since 1892, the politics of Irish education continued to be the subject that polarised opinion.
The Celtic had lost the support of Trinity public intellectuals for opposing the Boer War. This prompted Catholic businessmen associated with the Freeman to step into this breach, assuming the status of the Celtic’s patrons and discouraging it from continuing to champion non-denominational education. This occurred while a debate, dormant since the early 1880s, upon the possibility of Irish industrial development was revived in response to the establishment of new local government councils. Hitherto, socialists had joined Griffith and Rooney in arguing in favour of a state-controlled economy but disagreed with their ideal of Irish independence, which they deemed to be retrogressive.38 Griffith was now persuaded to join a Gaelic League subcommittee set up to examine the Irish industrial question.39 This became Griffith’s connection with the Gaelic League, while his old anticlerical mentor Henry Dixon was persuaded to join a Gaelic League subcommittee on the question of public libraries, in the process disappearing from the public eye.
By 1902, the Gaelic League had the support of the leaders of Clonglowes College, Blackrock College, Rockwell College, Saint Patrick’s Catholic teacher-training college in Drumcondra and Archbishop Walsh. It also had trans-Atlantic support from the recently revived Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) whose American wing succeeded in encouraging American Catholic universities to support the Gaelic League’s mission in Ireland while priests as far as Argentina collected funds for the same purpose.40 In Ireland itself, Catholic bishops began chairing most Gaelic League feiseanna while the AOH, a militant supporter of the Irish Party, was responsible for creating a demand to make Irish the nation’s first ‘official language’.41 The politics of ‘home rule’ had taken on a definite new tinge, as if it was seeking to establish a separate cultural identity for that subordinate imperial parliament that had been envisioned by Gladstone. At the same time, however, Catholic support for the Gaelic League was undoubtedly motivated by a simple determination to use the absence of a linguistic nationalism in the state’s education system as a means of bolstering the church’s argument for a religiously-controlled education system and putting more pressure on the Irish Party to stand by that Christian–democratic principle in the face of any potential British governmental opposition.42
Notwithstanding the Gaelic League’s anti-Trinity bias, the Irish-Ireland movement’s creation of an alliance between the cause of the language and religious education also made the Church of Ireland’s national magazine sympathetic towards the Gaelic League, which could only be accused of being sectarian in so far as Archbishop Walsh and Douglas Hyde were being sectarian in maintaining that nationalist ideologues were mistaken in their Napoleonic equation of state control of education with the existence of the nation state.43 Hitherto, Griffith had made no secret of his opposition to this anti-statist position. Just as he argued in favour of state grants to enable the working classes attend university and the establishment of more state institutes of technical education, he was particularly adamant that no education system, or university, could possibly be national if it was under denominational rather than purely state management:
We do not believe with those who would keep the present Protestant University in College Green, establish one for Catholics at Saint Stephens Green or elsewhere, and one for Presbyterians somewhere in Belfast. If three such universities were in existence tomorrow, we would regard them merely as part of the system whose chief object is to keep the people of Ireland in two or three opposing camps—such a system, in whatever guise it comes, we will continue to oppose, however strong the influences that support it.44
In opposition to Archbishop Walsh, Griffith expressed support for the stance of the Presbyterian Church in Belfast, which declared that non-denominational schools and universities were not detrimental to religion and were also more conducive to the progress of the nation-state and the material wellbeing of its citizens.45 This reflected the fact that the YIL’s call for the conversion of Trinity College into a national university under non-denominational management had been more in keeping with egalitarian Protestant dissenter than Protestant Episcopalian or Catholic social attitudes. The possibility of continuing to promote such an idea had been undermined, however, by the fact that the Gaelic League’s official organ, An Claidheamh Solus (edited by Eoin MacNeill, a militant supporter of the Catholic hierarchy’s stance on education ever since the 1892 controversy), was using Trinity College’s lack of support for the language movement as a basis for a political onslaught on that college, claiming that in the struggle for control of the future direction of Irish education ‘the combatants are Trinity College and the Irish people’.46 The sectarian divisions in Irish education were also an extension of the sectarian divisions that existed in the Irish business community, but it would be some time before Griffith came to understand the significance of this fact.
So long as Griffith defied the stance of Archbishop Walsh in the politics of education, both the Leader and An Claidheamh Solus were highly dismissive of the right of the United Irishman to have a voice in the debate on Irish education. Although Rooney had been co-opted as a member of the league’s committee for organising Oireachtas meetings, he was always denied membership of its executive council.47 Meanwhile, Griffith’s relationship with the Gaelic League was often less than cordial. This is hardly surprising, as Griffith had initially made no secret of the fact that he wished ‘a speedy extinction’ upon all those who ‘babbled of the Gael’ while claiming that ‘nationality is not a thing of rights, arms, freedom, franchises, brotherhood, duties’.48 Griffith was a firm believer in the republican idea that a man was either a citizen or a slave, ‘for there is no middle term’,49 and that patriotic citizenship was essential to the nation-state. By contrast, in keeping with papal encyclicals, Catholic educators throughout Europe and America defined both patriotism and the nation in purely cultural terms in order to minimise the power of state to control education. This was in keeping with a mainstream European trend whereby many writers and artists (including, perhaps most potently of all, musicians and composers; a trend admired by Griffith)50 were simultaneously celebrating indigenous folk cultures while attempting to portray the progressive appeal of a cultural patriotism in an essentially modernist or didactic way. In central Europe, for instance, the Czechs succeeded particularly well in creating a new national theatre in their minority-spoken language, with Catholic clergymen’s support, as part of a broader campaign in resistance to exclusive control of education by a central imperial parliament.51 This was why, with the moral support of London Gaelic Leaguers, An Claidheamh Solus maintained that Irish writers would have to do the same and expressed a disappointment with contemporary Irish productions.52 Griffith, whose own knowledge of the Irish language was limited,53 disagreed, however. He cited the example of the United States and Switzerland as evidence of the fallacy of Schlegel’s oft-quoted maxim ‘no language, no nation’ while, like many working-class figures, he also regarded the purely cultural definition of nationality embodied in the ‘new patriotism’ as a deliberate attempt to ignore political and economic realities.54
Griffith was not without prejudices of his own, of course, and it is clear that he was particularly annoyed that many Gaelic Leaguers questioned the capacity of fans of contemporary English literature to be Irish patriots. For example, he was not above typifying as ‘ignoramuses’ those pious Gaelic Leaguers who celebrated the fact that all surviving Irish language texts, dating mostly from early-modern times, were on religious rather than literary themes (a reality that motivated many priests’ zealous support for the league):
Years ago an ignoramus would have sneered at the language. Now the ignoramus yells out in bad English that all who do not speak it are mere Englishmen. This is a sure sign that the Gaelic League is going to achieve its object. A movement that at the same time is supported by the man of intellect and the profound jackass cannot fail … [When the Gaelic League] tells us in its funny way that Emmet and Tone and Davis are not Irish, and that O’Grady and Yeats will never write a line that will touch the heart of a single Irish ignoramus, one feels compassion for the Gaelic League and trusts it may be saved from its illiterate friends … The cause of the Irish language is a noble and national one, but it can be injured by allowing fools and hypocrites to pose as its champions.55
Thus spoke Griffith in 1901, but his ascribed role within the Gaelic League after 1902—to deal with the question of Irish industrial resources on a subcommittee that was headed by Fr Tom Finlay S.J.—potentially placed him in a subordinate