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Humbert that had landed in Co. Mayo in 1798:

      The mountain men of Connaught and Ulster, whose grandfathers marched after the banner of France and Humbert to Castlebar, still anxiously ask the sympathetic travelers when the French will come again … And France will not despise their simple faith. If fifty years ago, when nine millions of our people dwelt within our four seas, the tide of hope bounded fiercely through our veins and the lessons of self-reliance appealed strongly to us, it is not so today. We are a dwindling, sickly people, dwindling to extinction, and the blast of the war-bugles of France across our land is needed to rouse us from this death-sleep that is creeping upon us to save us from the Antichrist of Nations who e’er he destroys us, would fain mark us with the Mark of the Beast.50

      On 15 December 1900 the United Irishman noted the death of Michael G. Mulhall (1836–1900), a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, whose dictionary of international statistics was widely read. Mulhall had made the point that, during the reign of Victoria, 1,225,000 Irish people had died of famine, 4,186,000 emigrated and 3,668,000 were evicted: ‘The only European country which has suffered depopulation in the present century is Ireland …. The marriage-rate and birth-rate are the lowest in the world.’51 Yet Griffith, a contrarian editor, also published a lengthy piece by Edward McVey advocating emigration as the best option for young Irish people.52

      From time to time in Ireland, including in the United Irishman on 15 June 1901, it was claimed bitterly that the editor of the London Times wrote during the Great Famine: ‘A Catholic Celt will be as rare in Ireland as a Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan.’ The currency of the claim, regarded as symptomatic of British disdain, is reflected in a reference to it in Joyce’s Ulysses. The renowned Stanley Morison for The Times later suggested that the quotation had not appeared in a leading article, but conceded in respect to the Celts of Ireland ‘going and going with a vengeance’ that some such words ‘may have appeared’ in a letter or telegram that was published.53

      British Economic and Political Repression

      Griffith’s analysis of the actual causes of economic disadvantage in Ireland was detailed. Britain had long restricted Irish trade to its own advantage, and the Irish had little control of taxation or investment in their own country. Hackett thought that, for Griffith, ‘The economics of Ireland were secondary to his hatred of England, stones of wrath in a Ulysses battle against the Manchester Cyclops.’54 Kelly suggests ‘It is easy to be sceptical about Griffith’s constitutional theories, his economic projections, and his statistics.’55 But were Griffith’s arguments not at least as evidence-based as those of his opponents?

      Griffith’s papers included much information on agriculture and banking and many other areas of Irish life. He condemned restrictions on Irish trade as well as the dearth of local capital for investment in Irish business, something that Catholics in particular felt keenly. He articulated their suspicion that they were discriminated against by Protestant bankers and investors in favour of Protestant and even Jewish businessmen, the latter being free to join the Freemasons while the Catholic Church forbid its members to do so. He pointed out that Ireland payed a disproportionately high share of taxation while enjoying a low share of the United Kingdom’s capital investment. On 23 March 1901, for example, the United Irishman indicated that invested capital in Ireland was one-forty-fourth of that available throughout the United Kingdom while taxation revenue was one-twelfth of the whole. Griffith also published pamphlets, with James Joyce buying his tract on The Finance of the Home Rule Bill, for example.56

      Griffith’s Sinn Féin movement forefronted industrial development. He and other party members and supporters were closely involved in the Industrial Development Association (IDA), a voluntary precursor of the future state’s Industrial Development Authority. According to Seán T. O’Kelly, writing when he later became the president of Ireland, ‘Mrs. Wyse Power, afterwards Senator; Ryan who was afterwards the first Secretary of the I.D.A. and Kevin J. Kenny [grandfather of the present author], were the principal promoters of the I.D.A. in Dublin.’57 Jennie Wyse Power, nationalist and suffragette, ran the Irish Farm and Produce Company. At its shop and restaurant at 21 Henry St, Dublin, in the months before the 1916 Rising, O’Kelly frequently lunched with Griffith, Seán Mac Diarmada (MacDermott) and other activists. A plaque on the site now commemorates the signing of the 1916 proclamation there.

      With Wyse Power, Mac Diarmada, Kevin J. Kenny, Bulmer Hobson, Helena Molony and others, Griffith in 1907 formed the first Aonach committee. The annual Aonach, or industrial fair, held under Sinn Féin auspices between 1908 and 1914, served to popularise that political movement amongst Dublin businesses and to emphasise its importance.58 When Griffith’s weekly Sinn Féin paper went daily for a period he subtitled it ‘The Daily National Industrial Journal’. From 1908 Griffith also published, through Sinn Féin, the innovative Leabhar na hÉireann: The Irish Year Book, which was a digest of information 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

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      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

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