the United Irishman out of business.
W.B. Yeats described Griffith in his thirties as ‘an enthusiastic anti-cleric’,45 but the editor did not like being boxed in by definitions. Celebrating the survival of his first paper on its second anniversary, Griffith wrote ‘they accused us of being madmen, notoriety-seekers, socialists, bigots, cranks, anti-clericals, anti-Parnellites and Parnellites. We were none of these things. We were Irishmen, speaking straight to the people.’46
Straight talking got him into some trouble with a prominent churchman at a tense moment in October 1921. With the treaty talks due to begin in London, the Dáil’s cabinet was making detailed preparations. Nasty rumours about de Valera and his ministers were circulating, and the Irish republican delegation’s office in Rome informed Griffith that the rumours had reached the ears of John Hagan, rector of the Irish College there. Ministers suspected ‘enemy work’, and a brief note was dashed off on behalf of Griffith as minister for foreign affairs requesting Hagan to name whoever had spread the rumours in Rome. Hagan, who was sympathetic to republicans and was de Valera’s personal confessor for a period, took great umbrage at this innocuous note, claiming that it was ‘almost insulting in tone and written as from a superior to an inferior’. Margaret Gavan Duffy at the Irish office in Rome immediately contacted de Valera seeking his intervention, and the latter promptly wrote to the rector to explain, if not to apologise, that
the apparent curtness was due to the fact that it was dictated by the minister in charge in a moment’s interval in a Cabinet discussion on a reply which we were about to send to Lloyd George. The pressure of work here is very great and there is little time to give to our letters that polish and finish which we desire.
Emigration from Ireland
In 1918 Francis Hackett, the Irish-born founding editor of the influential left-wing New Republic journal in New York, pointed out that the population of Ireland halved between 1851 and 1914.48 The impact and scale of Irish migration in the nineteenth century and beyond can scarcely be exaggerated. Many who left went with a feeling of being wrenched away. The 1841 census of the United Kingdom, which is considered to be the first modern UK census, revealed that then, before the Great Famine, the population of Ireland (8.2m) was more than half that of England and Wales combined (15.9m). By 1901, it was about one-seventh, with just 4.5m inhabitants left on the island of Ireland but 32.5m people living in England and Wales. The United Irishman noted on 12 April 1900 that, on one day alone, ‘The extraordinary number of Irish people fleeing to the United States resulted in the frightful exodus of 1,100 on Easter Sunday, with “wild Irish howls”, as our friends say.’
In ten years to 1891 the population fell by half a million. From United Ireland, 11 April 1891.
In August 1900, it was reported that a rumour that French troops had landed in the west of Ireland swept through Irish migrant labourers in Lancashire and that up to a thousand of these workers fled home in panic to the west of Ireland.49 In September 1900 Griffith devoted two and a half columns to the trauma of emigration, within the context of addressing Franco–Irish relations. He evoked the memory of the French force under General Jean Joseph Humbert that had landed in Co. Mayo in 1798:
The mountain men of Connaught and Ulster, whose grandfathers marched after the banner of France and Humbert to Castlebar, still anxiously ask the sympathetic travelers when the French will come again … And France will not despise their simple faith. If fifty years ago, when nine millions of our people dwelt within our four seas, the tide of hope bounded fiercely through our veins and the lessons of self-reliance appealed strongly to us, it is not so today. We are a dwindling, sickly people, dwindling to extinction, and the blast of the war-bugles of France across our land is needed to rouse us from this death-sleep that is creeping upon us to save us from the Antichrist of Nations who e’er he destroys us, would fain mark us with the Mark of the Beast.50
On 15 December 1900 the United Irishman noted the death of Michael G. Mulhall (1836–1900), a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, whose dictionary of international statistics was widely read. Mulhall had made the point that, during the reign of Victoria, 1,225,000 Irish people had died of famine, 4,186,000 emigrated and 3,668,000 were evicted: ‘The only European country which has suffered depopulation in the present century is Ireland …. The marriage-rate and birth-rate are the lowest in the world.’51 Yet Griffith, a contrarian editor, also published a lengthy piece by Edward McVey advocating emigration as the best option for young Irish people.52
From time to time in Ireland, including in the United Irishman on 15 June 1901, it was claimed bitterly that the editor of the London Times wrote during the Great Famine: ‘A Catholic Celt will be as rare in Ireland as a Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan.’ The currency of the claim, regarded as symptomatic of British disdain, is reflected in a reference to it in Joyce’s Ulysses. The renowned Stanley Morison for The Times later suggested that the quotation had not appeared in a leading article, but conceded in respect to the Celts of Ireland ‘going and going with a vengeance’ that some such words ‘may have appeared’ in a letter or telegram that was published.53
British Economic and Political Repression
Griffith’s analysis of the actual causes of economic disadvantage in Ireland was detailed. Britain had long restricted Irish trade to its own advantage, and the Irish had little control of taxation or investment in their own country. Hackett thought that, for Griffith, ‘The economics of Ireland were secondary to his hatred of England, stones of wrath in a Ulysses battle against the Manchester Cyclops.’54 Kelly suggests ‘It is easy to be sceptical about Griffith’s constitutional theories, his economic projections, and his statistics.’55 But were Griffith’s arguments not at least as evidence-based as those of his opponents?
Griffith’s papers included much information on agriculture and banking and many other areas of Irish life. He condemned restrictions on Irish trade as well as the dearth of local capital for investment in Irish business, something that Catholics in particular felt keenly. He articulated their suspicion that they were discriminated against by Protestant bankers and investors in favour of Protestant and even Jewish businessmen, the latter being free to join the Freemasons while the Catholic Church forbid its members to do so. He pointed out that Ireland payed a disproportionately high share of taxation while enjoying a low share of the United Kingdom’s capital investment. On 23 March 1901, for example, the United Irishman indicated that invested capital in Ireland was one-forty-fourth of that available throughout the United Kingdom while taxation revenue was one-twelfth of the whole. Griffith also published pamphlets, with James Joyce buying his tract on The Finance of the Home Rule Bill, for example.56
Griffith’s Sinn Féin movement forefronted industrial development. He and other party members and supporters were closely involved in the Industrial Development Association (IDA), a voluntary precursor of the future state’s Industrial Development Authority. According to Seán T. O’Kelly, writing when he later became the president of Ireland, ‘Mrs. Wyse Power, afterwards Senator; Ryan who was afterwards the first Secretary of the I.D.A. and Kevin J. Kenny [grandfather of the present author], were the principal promoters of the I.D.A. in Dublin.’57 Jennie Wyse Power, nationalist and suffragette, ran the Irish Farm and Produce Company. At its shop and restaurant at 21 Henry St, Dublin, in the months before the 1916 Rising, O’Kelly frequently lunched with Griffith, Seán Mac Diarmada (MacDermott) and other activists. A plaque on the site now commemorates the signing of the 1916 proclamation there.
With Wyse Power, Mac Diarmada, Kevin J. Kenny, Bulmer Hobson, Helena Molony and others, Griffith in 1907 formed the first Aonach committee. The annual Aonach, or industrial fair, held under Sinn Féin auspices between 1908 and 1914, served to popularise that political movement amongst Dublin businesses and to emphasise its importance.58 When Griffith’s weekly Sinn Féin paper went daily for a period he subtitled it ‘The Daily National Industrial Journal’. From 1908 Griffith
