was totally insufficient to provide for the needs of the Irish population. Instead, they were fed mostly by mass-produced English consumable imports that were produced using Irish exports. Ireland’s annual agricultural produce was also smaller than the capital raised annually by the Irish railways alone. McCann argued that the managers of Irish transport companies should take the lead in demanding a cessation of the over-taxation of their country and, in turn, demand a greater investment of all revenue collected in Ireland in local business enterprises, including the meat industry. This should be accompanied by a deliberate alteration of their rates to favour Irish over British traders, as the combined effect of the inherently interrelated issues of commercial transit and national taxation practices were the cause of all Ireland’s economic woes.27
McCann, a Dublin MP much admired by Griffith, died suddenly in 1904,28 but his ally Field (MP for St Patrick’s Division, Dublin) had recently been elected to Dublin County Council as a member of the Dublin Port and Dock Boards. In this capacity, Field supported Sweetman’s Sinn Féin motion before the General Council of County Councils in October 1906.29 The timing of Sweetman’s motion was influenced by the fact that English railway directors, having recently created ‘Tourism Ireland’ in Dublin, were championing the idea of nationalising control of all Irish railways in London as a means of securing a total English monopoly over the expected future rise of a significant tourism trade in Ireland.30 Sweetman, a lifelong shareholder in J.T. Pim’s Great Southern and Western Railway, maintained that while the current management of the railways was destructive to Irish business interests, placing them in the hands of the British government (an idea first touted during the late 1860s, when Sweetman was a member of the Liberal Party)31 ‘would also be detrimental to Ireland’. The solution Sweetman recommended was that the railway companies should be brought under one management ‘subject to the control of some body representing the people of Ireland’. He suggested that ‘the General Council of County Councils could be made use of as such a representative body, if no other representative body were formed’.32
As Sweetman himself noted, a major stumbling block to his own proposal was that the General Council, a creation of Sir Thomas Henry Grattan Esmonde MP, acted just in an advisory capacity. It had neither law-making nor coordinating powers over the local government bodies or their finances. Sweetman believed, not unreasonably, that the General Council, by potentially representing all local government representatives in Ireland, was far more deserving of state funding than the Department of Agricultural and Technical Instruction, which owed its existence as a Dublin Castle cabal to a single politician who had been repeatedly defeated at the polls: Horace Plunkett.33 Sweetman’s proposed solution to the problem of the General Council’s lack of authority was to send a copy of his resolution to every local government body in Ireland to recommend their support for his proposal. He suggested that the rates collected by the county councils each year could be used as security for a long-term purchase agreement with the railways provided that they were first brought under a central management rather than the present situation of a multitude of separate boards of directors.34
In common with the shipping companies, most very wealthy businessmen in Ireland had some share in the railway companies although they were generally owned more by English than by Irish shareholders.35 In addition to the shipping companies, the membership of the railway companies’ boards of directors overlapped greatly with the board of directors of the banks within Ireland. Many of these men also served as chairmen of the (Tory) Dublin Chamber of Commerce. This placed control of the most important financial institutions of Ireland into a very small number of people’s hands. All these people were located within Dublin, not the Ulster Unionist Party’s heartland of Belfast or the Irish Party’s political heartland of the provinces. Their families also generally intermarried rather than risk any dispersion of their personal wealth.36 Reflecting this, it was significant that although James McCann, a respected Dublin stockbroker, had been able to give his views on ‘the economics of the Irish problem’ to the Bankers’ Institute of Ireland (a body recently established by Andrew Jameson, the Scottish director of the Bank of Ireland and an active unionist),37 this had evoked no actual response from such quarters. The Sinn Féin Policy was widely perceived to have its greatest potential support in Dublin (hence the use of Griffith’s writings by Kettle’s UCD society as a template for its own counter-propaganda).38 However, the fact that ‘Dublin does not lead Ireland as Paris leads France’ made the assumption of the political leadership of Ireland from a Dublin base or, indeed, the development of an Irish nationalist politics, a virtual impossibility.39 This situation was essentially the direct result of the extant banking arrangements of the 1820s.
The abolishment of the Irish customs houses during the 1820s progressively weakened the significance of the Chambers of Commerce in Ireland. Inevitably, this had an impact on Ireland’s political representation as well. Irish politicians were powerless to champion the commercial interests of these institutions, while Irish businessmen were equally powerless to assist politicians in mobilising effective platforms. This was why, for instance, William Dargan (1799–1867), the chief initiator of the Irish railway companies, at no stage maintained an association with any Irish politicians.40 During the 1900s, the competing demands for championing an industrial exhibition of Irish industry or an exhibition of British industry within Ireland was made meaningless by the nature of the country’s financial institutions.41 Inevitably, it was the latter option that was chosen (during 1907) and this resulted in the creation of new imperial parks and monuments in both Dublin city and Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) to celebrate the prosperity of imperial (London-based) merchant firms that operated in Ireland. This prosperity, however, neither had, nor was going to be, reinvested, or kept, within Ireland.42
The 1907 industrial exhibition in his hometown was a blow to Griffith’s programme. Ongoing religious divides within the Irish business community also evidently discouraged the formation of new commercial parties in Irish politics. For instance, in Dublin, there were many noted Quaker business leaders in the city. One of the most well known, the bookseller Alfred Webb, was, to his own admission, ‘very much in accord with the Sinn Féiners’, if they would avoid certain dubious, i.e. IRB, connections.43 Ever since the 1870s, however, the Quakers, as well as many Catholics, had been deliberately excluded from the city’s Chamber of Commerce, whose members were almost strictly members of the Church of Ireland.44 This reflected the irony of Dublin Tories’ passive support for Griffith’s propaganda. They evidently valued it only because it assisted their own arguments against the Irish Party. However, as Samuels’ career showed, they did not have the courage of their convictions.
On the question of nationalising financial institutions, Griffith realised that to speak of state ownership when there was no separate Irish government was contrary to his own definition of the potential benefits of nationalisation. He viewed nationalisation as a principle of government that was not inherently a good thing but merely a matter that suited current Irish needs, to resist the process of British centralisation.45 The many impasses the Sinn Féin Policy faced on the railways question essentially paled into insignificance, however, compared to the obstacles facing the Sinn Féin Policy of nationalising the banks. Griffith’s approach to this question reflected a major weakness in his reasoning. Griffith usually spoke of nationalisation not as a policy that began at the apex of the Irish commercial world, namely the banks. Instead, he spoke of it as a policy that began at the lowest levels of municipal or county council government and could somehow, in time, be impressed upon commercial elites.46 This was unreasonable, however, because of the nature of party politics and local government bodies as they operated within Ireland. In addition, his National Council was subsidised by as little as £500 a year (or sometimes far less). On such a budget, the best the National Council could do was to issue propaganda or—as would be attempted in the wake of the 1907 exhibition—publish yearbooks of relevant statistical information while patronising small-scale Christmas exhibitions of Irish-made goods.47 The very small scale of such enterprises made Sinn Féin seem ridiculous to many people.
While Griffith ridiculed ‘Irish conservatism’ as the ‘ostrich policy’, supposedly shared equally by Irish Tories and the Irish Party,48 Sweetman’s advice to Griffith that it was not their responsibility as Sinn Féiners to present any direct party political opposition to the Irish Party
