intended to boost Irish manufacturing. When he reorganised it for 1910, he stated that ‘the business side of the book has been entrusted to the capable hands of Mr Kevin J. Kenny’, who founded Ireland’s first full-service advertising agency. This commercial relationship did not stop Griffith later from publishing criticism of Kenny when the latter’s agency was hired to promote military recruitment.59 The Irish Year Book of 1910 included an article contending with certain prejudices among established Irish companies against advertising, a commercial practice that some saw as ‘undignified’ and ineffective.60
During 1910, Griffith described the Year Book and the Aonach, along with the Sinn Féin Co-operative People’s Bank Ltd which he had also founded (Plate 10), as three institutions Sinn Féin established that ‘could claim to be successful from the first’.61 If such innovative activities make Griffith a capitalist, they also place him in the mainstream of Irish economic ambitions before and after independence. His disinterest in taking on capitalism as a system in addition to taking on imperialism has irked some observers. Not least because of this, as Davis noticed, ‘Socialists and radicals naturally lost few opportunities for attacking Griffith.’62
During 1919 a brilliant young journalist and future renowned London theatre critic came to Ireland. The editor of The Guardian, C.P. Scott, had dispatched Ivor Brown to meet Sinn Féiners who were then on the run or expecting arrest. Brown wrote that the
Most powerful and clear-headed of these was Arthur Griffith. For a leader of rebellion in a romantic country he was totally unromantic. I met him in a clandestine way in a grubby little office where he sat with a bowler hat on one side looking like a grocer in his back room … But, he had, below his fanaticism, a Fabian capacity for handling facts and figures as well as ideas …63
Michael Laffan, in a recent entry for Griffith in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, writes of him as ‘inundating his readers with demographic, financial, and other statistics’. That he frequently presented cogent evidence-based arguments in support of his contention that Ireland was inequitably treated by Britain, both socially and economically, is not always clearly recognised. Welcoming the first annual report on the agricultural statistics of Ireland, issued by the government’s new department of agriculture and technical instruction, he thought ‘Politics or no politics we must have the facts, and the better and more widely these facts are known, the sooner we shall get rid of talking and theorizing, and get down to work to lift the country out of its present beggarly condition.’64 He believed that Ireland’s fundamental economic problem was its exploitation by Britain. Interned in an English jail when the rebel parliament, Dáil Éireann, first met on 21 January 1919, he wrote ‘England in her propaganda pointed to the Dublin slums as proof of Irish incapacity and corruption. The tables should be turned on her … Dublin slumdom is the creation of English robbery.’65 While he frequently berated Dublin Corporation and took aim at Irish traders and other locals whom he felt had selfish objectives, he never lost sight of the underlying problem caused by the extraction of resources from Ireland and by oppressive restrictions on his country’s trade and growth. In the late twentieth century, the leading economist Patrick Lynch acknowledged Griffith’s grasp of economic and financial realities.66
3
1871–1901: Hard-Working Men
‘It is tiresome being a boy. To relieve the ennui of my youth I had taken to having convictions. My first conviction was that the English were a detestable race, my last that my compatriots were an exceedingly foolish but highly admirable people.’ So wrote Arthur Griffith.1 Educated by the Christian Brothers, he was said by a fellow pupil to be ‘dilatory and unresponsive to the master’s strap’.2 Griffith believed that only the school system of the Christian Brothers properly recognised Ireland. In schools controlled by government nominees, he wrote: ‘The pupil was not taught as he is in every system elsewhere, to look out upon the world from his own country.’3
By the age of fourteen at the latest, Griffith left school to become apprenticed to a Protestant printer. About that time, his family later said, he wrote a piece that an English magazine (Old and Young) published.4 He also joined the Young Ireland Society. In 1885 its president John O’Leary, the Fenian veteran, presented him with books at the annual prize-giving of this ‘neo-Fenian’ organisation. Another member of the society was W.B. Yeats, with whom O’Leary shared his personal library.5 O’Leary, who was something of a mentor to Griffith and Yeats, once stated that no account of his own life as an ardent nationalist and journalist could be complete without mentioning his devotion to books.6
The Leinster
By the age of eighteen Griffith was also one of the most enthusiastic members of a group that styled itself variously as the Leinster Debating Club/Society or the Leinster Literary Club/Society. Its members met in a room at 87 Marlborough Street, where they kept a small lending library.7 Significantly, the bitter split in Irish politics occasioned by the downfall of Parnell led to the demise of the Leinster in 1892, and Griffith was to be the instrument of its destruction.
Meetings of the Leinster started by reading and discussing papers written by its members, and ended in poetry and sing-songs that included both ‘classical and patriotic’ ballads. Those ‘beautiful little concerts made the evenings enjoyable’, wrote one member.8 At St Patrick’s Day and Christmas there were special celebrations. All this happened in the centre of a city that was dirty and decaying. At Griffith’s suggestion in 1889, members organised long, healthy walks together in the country on Sundays, and reported back on sites of interest visited by them.9 In 1891 James Moran joined the club. He later fondly recalled these young men out together in the Dublin hills. Another acquaintance wrote of Griffith that ‘he was a splendid man to be with on tramps’, for ‘he could go on for hours with a deliberate gait, talking in a rather low voice about people and places. He knew everything about the local history of Dublin and the places adjoining’.10 Even when in London for treaty negotiations in 1921, Griffith led members of his delegation’s staff on rambles through that city.
Some of the young men also cycled together on Saturdays during the 1890s. Griffith got himself an old second-hand bike and named it ‘the humming-bird’, on account of the noise it made before it even came into sight.11 Later, he and some friends peddled 140 kilometers to a Gaelic League festival in Wexford.12 Such outings benefited him in 1916 when he had to ride his bicycle on a long circuitous route by the outskirts of Dublin for a secret meeting across town with Eoin MacNeill.
Minutes of the Leinster society survive for the years 1888–92,13 as does a bound volume of some contributions to the first seven issues of its occasional handwritten journal Eblana. ‘Eblana’ was a name that the Greek geographer Ptolemy once gave to an Irish settlement on or near the site of Dublin.14 Each issue of this journal that survives appears from the minutes to have been read aloud and discussed at meetings. The surviving volume, from 1889, includes an emphatic preface addressed by Eblana’s first editor, Robert Flood, to anyone whose property it might become in the future:
Our society was composed of hard-working young men of humble circumstances who formed a society for their mutual improvement … Therefore, Oh stranger, toss not your head in scorn when you peruse their maiden efforts in literature. Sneer not if colons, semi-colons, and full periods, are less numerous than they would be if our society boasted of M. [A.] and B.A … [It was] written by youths, to fortune and fame unknown.15
As if to underline this point, Flood had to be replaced as editor later in 1889 when he emigrated. He had been its main contributor, with Griffith the other main writer.16 In the fashion of the time contributors adopted pen names, with Griffith already using ‘Shanganagh’, with which he would become closely associated through the pages of the United Irishman. All pen names are identified at the start of the Eblana volume. Out of forty-nine contributions listed for the period of the extant volume, ten were by Flood and nine by Griffith. Shortly before Flood left, he contributed an essay on the ‘Social Condition of the Working Classes’ in which he praised a principle that became Griffith’s
