Arthur Griffith

Posted by Jim on August 17, 2012

 By Brian Maye (for the Irish Times)

 

 The Sinn Fein founder, Arthur Griffith, died 90 years ago this week.

 

He was the man who founded Sinn Fein and led the Dail delegation to

London that signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the founding document of

Irish independence. He contributed much to bringing about that

independence but it would be probably true to say that in the Ireland of

today he is largely forgotten. It was not always thus.

 

A small Dublin weekly paper called the Spark, edited by John Doyle under

the pen-name Edward Dalton, conducted a poll in February 1915 based on

the question: “Who is the Irish nationalist whom Dublin wishes most to

honour?” Griffith was the first choice, followed by Eoin MacNeill and

Alderman Tom Kelly, a longtime Sinn Fein representative on Dublin

Corporation.

 

Dalton wrote: “The name Arthur Griffith has been chosen by a majority of

readers of the Spark . . . What Ireland owes to Griffith, to his

patriotism, to his self-sacrifice and to his ability and earnestness

will one day be told. The man’s modesty prevents it being known to his

contemporaries.”

 

Michael Collins, WT Cosgrave, Richard Mulcahy and Desmond FitzGerald are

among the leaders on the pro-Treaty side who recorded their debt to

Griffith’s teachings.

 

Their testaments should not surprise us. But what about the leading

anti-Treatyites who were equally strong in recording their debt to his

influence? “He was the greatest intellectual force stimulating the

national revival,” wrote Erskine Childers, a particularly gracious

tribute given that Griffith, in an uncharacteristic outburst during a

Dail debate, referred to Childers as a “damned Englishman”.

 

Harry Boland declared to Dr Patrick McCartan: “Damn it, Paddy, hasn’t

Griffith made us all!” Sean T O’Kelly wrote that “Griffith’s political

philosophy, so eloquently taught, and his long years of toil and

sacrifice, brought the present generation of Irishmen from their knees

to their feet and rekindled in their hearts the almost extinct flame of

liberty.”

 

The centenary of Griffith’s birth was 1971 and it is revealing to

contrast that year with the hundredth anniversary of the birth of

Michael Collins (1990) from the point of view of commemorative events.

Collins’s centenary was marked by the publication of a major new

biography, by television and radio programmes and newspaper articles.

And by a wreath-laying ceremony at his birthplace, a function at which

every shade of political opinion in the State was represented.

 

Compare this to the muted manner in which Griffith was remembered nearly

20 years before. A campaign was undertaken by a few private citizens to

have a commemorative postage stamp struck in his honour, but then

taoiseach Jack Lynch dismissed the idea in the Dail with the comment

that Griffith was “a Civil War figure”. A thought-provoking piece in the

periodical Studies by Griffith’s foremost biographer, Sean O Luing, and

a few newspaper items were all that recalled him in 1971.

 

So why has he been forgotten and why should he be remembered? The

extract from the Spark quoted above referred to his modesty. He never

sought positions of leadership. Although he founded Sinn Fein in 1905,

he became its leader six years later only when he could not find anyone

else to take the role. And in 1917 he willingly stepped down in favour

of Eamon de Valera in order to prevent a split in the movement. De

Valera overshadows him in Irish history because of his longevity and

domination of Irish political life for so many of the 90 years that the

State has been independent.

 

Griffith was that non-glamorous person, the writer, intellectual and

philosopher, the one who worked quietly on policies in the background

while others claimed the limelight. Collins overshadows him because of

his role as orchestrator in the War of Independence and all the tales of

derring-do, close escapes and heroism, and the brilliant

counter-intelligence campaign he ran which turned the tables on the

British. Collins also has the romance associated with dying in action

and dying young – the lamented “lost leader” who might have achieved so

much had he lived.

 

It is not easy to do justice, in an article of this length, to the

extent of Griffith’s contribution to the Irish independence movement

from around 1900 to 1922. But there are three facets of that

contribution to which particular attention should be drawn.

 

Firstly, what mattered most to Griffith was not political independence

but economic independence, because he saw the former as useless without

the latter. As a result, he devoted much of his writing as a journalist,

editor and pamphleteer to making the case for Ireland’s economic

self-sufficiency, which is summed up in the name of the movement with

which his name will always be associated: Sinn Fein (Ourselves).

 

The economic philosophy he preached may be summed up as “economic

nationalism”, of which protectionism was the core. It is one of the

ironies of Irish history that it was not his lineal political successors

in Cumann na nGaedheal in the 1920s but his anti-Treaty opponents in

Fianna Fail from the 1930s onwards that put his economic ideas into

practice. And it is important to realise that the economic policies

pursued by successive Irish governments from 1932 up to the 1960s were

based on ideas that Griffith had advanced in the early decades of the

20th century.

 

Secondly, whatever about his attitude to or actions during the 1916

Rising, it was absolutely vital that the programme he had evolved in the

previous 20 years was there in the aftermath of the rising. That

programme provided the blueprint and framework on which future progress

could be built after 1916.

 

Terence de Vere White expressed this interaction between Griffith’s

programme and the sacrifice of the men of 1916 well: “Pearse and his

comrades . . . provided by their sacrifice whatever mystical and

romantic inspiration was lacking in Griffith’s work” but “he had created

the political philosophy and hammered out the framework” on which their

dream could be realised. Albeit they discarded his idea of a dual

monarchy.

 

Thirdly, and perhaps most enduringly in terms of his contribution, Dail

Eireann was primarily one of Griffith’s long-advocated theories put into

practice. From the beginning of the 20th century, he had called on the

Home Rule MPs to abstain from going to Westminister (because that, to

him, was to recognise the legitimacy of the British conquest) and to set

up their own parliament in Dublin. Griffith had always argued that the

way to achieve independence was to establish a rival administration at

home which would win the confidence of the Irish people.

 

That is exactly what the victorious Sinn Fein candidates in the general

election at the end of 1918 did and on January 21st, 1919, Dail Eireann

met for the first time. For Griffith, who had been elected to the Dail

but who was in jail in Gloucester at the time, the meeting of that

assembly in the Mansion House in Dublin was a dream come true.

 

To Arthur Griffith, the establishment of a separate parliament in

Ireland was part of the process of winning independence by peaceful

means. He was thus one of the earliest advocates of the theory of

non-cooperation or passive resistance. And its greatest 20th-century

exponent, Mahatma Gandhi, recorded his debt to the founder of Sinn Fein

in his campaign to free India from British rule.

 

When Griffith collapsed and died, probably from a heart attack, on

August 12th, 1922, it is said that the only money found in his pockets

was one penny. But he left behind a legacy of selfless dedication to his

country for which he deserves to be remembered.