birthday.
Sackville/O’Connell Street, 1903–8. The Dublin of Griffith and of Joyce’s Ulysses (National Library of Ireland [L_CAB_06672]).
4
An ‘Un-Irish’ Personality?
During negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Michael Collins was filmed impatiently pacing a back balcony at the Irish delegation’s house in Hans Place. Griffith was photographed standing quietly at its front door with his wife, facing a little park on the other side of the building (Plate 15). He was not excitable, being ‘one of the calmest appraisers of men’, and ‘not lavish of his praises’.1 He reluctantly granted interviews to journalists, and could prove difficult to interview due not least to his falling silent.2 Yet to shy young people he was fatherly and kind. When the Butler sisters first approached him as teenagers at his ‘grimy’ office in Fownes Street, for example, ‘suddenly his face lit up with a smile that had something paternal in it – though he was quite a young man’.3
Patrick Carey said ‘I often had a conversation with him, but he was a very silent and retiring man, not pushing. His parents were nice and respectable people. They had no time for gossip. Griffith was a hard-working man and had nothing to give away.’ Carey, a crane operator along the Liffey, was a tenant at 83 Summerhill in the early 1900s, when the Griffiths also rented rooms there.4
Griffith being a Dubliner of artisan or lower middle-class origins and of low income, his formal education was undistinguished. He left school in his early teens as was common then, but he read widely, buying books cheaply from barrows along the quays. He facilitated, argued with and was surrounded by confident men who had completed secondary school and attended college. They included John O’Leary (Tipperary Grammar School, TCD and QCG), W.B. Yeats (Erasmus Smith High School and the Metropolitan School of Art), James Joyce (Clongowes and Belvedere, UCD), Patrick Pearse (Christian Brothers’ School, UCD, Trinity and King’s Inns) and Éamon de Valera (Blackrock College, the Royal University of Ireland and lectures at TCD and UCD).
Neither his features nor his temperament marked Griffith as exotic. He did not pose in a studio with a gun, as Constance Markievicz did with her revolver, thus bequeathing future generations an image of her as a dramatic revolutionary icon. Griffith was photographed not as he collected his rifle from a boat at Howth, but bent over a desk at work. ‘Griffith’s Sinn Féin policy was improving the morale of the people but it was plodding work, not revolution,’ wrote Maud Gonne, somewhat dismissively, of the hard grind of everyday politics.5
When Michael Lennon was gathering information about Griffith in the early 1950s, a correspondent wrote:
I think the man in any Irish revolutionary movement who is likely to be remembered longest is the one with a romantic sounding name. O’Donovan Rossa is spoken of now when James Stephens [1825–1901] is forgotten – the latter was the more prominent in the Fenian days. De Valera is another instance of this Irish tendency. The name had an irresistible fascination for the crowd.6
De Valera’s name also evolved, from George de Valero on his New York birth certificate to Edward at his baptism, to Eddie Coll when sent back to live with his mother’s people in Ireland, to Éamon (sometimes spelt by him with two letters ‘n’) de Valera (sometimes spelt by him with an accent/fada). His ‘exotic name helped him to stand out in later life’, thinks his most recent biographer.7 And perhaps his birth overseas even strengthened de Valera’s appeal at some level in the national psyche, by associating him with that salvation from abroad that Gaelic poets had long anticipated in the form of exiled Irish lords returning with Spanish or French help?
For his part Griffith was a common Dubliner, born and bred in the heart of a city long set apart from Gaelic Ireland. He had no exotic name, no Anglo-Irish sheen of a George Moore or Yeats, and no barrister’s wig like Patrick Pearse. Although a city boy, he had not the working-class profile of his socialist friend Connolly or of ‘Big Jim’ Larkin. Yet H.E. Kenny (‘Sean-ghall’) admired his dedication, writing to Alice Stopford Green in 1915 ‘He has remained voluntarily poor in a venal age’ and ‘I love him with as rich a love as my nature can yield.’8
‘Un-Irish’?
Among the papers that Seán Ó Lúing left to the National Library of Ireland are two reports for his publishers that implicitly raise an interesting but disturbing question: was Griffith’s artisan and ostensibly Protestant background a factor in how he was assessed by Irish Catholics among others?
One of the reports refers to Ó Lúing’s manuscript for his book on Griffith, and the second to his manuscript for an essay subsequently published in a collection edited by the historian F.X. Martin.9 The first reader, who is unidentified, wrote ‘I have heard it said … that Griffith in his early stage flirted with theosophy or neo-Buddhism. The text rightly says he was given to private judgement.’10 The second reader, identified as F.X. Martin himself, asked ‘Was he [Griffith] not intolerant? Un-Irish in character and application? Was he not either vain or rigid so as to be caught by Lloyd George on the point of “honour” in the Treaty negotiations – any typical Irishman would have dismissed Lloyd George’s objection.’ The question of whether or not Griffith was ‘caught’ by Lloyd George into giving his word will be considered later. What is relevant here is the suggestion that keeping one’s word (assuming that this was what Griffith actually did) might not be ‘typically’ Irish.
The two reports raise the spectre of someone suspected of having rather too carefully weighed up moral decisions and then taken them unduly seriously, who relied on a very non-Catholic ‘private judgement’ rather than follow dogma (nationalist dogma) and who, being given to sipping quietly just a glass or two of Guinness when gathered with voluble friends in a pub, was ‘un-Irish’ in an ill-defined but communally understood way (being not ‘one of the lads’ as it were).
Griffith’s widow mentioned an ancient relative of Griffith who contacted her and invited her to Cavan.11 Griffith’s Ulster Protestant antecedents were mentioned in broad terms when he was a candidate in Cavan for Sinn Féin, as candidates often accentuate local connections if they can do so at election time. However, biographers have pinned down little or nothing definite about Griffith’s ancestors or his father’s family outside Dublin. At one point, as files in the National Library show, the district justice Michael Lennon went to considerable lengths searching for that information. Griffith’s acquaintance Dan McCarthy told Ó Lúing that Griffith ‘was extremely reticent about his family, ancestors, etc.’.12
Lennon was, for some unknown reason, made aware of the story of one ‘Billy Griffith’ of Co. Tipperary that had appeared in Young Ireland.13 Attributed to ‘Mrs J. Sadlier’, this told how a Protestant farmer Billy Griffith had long ago hidden a Catholic priest from men hunting him.’14 To Irish Catholics of Griffith’s day, Arthur’s own name and that of his brother Billy (William) would seem more likely to be Protestant than Catholic. Indeed, according to Ó Lúing, when Griffith’s son was presented for baptism, a Catholic priest challenged the choice of the name Nevin: ‘Huh? What? Naomhán! My goodness, I never heard of it. Was Naomhán a saint?’ Griffith reportedly answered simply that he did not know but that ‘He was a bishop, anyway’, and the priest laughed.15 His laugh suggests discomfort. Occasional speculation that Griffith’s ancestors came from Wales to Ireland as settlers is no more than gossip, but the kind of gossip that might do damage to one’s Irish nationalist credentials.
The series of articles about ‘notable graves’ that Griffith and Rooney wrote for a Dublin newspaper in 1892 included those of Lord Clare and Charles Lucas, two persons who would not occur to many Catholic nationalists to be praiseworthy but whom Griffith respected as independent spirits.16 He also had kind words for Lord Russell of Killowen on the latter’s death.17 Griffith’s
