The Enigma
of
Arthur Griffith
Colum Kenny is Professor Emeritus at Dublin City University. A barrister, journalist and historian, he has written widely on culture and society. His books include An Irish-American Odyssey (2014) and Moments that Changed Us: Ireland after 1973 (2005). An honorary bencher of King’s Inns, he has been awarded the gold medal of the Irish Legal History Society and the DCU President’s Award for Research. A founding board member of the E.U. Media Desk in Ireland, he served on the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland.
The Enigma
of
Arthur Griffith
‘Father of Us All’
COLUM KENNY
First published in 2020 by
Merrion Press
10 George’s Street
Newbridge
Co. Kildare
Ireland
© Colum Kenny, 2020
9781785373145 (Paper)
9781785373152 (Kindle)
9781785373169 (Epub)
9781785373176 (PDF)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Typeset in Minion Pro 11.5/15 pt
Cover front: New York Times supplement, January 1922.
Cover back: Griffith and Collins in Sligo, spring 1922 (NLI, INDH400A).
A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness,
is a necessary evil.
– from Ulysses
by James Joyce (1922).
You had the prose of logic and of scorn,
And words to sledge an iron argument,
And yet you could draw down the outland birds
To perch beside the ravens of your thought –
The dreams whereby a people challenges
Its dooms, its bounds. You were the one who knew
What sacred resistance is to men
That are almost broken; how, from resistance used,
A strength is born, a stormy, bright-eyed strength
Like Homer’s Iris, messenger of the gods,
Coming before the ships the enemy
Has flung the fire upon. Our own, our native strength
You mustered up.
– from ‘Odysseus: In Memory of Arthur Griffith’
by Padraic Colum (1923).
CONTENTS
1. Griffith and Mother Ireland
3. 1871–1901: Hard-Working Men
5. Ballads, Songs and Snatches
6. His ‘Best Friend’ Rooney Dies
7. Women as Comrade and Wife
8. Griffith, Race and Africa
9. Connolly, Yeats, Synge and Larkin
10. Journalist, Editor and Crusader
11. 1902–16: Sinn Féin and the Rising
12. Irish and Jewish
13. 1917–20: Griffith and de Valera
14. A Fateful Weekend
15. 1921: ‘He Signed the Treaty’
16. 1922: Destruction and Death
17. Arthur Griffith and Joyce’s Ulysses
18. 2022: Commemorating Griffith
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Bibliography
Griffith’s Timeline
Index
1
Griffith and Mother Ireland
Arthur Griffith was ‘an enigma’, mysterious or difficult to understand, wrote his contemporary James Stephens. He was ‘the father and the founder’ of Sinn Féin, John Dillon MP informed the House of Commons in 1916.1
A photograph of Griffith taken in London during the treaty talks in late 1921, but published by The New York Times in 1922 above the caption ‘Head of the Irish Free State’ is a reminder of his resilience (Plate 1), – until civil war finally undid him.
Harry Boland, who fought against Griffith’s side in that civil war and who died just eleven days before him, is purported to have said of Griffith to a friend, ‘Damn it, Pat, hasn’t he made us all?’2 The first prime minister of the Irish Free State, W.T. Cosgrave, declared in 1925 that Michael Collins could but say ‘Griffith was the greatest man of his age, the father of us all.’3
Griffith was a politician and thinker, a cultural and economic analyst. Yet when the French journalist Simone Téry met him in Dublin in the summer of 1921, she remarked: ‘With his broad-shoulders, square fists and square face, Arthur Griffith looks more like a manual worker than an intellectual.’4
He was one of the founding fathers of the Irish state, if not indeed the founding father. It took courage and judgement for him to sign the articles of agreement for an Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. Doing so after him, Michael Collins said that he had signed his own death warrant. Assessing Griffith – warts and all – tells us something about ourselves. For, like him or not, he shaped the political framework of modern Ireland. When he died, his devastated and loving widow Mollie bitterly described him as having been ‘a fool giving his all, others having the benefit’.5
James Joyce sought his advice when trying to get Dubliners published, and Griffith gave W.B. Yeats both paternal guidance and what John Hutchinson has described in his study of the Gaelic Revival as ‘invaluable’ aid.6 Joyce and Yeats had complex relationships with their own fathers, who were not very practical.7 Griffith’s helpful dealings with these men merit closer