majority in a restored Irish parliament, echoed Douglas Hyde’s desire ‘to render the present a rational continuation of the past’.18 It left the door open to northern Protestants to support independence, not least by maintaining a link with the Crown.
Was Fr F.X. Martin unconsciously painting the ostensibly Catholic Griffith as a morally severe Presbyterian who took life too seriously, as even being akin to those Protestants whom some Catholics found ‘un-Irish’ in their sensibilities and termed ‘sourpusses’? Griffith prided himself on basing his arguments rationally on economic and other statistical evidence. However, when the conscience of Catholics was expected to be primarily ‘informed’ by the hierarchy, ‘private judgement’ was a fruit of the Reformation that might raise suspicions.
Any suspicion that he was ‘un-Irish’ may have been coloured too by his being not only a Dubliner but also a trade unionist printer before he became an editor. In 1943 Michael Hayes commented to Seán Milroy, ‘Griffith was a remarkable man but he had essentially the outlook of the Dublin skilled worker. It would be interesting to see from his writing whether he had any rural touch at all.’19 The respective definitions of ‘a rural touch’ and ‘a Dublin skilled worker’ might include reference to class, personal attitude and anglicisation among other factors. For implying that someone is not ‘one of us’ is a way of marginalising that person. Thus, for example, John Devoy described Éamon de Valera as
the vainest man intellectually that I ever met. He is really a half breed Jew and his mother was a ‘Palatine’ – that is, of German descent. His temperament is not Irish and no man can get along with him except on the condition of absolute submission to his will … he has not an original mind nor any real grasp of politics.20
Such descriptions tell us at least as much about the person making them, and that person’s understanding of their community’s imagined identity, as they do about the object of their description.
Or was Ó Lúing’s reviewer simply acting the part of devil’s advocate, taking his cue from Lloyd George’s stereotyping? In December 1922 the latter wrote of sitting in Downing Street opposite ‘a dark, short, but sturdy figure with the face of a thinker. That was Mr Arthur Griffith, the most un-Irish leader that ever led Ireland, quiet to the point of gentleness, reserved almost to the point of appearing saturnine.’21
Allied to Griffith’s ‘un-Irish’ character and moral decisiveness was a certain perceived intolerance or narrowness for which he was criticised by Bulmer Hobson and Patrick Pearse among others. He impatiently filled columns of his papers with articles dismissing humbug and ‘sunburstery’, a term in use then to denote fine words spouted by those who are elated by their own bright ideas and rhetoric.
Yet, in at least one way, he was quintessentially Irish. For he bristled when facing an English opponent, and the memory of past slights and wrongs was never far from the surface. On 10 January 1922, in Dáil Éireann, he was challenged on a point by Erskine Childers. Born in London and educated in England, Childers had been reared partly by his Barton cousins in Co. Wicklow. Although secretary to the Irish negotiating team in London, he joined the anti-treaty side.22 Griffith struck the table before responding angrily ‘I will not reply to any damned Englishman in this Assembly.’ It was an uncharacteristic outburst.
Griffith does not fit neatly into an Irish stereotype. James Owen Hannay, the Church of Ireland clergyman who wrote novels as ‘George A. Birmingham’ and who also wrote fiction for Sinn Féin, became acquainted with him first through the Gaelic League. He found Griffith
utterly unlike any Irish politician that I knew. He had no gift of private conversation and indeed talked very little. He used to look at me through pince-nez glasses which always seemed on the point of falling off his nose. When he did speak, it was briefly and coldly. Yet, from the first time I met him I was greatly attracted by him. He was a man of absolute honesty and no idea of self-glorification or self-advancement ever seemed to enter his head. He had a very clear intellect and was one of those rare men who never shrink from the logical conclusion of any line of thought or seek to obscure meaning with misty words.
Hannay thought Griffith to be unrelentingly serious: ‘I never discovered in him a trace of a sense of humour. Things seemed to him right or wrong, wise or unwise, but they never seemed funny; though that is what most things are.’23 Others disagreed.
Sense of Humour
Unlike Hannay, other acquaintances discerned in Griffith a keen if sometimes caustic sense of humour. His wife found him ‘such fun with friends’.24 James Joyce took pleasure in Griffith’s tilting at the windmills of parliamentary verbiage. For Griffith such humbug was well represented by the standard graphic above the daily editorial column of Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal. This showed the sun shining above the building that had once housed the old pre-Union Irish parliament. Joyce was prompted to write mischievously in Ulysses:
Sunburst on the titlepage. He smiled, pleasing himself. What Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the Freeman leader: a homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank of Ireland. He prolonged his pleased smile. Ikey [Jewish] touch that: homerule sun rising up in the northwest.25
Griffith jokes at his own expense (Sinn Féin, 9 April 1910).
Griffith’s satirical streak is evident also in certain verses or poems that he wrote, as well as from a witty if lengthy article on the Royal Irish Academy that appeared under his pen name ‘Lugh’ in 1901, and another on the ‘Royal Academy Auf Musicke’ that spoke up for Irish compositions that same year. A ‘delightful’ piece on Professor Atkinson of Trinity College reportedly filled readers with ‘great glee’.26 His ability to quip is also evident in the United Irishman. On 16 March 1901 he wrote ‘The Australian Leader is wrong in supposing that the United Irishman would back the devil if that personage attacked England. The United Irishman would not interfere in a family quarrel.’ He published a cartoon of himself as the devil, to please his detractors.
Liam Ó Briain, a founder member of Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe, the Irish-language theatre, insisted that Griffith could be delightful company.27 On one occasion Griffith brought an old acquaintance with him to meet friends. He extracted much amusement from pretending that his companion was a Hungarian baron interested in Griffith’s proposal to adapt the Austro-Hungarian constitutional model for Ireland.28 And for all the economics and politics he read, he sometimes liked to help sleep come by reading a popular romance such as Charles Garvice’s Her Heart’s Desire.29
When interned in Reading in 1916, Griffith grew a beard, about which he joked, and kept up the spirits of fellow prisoners by organising games of handball and other activities that included the writing of verses. A fellow prisoner later thought that Griffith was ‘never depressed in jail, or never appeared to be depressed’.30 Even during the tense weeks at 22 Hans Place in London, lodged with his team negotiating an Anglo-Irish treaty in late 1921, his private secretary found evidence of his sense of humour and composure.31
Shyness and Obstinacy
Maud Gonne wrote that she got to know Griffith well in 1899: ‘He was not an orator, and was at first very shy and inaudible when addressing meetings’.32 George Lyons too met him then, at a session of the Celtic Literary Society after Griffith’s return from South Africa:
Griffith, from his studious and bookish habits and his long spells of solitary companionship with his pen, became somewhat shy and retiring, and to many who knew him but slightly appeared cold and unsocial, but this was not his true nature. He would pass through the streets of Dublin without noticing his associates or even his friends. He would enter a hall or a crowded meeting place and pass through without saluting any one. There were three reasons: firstly,
