Scotland and 9 per cent for Ireland were fixed has never been explained, and the figures and calculations upon which it was established have never been disclosed.’ In the absence of the office of Vice Treasurer of Ireland (abolished by Gladstone in 1872), no means of appealing for financial fair play for Ireland even existed. Instead, all Irish revenue was included within that of the United Kingdom and only a maximum of 9 per cent of such revenue could ever be reinvested in Ireland. While some English politicians maintained that the respective populations of each country justified this arrangement, Samuels argued that this ‘is not in accordance with constitutional right or fair play’ as ‘taxation should be so arranged as to fall equally—that is with equality of burden according to their resources—upon each of the three kingdoms … fairly applied to meet the particular needs of each of the three kingdoms’. If this was not done, then the existence of the Union could only be ‘to the detriment of Ireland’. Therefore, Samuels suggested, there was a need to return to ‘the financial principles [of equality between the kingdoms] upon which they entered that Union’ in 1801; principles that had first been established or won during the later-eighteenth century by Grattan’s parliament.112
Griffith’s principle hope for the Sinn Féin Policy was evidently that this particular Irish Tory (‘unionist’) case could be adapted and made to serve Irish nationalist purposes through the medium of the National Council. However, although 75 per cent of the 6,000 individuals currently employed by the urban and county councils and poor law boards in Ireland claimed to hold nationalist sympathies, they equated this sympathy simply with loyalty to the Irish Party in opposition to all the Irish Tories’ ideas. They were certainly not likely to embrace Griffith’s idea of making a unilateral decision to act like ‘a national civil service’, as opposed to an imperial one, by joining the National Council because that would have inherently meant rejecting the Gladstonian politics of home rule to which the Irish Party leadership was committed. Meanwhile, in Ulster if not in Dublin, the Tories, being committed by party politics first and foremost to opposing the Irish Party, were suspicious of any ‘nationalist’ scheme, no matter how well it was justified, because of the majority Irish Party’s closeness to the material interests of the Catholic hierarchy. In this way, a combination of misleading party-political nomenclatures in Ireland, Dublin Castle clientelism and sectarian attitudes was likely to sink the Sinn Féin Policy at its inception.
The Hungarian Policy of calling upon Irish MPs to abstain from attending the imperial parliament was justified as part of the new Sinn Féin Policy economically. Griffith claimed that as trading figures showed that Britain was claiming almost all of the yearly profits from Irish trading, it would be of infinitely greater value to Ireland than sending representatives to the imperial parliament to attempt to establish the identity of Ireland as a distinct economic and trading entity internationally by seeking to break the British boycott on direct Irish trade with the international community.113 Tory opinion, represented by Craig and Samuels, was not so sure about Griffith’s claim about the possibilities of international trade. For example, Samuels lamented that ‘since 1825 there has been no records kept of Irish imports and exports’ owing to the abolishment of separate customs boards for Ireland. Although Plunkett’s Department of Agriculture would begin publishing during 1906 ‘for the first time a report on the trade in imports and exports at Irish ports’, the reliability, as well as the source, of this information and what it actually meant for the economy of Ireland was totally unascertainable. This was because
There is at present no means of accurately distinguishing from the colonial and foreign trade of Great Britain, the indirect colonial and foreign trade of Ireland which passes to and from Irish ports through those of Great Britain, especially Liverpool and London … The consequence is that the total trade of Ireland with countries outside of Great Britain cannot be at present definitely ascertained.
This very uncertainty was Craig and Samuels’ motive for continuing to uphold the Union. This mentality was reflected by Samuels’ decision to accept on faith that the overall figures for British imperial trade were so positive that ‘Irishmen, too often prone to pessimism’, should think optimistically about ‘the opening markets of today and of the years to come’. Furthermore, as ‘by far the greatest part of our commerce is, and always will be, with Great Britain and care must be taken that this shall be developed and not diminished’, it was not
