the task of crossing the Irish Sea to negotiate a treaty. Although in 1923 a former IRB man George Lyons described Griffith as ‘the Moses who led his benighted people out of the shadows into the light’, Griffith never satisfied de Valera. Was de Valera, whose own father and mother were absent from most of his childhood,19 unconsciously taking revenge by sending the man then known as the ‘father of Sinn Féin’ to London instead of going himself? De Valera was ‘president’ or first minister of the new Dáil Éireann and might reasonably have been expected to sit opposite Prime Minister Lloyd George during those negotiations. His absence was critical.
Griffith long encouraged people to assert their independence (sinn féin, sinn féin amháin: we ourselves alone) rather than wait impassively to be washed clean by the blood of martyrs or yearn impotently and submissively for that salvation from abroad that Gaelic poetry long invoked. Yet anyone who thought that he might have earned for himself the eternal gratitude of all those whom he led to the promised land of an Irish state had not reckoned with the kind of patricidal or Oedipal undercurrents that are as much a feature of nations as of families.
During a bitter parliamentary debate on 27 April 1922, Griffith claimed that when he agreed the previous October to lead a delegation to negotiate a treaty, de Valera said to him, ‘There may have to be scapegoats.’ He told the Dáil that he replied to de Valera that he was ‘willing to be a scapegoat to save him from some of his present supporters’ criticism’. And Griffith was to become something of a scapegoat, not just in respect to the treaty but also as regards Irish anti-Semitism. His reputation as well as his life fell victim to the civil war, during which he collapsed and died in August 1922.
Patriotic verses that Yeats wrote in 1891 mourning Parnell as Moses were reprinted in 1922 to mourn Griffith in the same terms. Since then, some politicians have used his name to bolster their arguments, but others have opted not to speak of him at all. That may be easier than admitting that he was an Irishman who perhaps represented the emerging consensus of an increasingly inclusive electoral franchise more accurately than did his more violent friends and acquaintances. To this day remembering Griffith disturbs our national psyche. If we drop a bucket into his pond we draw up a mix as real but less heady than the blood of which Yeats sang so gloriously. We may unconsciously yearn for the intoxication of heroic daydreams.
It is true that twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of Ireland might not have achieved what level of independence they did in 1922 without the shock of the rebellion and executions of 1916 or the plotting of the IRB and the Volunteers. However, it was the constant commitment and steady hard work of Arthur Griffith and a few others that created and sustained the Sinn Féin movement, giving context and shape to the emotional desire for freedom and eventually enshrining that ambition in a viable constitutional compromise that was pragmatic rather than fanciful. Griffith risked his life, but saw no good reason to throw it away. His way was fatherly, at times paternalistic. His friends and critics alike frequently used epithets to describe him that were characteristic of positive and negative aspects of the father archetype.
The Ireland of the European Union, of the United Nations, of the Good Friday Agreement is the kind of everyday Ireland for which Griffith worked. The state’s foundation in 1922 should not be recalled in 2022 without generously recognising his crucial role in its conception and birth.
2
The Name of the Father
Arthur Griffith was born at 61 Upper Dominick Street, Dublin, on 31 March 1871. His widow later said that Dublin was ‘where his grandfather or great-grandfather had come to from Redhills in Cavan, having been thrown out by his Presbyterian family because he had become Catholic’.1
Arthur Griffith’s father, who was also named Arthur, was a printer. He was of the Dublin artisan class that comprised the backbone of the Fenian movement. Among Fenians who had been ‘out’ in the troubled year 1867 was another printer, the present author’s great-grandfather, Michael Kenny. In 1898 Michael took out of its frame an old printed oleograph sketch of ‘The Death of Ireland’s Liberator’ (namely Daniel O’Connell) that his own father had earlier framed in 1849. The sketch clearly meant something to Michael, for he carefully cleaned and reframed it.2
Young Arthur Griffith was known by his family, friends and future wife as ‘Dan’. Some believe that he got this name ‘because of his boundless capacity for debate and his consummate absorption with the cause of national independence. To his associates he was another Daniel O’Connell.’3 If so, the nickname identified Griffith with a political leader whose peaceful parliamentary campaign to repeal the union of Ireland and Britain had failed, and on whom in his younger days Griffith used to ‘pour unlimited scorn’.4 He preferred the writings and songs of the revolutionary movement that superseded O’Connell in the 1840s, looking up to the Young Ireland leaders Thomas Davis, John Mitchell and James Fintan Lalor. Scattered throughout the papers of which he became editor are many extracts from their works. Ironically, given such views, ‘Dan’ would later develop into a democratic constitutionalist, defending the nascent Irish state against those whom his colleague Kevin O’Higgins described as ‘wild men screaming through the keyholes’.5
Griffith’s nickname ‘Dan’ also hints at fatherly warmth, with its last consonant lengthening the first two letters that spell the most common Dublin term of endearment for a father, ‘Da’. One of his friends later wrote ‘that name, I think, gave his likeableness and his humour’.6
In 1899, Griffith delivered a public talk in the Workingmen’s Club on ‘The Songs of our Fathers’, including patriotic songs that reflected Young Ireland and Fenian values. This was probably the same Griffith lecture ‘on the ballad poetry of the Young Ireland period’ that a future president of Ireland, Seán T. O’Kelly (also Ó Ceallaigh), attended that year.7 In Griffith’s own life, the Young Irelander and veteran Fenian leader John O’Leary (1830–1907) became an occasional fatherly mentor or advisor.
Griffith’s Creed
In an editorial in the first issue of his United Irishman, on 4 March 1899, Griffith wrote:
Lest there be a doubt in any mind, we will say that we accept the [revolutionary] Nationalism of [17]98, [18]48 and [18]67 as the true Nationalism; and Grattan’s cry ‘Live Ireland – Perish the Empire!’ as the watchword of patriotism.
Two years later he repeated that sentiment. He also then described three movements as ‘tending to build up and brace the Nation for the final struggle for independence’, these being movements for the development of the Irish language, literature and industry. He regarded every objective as ultimately subsidiary to the achievement of independence itself:
A fatter Gaelic-speaking Ireland kissing its chains would be perhaps more contemptible than even a pauperized, English-tongued Ireland fighting with its mouth against the Government which believes in preaching to the weak from the ‘holy text of pike and gun’. What we wrote in the first issue of the United Irishman [4 March 1899, quoted above] we reaffirm as our creed.8
To understand Griffith, to fathom his methodology and motives, it is crucial to recognise his single-mindedness. James Owen Hannay, a Church of Ireland clergyman who penned popular novels as ‘George A. Birmingham’, wrote of Griffith that ‘He was more idea-possessed than any one I have ever met and the idea which possessed him to the exclusion of every other was that of an Ireland free to lead her own life and manage her own affairs.’9 Helena Molony, secretary of Inghinidhe na hÉireann between 1907 and 1914, admired his capacity to inspire people to overlook differences of opinion and work together.10
Five factors in particular shaped Griffith’s character and outlook, and he cannot be understood without appreciating the importance of each of them. Their burning significance for him may not be self-evident today when Irish people live in a very different Ireland, as he always hoped we would:
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