ill. His face was livid and haggard, one of his arms bandaged, and the hand I shook had no longer the firm grip I had felt previously … As he descended from the car a woman beside me stretched out her hand to him saying ‘God bless you, Mr Parnell – don’t go tonight.’ He turned towards her, smiled and shook his head. That was the last we saw of Parnell alive.35
Joyce’s fictional Leopold Bloom had a moment with Parnell too: ‘He saw him once on the auspicious occasion when they broke up the type in the Insuppressible or was it United Ireland, a privilege he keenly appreciated, and, in point of fact, handed him his silk hat when it was knocked off and he [Parnell] said Thank you’. When Parnell died, Griffith and Rooney and other members of the Leinster marched as a group in the funeral procession on Sunday, 11 October 1891.36
Parnell’s downfall poisoned and dulled Irish politics for more than a decade, its venom evident at a meeting of the Leinster Debating Club, when one of that society’s occasional visitors, James McCluskey, scoffed at members and claimed that they would be anti-Parnellites if they lived down in Mallow, Co. Cork. Nevertheless, Rooney and others in the club proposed McCloskey for membership a fortnight later. Griffith spoke strongly against McCloskey’s admission but was defeated. He and some others immediately resigned.37 During a lively discussion one week afterwards, Rooney explained that he had supported McCloskey on the assumption that the man had spoken originally in the heat of the moment and would pull back. But the damage was done, and on 9 December 1892, the remaining members of the Leinster Debating Club wound up their society.
Girls and Gas
Girls did not participate in the usual meetings of the Leinster. But Griffith could enjoy female company at the house of his more affluent Whelan cousins, where there were frequent Sunday teas, with a piano and girls singing favourite songs.38 A printer’s apprentice told Padraic Colum that when a group including Griffith paired off with girls, ‘“Dan” [i.e. Griffith] would begin to spout lines such as “To be or not to be,” or “The quality of mercy is not strained” [both by Shakespeare].’ Padraic Colum suspected that this display of erudition was as much to cover Griffith’s shyness as to make an impression, and one fears that some of the girls were not impressed.39
However, if he was not always fascinating, at least Griffith was by no means out of place in the emerging social order for which James Joyce in Ulysses outlined alternative qualifications:
You must have a certain fascination: Parnell. Arthur Griffith is a squareheaded fellow but he has no go in him for the mob. Or gas about our lovely land. Gammon and spinach. Dublin Bread Company’s [DBC] tearoom. Debating societies. That republicanism is the best form of government. That the language question should take precedence of the economic question. Have your daughters inveigling them to your house.
Griffith and Rooney could certainly, and did ‘gas about our lovely land’. Why would they not when others trumpeted the glories of empire? Griffith frequented lively debating clubs, when a growing number of small literary societies generated a head of steam about a national revival. Pubs and tearooms such as the DBC provided further venues for discussion with his friends. And at the Leinster he argued that republicanism was the best form of government. Whether or not he was ‘inveigled’ by Peter Sheehan’s daughters into their home on Cook Street is unknown, but he certainly visited them there, and perhaps later called to the new home that, at the turn of the century, the family acquired on a fashionable street. Griffith might not be convinced that the Irish language question ‘should take precedence of the economic question’, regretting as he did that there were ‘muddled persons who confound language and nationality’ and disdaining ‘camp-followers of the language movement, shouting raucously their shibboleth “An Gaedheal Thu?”’. But he studied Irish, believing that ‘all of us surely can inspire those destined to carve our epitaphs to re-learn it’.40 Seán T. O’Kelly, when later president of Ireland, wrote that from 1899 ‘Griffith and Rooney, in the pages of the United Irishman gave the Gaelic League all the support that they could’. O’Kelly added:
Griffith himself practised what he preached, and was a regular attendant at Irish classes which were held every week in the rooms of the Celtic Literary Society. Though I know that he worked hard to learn Irish, and long years after these days I speak of now, I can say Griffith attended regular classes in Irish in Reading Prison, I am afraid his efforts to get a knowledge of the language were never very successful, but he gave the example which was the effective thing at the time.41
The turn of the century saw many young men attempting to learn Irish, with James Joyce among those taking lessons.
South Africa
When the Leinster was dissolved, Rooney soon became the founding stalwart of a new Celtic Literary Society. Griffith seems not to have been actively involved at meetings of this new group before going to South Africa in January 1898, although before leaving he attended its Christmas festivities with the woman whom he would one day marry.42 He had recently lost his job in Dublin, perhaps by quitting in resentment at the response to a practical joke played on him, and this presumably put him under financial pressure. Printing jobs were not easy to find at the time.43 He was not alone or first among his friends in leaving Ireland. John R. Whelan, ‘a capable and energetic secretary’ of the Celtic Literary Society and ‘a disciple of John Mitchel’ had no sooner had his considered appeal to ‘the thinking Irishman’ on literature and nationalism printed in the advanced nationalist Shan Van Vocht in 1897 than he went to South Africa before Griffith. In his case, Dublin Castle suspected that it was for political rather than economic reasons. Griffith was fond of Whelan, and Griffith’s humorous poem ‘The Thirteenth Lock’ was recited at Whelan’s farewell drinks.44 Griffith’s son Nevin later said that Whelan wrote from Africa urging his father to go out. Rumours that Whelan was killed there were false, and he later returned to Ireland before emigrating long-term to Scotland.45
When Griffith announced that he was leaving Ireland, his friends held a farewell session for him too. At it Rooney paid Griffith a glowing tribute, speaking as someone who knew ‘how much the existence of many National organisations have owed to your support, who have watched how well the gospel of Young Ireland has been put into practice by you, who have recognised the reality of your enthusiasm and patriotism by your very modesty and reserve.’46 Before Griffith went he contributed for the society’s journal under his pen name ‘J.P. Ruhart’ a ‘very amusing skit’ about the adventures of an Irish philosopher.47
Griffith may have emigrated simply in search of better-paid employment. But there is also a hint of threatened tuberculosis, a disease that was common in Dublin. It has even been suggested that he deliberately went to South Africa to ‘make friends for Ireland’.48 Perhaps he went as part of a general strategy on the part of the IRB, when it was hoped that the Boers might beat the British in an imminent war. He was certainly politically active there, along with John MacBride.
So much did Griffith’s friends admire his skills that months after he left they took the unusual step of devoting a special session of the Celtic Literary Society to his writings. These consisted ‘in a great measure of local stories, sketches, and songs, dealing with life in the Liberties and other ancient parts of our city’. It was recorded that ‘The character drawing, treatment of dialogue, and general surroundings of the story were recognised and heartily enjoyed by the audience as absolutely true to their models.’49 Members regretted that Griffith’s writings were not better known, ‘and trusted that some effort would be made to bring them into greater popularity’. In this way a seed was planted that would grow into Rooney’s decision to propose for the position of editor of the planned United Irishman his friend Arthur Griffith, who returned to Dublin from South Africa in the autumn of 1898.
Griffith then sometimes made his way to Sandycove, in south Dublin, to swim at the Forty Foot and relax on the sheltered roof of a nearby Martello tower that Oliver St John Gogarty occasionally leased from its owner (Plate 6). Gogarty, like Griffith, was a strong swimmer and the two men ventured far out into Dublin
