the Financial Relations Report of 1896 to show that ‘in the memory of living man … no more excessive taxer of the Irish people has ever been known than William Ewart Gladstone’46 was ineffective in a party-political sense precisely because Gladstone (who died in 1898) had already been retired for over a decade.
In the Resurrection of Hungary, Griffith suggested that the Irish Party revert to its independent political stance prior to 1884 and accept the ‘one statesmanlike idea’ that the elderly Daniel O’Connell had been tempted to follow, alongside the Young Irelanders, during the mid-1840s. This was to set up in Ireland a national council of three hundred representatives that would act unilaterally as an Irish parliament, establish their own arbitration courts (which Griffith believed could now be supported by the new local government bodies) and force the British government to abandon the unequal relationship that had come to define the Union by recognising Irishmen’s right to political self-determination.47 Looking back even further in time, Griffith suggested that those Gaelic Leaguers who declared themselves willing to promote Irish economic development should follow the example of the Irish Volunteers of 1779. This volunteer movement instigated a boycott of British goods in an attempt to force the British government to surrender its control of the Irish economy; the event that prefigured the establishment of Irish legislative independence in 1782–3.48 Griffith cited this historic case study and the Irish Party’s current toleration of the over-taxation of Ireland in order to drive home his argument that the Irish Party had completely surrendered all political direction to the imperial parliament, in the process ensuring that the Irish nation was becoming a defunct concept: ‘a man who runs his business on such lines ends up in the bankruptcy court. A nation that runs its business on such lines must inevitably go smash.’49
As Sweetman had not been an MP since 1895 and Healy had refused to come out in favour of the Hungarian Policy, Griffith had no allies among Ireland’s parliamentary representatives. Meanwhile, his sole claim to credibility as a spokesman on economic matters stemmed from his membership of the five-man executive of the Industrial Committee of the Gaelic League. However, together with Douglas Hyde, two of its members had been in favour of the British government’s international industrial exhibition of 1903.50 In addition, while Sweetman and the Catholic Church desired that Irish-America would henceforth fund the Gaelic League rather than the Irish Party,51 in practice this ambition related primarily to the financing of Irish education, not the state of the nation. As an avowedly non-political body, the Gaelic League could not support Griffith’s Hungarian Policy. Furthermore, while its Industrial Committee had declared its intention to draw on the advice of independent economic experts, its circulars requesting suitable nominations of personnel had received no names in return.52 This reflected the fact that Gaelic League activities were primarily social, such as summer schools and dances that were run by travelling teachers and supervised by the clergy. Meanwhile, despite its nominally non-sectarian platform, its membership would soon become religiously segregated.53 This was not a promising development.
Douglas Hyde’s claim that the Gaelic League was non-political was disingenuous. It was closely connected to Dublin Castle, the Irish Party and the Catholic Church according to the consensus established during 1886. Dublin Castle’s National Education Board accepted the league’s exclusive identification with the principle of voluntary rather than state-run schools. The leader of its industrial committee Tom Finlay S.J., who unusually for a UCD Jesuit was the son of a Scottish Presbyterian, was also the vice-president of the recently established Irish Agricultural Organisation Society that worked with Dublin Castle’s new Congested District Board and Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction.54 Some historians have typified the establishment of these bodies (inspired by Lord Dunsany’s son, Sir Horace Plunkett, and led by Lord Monteagle) as marking a shift in British government policy regarding Ireland because they supposedly favoured interventionist activity in the economy.55 However, their administrative lynchpin Sir George Fottrell, the secretary of the Irish Land Commission, was a Catholic administrator at Dublin Castle who, alongside E.G. Jenkinson, was knighted for his role in negotiating the secret Anglo-Irish security consensus of 1884–6.56 This had involved a total Irish political acceptance of Gladstone’s longstanding imperial fiscal plan for Ireland. The Tories professed willingness to invest a higher percentage of Irish revenue in the Dublin Castle administration did not overrule or alter this consensus in the slightest. Reflecting this, Fr Finlay, with the moral support of George Russell and the enthusiastic support of D.P. Moran (who would continue to make no secret of his detestation for all Griffith’s ideas),57 accepted the judgment of the Congested Districts Board that the chief dynamic of both emigration and economic stagnation in Ireland was the absence of economically viable land holdings in the west of the country. The solution was deemed to be the creation of a rural economy that was more self-sufficient and that would not continue to be burdened by a surplus population.
At the inception of the United Irish League (1898), both William O’Brien and Michael Davitt had denounced this idea of labelling the west of Ireland as a ‘congested district’. Laurence Ginnell, a passive sympathiser with Griffith’s writings,58 would soon attempt to revive a political agitation on behalf of the rural poor.59 This agrarian tradition in Irish politics had always lacked power however.60 Ever since the reunification of the Irish Party (1900), it was being labelled as reactionary in its response to supposedly progressive governmental reforms. In his capacity as a UCD professor of economics (formerly, he was a professor of moral philosophy), Finlay would shape the thinking of many future Irish political leaders. In doing so, he has been described as a conservative rather than a reactionary in his thinking.61 However, Finlay was temperamentally inclined to judge all political matters far more from an ethical rather than a practical standpoint. Therefore, he was ill suited to conceiving of any potential initiatives and was content to let decision-making rest with Whitehall.62
Land law reform was a UK wide and in no sense specifically Irish phenomenon. Ever since the 1880s, the chief divergence between the British and Irish application of this reform was that the British reforms were designed to facilitate a prioritisation of the municipal authorities’ capacity for promoting business over that of the traditional ruling landowning class. No such provisions were made for the development of an infrastructure for business within Ireland, however.63 This made the Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898 an insignificant reform. As an extension of this, current UIL branch leaders, which included many local government officials as well as parish priests, owned extensive grazing land themselves and had no interest in promoting Irish business. They conveniently forgot, or rather deliberately ignored, that the original ideal of the Irish National Land League (its ‘Irish National’ title had already been permanently erased from history books) was to conceive of the rural and urban Irish economies as one entity and to launch an Irish nationalist political agitation upon precisely that basis.64 This had reflected the input of republican radicals into that agitation. Griffith’s attitude towards both emigration and the general economy was rooted in this tradition. This made him reject the British government’s policy that agriculture was inherently the basis of the economy of Ireland. Instead, Griffith focused on the indisputable fact that the union of the British and Irish exchequers was inherently the central dynamic of all economic developments on the island, both rural and urban. Therefore, this development combined with the imperial taxation regime launched by Gladstone was unquestionably ‘at the root of the question of emigration and lack of employment in Ireland’.65 Although entirely logical, this was a deeply unpopular stance. This was because it did not fit with the material interests of Catholic Ireland as they had developed. It also made Griffith the odd-man out on the Gaelic League’s industrial committee (although, in time, Sweetman would succeed in getting himself nominated onto that body).66
During 1904–1905, the only member of the Gaelic League’s Industrial Committee with similar attitudes to Griffith was Robert Lindsay Crawford of Lisburn, Co. Antrim. Together with Thomas Sloan, a Belfast Methodist street preacher, and Belfast trade unionist Alex Boyd, Crawford favoured a labour-led political uprising against the existing leaderships of both the Ulster Party and the Irish Party, each of which were deemed to be cowardly reactionaries and mindless clericalists in politics.67 Crawford, however, was not a popular figure. The Ulster Party would soon work to have him removed as editor of the Irish Protestant. Crawford created an Independent Orange Order in opposition to the landed-gentry led Orange Order but his organisation never acquired a large membership. This reflected his