took public issue with Fr John Creagh, the Limerick Redemptorist priest whose sermons had sparked the initial assaults, whom he condemned for introducing a ‘spirit of barbarous malignity’ against Jews previously unknown in Ireland.147 Redmond offered a parliamentary nomination to Jacob Elyan, honorary secretary to the Dublin Jewish community. However, asked in 1907 by S. Spiro, president of the Cork Jewish community, to use his influence against the further publication of anti-Jewish articles in the Cork Trade and Labour Journal, he replied, though sympathetically, that he could not interfere.148 These were the years of the first publication of the notorious anti-Jewish forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a time when horrifying massacres of Jews occurred in the Russian empire. Redmond joined with British Jewish Liberals in 1906 in condemning the Russian pogroms.149 Davitt visited the site of and wrote a book on the 1903 massacre of Jews at Kishinev.150
The organization that most unselfconsciously mirrored the sectarianism of The Leader was the Ancient Order of Hibernians. In 1905, it was predominantly an Ulster organization, a fast-growing Catholic counterweight to the Orange Order; as the chief power base of Devlin, most of its branches worked in harmony with the UIL.151 Its Dublin convention in July 1905 resolved that part of its mission must be to ‘instruct in nationality’ the young men of the country, using lectures, history readings, songs and other means.152 By 1908, it was making inroads into Leinster and Munster, where it competed with local UIL branches for members. Internal disagreement from 1906 onward over support for parliamentarianism led to a split, with the majority of Irish branches following Devlin in the AOH (Board of Erin) and a minority allying themselves with the separatist ‘Scottish section’, itself part of the AOH ‘American Alliance’ under the control of Clan-na-Gael.153 The later spectacular growth of the larger faction in the south led it gradually to supplant the UIL as the active grass roots Irish Party organization.154
By 1905, the Irish political arena also contained a number of smaller actors not present when Redmond had assumed the leadership. At the suggestion of Arthur Griffith in 1900, several of the smaller cultural nationalist groups hostile to the Irish Party were joined in a loose federation to be known as Cumann na nGaedheal (‘Association of Gaels’). Containing many physical-force separatists, the new body soon became a front for the Irish Republican Brotherhood, although its declared objective was the vague ‘sovereign independence’ rather than a republic.155 The ‘Battle of the Rotunda’ in May 1903 led the separatists to form the National Council, a body dedicated to opposing ‘toadyism and flunkeyism’ (welcoming royal visitors) and to embracing all who believed in ‘the absolute independence of the country’.156 The new organization became the main vehicle of Griffith’s influence for the next four years, an outlet for his many propaganda pamphlets. It attracted a cross-section of nationalists, with Griffith resisting Gonne’s attempts to commit it to overt republicanism. In the autumn of 1904, the National Council published in booklet form The Resurrection of Hungary, published earlier by Griffith as a series of articles in the United Irishman. The booklet, which achieved a circulation of around 30,000, sought to answer the argument that no alternative to the Irish Party existed apart from hopeless insurrectionism. It advocated as a model for Ireland the relations between Austria and Hungary embodied in the Ausgleich dual monarchy of 1867. Nationalist MPs should follow the example of the Hungarian leader Déak, who had withdrawn from the Austrian Imperial Parliament and set up a de facto Government at home, by abandoning Westminster and reconvening as a parliament in Ireland to administer the country through local authorities. A prototype had already been attempted in 1899 when John Sweetman, a former anti-Parnellite MP turned Redmondite and vice-chairman of Meath county council, and Sir Thomas Grattan Esmonde, of the Wexford council, co-operated in setting up a ‘general council of county councils’, comprising three delegates from each of the new Tory-legislated councils, to act as a de facto Irish parliament; that initiative was stillborn following the reunion of the Irish Party. The final part of the book focused on the Irish constitution of 1782, which Griffith maintained was still the de jure constitution of Ireland, the Union having been enacted illegally. A self-governing Ireland would be a separate kingdom linked to Britain with a shared monarch.157
Despite the preference of some National Council members to build a new national organization to combat parliamentarianism, Griffith’s hope was rather to win adherents from the Irish Party.158 The spread of the new ideas, increasingly referred to as the Sinn Féin [‘Ourselves’] policy, was evident in June 1905 when the National Council had thirteen of its twenty candidates elected to the Dublin Poor Law boards.159 The National Council held its first convention on 28 November 1905, at which it resolved to organize itself country-wide as a political party. Griffith proposed a comprehensive programme embracing abstention from the Westminster Parliament, economic self-sufficiency, industrial development and Gaelic language revival, subsequently published as The Sinn Féin Policy. Reference to the 1782 constitution was dropped, and emphasis shifted to the potential of the general council of county councils, Sweetman moving that this body was ‘the nucleus of a national authority’.
Alongside Cumann na nGaedheal and the National Council, a third anti-party grouping had sprung into being during 1905. Known as the ‘Dungannon clubs’, this was another loose federation taking its lead from the original club founded in Belfast by two young Ulster activists, the Quaker Bulmer Hobson and the Catholic Denis McCullough, which set exacting standards of sobriety and activism. Similar in its initial policy to the National Council, it argued for passive resistance to British authority based on a de facto Irish parliament. By late 1905, Hobson, a very effective orator, had spoken all over Ireland, and four such clubs had been founded; the following year there were ten clubs in Ireland and two in Britain.160
These smaller groups were a latent threat to the position of the Irish Party, but the Castle authorities were relaxed in their assessment. The RIC Inspector General told the Chief Secretary in March 1905:
During two-and-a-half years of careful observation I have not seen a particle of substantial evidence to show that there is in Ireland any secret political activity of which the Government need have the smallest apprehension.161
Notes and References
1F.J., 29 May 1903.
2F.J., 26 Aug. 1903; Lyons, Dillon, p. 236.
3F.J., 26 Aug. 1903; I.D.I., 2 Sep., 10 Oct. 1901.
4Bull, ‘The nationalist response’, pp. 292–4.
5F.J., 18, 22, 23 Sep. 1903. The price was the equivalent of 21 years’ purchase of first-term rents, for land that in 1886 had been offered for 18 years’ purchase. Adding on the bonus, the paper reckoned that the landlord would receive 28 years’ purchase,