in 1938, as he flirted with fascist ideas:
And yet who knows what’s yet to come?
For Patrick Pearse had said
That in every generation
Must Ireland’s blood be shed.
Griffith preferred ‘politic words’ to bloodshed, regarding them as an art and a democratic necessity rather than a withering disease. Yet, he was no pacifist, for he advocated defensive force and even countenanced attack where it was necessary. In 1914 he attended a key private meeting with Patrick Pearse and other future signatories of the 1916 proclamation and, as will be seen, agreed a broad strategy with them. He participated in the Howth gun-running of 1914 and later drilled dutifully with the rifle that he got there, although he was not at the barricades on Easter Monday 1916. He subsequently became acting president of the provisional government during the War of Independence, when de Valera went to America for eighteen months.
Griffith informed and guided the political consciousness of a cultural revival that had floated on an ocean of sentimental affection for the idea of Mother Ireland, or ‘Erin’ – that poor old woman worn down, but destined to come into her queenly inheritance and be rejuvenated: ‘There was much Kathleen Ni Houlihan, Dark Rosaleen poetry written,’ Mary Colum later remarked somewhat sarcastically of the period.13 Griffith himself was not adverse to idealising Ireland and Irish women when articulating his vision of an Ireland that he hoped would be self-sufficient, while also being less materialistic than England. However, his unifying emphasis was ultimately modern and pragmatic.
In an effort to explain the significance of Sinn Féin’s sensational victory at the polls in 1918, the Anglo-Irish anarchist Jack White offered a psychological interpretation inspired by the ‘subliminal uprush’ idea of pioneering psychologist Frederic H. Myers, who also influenced W.B. Yeats. White saw Sinn Féin’s function as one of ‘re-introducing pure emotion as a factor in Western world-politics’, which could only be prevented from ‘lapsing into hysteria’ by the restraints and objectives of organised labour. White’s well-intended theory ran the risk of once more casting ‘the Irish race’ (as he called it) as essentially the wild and ‘intuitive’ type.14 Griffith’s plan was not ‘pure emotion’ but was to harness national consciousness within national political structures such as existed elsewhere in Europe, taking advantage of an expanding electorate with its broader social base and with some women enfranchised for the first time in 1918. He wanted voters to accept the need for and benefit of self-reliant institutions rather than just venting their anger or lapsing into reliance on favours from the Westminster parliament. He wished to see people develop independently and, in that respect, attempted to exercise on a national level that which Carl Jung has represented as the centrally organising psychic function of a father.
In July 1922, as Ireland faced into civil war, the distinguished Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones also addressed non-political factors that might throw light on the political roots of the English–Irish conflict. He recognised the particularly rich variety of female names used by the Irish for Ireland, remarking that ‘the customary one of Erin … would content most countries’. The tradition of the Gaelic ‘aisling’ or dream poetry had fostered such variety. Jones wrote that ‘The complexes to which the idea of an island home tends to become attached are those relating to the idea of woman.’ He suggested that history might have been different had England ‘instead of ravishing Ireland as though she were a harlot, wooed her with the offer of an honorable alliance’.15 He also discerned Oedipal implications in the strong identification of the homeland as ‘mother’, and these are relevant to a consideration of the fate and reputation of anyone cast in the national role of ‘father of us all’.
In a gloss on Jones’ commentary, one Irish analyst in 1998 cautioned against seeing the dominance of the myth of Mother Ireland as some kind of deterministic or primary given. Cormac Gallagher related the myth to what he saw as a singular lack of Irish father figures. Instead, there are ‘sons and brothers who have been willing to lay down their lives to defend the honour of their mother’. He asked, with an eye perhaps to Freud’s key text on the biblical patriarch, ‘Where do we find an Irish Moses?’16 In doing so, he echoed the lament of Gaelic poets who identified Ireland’s plight with that of Israel.
For years after King William routed King James at the battle of the Boyne in 1690, many Irish regarded the possible return of a Jacobite king or prince as their best hope of salvation. The impoverished poet James Clarence Mangan, who died in 1849 and who intrigued not only Griffith but also Yeats and Joyce, ended his rendering of an old Jacobite song by praying that ‘He who stood by Moses, when his foes were fierce and strong’ might ‘show forth his might in saving Kathleen-Ni-Houlahan [i.e. Ireland]’. Gradually, Irish writers identified possible Irish versions of the biblical patriarch who had led the Jews out of captivity in Egypt. Charles Stewart Parnell in particular but also Michael Davitt by Fanny Parnell were cast in this fantasy role.17 Another candidate was ‘Griffith’, albeit as Moses in the shape of a leader for an industrialised and democratic age, or even as a modern version of the Irish patriarch St Patrick, determined to drive out all snakes of faction and convert his people from UK parliamentarianism to Irish independence.
Ireland grapples with the serpent ‘Faction’ following the death of Parnell in October 1891 (Weekly National Press, 24 October 1891).
However, in Yeats’ influential play Kathleen Ni Houlihan, written with assistance from Lady Gregory and even ostensibly with some help from Griffith as will be seen, it was not sustained paternal leadership but the blood sacrifice of her children that was seen to redeem Mother Ireland. Indeed, relative to certain ‘typical examples’ of ‘innumerable’ identifications of Ireland as a woman that he cited (and for the selection of which he thanked one Violet Fitzgerald), Ernest Jones found the final scene of Yeats’ Kathleen Ni Houlihan to be for him ‘the most moving description of all’.18 Yeats himself later wondered if his words were responsible for sending men out to die in the Rising.
Following that bloody revolt of 1916, Éamon de Valera stepped into the sandals of Moses but then delegated to Griffith the task of crossing the Irish Sea to negotiate a treaty. Although in 1923 a former IRB man George Lyons described Griffith as ‘the Moses who led his benighted people out of the shadows into the light’, Griffith never satisfied de Valera. Was de Valera, whose own father and mother were absent from most of his childhood,19 unconsciously taking revenge by sending the man then known as the ‘father of Sinn Féin’ to London instead of going himself? De Valera was ‘president’ or first minister of the new Dáil Éireann and might reasonably have been expected to sit opposite Prime Minister Lloyd George during those negotiations. His absence was critical.
Griffith long encouraged people to assert their independence (sinn féin, sinn féin amháin: we ourselves alone) rather than wait impassively to be washed clean by the blood of martyrs or yearn impotently and submissively for that salvation from abroad that Gaelic poetry long invoked. Yet anyone who thought that he might have earned for himself the eternal gratitude of all those whom he led to the promised land of an Irish state had not reckoned with the kind of patricidal or Oedipal undercurrents that are as much a feature of nations as of families.
During a bitter parliamentary debate on 27 April 1922, Griffith claimed that when he agreed the previous October to lead a delegation to negotiate a treaty, de Valera said to him, ‘There may have to be scapegoats.’ He told the Dáil that he replied to de Valera that he was ‘willing to be a scapegoat to save him from some of his present supporters’ criticism’. And Griffith was to become something of a scapegoat, not just in respect to the treaty but also as regards Irish anti-Semitism. His reputation as well as his life fell victim to the civil war, during which he collapsed and died in August 1922.
Patriotic verses that Yeats wrote in 1891 mourning Parnell as Moses were reprinted in 1922 to mourn Griffith in the same terms. Since then, some politicians have used his name to bolster their arguments, but others have opted not to speak of him at all. That may be easier than admitting that he was an Irishman who perhaps represented the emerging consensus of an increasingly inclusive electoral franchise more accurately than did his