The Enigma
of
Arthur Griffith
Colum Kenny is Professor Emeritus at Dublin City University. A barrister, journalist and historian, he has written widely on culture and society. His books include An Irish-American Odyssey (2014) and Moments that Changed Us: Ireland after 1973 (2005). An honorary bencher of King’s Inns, he has been awarded the gold medal of the Irish Legal History Society and the DCU President’s Award for Research. A founding board member of the E.U. Media Desk in Ireland, he served on the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland.
The Enigma
of
Arthur Griffith
‘Father of Us All’
COLUM KENNY
First published in 2020 by
Merrion Press
10 George’s Street
Newbridge
Co. Kildare
Ireland
© Colum Kenny, 2020
9781785373145 (Paper)
9781785373152 (Kindle)
9781785373169 (Epub)
9781785373176 (PDF)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Typeset in Minion Pro 11.5/15 pt
Cover front: New York Times supplement, January 1922.
Cover back: Griffith and Collins in Sligo, spring 1922 (NLI, INDH400A).
A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness,
is a necessary evil.
– from Ulysses
by James Joyce (1922).
You had the prose of logic and of scorn,
And words to sledge an iron argument,
And yet you could draw down the outland birds
To perch beside the ravens of your thought –
The dreams whereby a people challenges
Its dooms, its bounds. You were the one who knew
What sacred resistance is to men
That are almost broken; how, from resistance used,
A strength is born, a stormy, bright-eyed strength
Like Homer’s Iris, messenger of the gods,
Coming before the ships the enemy
Has flung the fire upon. Our own, our native strength
You mustered up.
– from ‘Odysseus: In Memory of Arthur Griffith’
by Padraic Colum (1923).
CONTENTS
1. Griffith and Mother Ireland
3. 1871–1901: Hard-Working Men
5. Ballads, Songs and Snatches
6. His ‘Best Friend’ Rooney Dies
7. Women as Comrade and Wife
8. Griffith, Race and Africa
9. Connolly, Yeats, Synge and Larkin
10. Journalist, Editor and Crusader
11. 1902–16: Sinn Féin and the Rising
12. Irish and Jewish
13. 1917–20: Griffith and de Valera
14. A Fateful Weekend
15. 1921: ‘He Signed the Treaty’
16. 1922: Destruction and Death
17. Arthur Griffith and Joyce’s Ulysses
18. 2022: Commemorating Griffith
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Bibliography
Griffith’s Timeline
Index
1
Griffith and Mother Ireland
Arthur Griffith was ‘an enigma’, mysterious or difficult to understand, wrote his contemporary James Stephens. He was ‘the father and the founder’ of Sinn Féin, John Dillon MP informed the House of Commons in 1916.1
A photograph of Griffith taken in London during the treaty talks in late 1921, but published by The New York Times in 1922 above the caption ‘Head of the Irish Free State’ is a reminder of his resilience (Plate 1), – until civil war finally undid him.
Harry
