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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
To this list he was explicitly to add Jewish people, as will be seen. In his United Irishman on 15 February 1902 he stated: ‘Ireland is our mother whichever father begot us.’ In 1927, when the minister for external affairs Desmond FitzGerald referred at a public meeting to Tom Johnson, the English-born leader of the Irish Labour Party, a heckler cried ‘He is an Englishman.’ FitzGerald retorted ‘Long ago Arthur Griffith said an Irishman was a man who was prepared to work for the Irish people, and in the Black and Tan days Tom Johnson did his part in the job.’34
The Parnell affair clearly demonstrated the threat of divisiveness to Irish political ambitions, but Griffith himself was under no illusions about his own shortcomings as a possible unifying national leader. In Ulysses, James Joyce has a character declare that Griffith ‘has no go in him for the mob’. Griffith readily placed his hopes in others. At the same time, his acquaintance Padraic Colum understood that the downfall of Parnell had taught Griffith the dangers of relying on just one man:
In Arthur Griffith’s mind there were contradictions. He was to devote his maturity to the formation of an order in which Parnellism or O’Connellism would have no part. And yet, more than any other man, he believed in the avatar. He saw Parnell as an avatar. He was to see Éamon de Valera as an avatar. Parnellism had been a tremendous force – he had felt it – but was it right that a country should put its whole trust in one man? And there was O’Connellism which, too, had left the country at a dead end. But here was one who would lead the country – William Rooney [his friend who died young].35
The Role of the Catholic Church
The vast majority of Irish nationalists were observant members of the Catholic Church, but Griffith was not afraid to question its authorities and pointed out that it was legitimate for a Roman Catholic to do so.36 His United Irishman contextualised Irish hierarchical power by noting a condemnation of anti-English Boers that was published in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, and recalling when ‘Bishop Moriarty condemned the Fenians’.37 One correspondent soon complained that ‘The United Irishman lends its pages to writers who slander the Catholic Church.’38
The fact that Griffith came partly of Ulster Protestant stock may have given him a particular insight into religion, with one of his ancestors leaving his church for the love of a Catholic woman. Griffith looked around at Ireland’s rapidly shrinking population and advised young men ‘if you can do nothing else for your country, get married’. He thought that Catholic priests were infected by a ‘gloomy Presbyterian spirit’:
Lack of employment and grinding poverty are largely responsible for the ever-continuing and increasing emigration. If the Irish people support their own industries they can mitigate those evils. But there is another and a potent cause in the drab dullness of Irish rural life. With the priests of Ireland the remedy lies; with good intentions, but bad judgement they frowned down upon the merrymaking, the ceilidh and roadside dance, which gave colour and joy to the lives of the poor. Irish men and women cannot live merely to work and eat and sleep, and thousands of those who flee yearly from the land do so to escape the dreary monotony of life in a country where the gloomy Presbyterian spirit seems to have infected so many of the Catholic clergy. The Gaelic League has done much to bring a little joy into the people’s life. The three thousand priests of Ireland, by being true to their own Irish nature, could do much …39
A week later, he pointed out that the proportion of Protestants in Ireland was rising relative to Catholics (and thus was Anglo-Irish culture spreading), demanding to know what the Catholic hierarchy would do to resist the trend.40 There were also sharp exchanges in his paper following its publication of a negative review of Canon Sheehan’s novel My New Curate.41 And a nationalist priest in sympathy with Griffith’s political aims nevertheless attacked a letter in the United Irishman written by the socialist Fred Ryan. The priest condemned its ‘heresy’ in ridiculing the doctrine of eternal hell in the context of a discussion of Chinese news, and demanded to know if the paper would ‘be used in future for disseminating such un-Christian and un-Catholic doctrines’. Griffith as editor blandly replied underneath ‘we are not responsible for the opinions of our correspondents’.42
Griffith favoured the provision of non-denominational higher education and published criticism of a ‘sycophantic speech’ about a Catholic university made to a gathering of Englishmen by the Jesuit intellectual Fr Thomas Finlay (with whom James Connolly also had a disagreement). Griffith’s objections to Finlay’s idea were as much socio-economic as secular, it being ‘proposed to tax the workers for the education of the sons of landowners and retired commercials’.43 Such critical views in his paper, including one outright reference by a letter writer to ‘the spirit of opportunism, full-fledged in the Irish Catholic Church’,44 cannot have endeared Griffith to its bishops. Those views may even have contributed to a perception of him as ‘un-Irish’, or not ‘typically’ Irish, that will be considered later. In the end, indeed, it was a defamation action by a priest that forced 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,