was followed as editor, successively, by Edward Whelan, John Doyle and William Rooney. No issue that any of these three edited appears to have survived.
Griffith spent a night alone in Glasnevin Cemetery, writing for the Eblana about doing so.18 His friend Ed Whelan wrote on ‘Strikes: Their Remedy’. The minutes show that ‘Whelan advocated a system of state socialism or the owning of all sources of trade and industry by the state’, and that his paper was favourably received by Griffith and other members.19
There appear to have been about twenty active members of the club, writing about and discussing a range of literary and other matters from Longfellow and Tennyson, through socialism and religion and on to Irish poetesses. All its members were male, although an explicit late effort by John R. Whelan to have the exclusion of women written into the club’s rules as a requirement, was defeated on the casting vote of the meeting’s chairman, Arthur Griffith.20 Griffith was president of the club from 3 October 1890 until 11 December 1891.
Papers read by Griffith to members included ‘The Irish Writers of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ (‘loudly applauded’), ‘The Elizabethan Poets’, and ‘Thomas Parnell and His Contemporaries’. The latter ‘exhaustive paper’ was unfortunately interrupted from time to time by ‘the uproariousness of a dance club in the room beneath us’.21 During the delivery of his paper on Elizabethans on 5 February 1892, Griffith ‘contended that Marlowe and Massinger have not been accorded the position among the poets of their time which their words entitled them to, and that the abilities of Ben Jonson were much over-rated’. This he delivered to a club of hard-working men like himself who had left school early and who were trying to make a living by day.
There were also formal debates. Griffith argued in the affirmative on a question ‘Is the Church opposed to civilization’, and ‘also spoke in favour of republicanism’ on a heavily defeated motion ‘That monarchial is a better form of government’.22 In a paper on ‘Grattan and Flood’, who were leading lights of the pre-1800 independently minded Protestant Irish parliament, Griffith said of Grattan ‘Had he not played the generous fool prating of Ireland’s trust in English generosity the misery of the last ninety years would have been impossible … Had Henry Flood’s advice been taken by his rival, Ireland, in all human probability would to-day be a free and prosperous nation.’ This paper was read on the evening that his younger friend William Rooney joined the club in 1891.23 Griffith’s contributions to Eblana also included essays on Irish street ballads, James Clarence Mangan, the Gracchi and Sir Richard Steele. The editor commended Griffith for his essay on Irish street ballads, including ‘the simplicity of language and humourous descriptions’, and said of the eighteen-year-old who was already using what became his best-known pen name ‘We expect much from “Shanganagh”.’ In the spirit of the club he also criticised some of Griffith’s other work.24
Griffith’s humourous contributions to Eblana included some lyrical lines devoted to ‘Ye Maide Without a Name’. These resemble in tone verses that he would later dedicate to ‘Mollie’ (Mary/Maud Sheehan) in the 1890s. In this way he responded to the editor’s appeal for a lighter approach than that which he and other earnest young men had taken on ‘very heavy subjects’ when first invited to write for Eblana.25 Griffith also showed his sense of humour in a piece about printers, such as he and his father were. He wrote for Eblana of ‘the unfortunate being’ who misreading the line ‘I kissed her under the kitchen stairs’ rendered it as ‘I kicked her under the kitchen stairs’.26 As MP for the Coombe in a moot parliament held by the club he wittily opposed a bill proposing Home Rule for Ringsend on the paradoxical grounds that he was ‘following the dictates of his own conscience and the instructions of his constituents’, only to abstain on the vote.27
Griffith and others ‘succeeded in contributing much to make the evening a very bright and happy one’ when members organised a ‘smoking-concert’ one dismal November day. On another occasion a meeting ‘resolved itself into a bohemian choral society’. Apparently members sometimes drank ‘gooseberry wine champagne’, as at their St Patrick’s Annual Banquet, held in the room where they usually met. At Christmas 1891, Griffith recited ‘The Courtship of Tarlagh Mulligan’, while his friend William Rooney sang ‘A Nation Once Again’ and ‘Carolan’s Cup’.28
Tensions and Charles Stewart Parnell
Contributions to the Eblana were sternly criticised at meetings, and also in writing by its editor. This was believed to encourage success in the tradition of Young Ireland.29 Its range and tone prefigured the ethos of Griffith’s United Irishman. The club’s minutes also show that, as might be expected of any group of young Irishmen debating politics and society, there were occasional tensions and disagreements. However, reading its minutes, one is unprepared for the eruption that destroyed the club in 1892 and that saw Griffith and his friend Rooney express different opinions. It was an example of the damaging divisiveness caused by ‘the Parnell split’ in Irish politics, a split that Griffith would long seek to avoid replicating by his single-minded demand for national independence and his determination that all other considerations, whether personal, cultural or social, be subsidiary to that.
Griffith at this point even tried his hand at Parnellite verse, more successfully than James Joyce’s alter ego would in the latter’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen Dedalus ‘saw himself sitting at his table in Bray the morning after the discussion at the Christmas dinner table, trying to write a poem about Parnell on the back of one of his father’s second moiety notices. But his brain had then refused to grapple with the theme’. On 8 March 1889, Griffith included in his contributions to the first run of Eblana some verses entitled ‘The Crimes of The Times’.30 It was just two weeks since the Pigott forgeries published in the London Times had been exposed, having been used to implicate Parnell falsely in the Phoenix Park murders. It was nine months before Katharine O’Shea’s husband filed for divorce. Griffith’s lines included these:
Our great and glorious Parnell’s victorious
The forgers scattered far and near
And the wicked crimes of the blaguard Times
Will soon be punished I have no fear.
However, by the following winter events finally overtook the Irish leader. On 25 November 1890 Prime Minister William Gladstone’s letter urging Parnell’s resignation was published. Later that week Griffith proposed a very strong and detailed motion of support for Parnell, and persuaded members of the Leinster ‘comprising all shades of public opinion’ to agree with it unanimously: ‘Mr Griffith spoke as one who never was a supporter of Mr Parnell but was an independent nationalist.’ The club agreed to inform Parnell that ‘To us it matter not whether ecclesiastical domination on the one side, or Dublin Castle influence on the other prevail, our duty is imperative. The path of independence is before us.’31 Griffith and a friend are said to have tried but failed to persuade Timothy Harrington, a Parnellite MP, to give up his seat in Dublin so that Parnell might be elected there instead.32 The Leinster also canvassed the voters of North Kilkenny in a vital by-election, with Griffith as club president using then on its notices his pen name J.P. Ruhart (an anagram of ‘Arthur’).33
In 1891 Griffith went to support Parnell at Broadstone Station in Dublin when Parnell left for Creggs, Co. Galway, to address what was his last election meeting. Parnell told those present that he was going to the west ‘contrary to his doctor’s orders, as he was suffering from a severe cold’.34 It was a dismal time, recalled in Griffith’s paper twenty years later:
On a September night, gloomy and cold, Parnell came to the Broadstone on an outside car to journey to his last meeting, accompanied by one faithful friend. Around the station the present writer and fifty or sixty others waited to give him a parting blessing – to cheer him up with the message that the rank-and-file of his followers in Dublin would stand by him to the last, although every man who wore the letters ‘M.P.’
