Arthur Griffith
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Arthur Griffith (Árt Ó Gríofa in Irish) (March 31, 1872 – August 12, 1922) was the founder and first leader of Sinn Féin. He served as President of Dáil Éireann from January to August 1922, and was head of the Irish delegation at the negotiations that produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.
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Early life
Arthur Griffith (not Arthur Griffiths as his name is sometimes misspelled) was born in Dublin, Ireland on March 31, 1872, of distant Welsh lineage, and was educated by the Irish Christian Brothers.
He worked for a time as a printer before joining the Gaelic League, which was aimed at promoting the restoration of the Irish language. His father had been a printer on The Nation newspaper — Griffith was one of several employees locked out in the early 1890s due to a dispute with a new owner of the paper. The young Griffith was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). He visited South Africa from 1897 – 1898, after the defeat and death of Charles Stuart Parnell whose more moderate views he had initially supported, while he (Griffith) convalesced from tuberculosis; there he supported the Boers against British expansionism and was a strong admirer of Paul Kruger.
In 1899, on returning to Dublin, he co-founded the weekly United Irishman newspaper with his associate William Rooney, who died in 1901. In 1910, Griffith married his fianceé, Maud, after a fifteen-year engagement; they had a son and a daughter.
Griffith's fierce criticism of the Irish Parliamentary Party's alliance with British Liberalism was heavily influenced by the anti-liberal rhetoric of Young Irelander John Mitchel, the County Derry-born son of a Presbyterian minister; Griffith combined fierce hostility to snobbery and deference, as well as a sort of "producerist" attitude based on skilled craft trade unionism, with some strongly illiberal attitudes. He defended anti-semitic rioters in Limerick, denounced socialists and pacifists as conscious tools of the British Empire, and successively praised Tsarist Russia and Wilhelm II as morally superior to Great Britain.
In 1904, he established an organization called Cumann na nGaedhael (1904 – 1905) to campaign against the visit to Ireland of King Edward VII and Princess Alexandra of Denmark.
In 1905, this organization merged with a number of others to form Sinn Féin (Irish for "We Ourselves"). In 1906, after the United Irishman journal collapsed because of a libel suit, Griffith refounded it under the title Sinn Féin; it briefly became a daily in 1909 and survived until its suppression by the British government in 1914, after which it was sporadically revived as the ultranationalist journal, Nationality.
Foundation of Sinn Féin
Image:Irish Stamp Arthur Griffith.jpg
Most historians opt for November 28, 1905, as a founding date because it was on this date that Griffith first presented his 'Sinn Féin Policy'. In his writings, Griffith declared that the Act of Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800 was illegal and that, consequently, the Anglo-Irish dual monarchy which existed under Grattan's Parliament, and the so-called Constitution of 1782 was still in effect.
The fundamental principles on which Sinn Féin was founded were outlined in a book published in 1904 by Griffith called the Resurrection of Hungary, in which, noting how in 1867 Hungary went from being part of the Austrian Empire to a separate co-equal kingdom in Austria-Hungary. Though not a monarchist himself, Griffith advocated such an approach for the Anglo-Irish relationship, namely that Ireland should become a separate kingdom alongside Great Britain, the two forming a dual monarchy with a shared monarch but separate governments, as it was thought this solution would be more palatable to the British. However, this idea was never really embraced by later separatist leaders, especially Michael Collins, and never came to anything, although Kevin O'Higgins toyed with the idea as a means of ending partition, shortly before his assassination.
Griffith sought to combine elements of Parnellism with the traditional separatist approach; he saw himself not as a leader but as providing a strategy which a new leader might follow. Central to his strategy was parliamentary abstention: the belief that Irish MPs should refuse to attend the Parliament of the United Kingdom at Westminster, but should instead establish a separate Irish parliament (with an administrative system based on local government) in Dublin.
In 1907 Sinn Féin successfully contested a by-election in North Leitrim, where the sitting MP, one Charles Dolan of Manorhamilton, County Leitrim, had defected to Sinn Féin. At this time Sinn Féin was being infiltrated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who saw it as a vehicle for their aims; it had several local councillors (mostly in Dublin, including W.T. Cosgrave) and contained a dissident wing grouped from 1910 around the monthly periodical called Irish Freedom. The IRB members argued that the aim of dual monarchism should be replaced by republicanism, and that Griffith was excessively inclined to compromise with conservative elements (notably in his pro-employer position during the 1913 – 1914 Dublin Lockout, when he saw the syndicalism of James Larkin as aimed at crippling Irish industry for Great Britain's benefit).
Griffith was sexually puritanical and bigoted. Despite initially supporting William Butler Yeats' National Theatre he attacked John Millington Synge's The Shadow of the Glen and The Playboy of the Western World as slandering Irish womanhood and morality, and was extremely critical of William Butler Yeats' acceptance of a literary pension from the British Crown. He also voiced his support for a 1904 pogrom in Limerick against the tiny Jewish community, which was supported by the Catholic bishop of that diocese.
1916 Rising
In 1916 rebels seized and took over a number of key locations in Dublin, in what became known as the Easter Rising. After its defeat, it was widely described both by British politicians and the Irish and British media as the "Sinn Féin rebellion", even though Sinn Féin had no involvement. When in 1917, surviving leaders of the rebellion were released from gaol (or escaped) they joined Sinn Féin en masse, using it as a vehicle for the advancement of the republic. The result was a bitter clash between those original members who backed Griffith's concept of an Anglo-Irish dual monarchy and the new members, under Eamon de Valera, who wanted to achieve a republic. Matters almost led to a split at the party's Ard Fheis (conference) in October, 1917.
In a compromise, it was decided to seek to establish a republic initially, then allow the people to decide if they wanted a republic or a monarchy, subject to the condition that no member of Britain's royal house could sit on any prospective Irish throne. Griffith resigned the party leadership and presidency at that Ard Fheis, and was replaced by de Valera. The leaders of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) sought a rapprochement with Griffith over the British threat of conscription, which both parties condemned, but Griffith refused unless the IPP embraced his more radical and subversive ideals, a suggestion which John Dillon, a leader of the IPP rubbished as unrealistic, although it would ultimately mean the defeat and dissolution of the IPP after the election in December 1918.
War of Independence
Griffith was elected a Sinn Féin MP in the East Cavan by-election of mid-1918, and Sinn Féin routed the Irish Parliamentary Party at the 1918 general election. Sinn Féin's MPs decided not to take their seats in the British House of Commons but instead set up their own Irish parliament, Dáil Éireann; the War of Independence followed almost immediately. The dominant leaders in the new unilaterally declared Irish Republic were figures like Eamon de Valera, President of Dáil Éireann (1919-21), President of the Republic (1921-1922), and Michael Collins, Minister for Finance, head of the IRB and the Irish Republican Army's Director of Intelligence. During de Valera's absence in the United States (1919-21) Griffith served as Acting President and gave regular press interviews. He was imprisoned in 1921 but subsequently released. Griffith became central to the Republic again when, in late 1921, President de Valera asked him to head the delegation of Irish plenipotentiaries to negotiate with the British government.
Griffith was the member of the treaty delegation most supportive of its eventual outcome (a compromise based on dominion status, rather than a republic); after the narrow ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty by the Dáil in December 1921, followed by a second ratification by the House of Commons of Southern Ireland in January 1922, he replaced de Valera who stepped down in protest as acting head of the abolished Irish Republic. Griffith was, however, to a great extent merely a figurehead as President of the second Dail Eireann and his relations with Michael Collins, head of the new Provisional Government were somewhat tense. Under increasing strain because of quarrels with many old friends, and faced with a nation sliding into chaos, Griffith's health deteriorated and he died of a brain haemorrhage on August 12, 1922, at the age of 50, ten days before Michael Collins' assassination in County Cork.
Quotations
- "In Arthur Griffith there is a mighty force in Ireland. He has none of the wildness of some I could name. Instead there is an abundance of wisdom and an awareness of things which are Ireland." - Michael Collins.
- "A braver man than Arthur Griffith, I never met" - comment by one of the British delegates at the end of the Treaty negotiations.
Sources
- Patrick Maume, The Long Gestation (Gill & Macmillan, 1999).
- There is a 2003 reprint of The Resurrection of Hungary with an introduction by Patrick Murray (University College Dublin Press).
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See also
fr:Arthur Griffith ga:Art Ó Gríofa ja:アーサー・グリフィス pl:Arthur Griffith uk:Гріффіт Артур