LITMIR.BIZ

      First published in 2020 by

      Merrion Press

      10 George’s Street

      Newbridge

      Co. Kildare

      Ireland

       www.merrionpress.ie

      © Colum Kenny, 2020

      9781785373145 (Paper)

      9781785373152 (Kindle)

      9781785373169 (Epub)

      9781785373176 (PDF)

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      An entry can be found on request

      Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

      An entry can be found on request

      All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

      Typeset in Minion Pro 11.5/15 pt

      Cover front: New York Times supplement, January 1922.

      Cover back: Griffith and Collins in Sligo, spring 1922 (NLI, INDH400A).

      A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness,

      is a necessary evil.

      – from Ulysses

      by James Joyce (1922).

      You had the prose of logic and of scorn,

      And words to sledge an iron argument,

      And yet you could draw down the outland birds

      To perch beside the ravens of your thought –

      The dreams whereby a people challenges

      Its dooms, its bounds. You were the one who knew

      What sacred resistance is to men

      That are almost broken; how, from resistance used,

      A strength is born, a stormy, bright-eyed strength

      Like Homer’s Iris, messenger of the gods,

      Coming before the ships the enemy

      Has flung the fire upon. Our own, our native strength

      You mustered up.

      – from ‘Odysseus: In Memory of Arthur Griffith’

      by Padraic Colum (1923).

      CONTENTS

       1. Griffith and Mother Ireland

       2. The Name of the Father

       3. 1871–1901: Hard-Working Men

       4. An ‘Un-Irish’ Personality?

       5. Ballads, Songs and Snatches

       6. His ‘Best Friend’ Rooney Dies

       7. Women as Comrade and Wife

       8. Griffith, Race and Africa

       9. Connolly, Yeats, Synge and Larkin

       10. Journalist, Editor and Crusader

       11. 1902–16: Sinn Féin and the Rising

       12. Irish and Jewish

       13. 1917–20: Griffith and de Valera

       14. A Fateful Weekend

       15. 1921: ‘He Signed the Treaty’

       16. 1922: Destruction and Death

       17. Arthur Griffith and Joyce’s Ulysses

       18. 2022: Commemorating Griffith

       Acknowledgements

       Endnotes

       Bibliography

       Griffith’s Timeline

       Index

1

      Griffith and Mother Ireland

      Arthur Griffith was ‘an enigma’, mysterious or difficult to understand, wrote his contemporary James Stephens. He was ‘the father and the founder’ of Sinn Féin, John Dillon MP informed the House of Commons in 1916.1

      A photograph of Griffith taken in London during the treaty talks in late 1921, but published by The New York Times in 1922 above the caption ‘Head of the Irish Free State’ is a reminder of his resilience (Plate 1), – until civil war finally undid him.

      Harry Boland, who fought against Griffith’s side in that civil war and who died just eleven days before him, is purported to have said of Griffith to a friend, ‘Damn it, Pat, hasn’t he made us all?’2 The first prime minister of the Irish Free State, W.T. Cosgrave, declared in 1925 that Michael Collins could but say ‘Griffith was the greatest man of his age, the father of us all.’3

      Griffith was a politician and thinker, a cultural and economic analyst. Yet when the French journalist Simone Téry met him in Dublin in the summer of 1921, she remarked: ‘With his broad-shoulders, square fists and square face, Arthur Griffith looks more like a manual worker than an intellectual.’4

      He was one of the founding fathers of the Irish state, if not indeed the founding father. It took courage and judgement for him to sign the articles of agreement for an Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. Doing so after him, Michael Collins said that he had signed his own death warrant. Assessing Griffith – warts and all – tells us something about ourselves. For, like him or not, he shaped the political framework of modern Ireland. When he died, his devastated and loving widow Mollie bitterly described him as having been ‘a fool giving his all, others having the benefit’.5

      James Joyce sought his advice when trying to get Dubliners published, and Griffith gave W.B. Yeats both paternal guidance and what John Hutchinson has described in his study of the Gaelic Revival as ‘invaluable’ aid.6 Joyce and Yeats had complex relationships with their own fathers, who were not very practical.7 Griffith’s helpful dealings with these men merit closer

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