The Parnell affair and its lasting trauma
• The role of the Catholic Church
• Catastrophic and continuing emigration
• British economic and political repression
His Poverty and that of his City
Griffith was raised in the heart of a city teeming with poverty. The slums of Dublin were amongst the worst in Europe, with many of its Georgian houses that had been home to prosperous middle-class families before the Act of Union of 1800 now reduced to tenements.11 Dublin’s population had increased as people deserted rural Ireland, not least during the Great Famine, putting great pressure on its infrastructure. Political union with Britain after 1800 had not benefited Ireland, and both Dublin and Cork ‘saw the manufacturing share of their workforce halved between the famine and the early twentieth century’.12 Diseases such as tuberculosis and typhoid were rampant. Griffith’s own father suffered from bad health for years and the Griffiths moved a number of times, always renting rooms in central Dublin in an arc around Summerhill. It was an area blighted by decline.
Griffith’s parents Arthur and Mary had been married at Dublin’s pro-cathedral on 14 May 1860 and had five children.13 Their son Frank, born in 1874, said that his father ‘often’ spoke of having been in Richmond, Virginia, at some point during the US civil war of 1861–5, and of having worked as a printer on the popular Illustrated London News in England before settling back in Ireland.14 Frank himself sometimes helped to run the United Irishman office and was an usher in the Gaiety Theatre.15 Frank’s brother Billy was born in Dublin in 1865. Billy, ‘upright and conscientious’, became a hairdresser and, as registrar of the hairdressers’ trade union, found jobs for unemployed barbers. He died of pneumonia in 1924.16 Their sister Marcella was a machinist who, in 1900, died of an ulcerous disease of the larynx of a tubercular nature.17 Their other sister, Frances (known as ‘Fanny’), joined the women’s nationalist group Inghinidhe na hÉireann, and lived until 1949.18
In 1897 Arthur Griffith bid farewell to his parents and went to South Africa, working there at a small newspaper and in mining administration. He returned by September the following year ‘as poor as when leaving Ireland’ his widow later wrote. She added ‘Poor Dan never could make money.’19 His father died in 1904, aged 66.20 Griffith was still unmarried, and during the first decade of the twentieth century continued to reside in the family’s rented rooms at 83 Summerhill (today the site of a modern block). He supported his widowed mother and surviving sister Frances. A fellow tenant in that house later said that ‘The Griffiths lived a very quiet life.’ The house belonged to the widow of a seaman who had been drowned.21
The Griffiths moved in the shadow of ‘Monto’, a notorious district centred on Montgomery Street and known for prostitution. James Joyce memorialised it as ‘Nighttown’ in Ulysses. A description of the adjacent Gardiner Street about 1900 is graphic:
Fifty years ago this street was inhabited by professional people and other rich residents, and every house had its carriage, its coachman and its butler. To-day this imposing stretch of street has sunk to the condition of a street of tenement houses, inhabited not alone by the lowest class of society but by the tramp and vagrant, and mendicant classes. The area around it … constitutes, perhaps, the greatest blot upon the social life of Dublin and of Ireland. There is no such area in London, or in any other town of Great Britain, that I ever saw or heard of. Within this area the trade of prostitution and immorality is carried on as openly as any branch of legitimate business is carried on in the other portions of Dublin.22
Many impoverished Dubliners joined the army. Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses lies in bed musing on the attraction of a lost soldier, recalling one she liked who was killed on the British side in the Boer War: ‘he was a lovely fellow in khaki and just the right height over me … he was pale with excitement about going away … and I so hot as I never felt’.
Griffith and other contributors to his papers sometimes idealised Irish women and protested against certain theatrical depictions of them. There is a curious mixture of respect and chauvinism in his admonition to young Irishmen: ‘Do not talk lightly of women. To do so is to be English.’23 His attitude was partly informed by the degradation and exploitation that he saw before his eyes. When he conducted a campaign against Irish girls walking out with soldiers on Dublin’s main thoroughfare, he was not simply being priggish. His principal objective was to discourage recruitment, but he also saw the effects of economic deprivation on people’s options and of prevalent venereal disease on their health. In 1918 Francis Hackett wrote of those who followed James Connolly in rebellion that ‘They knew that incest and prostitution and syphilis accompanied that slum life, a life of indecencies so unmentionable that no one can fully quote the government reports [e.g. of 1914].’24 Unlike some of the clients of ‘Nighttown’, people who lived near it had not fragrant homes in the suburbs to which to retreat.
When he became an editor, Griffith liked to meet friends over a glass or two of stout, but he never grew rich and was widely believed to have refused better-remunerated journalism in Dublin and abroad in order to continue working on his advanced nationalist papers. Chrissie Doyle, an activist, later said that he was ‘awfully badly off … The story is true of his working in his office in stockinged feet while his shoes, the only pair he had, were being repaired at the shoemakers. He was the most simple of men … he would eat anything served to him’.25 Dan McCarthy, who helped Griffith to produce the United Irishman, described him as ‘poverty-stricken’, and McCarthy and others commented on his worn clothing.26
Sinn Féin, 13 November 1909. By Austin Molloy (‘Maolmhuaidh’). Dirty streets added to the threat of diseases such as TB and typhoid.
James Joyce appreciated Griffith’s efforts to improve the lot of his people. In 1906, in Italy, he wrote that
as far as my knowledge of Irish affairs goes, he was the first person in Ireland to revive the separatist idea on modern lines nine years ago. He wants the creation of an Irish consular service abroad and of an Irish bank at home … He said in one of his articles that it cost a Danish merchant less to send butter to Christiania and then by sea to London than it costs an Irish merchant to send his from Mullingar to Dublin. A great deal of his programme perhaps is absurd but at least it tries to inaugurate some commercial life for Ireland and to tell you the truth once or twice in Trieste I felt myself humiliated when I heard the little Galatti girl sneering at my impoverished country. You may remember that on my arrival in Trieste I actually ‘took some steps’ to secure an agency for Foxford Tweeds there.27
The Parnell Affair
The political divisions that marked Parnell’s downfall were deeply felt by Griffith. There was a pervasive bitterness such as Joyce encapsulated in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when a row over Christmas dinner in Bray ends with an angry but gleeful cry: ‘At the door Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage: – Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend! The door slammed behind her.’
When Parnell fell in disgrace for having an affair, and died soon afterwards, the door slammed shut for years on the prospect of Ireland winning back a measure of political independence through ‘Home Rule’, which Irish parliamentarians at Westminster had been seeking. Griffith as a young man emotionally defended Parnell, although he was not an enthusiast for Parnell’s parliamentarianism. He regarded Parnell’s downfall as an example of the factional distractions that destroy political movements, and to the end of his days insisted on the primacy of the fight for political independence over all else. This is the key to understanding his loss of interest in artists when they diverged on an individualistic or subjective track.
Similarly, he drew
