the British Empire. As Sweetman noted, within this debate, the Irish Party was being ‘openly imperialistic’ but ‘the people do not seem to mind’.28 Griffith’s response to this debate was to argue that the Empire was a culturally alien concept in Ireland—a perspective then championed by many Irish Freedom contributors—but nevertheless the central role of British foreign policy in shaping Irish politics, both past and present, could not be ignored.29
Griffith argued that the brief period in history when Ireland exercised some real political and fiscal autonomy (1783–5) had been made possible only because developments in British foreign policy had made England temporarily powerless to combat an Irish determination to resist an English economic absolutism over the British Isles. According to Griffith, British foreign policy had impacted on Ireland since 1794 not in the manner of colonial evolution posited by Childers. Instead, Britain had sought to scare Irish politicians into surrendering more completely to English economic absolutism through political subterfuge. Frequently, this was done by forming and sustaining revolutionary undergrounds in Ireland to assist Whitehall gather foreign policy intelligence abroad and, occasionally, to cause uprisings in Ireland itself so that the public would look to Britain for protection. Notwithstanding his own republican background, Griffith maintained that this was a central dynamic to British governmental policy regarding Ireland ever since the days of William Pitt and was still the role of Ireland in British foreign policy in the present day.30 This meant that Irish politicians could be absolutely certain that, as the next major European war approached, the British government would again promote sectarian disturbances in Ulster, in order to polarise Ireland’s political representatives along religious lines, and use so-called revolutionaries during wartime to both cause a self-defeating rebellion in Ireland and to perform espionage work among Britain’s continental and north American enemies. If history was not to repeat itself endlessly, Griffith argued, it was absolutely essential that those politicians who wielded most control over the wealth of Ireland made a definitive stand against English economic absolutism now. For this reason, Griffith appealed primarily to Ireland’s self-styled ‘unionists’ to call for the creation of a coequal ‘Anglo-Hibernian Empire’ (an idea influenced by Samuels’ TCD predecessor W.E. Lecky)31 under a dual monarchy as the price for Ireland’s support of England in the forthcoming European war with Germany.32 Only if Irish Tories accepted the Sinn Féin Policy of an Irish economic nationalism, Griffith argued, could the ever-repeating cycle in Irish history of the exercise of English economic absolutism over the British Isles and the inevitable result of constant Irish political instability, perpetuated cheaply by Britain by means of revolutionary undergrounds, be finally and definitely broken.33
Griffith’s provocative thesis was unique and it was meant to justify his claim that the Sinn Féin Policy provided the only possible means of ever advancing the ideal of Irish independence. Instead, however, it merely provoked a response from C.H. Oldham, a stalwart of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland. In the recent past, while president of the Rathmines School of Commerce (1900–8), Oldham had been a stern critic of Irish-Ireland attitudes towards industrial revival but on subsequently becoming professor of commerce at UCD he was generally considered to be a passive sympathiser with Sinn Féin.34 Oldham rejected Griffith’s provocative thesis on the grounds that the English Privy Council actually controlled all Irish legislation from 1495 until 1793. He emphasised that no English government had ever compelled Ireland to pay it taxes or to contribute to imperial expenditure prior to the Union of 1801, but the Irish parliament of the day, which Griffith had falsely presented as nationalistic, had always volunteered to do so anyway. According to Oldham, it was not William Pitt and the French War of 1793–1815 that had led Ireland into such a damaging position financially, but rather the fact that England’s own system of financial regulation during that period was slightly chaotic. This had prompted fiscal miscalculations, such as that Ireland could afford to contribute a higher percentage of all British revenue each year than it actually could. This frequently bankrupted the country. This was why ‘the Articles of Union’ were ‘waste paper so far as finance is concerned’ but Britain had been content with these arrangements ‘for at least as long as Ireland has yielded a net profit’.35
Although he had a different perspective on history, Oldham agreed with Griffith regarding the present. He supported Griffith in arguing that nobody could realistically claim there was a deficit in Ireland’s contribution to British imperial treasury.36 Oldham emphasised that while Britain was now complaining of a loss of £1.5 million over the past year, Ireland was still paying £3 million more every year than it could afford. He estimated that, to date, Ireland’s true revenue paid into a common British treasury under the Union had exceeded what was expended locally by about £330 million, ‘which I call the British profit out of the Union’. Therefore, ‘the Irish nation must be incapable of learning any lesson from its past history’ if it was not prepared to demand a comprehensive financial tribunal now to establish a regime of strict fiscal justice in the government’s management of Irish finances. In a remarkable expression of optimism, Oldham even argued that the current situation could have ‘no element of permanence more than any other swindle can have’. Without seeking to provoke the Irish Party, he also intimated that any debate upon the idea of home rule must be made by Irish political representatives to reflect that fact.37
This necessitated a response from Tom Kettle. In the light of Oldham’s argument, Kettle now admitted that the Union, as it has developed, had led to the financial plunder of Ireland in violation of the original terms of the Union;38 that no audit of the sources of British treasury claims regarding Ireland was possible and thus its claims regarding deficits could never be trusted;39 and that Parnell and the Irish Party, in ‘an offence to national dignity’, had accepted Government of Ireland Bills by which an Irish parliament would hold no fiscal autonomy, thereby ensuring that ‘our position will be merely that of an employee, doubtless not without remuneration … [which] may be irresistible’.40 Nevertheless, Kettle still maintained that the only stance possible of Ireland on fiscal affairs was that of John Redmond. This was three-fold: to seek recognition that the only question raised by financial matters was a purely ethical or moral one; to raise the question of whether existing provisions for the financing of education in Ireland was morally justifiable on a politico-religious level compared to the situation that existed in England; and to see what might arise in the future from Lloyd George’s recent suggestion to establish an Irish Development Fund.41
Griffith had recently called for ‘a council on finance’ to be established in Ireland.42 Unlike Oldham, Griffith argued that a root of Irish financial problems was that banking practices in Ireland were doing absolutely nothing to improve the material welfare of the Irish people.43 As a solution, Griffith had called for the establishment of a proto-national bank in Ireland, or else for ‘the public bodies in Ireland’ (such as the county councils) to persuade ‘the existing banks … [to] play the part of national banks’ by threatening to otherwise withdraw their accounts. In this way, without necessarily breaking with the (sterling) gold standard based on the gold reserves of the Bank of England, the liquidity of Irish banks could become localised within Ireland, rather than tied up in investments in British government stock, in turn encouraging the banks in Ireland to cease their longstanding practice of being ‘willing to lend the money of the Irish people for British [business] purposes but not for Irish ones’.44 To promote this idea, Griffith had launched the Sinn Féin People’s Bank Limited during 1909 with some moral support from Terence MacSwiney’s Cork IDA. Griffith promoted this bank by suggesting that it ‘is successfully combating usury and offering equal inducements to depositors with those offered by the British Post Office Banks [a government-owned bank and the main holder of most ordinary Irish citizens’ private savings] with the distinct advantage … that Irish money is available for Irish purposes only.’45 Subsequent efforts to promote debate on banking in Ireland were quickly silenced, however.
During January 1910, an attempt was made to revive the Irish Financial Reform League that had been suppressed on the reunification of the Irish Party ten years previously but this initiative was crushed within a month.46 That summer, to coincide with the relocation of the Sinn Féin Bank from Lower O’Connell Street to a new party headquarters at 6 Harcourt Street,47 anonymously published articles that sternly criticised the
