and some members of the Irish Catholic hierarchy and of the Irish Parliamentary Party responded to news of Parnell’s relationship with Katharine O’Shea by turning on the leader. But Griffith articulated in the United Irishman a general principle that ‘A man can be a good patriot without being virtuous in his private life.’28 This was not the later sentiment of an anonymous writer of a Sinn Féin pamphlet in September 1917 who declared ‘The only way to be a patriotic Irishman is to do your best to become a perfect man.’29 Griffith in 1900 contrasted the example of an Arab leader who unwisely appointed ‘a notorious libertine’ to be keeper of the harem with one who appointed such a man as the State Treasurer:
I do not see, unless the libertine were also a rogue, why he should not prove himself a faithful public servant. I do not believe that a political leader should be deposed for any save a political offence. I believe the Irish people made themselves ridiculous by their treatment of Charles Stewart Parnell. He had committed no political crime. He had not sinned against them.
This led to debate in his paper between himself and a regular contributor, the nationalist priest Fr Patrick Fidelis Kavanagh.30 Griffith’s position was consistent when it came to the scandalous Oscar Wilde and his homosexuality, a sexual orientation into which Griffith may have had some personal insight due to the warmth of his devotion to his close friend William Rooney who died young:
Last week one of the most brilliant Irishmen of the century, Oscar Wilde, died. Our highly moral Dublin newspapers printed the announcement in their back columns. The Evening Herald timidly referred to the passing of Wilde in order to bring in a compliment to Mr John Redmond. For it appears that Mr Redmond had the moral courage, once upon a time, to quote some lines of Wilde’s poetry to the British House of Commons … It was not because Wilde was a sinner that our cowardly journals kept silence – it was because they feared to shock the fetid conscience of pharisaical England.31
And when reviewing A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue, edited by S.A. Brooke and T.W. Rolleston, Griffith complained of Wilde’s omission: ‘We have not Wilde. ’Twould have offended the virtuous Englishman to have included him.’32 That Griffith thus distinguished between Wilde’s public and private lives may surprise some who assume that his criticism of Synge’s Playboy was merely prudish.
Griffith’s inclusiveness meant that he wished the cause of Irish nationalism to encompass all who desired to embrace it. He made this clear in the first issue of his United Irishman, and repeated and endorsed that position in the issue of 18 May 1901 when wrapping up what had become a somewhat bitter exchange in the paper as to whether ‘there is no Irishman but the Gael’ (or ‘the Irish are now a composite race’). Of this proposition he wrote:
That the very same test which is the hall-mark of the American citizen ought to be the test of the Irishman, that he accept the doctrine of an Irish nation, Irish in its language, Irish in its policy, Irish in every outlook of its national life; and that to forswear all allegiance to every other nation in the world … be he Gael or Cromwellian, French-Huguenot or Spanish-Irish, the man who swears to an Irish Nation and he only is an Irishman.33
To this list he was explicitly to add Jewish people, as will be seen. In his United Irishman on 15 February 1902 he stated: ‘Ireland is our mother whichever father begot us.’ In 1927, when the minister for external affairs Desmond FitzGerald referred at a public meeting to Tom Johnson, the English-born leader of the Irish Labour Party, a heckler cried ‘He is an Englishman.’ FitzGerald retorted ‘Long ago Arthur Griffith said an Irishman was a man who was prepared to work for the Irish people, and in the Black and Tan days Tom Johnson did his part in the job.’34
The Parnell affair clearly demonstrated the threat of divisiveness to Irish political ambitions, but Griffith himself was under no illusions about his own shortcomings as a possible unifying national leader. In Ulysses, James Joyce has a character declare that Griffith ‘has no go in him for the mob’. Griffith readily placed his hopes in others. At the same time, his acquaintance Padraic Colum understood that the downfall of Parnell had taught Griffith the dangers of relying on just one man:
In Arthur Griffith’s mind there were contradictions. He was to devote his maturity to the formation of an order in which Parnellism or O’Connellism would have no part. And yet, more than any other man, he believed in the avatar. He saw Parnell as an avatar. He was to see Éamon de Valera as an avatar. Parnellism had been a tremendous force – he had felt it – but was it right that a country should put its whole trust in one man? And there was O’Connellism which, too, had left the country at a dead end. But here was one who would lead the country – William Rooney [his friend who died young].35
The Role of the Catholic Church
The vast majority of Irish nationalists were observant members of the Catholic Church, but Griffith was not afraid to question its authorities and pointed out that it was legitimate for a Roman Catholic to do so.36 His United Irishman contextualised Irish hierarchical power by noting a condemnation of anti-English Boers that was published in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, and recalling when ‘Bishop Moriarty condemned the Fenians’.37 One correspondent soon complained that ‘The United Irishman lends its pages to writers who slander the Catholic Church.’38
The fact that Griffith came partly of Ulster Protestant stock may have given him a particular insight into religion, with one of his ancestors leaving his church for the love of a Catholic woman. Griffith looked around at Ireland’s rapidly shrinking population and advised young men ‘if you can do nothing else for your country, get married’. He thought that Catholic priests were infected by a ‘gloomy Presbyterian spirit’:
Lack of employment and grinding poverty are largely responsible for the ever-continuing and increasing emigration. If the Irish people support their own industries they can mitigate those evils. But there is another and a potent cause in the drab dullness of Irish rural life. With the priests of Ireland the remedy lies; with good intentions, but bad judgement they frowned down upon the merrymaking, the ceilidh and roadside dance, which gave colour and joy to the lives of the poor. Irish men and women cannot live merely to work and eat and sleep, and thousands of those who flee yearly from the land do so to escape the dreary monotony of life in a country where the gloomy Presbyterian spirit seems to have infected so many of the Catholic clergy. The Gaelic League has done much to bring a little joy into the people’s life. The three thousand priests of Ireland, by being true to their own Irish nature, could do much …39
A week later, he pointed out that the proportion of Protestants in Ireland was rising relative to Catholics (and thus was Anglo-Irish culture spreading), demanding to know what the Catholic hierarchy would do to resist the trend.40 There were also sharp exchanges in his paper following its publication of a negative review of Canon Sheehan’s novel My New Curate.41 And a nationalist priest in sympathy with Griffith’s political aims nevertheless attacked a letter in the United Irishman written by the socialist Fred Ryan. The priest condemned its ‘heresy’ in ridiculing the doctrine of eternal hell in the context of a discussion of Chinese news, and demanded to know if the paper would ‘be used in future for disseminating such un-Christian and un-Catholic doctrines’. Griffith as editor blandly replied underneath ‘we are not responsible for the opinions of our correspondents’.42
Griffith favoured the provision of non-denominational higher education and published criticism of a ‘sycophantic speech’ about a Catholic university made to a gathering of Englishmen by the Jesuit intellectual Fr Thomas Finlay (with whom James Connolly also had a disagreement). Griffith’s objections to Finlay’s idea were as much socio-economic as secular, it being ‘proposed to tax the workers for the education of the sons of landowners and retired commercials’.43 Such critical views in his paper, including one outright reference by a letter writer to ‘the spirit of opportunism, full-fledged in the Irish Catholic Church’,44 cannot have endeared Griffith to its bishops. Those views may even have contributed to a perception of him as ‘un-Irish’, or not ‘typically’
