that implicitly raise an interesting but disturbing question: was Griffith’s artisan and ostensibly Protestant background a factor in how he was assessed by Irish Catholics among others?
One of the reports refers to Ó Lúing’s manuscript for his book on Griffith, and the second to his manuscript for an essay subsequently published in a collection edited by the historian F.X. Martin.9 The first reader, who is unidentified, wrote ‘I have heard it said … that Griffith in his early stage flirted with theosophy or neo-Buddhism. The text rightly says he was given to private judgement.’10 The second reader, identified as F.X. Martin himself, asked ‘Was he [Griffith] not intolerant? Un-Irish in character and application? Was he not either vain or rigid so as to be caught by Lloyd George on the point of “honour” in the Treaty negotiations – any typical Irishman would have dismissed Lloyd George’s objection.’ The question of whether or not Griffith was ‘caught’ by Lloyd George into giving his word will be considered later. What is relevant here is the suggestion that keeping one’s word (assuming that this was what Griffith actually did) might not be ‘typically’ Irish.
The two reports raise the spectre of someone suspected of having rather too carefully weighed up moral decisions and then taken them unduly seriously, who relied on a very non-Catholic ‘private judgement’ rather than follow dogma (nationalist dogma) and who, being given to sipping quietly just a glass or two of Guinness when gathered with voluble friends in a pub, was ‘un-Irish’ in an ill-defined but communally understood way (being not ‘one of the lads’ as it were).
Griffith’s widow mentioned an ancient relative of Griffith who contacted her and invited her to Cavan.11 Griffith’s Ulster Protestant antecedents were mentioned in broad terms when he was a candidate in Cavan for Sinn Féin, as candidates often accentuate local connections if they can do so at election time. However, biographers have pinned down little or nothing definite about Griffith’s ancestors or his father’s family outside Dublin. At one point, as files in the National Library show, the district justice Michael Lennon went to considerable lengths searching for that information. Griffith’s acquaintance Dan McCarthy told Ó Lúing that Griffith ‘was extremely reticent about his family, ancestors, etc.’.12
Lennon was, for some unknown reason, made aware of the story of one ‘Billy Griffith’ of Co. Tipperary that had appeared in Young Ireland.13 Attributed to ‘Mrs J. Sadlier’, this told how a Protestant farmer Billy Griffith had long ago hidden a Catholic priest from men hunting him.’14 To Irish Catholics of Griffith’s day, Arthur’s own name and that of his brother Billy (William) would seem more likely to be Protestant than Catholic. Indeed, according to Ó Lúing, when Griffith’s son was presented for baptism, a Catholic priest challenged the choice of the name Nevin: ‘Huh? What? Naomhán! My goodness, I never heard of it. Was Naomhán a saint?’ Griffith reportedly answered simply that he did not know but that ‘He was a bishop, anyway’, and the priest laughed.15 His laugh suggests discomfort. Occasional speculation that Griffith’s ancestors came from Wales to Ireland as settlers is no more than gossip, but the kind of gossip that might do damage to one’s Irish nationalist credentials.
The series of articles about ‘notable graves’ that Griffith and Rooney wrote for a Dublin newspaper in 1892 included those of Lord Clare and Charles Lucas, two persons who would not occur to many Catholic nationalists to be praiseworthy but whom Griffith respected as independent spirits.16 He also had kind words for Lord Russell of Killowen on the latter’s death.17 Griffith’s advocacy of a system of government for Ireland akin to that which had existed before the Act of Union, including a monarch but now with a Catholic majority in a restored Irish parliament, echoed Douglas Hyde’s desire ‘to render the present a rational continuation of the past’.18 It left the door open to northern Protestants to support independence, not least by maintaining a link with the Crown.
Was Fr F.X. Martin unconsciously painting the ostensibly Catholic Griffith as a morally severe Presbyterian who took life too seriously, as even being akin to those Protestants whom some Catholics found ‘un-Irish’ in their sensibilities and termed ‘sourpusses’? Griffith prided himself on basing his arguments rationally on economic and other statistical evidence. However, when the conscience of Catholics was expected to be primarily ‘informed’ by the hierarchy, ‘private judgement’ was a fruit of the Reformation that might raise suspicions.
Any suspicion that he was ‘un-Irish’ may have been coloured too by his being not only a Dubliner but also a trade unionist printer before he became an editor. In 1943 Michael Hayes commented to Seán Milroy, ‘Griffith was a remarkable man but he had essentially the outlook of the Dublin skilled worker. It would be interesting to see from his writing whether he had any rural touch at all.’19 The respective definitions of ‘a rural touch’ and ‘a Dublin skilled worker’ might include reference to class, personal attitude and anglicisation among other factors. For implying that someone is not ‘one of us’ is a way of marginalising that person. Thus, for example, John Devoy described Éamon de Valera as
the vainest man intellectually that I ever met. He is really a half breed Jew and his mother was a ‘Palatine’ – that is, of German descent. His temperament is not Irish and no man can get along with him except on the condition of absolute submission to his will … he has not an original mind nor any real grasp of politics.20
Such descriptions tell us at least as much about the person making them, and that person’s understanding of their community’s imagined identity, as they do about the object of their description.
Or was Ó Lúing’s reviewer simply acting the part of devil’s advocate, taking his cue from Lloyd George’s stereotyping? In December 1922 the latter wrote of sitting in Downing Street opposite ‘a dark, short, but sturdy figure with the face of a thinker. That was Mr Arthur Griffith, the most un-Irish leader that ever led Ireland, quiet to the point of gentleness, reserved almost to the point of appearing saturnine.’21
Allied to Griffith’s ‘un-Irish’ character and moral decisiveness was a certain perceived intolerance or narrowness for which he was criticised by Bulmer Hobson and Patrick Pearse among others. He impatiently filled columns of his papers with articles dismissing humbug and ‘sunburstery’, a term in use then to denote fine words spouted by those who are elated by their own bright ideas and rhetoric.
Yet, in at least one way, he was quintessentially Irish. For he bristled when facing an English opponent, and the memory of past slights and wrongs was never far from the surface. On 10 January 1922, in Dáil Éireann, he was challenged on a point by Erskine Childers. Born in London and educated in England, Childers had been reared partly by his Barton cousins in Co. Wicklow. Although secretary to the Irish negotiating team in London, he joined the anti-treaty side.22 Griffith struck the table before responding angrily ‘I will not reply to any damned Englishman in this Assembly.’ It was an uncharacteristic outburst.
Griffith does not fit neatly into an Irish stereotype. James Owen Hannay, the Church of Ireland clergyman who wrote novels as ‘George A. Birmingham’ and who also wrote fiction for Sinn Féin, became acquainted with him first through the Gaelic League. He found Griffith
utterly unlike any Irish politician that I knew. He had no gift of private conversation and indeed talked very little. He used to look at me through pince-nez glasses which always seemed on the point of falling off his nose. When he did speak, it was briefly and coldly. Yet, from the first time I met him I was greatly attracted by him. He was a man of absolute honesty and no idea of self-glorification or self-advancement ever seemed to enter his head. He had a very clear intellect and was one of those rare men who never shrink from the logical conclusion of any line of thought or seek to obscure meaning with misty words.
Hannay thought Griffith to be unrelentingly serious: ‘I never discovered in him a trace of a sense of humour. Things seemed to him right or wrong, wise or unwise, but they never seemed funny; though that is what most things are.’23 Others disagreed.
Sense of Humour
Unlike Hannay, other acquaintances discerned in Griffith a keen if sometimes caustic sense of humour. His wife found him ‘such fun with friends’.24 James Joyce took pleasure in Griffith’s tilting at the windmills of parliamentary verbiage. For Griffith such humbug was well represented