Diarmaid Ferriter on Arthur Griffith = Newstalk 106-108 FM Part 1

Arthur Griffith Art Ó Gríobhtha (1871-1922)

Born at 61 Upper Dominick Street on 31 March 1871 into a family of Welsh descent, Arthur Griffith was educated by the Christian Brothers before working as a printer like his father who worked for The Nation newspaper. As a young man he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Gaelic League. After the split in the Irish Parliamentary Party, the failure of the Home Rule campaign and the death of Charles Stuart Parnell, a hero for the young Griffith, he went to live in South Africa for a time while recovering from TB where he sympathetized and identified with the Boer cause and supported Paul Kruger.

Griffith returned to Ireland in 1899 and together with William Rooney (d. 1901) formed the United Irishman newspaper. Inspired by the rhetoric of 19th century Irish nationalist John Mitchel, Griffith was a fierce opponent of the IPP alliance with the Liberal Party. He also supported independence movements in Egypt and India and was an outspoken opponent of British imperialism as well as socialism (his attitudes did not stop him co-operating with James Connolly). In 1900 he and Maud Gonne, the muse of poet W.B. Yeats and wife of John McBride, organised opposition to the visit of Queen Victoria to Ireland and in 1903 opposed the visit of King Edward VII. In 1900 he also formed the Cumann na nGaedheal ("Society of Gaels") which aimed to unite the various Irish nationalist separatist movements. During the Boer War, Griffith supported the Boers and opposed British Army recruitment while John McBride and others formed an Irish Brigade to fight against the British.

Later Griffith like many others in Irish society in 1904 defended an ugly anti-Jewish pogram in Limerick however years later his anti-semitic opinions changed and he became a close friend of many prominent Irish Jews. Griffith also shared the period's social conservativism and tight laced sexual morality. In 1907 he denounced the John Milington Synge's The Playboy Of The Western World as "a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform" and for its protrayl of Irish women as "a drift of females standing in their shifts."

The tenets of the Sinn Féin policy were outlined in Griffith's highly influential work The Resurrection of Hungary which proposed a dual monarchy for Britain and Ireland with separate governments for both kingdoms in the style of Hungary which had secured a similar autonomy within the Austran Empire. Griffith claimed the Act of Union of 1800 which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was illegal and that the Irish Parliament founded by Henry Grattan in 1782 should be restored and that Irish parliamentarians should abstain from Westminister. When the Sinn Féin Party was formed in 1905 its first leader was Edward Martyn, a wealthy cultural activist and playwright who was descended from Jacobite Irish Catholic gentry. The party merged with other nationalist organisations and quickly became infiltrated by hardline IRB members who sought to turn it into an openly republican party. It struggled to gain support in competition with the broader IPP but succeeded in electing a number of councillors including W. T. Cosgrave in Dublin. Matters were not helped by Griffith's opposition to strikers led by Jim Larkin and support for the employers during the 1913 Dublin Lockout.

Griffith and most other Irish nationalists passionately supported the drive for Home Rule in the 1910s that led to the passage of the Home Rule in 1914 which was nonetheless suspended by the British government after the commencement of World War I 1914-1918. The Irish Volunteers enjoyed the support of the broad Irish nationalist spectrum who had been gearing up to what looked like an inevitable confrontation with the Ulster Volunteer Force, the British military and British Conservatives who sought to usurp the democratic will of the majority of the Irish people which was behind Home Rule. When John Redmond and his IPP and the majority of the membership endorsed Irish participation in the war, the movement split and a hardline republican clique around Thomas Clarke, Thomas McDonagh and Patrick Pearse planned what became the Easter Rising in 1916.

Griffith and Sinn Féin had little or nothing to with the rebellion except that some members had participated such as W. T. Cosgrave and the rising became erronously known as the Sinn Féin rebellion. After the release of rebel prisoners by late 1916 and eqarly 1917, the membership of the party exploded and the IRB took over control of organisation sidelining the dual monarchists and transforming it into an openly republican party under the new leadership of Eamon De Valera. Griffith who had resigned the leadership and his supporters sidelined by the republican newcomers had threatened to split the party in 1917. Nonetheless the popularity of Sinn F

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