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The Enigma of Arthur Griffith. Colum Kenny
Читать онлайн.Название The Enigma of Arthur Griffith
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isbn 9781785373169
Автор произведения Colum Kenny
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
It is true that twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of Ireland might not have achieved what level of independence they did in 1922 without the shock of the rebellion and executions of 1916 or the plotting of the IRB and the Volunteers. However, it was the constant commitment and steady hard work of Arthur Griffith and a few others that created and sustained the Sinn Féin movement, giving context and shape to the emotional desire for freedom and eventually enshrining that ambition in a viable constitutional compromise that was pragmatic rather than fanciful. Griffith risked his life, but saw no good reason to throw it away. His way was fatherly, at times paternalistic. His friends and critics alike frequently used epithets to describe him that were characteristic of positive and negative aspects of the father archetype.
The Ireland of the European Union, of the United Nations, of the Good Friday Agreement is the kind of everyday Ireland for which Griffith worked. The state’s foundation in 1922 should not be recalled in 2022 without generously recognising his crucial role in its conception and birth.
2
The Name of the Father
Arthur Griffith was born at 61 Upper Dominick Street, Dublin, on 31 March 1871. His widow later said that Dublin was ‘where his grandfather or great-grandfather had come to from Redhills in Cavan, having been thrown out by his Presbyterian family because he had become Catholic’.1
Arthur Griffith’s father, who was also named Arthur, was a printer. He was of the Dublin artisan class that comprised the backbone of the Fenian movement. Among Fenians who had been ‘out’ in the troubled year 1867 was another printer, the present author’s great-grandfather, Michael Kenny. In 1898 Michael took out of its frame an old printed oleograph sketch of ‘The Death of Ireland’s Liberator’ (namely Daniel O’Connell) that his own father had earlier framed in 1849. The sketch clearly meant something to Michael, for he carefully cleaned and reframed it.2
Young Arthur Griffith was known by his family, friends and future wife as ‘Dan’. Some believe that he got this name ‘because of his boundless capacity for debate and his consummate absorption with the cause of national independence. To his associates he was another Daniel O’Connell.’3 If so, the nickname identified Griffith with a political leader whose peaceful parliamentary campaign to repeal the union of Ireland and Britain had failed, and on whom in his younger days Griffith used to ‘pour unlimited scorn’.4 He preferred the writings and songs of the revolutionary movement that superseded O’Connell in the 1840s, looking up to the Young Ireland leaders Thomas Davis, John Mitchell and James Fintan Lalor. Scattered throughout the papers of which he became editor are many extracts from their works. Ironically, given such views, ‘Dan’ would later develop into a democratic constitutionalist, defending the nascent Irish state against those whom his colleague Kevin O’Higgins described as ‘wild men screaming through the keyholes’.5
Griffith’s nickname ‘Dan’ also hints at fatherly warmth, with its last consonant lengthening the first two letters that spell the most common Dublin term of endearment for a father, ‘Da’. One of his friends later wrote ‘that name, I think, gave his likeableness and his humour’.6
In 1899, Griffith delivered a public talk in the Workingmen’s Club on ‘The Songs of our Fathers’, including patriotic songs that reflected Young Ireland and Fenian values. This was probably the same Griffith lecture ‘on the ballad poetry of the Young Ireland period’ that a future president of Ireland, Seán T. O’Kelly (also Ó Ceallaigh), attended that year.7 In Griffith’s own life, the Young Irelander and veteran Fenian leader John O’Leary (1830–1907) became an occasional fatherly mentor or advisor.
Griffith’s Creed
In an editorial in the first issue of his United Irishman, on 4 March 1899, Griffith wrote:
Lest there be a doubt in any mind, we will say that we accept the [revolutionary] Nationalism of [17]98, [18]48 and [18]67 as the true Nationalism; and Grattan’s cry ‘Live Ireland – Perish the Empire!’ as the watchword of patriotism.
Two years later he repeated that sentiment. He also then described three movements as ‘tending to build up and brace the Nation for the final struggle for independence’, these being movements for the development of the Irish language, literature and industry. He regarded every objective as ultimately subsidiary to the achievement of independence itself:
A fatter Gaelic-speaking Ireland kissing its chains would be perhaps more contemptible than even a pauperized, English-tongued Ireland fighting with its mouth against the Government which believes in preaching to the weak from the ‘holy text of pike and gun’. What we wrote in the first issue of the United Irishman [4 March 1899, quoted above] we reaffirm as our creed.8
To understand Griffith, to fathom his methodology and motives, it is crucial to recognise his single-mindedness. James Owen Hannay, a Church of Ireland clergyman who penned popular novels as ‘George A. Birmingham’, wrote of Griffith that ‘He was more idea-possessed than any one I have ever met and the idea which possessed him to the exclusion of every other was that of an Ireland free to lead her own life and manage her own affairs.’9 Helena Molony, secretary of Inghinidhe na hÉireann between 1907 and 1914, admired his capacity to inspire people to overlook differences of opinion and work together.10
Five factors in particular shaped Griffith’s character and outlook, and he cannot be understood without appreciating the importance of each of them. Their burning significance for him may not be self-evident today when Irish people live in a very different Ireland, as he always hoped we would:
• His poverty and that of his city
• The Parnell affair and its lasting trauma
• The role of the Catholic Church
• Catastrophic and continuing emigration
• British economic and political repression
His Poverty and that of his City
Griffith was raised in the heart of a city teeming with poverty. The slums of Dublin were amongst the worst in Europe, with many of its Georgian houses that had been home to prosperous middle-class families before the Act of Union of 1800 now reduced to tenements.11 Dublin’s population had increased as people deserted rural Ireland, not least during the Great Famine, putting great pressure on its infrastructure. Political union with Britain after 1800 had not benefited Ireland, and both Dublin and Cork ‘saw the manufacturing share of their workforce halved between the famine and the early twentieth century’.12 Diseases such as tuberculosis and typhoid were rampant. Griffith’s own father suffered from bad health for years and the Griffiths moved a number of times, always renting rooms in central Dublin in an arc around Summerhill. It was an area blighted by decline.
Griffith’s parents Arthur and Mary had been married at Dublin’s pro-cathedral on 14 May 1860 and had five children.13 Their son Frank, born in 1874, said that his father ‘often’ spoke of having been in Richmond, Virginia, at some point during the US civil war of 1861–5, and of having worked as a printer on the popular Illustrated London News in England before settling back in Ireland.14 Frank himself sometimes helped to run the United Irishman office and was an usher in the Gaiety Theatre.15 Frank’s brother Billy was born in Dublin in 1865. Billy, ‘upright and conscientious’, became a hairdresser and, as registrar of the hairdressers’ trade union, found jobs for unemployed barbers. He died of pneumonia in 1924.16 Their sister Marcella was a machinist who, in 1900, died of an ulcerous disease of the larynx of a tubercular nature.17 Their other sister, Frances (known as ‘Fanny’), joined the women’s nationalist group Inghinidhe na hÉireann, and lived until 1949.18
In 1897 Arthur Griffith bid farewell to his parents and went to South Africa, working there at a small newspaper and in mining administration. He returned by September the following year ‘as poor as when leaving Ireland’ his widow later wrote. She added ‘Poor Dan never could make money.’19 His father died in 1904, aged 66.20 Griffith was still unmarried, and during the first decade of the twentieth century continued to reside in the family’s rented rooms at 83 Summerhill (today