and happy one’ when members organised a ‘smoking-concert’ one dismal November day. On another occasion a meeting ‘resolved itself into a bohemian choral society’. Apparently members sometimes drank ‘gooseberry wine champagne’, as at their St Patrick’s Annual Banquet, held in the room where they usually met. At Christmas 1891, Griffith recited ‘The Courtship of Tarlagh Mulligan’, while his friend William Rooney sang ‘A Nation Once Again’ and ‘Carolan’s Cup’.28
Tensions and Charles Stewart Parnell
Contributions to the Eblana were sternly criticised at meetings, and also in writing by its editor. This was believed to encourage success in the tradition of Young Ireland.29 Its range and tone prefigured the ethos of Griffith’s United Irishman. The club’s minutes also show that, as might be expected of any group of young Irishmen debating politics and society, there were occasional tensions and disagreements. However, reading its minutes, one is unprepared for the eruption that destroyed the club in 1892 and that saw Griffith and his friend Rooney express different opinions. It was an example of the damaging divisiveness caused by ‘the Parnell split’ in Irish politics, a split that Griffith would long seek to avoid replicating by his single-minded demand for national independence and his determination that all other considerations, whether personal, cultural or social, be subsidiary to that.
Griffith at this point even tried his hand at Parnellite verse, more successfully than James Joyce’s alter ego would in the latter’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen Dedalus ‘saw himself sitting at his table in Bray the morning after the discussion at the Christmas dinner table, trying to write a poem about Parnell on the back of one of his father’s second moiety notices. But his brain had then refused to grapple with the theme’. On 8 March 1889, Griffith included in his contributions to the first run of Eblana some verses entitled ‘The Crimes of The Times’.30 It was just two weeks since the Pigott forgeries published in the London Times had been exposed, having been used to implicate Parnell falsely in the Phoenix Park murders. It was nine months before Katharine O’Shea’s husband filed for divorce. Griffith’s lines included these:
Our great and glorious Parnell’s victorious
The forgers scattered far and near
And the wicked crimes of the blaguard Times
Will soon be punished I have no fear.
However, by the following winter events finally overtook the Irish leader. On 25 November 1890 Prime Minister William Gladstone’s letter urging Parnell’s resignation was published. Later that week Griffith proposed a very strong and detailed motion of support for Parnell, and persuaded members of the Leinster ‘comprising all shades of public opinion’ to agree with it unanimously: ‘Mr Griffith spoke as one who never was a supporter of Mr Parnell but was an independent nationalist.’ The club agreed to inform Parnell that ‘To us it matter not whether ecclesiastical domination on the one side, or Dublin Castle influence on the other prevail, our duty is imperative. The path of independence is before us.’31 Griffith and a friend are said to have tried but failed to persuade Timothy Harrington, a Parnellite MP, to give up his seat in Dublin so that Parnell might be elected there instead.32 The Leinster also canvassed the voters of North Kilkenny in a vital by-election, with Griffith as club president using then on its notices his pen name J.P. Ruhart (an anagram of ‘Arthur’).33
In 1891 Griffith went to support Parnell at Broadstone Station in Dublin when Parnell left for Creggs, Co. Galway, to address what was his last election meeting. Parnell told those present that he was going to the west ‘contrary to his doctor’s orders, as he was suffering from a severe cold’.34 It was a dismal time, recalled in Griffith’s paper twenty years later:
On a September night, gloomy and cold, Parnell came to the Broadstone on an outside car to journey to his last meeting, accompanied by one faithful friend. Around the station the present writer and fifty or sixty others waited to give him a parting blessing – to cheer him up with the message that the rank-and-file of his followers in Dublin would stand by him to the last, although every man who wore the letters ‘M.P.’ after his name disappeared from his side. When Mr Parnell arrived at the station, it needed no physician to see that he was ill, and wretchedly ill. His face was livid and haggard, one of his arms bandaged, and the hand I shook had no longer the firm grip I had felt previously … As he descended from the car a woman beside me stretched out her hand to him saying ‘God bless you, Mr Parnell – don’t go tonight.’ He turned towards her, smiled and shook his head. That was the last we saw of Parnell alive.35
Joyce’s fictional Leopold Bloom had a moment with Parnell too: ‘He saw him once on the auspicious occasion when they broke up the type in the Insuppressible or was it United Ireland, a privilege he keenly appreciated, and, in point of fact, handed him his silk hat when it was knocked off and he [Parnell] said Thank you’. When Parnell died, Griffith and Rooney and other members of the Leinster marched as a group in the funeral procession on Sunday, 11 October 1891.36
Parnell’s downfall poisoned and dulled Irish politics for more than a decade, its venom evident at a meeting of the Leinster Debating Club, when one of that society’s occasional visitors, James McCluskey, scoffed at members and claimed that they would be anti-Parnellites if they lived down in Mallow, Co. Cork. Nevertheless, Rooney and others in the club proposed McCloskey for membership a fortnight later. Griffith spoke strongly against McCloskey’s admission but was defeated. He and some others immediately resigned.37 During a lively discussion one week afterwards, Rooney explained that he had supported McCloskey on the assumption that the man had spoken originally in the heat of the moment and would pull back. But the damage was done, and on 9 December 1892, the remaining members of the Leinster Debating Club wound up their society.
Girls and Gas
Girls did not participate in the usual meetings of the Leinster. But Griffith could enjoy female company at the house of his more affluent Whelan cousins, where there were frequent Sunday teas, with a piano and girls singing favourite songs.38 A printer’s apprentice told Padraic Colum that when a group including Griffith paired off with girls, ‘“Dan” [i.e. Griffith] would begin to spout lines such as “To be or not to be,” or “The quality of mercy is not strained” [both by Shakespeare].’ Padraic Colum suspected that this display of erudition was as much to cover Griffith’s shyness as to make an impression, and one fears that some of the girls were not impressed.39
However, if he was not always fascinating, at least Griffith was by no means out of place in the emerging social order for which James Joyce in Ulysses outlined alternative qualifications:
You must have a certain fascination: Parnell. Arthur Griffith is a squareheaded fellow but he has no go in him for the mob. Or gas about our lovely land. Gammon and spinach. Dublin Bread Company’s [DBC] tearoom. Debating societies. That republicanism is the best form of government. That the language question should take precedence of the economic question. Have your daughters inveigling them to your house.
Griffith and Rooney could certainly, and did ‘gas about our lovely land’. Why would they not when others trumpeted the glories of empire? Griffith frequented lively debating clubs, when a growing number of small literary societies generated a head of steam about a national revival. Pubs and tearooms such as the DBC provided further venues for discussion with his friends. And at the Leinster he argued that republicanism was the best form of government. Whether or not he was ‘inveigled’ by Peter Sheehan’s daughters into their home on Cook Street is unknown, but he certainly visited them there, and perhaps later called to the new home that, at the turn of the century, the family acquired on a fashionable street. Griffith might not be convinced that the Irish language question ‘should take precedence of the economic question’, regretting as he did that there were ‘muddled persons who confound language and nationality’ and disdaining ‘camp-followers of the language movement, shouting raucously their shibboleth “An Gaedheal Thu?”’. But he studied Irish, believing that ‘all of us surely can inspire those destined to carve our epitaphs to re-learn it’.40 Seán T. O’Kelly, when later president of Ireland, wrote that from 1899 ‘Griffith and Rooney, in the pages of the United Irishman gave the Gaelic League all the support that they could’. O’Kelly added:
Griffith