and who came back from the House of Commons … [regarding] every measure from the point of view of the exigencies of English parties and not from the point of view of the Irish people … [yet the public] were told that when the Irish members left parliament, they were leaving the battle ground.82
Griffith maintained that as soon as the Irish public withdrew its representatives from the imperial parliament and supported the anti-enlistment campaign against the British army, Britain would be forced to abandon the unequal Anglo-Irish relationship that was defining the Union and allow Ireland the status of an equal. Suggesting that there was ‘nothing wild’ about the Sinn Féin policy, Griffith argued that if ‘the Gaelic League gives Ireland a firm foothold in true Irish nationalism’, ‘the Sinn Féin movement gives Ireland a firm foothold in true Irish politics’ so that ‘a few years hence, men will wonder at themselves at having ever looked to Westminster for Irish salvation’.83
After James O’Mara (MP for Kilkenny) resigned from parliament, some prominent Irish Party figures wrote to him expressing their opinion that it was a courageous thing to do.84 This was because, as was the case with John Sweetman’s resignation in 1895, what was possible for O’Mara was not possible for most other party members: lacking his financial independence, they could not afford to do without their parliamentary salary.85 Resigning from parliament would have meant the end of their careers in more senses than one, while few had the good fortune of the popular nationalist leader William O’Brien to be married to a wealthy Russian lady who had saved him from bankruptcy on more than one occasion.86 The fact that O’Brien’s wife was also Jewish even made him the subject of anti-Semitic rants by Irish Party supporters.
There was also the issue of party discipline.87 Refusing to tolerate any opposition, the UIL had already responded to the Sinn Féin challenge by using its influence to demote Esmonde and Sweetman from their positions as president and vice-president respectively of the General Council of County Councils.88 O’Mara realised the difficulty of this situation. While he contributed money to Sinn Féin (which still made a loss, under Sean T. O’Kelly’s management, of about £130 in its first year of publication),89 he encouraged C.J. Dolan (MP for Leitrim) to adopt a policy of parliamentary obstructionism within the Irish Party instead of resigning. This was because Sinn Féin did not yet have a credible political organisation. This would have been a constructive political strategy. It was also in keeping with Esmonde’s sense of the political situation. C.J. Dolan, however, decided to resign (not suddenly, for ‘as you know I took a long time to make up my mind as to the wisdom of the Sinn Féin policy’)90 and seek re-election to parliament in Sligo-Leitrim as a National Council candidate. This was despite the fact that the National Council (‘Sinn Féin’) did not yet have a political organisation outside of Dublin city council.91 This was a foolish decision.
Reluctantly, O’Mara offered the funding for Dolan’s election campaign but Esmonde, in the name of common sense, backed off and instead appealed to the UIL not to follow Dolan’s example.92 As a result, when Tom O’Donnell, one of O’Mara’s closest allies in the Irish Party, moved in favour of the withdrawal of the Irish Party from Westminster at a meeting of the UIL Directory, only four present voted in favour of the motion.93 Redmond’s chief agent to defeat Dolan’s election campaign was P.A. McHugh MP, editor of the Sligo Champion and close confrere of AOH president Joseph Devlin, the young MP for West Belfast, who rapidly became the political leader of Catholic Ulster after Bishop O’Donnell, the Irish Party treasurer, lifted the church’s ban on membership of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (hitherto known derogatively to most Ulster Catholics as ‘the Green Order’). McHugh assured Redmond that Dolan did not have the slightest chance as the Catholic Bishop of Kilmore ‘has nailed his columns to the mast in support of the party’.94 This fact ensured that all UIL branch leaders, being parish priests, worked to defeat Dolan, who did not poll well.
Although Griffith had believed that ‘the party—or at least the majority—will not consent to withdraw from Westminster’, he had intended in the run up to the Dolan campaign that Sinn Féin would attend a conference of Irish Party backbenchers that Tom Kettle was planning to convene to discuss all future alternatives for the party.95 This was potentially a great opportunity for Griffith to present his case. The passive sympathy for Sinn Féin of Laurence Ginnell’s Independent United Irish League in the midlands and the call of William O’Brien’s Irish People in Cork (probably the most influential provincial Irish newspaper) for the creation of a new political movement that would reflect popular opinion by incorporating Sinn Féin also reflected the existence of significant potential.96 However, at National Council meetings, IRB activists P.T. Daly and Bulmer Hobson started arguing ‘for some reason I can’t understand that the present [National Council] constitution permits the whittling-down of the national demand’ and argued against attending Kettle’s conference.97 Noting that this stance was definitely ‘not calculated to do good’, Griffith emphasised that ‘the platform of the National Council is broad enough for all Irishmen—whether they be republicans or repealers—and to narrow as a small number wish to the former only would make the Sinn Féin movement impossible of achieving its end’. This was because it would prevent it from making a persuasive case to the Irish Party and other political interest groups to join its ranks.98
The death of John O’Leary in March 1907 had led to the amalgamation of Cumann na Gaedhael (of which he had nominally been president) with the Dungannon Clubs under P.T. Daly’s presidency. Daly named this group the Sinn Féin League. After months of republican obstructionism, it was not until late in 1907 that this Sinn Féin League and Griffith’s National Council amalgamated and officially became known as the Sinn Féin Party. The first Sinn Féin Party Executive consisted of Edward Martyn as president, John Sweetman and Griffith as vice-presidents, Aindrais O’Broin (Andy Byrne) as general secretary and Walter Cole and Sean T. O’Kelly as honorary secretaries. Its Dublin-centred focus was reflected by the subdivision of its National Executive (at 11 Lower O’Connell Street) into ‘resident’ and ‘non-resident’ members, the former consisting entirely of inhabitants of Dublin. As the influence of the National Council representatives in Dublin city council (totalling seventeen councillors) far outweighed the importance of the Dungannon Clubs, the Renunciation Act clause was kept in the party’s constitution.99 This fact was of far less significance, however, than Sinn Féin’s failure to develop a party organisation that summer when it was needed the most thanks to P.T. Daly.100
To mobilise enthusiasms, Sinn Féin would soon boast, unrealistically, of having the support of ‘one-fourth of the whole population, despite the opposition of the entire daily press and misrepresentation from nearly every quarter’.101 Griffith would later claim, alongside new supporters such as Sean Milroy (an English-born nationalist activist in Ulster), that it was Sinn Féin alone that saved Ireland during 1907 from the debacle that was Birrell’s Irish Council Bill.102 The Irish Party’s decision to withdraw its support from the Irish Council Bill was certainly wise and opportune, but this was evidently motivated by the state of opinion within its own party alone. For instance, the Dublin Irish Party MP Tim Harrington felt confident in typifying Griffith alongside P.T. Daly and Henry Dixon as ‘the representatives and the agents of [the American] Clan na Gael’ and, upon this basis, suggested that they had ‘no real grip in the city’.103
Notwithstanding Griffith’s claim that there was ‘nothing wild’ about the Sinn Féin Policy, it was practically revolutionary in its logic. For instance, Griffith had suggested that while the British treasury gave £2,000,000 every year to the Irish poor law boards on the condition that they buy all their workhouse supplies in Britain, the poor law boards (consisting mostly of UIL members) could simply ignore this provision and instead use this money to purchase Irish supplies to boost Irish businesses, in the process reducing unemployment and ensuring less Irish people would have to rely on poor law aid or else emigrate.104 In effect, he was talking about launching an immediate economic war against Britain. People could admire such ideas in theory but nobody was prepared to support them in practice.
One achievement of Griffith’s propaganda campaign was to re-highlight discrepancies in the Irish Party political tradition. For instance, as had been the case in the past, its publicity body in Britain, J.J. Clancy’s Irish Press Agency (established 1886), was often prepared to publish rational critiques of British rule in Ireland, including damning Griffithite criticisms of the system