(1793–1815), London abandoned cherished promises that had been made to Irish politicians at the time of the Union of 1801 (enshrined in Article Six of that Act) by merging the Irish with the Imperial Exchequer. As a result, the Bank of England now banked all Irish customs and excise; the former national bank, the Bank of Ireland, began investing solely in British imperial defence stock in London; a parity was enforced between the Irish and English pound; and the formation of new Irish banks was encouraged, each of which tailored themselves not only to the new imperial economy (represented by the abolishment of all Irish customs houses) but also, in their search for customers, to the existence of strictly segregated religious communities within Ireland.87 This was the political precursor to granting Catholics the right to parliamentary representation in 1829 and the ineffective Young Ireland protests, partly supported by an elderly Daniel O’Connell, against W.E. Gladstone, the president of the Imperial Board of Trade during the mid-to-late 1840s. Gladstone subsequently managed to ‘permeate the thinking not only of treasury officials but of a generation of civil servants in virtually all departments of administration’ by prioritising increasing England’s economic control over all British territories while simultaneously appearing to address their desires for more autonomy in public. The much lauded mid-Victorian age of prosperity (1851–75) was actually a period defined by a largely unnoticed establishment of a complete English monopoly over all imperial markets, very often at the direct expense of the rest of the United Kingdom, while simultaneously cutting expenditure for all colonial governments or administrations.88
The relevance of this Gladstonian fiscal doctrine to Irish circumstances was highlighted during Gladstone’s own tenures as Prime Minister. In the wake of the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (a purely symbolical measure that nevertheless convinced some clericalist Catholic politicians that Gladstone favoured ‘justice for Ireland’), Gladstone abolished the office of Vice-Treasurer of Ireland that had been established on the merging of the exchequers to guarantee there would be some regulatory measures in place to ensure financial fair play for Ireland. As a result, even those Irish businessmen who enthused over annual return figures for trade as an indication that they were operating within a prosperous economy admitted that they had no means of ever knowing either what these figures meant in practice for Ireland or what financial returns were ever being made to Ireland because of the arbitrary manner in which London was determining its figures and the fact that these figures only gave statistics for the United Kingdom as a whole.89 In effect, Gladstone had succeeded in making all Irish politicians economically blind. This exacerbated a trend whereby Irish businessmen literally had to make London their headquarters if they were to be sufficiently well attuned to market trends to be able to survive in business at all.
Gladstone’s masterstroke in forwarding this policy occurred during the 1880s. He abandoned his recent coercive policy in Ireland (imprisoning over 1,000 Land League officials without trial and establishing, for the first time in history, a permanent secret service in Ireland)90 and suddenly announced his willingness to embrace the idea of ‘home rule’ for Ireland. Irish Tories, under Isaac Butt, had actually initiated an idea of home rule for Ireland during the early 1870s in protest against Gladstone’s abolishment of the office of Vice Treasurer for Ireland. Now, however, Gladstone saw an embrace of the home rule slogan as a means of increasing existing levels of over-taxation in Ireland, which he had first established during the 1850s, while simultaneously cutting back on government expenditure in Ireland. In particular, by forcing Irish political representatives to sit in a completely powerless and subordinate assembly in Dublin with no fiscal autonomies, he intended to deny Irish political representatives any means of ever counteracting his policy.91 Even though it was fully understood that ‘Gladstone’s proposed contribution from Ireland to England under the Home Rule Bill is more than Ireland could possibly continue to pay’, Parnell’s party went along with Gladstone’s policy,92 in the process tearing the Irish political community apart. Many former supporters of the Liberal party in Ireland, particularly within Ulster, now defected permanently to the Tories in opposition to Gladstone’s initiative.
After 1886, Irish Tories protested that Ireland was legally supposed to be an equal part of the United Kingdom but it was now being governed in a purely exploitative manner in keeping with trends in Gladstonian foreign policy in third-world countries. This was why Parnell’s willingness to depend on a Catholic Church that was completely indifferent to the economic well being of Ireland, except in so far as it affected its own private concerns, was equated with being willing to risk letting the country be economically ruined purely for the sake of a short-term electoral expediency. Irish Tory opponents of Parnell and Gladstone now described themselves as ‘unionist’, a political term they invented to denote their preoccupation with the terms of the original Union of 1801, but Gladstone’s dismissal of their politics by noting that ‘we are all unionists’ was one to which Irish political commentators could offer no effective retort.93 Indeed, after 1886 both Irish ‘nationalist’ and ‘unionist’ political organisations not only grew increasingly confessional but they were also frequently subject to ridicule because Irish politicians had neither the authority nor the means to ever establish a tribunal on the fiscal relations between Britain and Ireland. This meant they were inherently impotent in championing Irish economic interests.
The economic backdrop to the political operations of Griffith’s YIL was that the fall of Parnell coincided with a shift in Tory economic policy in England. The exclusion of Britain from European free-trade markets around 1891 led English Tories to attack Gladstone’s policy in that regard,94 and this provided Irish Tories with an opportunity to step up their own criticisms of Gladstone. This was done by attempting to link the question of the financing of Irish education, which alone preoccupied the Catholic Church, with intellectual and cultural nationalist debate within Ireland in an attempt to highlight the existence of other political alternatives. However, the proverbial Irish nationalist response, as represented by the Irish Party, was simply to label the Tory-minded Parnellite press and the YIL that it publicised as an anti-Catholic faction. This reflected a central dynamic and deep paradox to the history of the Irish Party. From 1886 onwards it espoused a Liberal Party alliance for the sake of retaining support for the idea of home rule but in doing so it was actually defending a party that supported neither the economic interests of Ireland nor the principle of denominational education. Instead, the Liberal Party was simply prepared to allow for the greater promotion of Irish Catholic professionals within the British imperial civil service in order to further implement Gladstone’s principles of fiscal administration.95 The Catholic Church welcomed this development purely because it assisted it in promoting its missionary work throughout the British Empire; a key issue as far as the Vatican was concerned. As far as Griffith was concerned, however, the only real defence that could be offered in favour of this policy was the opportunities it presented for individuals’ professional development at the expense of Ireland itself. This was essentially true.96
Politically, Griffith’s YIL occupied the position of being independent to such a degree that it fitted into no particular camp but instead found its audience primarily within the republic of letters. This was not necessarily a guarantee of obscurity during the 1890s. Many could identify with the protests of Griffith and his YIL friends that, judging from contemporary trends, the ideals of Irish nationalism had been completely forgotten in a race for civil service employments and that this was being masked and justified in public by disingenuous attempts by politicians to promote sectarian animosities purely in an attempt to hide their own personal, or careerist, ambitions.97 Therefore, even if it was ineffective in a purely party-political sense, the fact that the YIL refused to obey MPs’ request that it engage in electioneering and distributed copies of its resolutions to all parties, irrespective of whether or not they identified themselves as ‘nationalist’ or ‘unionist’ (according to the post 1886 party-political definitions) or whether or not they held government offices, was respected by all who disliked the tenor of Irish party politics ever since 1886.98 In reviving debate on the ideals of the Young Irelanders of the 1840s, Griffith and his friends were also consciously echoing the green-white-and-orange symbolism of T.F. Meagher’s republican tricolour of 1848.
Griffith’s mentor in the YIL was Henry Dixon, a legal secretary at the Dublin Four Courts and former member of the Rathmines branch of the Irish National League.
