In the introduction of his biography of Griffiths, Brian Maye offersa a multiplicity of reasons why Arthur Griffith should be the subject of a new biography. Neither Griffith nor Maye need any such nustification.
Griffith remains one of the most important ideologues of 20th-century ~Irish history. His thinking on Irish nationalism and non-violent separatism popularised through his newspapers and pamphlets provided the intellectual backbone of pre-Revolutionary advanced nationalism. Beyond this Griffith also set the agenda, as Maye points out, for the constitutional side of the Irish revolution.
The provenance of the abstention from Westminster of Irish MPs in 1919, the re-establishment of a native parliament in dublin, and the undermining of the British administration at local government level in Ireland - all of which constituted the administrative revolution in Ireland - is to be located in Griffith's thinking. The meeting of the first Dail in Dublin on January 21st, 1919, was the culmination and triumph of 15 years of literary agitation by Griffith. For a few hours on that momentous day his non-violent, constitutional vision appeared to be in the ascent.
Griffith had attempted to offer a "third way" between the revolutionary violence of the IRB and the constitutional politics of the Irish parliamentary party. He advocated a settlement for Ireland based on his reading of the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich of 1867 which saw the Hungarian nationalists withdraw from the Austrian Imperial parliament in vienna, Austria-Hungary was thereafter joined by the imperial crown and the reigning monarch was crowned both in Vienna, and in Budapest. Griffith saw in this dual-monarchy settlement a model for Ireland which would placate nationalist and unionist aspirations within a united Kingdom of Ireland, with the British monarch crowned in Ireland as well as in Britain.
If Griffith indulged himself in a moment of self-congratulation on that first day of the new Irish parliament it was short-lived. For any hope he had of achieving peace and reconciliation between Irish nationalists and unionists and British imperialists under a dual monarchy or any other acceptable compromise was put pay to by the action of some Tipperary Volunteers who killed two armed policemen who were escorting dynamite at a remote quarry called Soloheadbeg. The two strands of the Irish revolution - constitutional and revolutinary - were set in train. Griffith, from that moment until his death in August 1922 found himself inexorably fastened to the violence of the revolution and those who controlled it.
Griffith as a biographical subject, presents a series of problems. He left little if anything as a record of his private life. In the company of even his close literary and political friends he was shy if not taciturn. At the little social gatherings in the upstairs room of the Bailey Restaurant in Dublin he preferred to listen rather than to hold forth to what would have been an admiring audience. As for the public man, even when in government, he penned few memoranda and left little to give a flavour of his real political thinking or plans for the construction of the new State. When he achieved political prominence as deputy leader of Sinn Fein, and later as a Sinn Fein plenipotentiary and president of the Dail in January 1922, he was overshadowed - and has remained so in the public's perception - by the personalities of de Valera and Collins.
That is not to denigrate Griffith or to make the mistake of underestimating his intellectual role and influence on the revolution. It is, however, to point out that although he exists as an icon of the nationalist revolution he remains an elusive political and private personality. In as much as Griffith exists as a historical entity at all, it is as a propagandist, agitator and agent provocateur in the pages of his many newspapers. Week in and week out in the two decades before independence Griffith relentlessly produced column inches by the foot in his newspapers.
Griffith was in effect a one-man propaganda machine responsible for writing, editing, financing and even, up until the last years of his career, setting the type of his own papers. Like many a journalist chattelled to the demands of a weekly column, the quality and clarity of the input was often qualified by the demands of the output. From his small and precarious enterprise he eked outa meagre existence on which he supported his family and continued financing what was an all consuming passion.
Brian Maye has opted for a thematic interpretation to Griffith's life and politics which worked so well for Richard davis in his important work, Arthur Griffith and Non-Violent Sinn Fein (Dublin, 1974). This approach has afforded him considerable latitude in discussing Griffith's approach to political independence; Irish unionism; the Anglo-Irish Treaty; the Irish literary renaissance; his relationship with Labour and, most notorious of all, the Jewish community in Ireland.
In what is a large work of some 400 pages, Maye writes with clarity and ease. However, he has produced not so much a biography of Griffith as a series of historigraphical essays on his subject. Though Maye has done some work on primary sources - most notably Griffith's journalism - the bulk of the book rests squarely on secondary published sources. On the issues around which Maye has chosen to build his study - which in the absence of primaruy research has been dictated by other writers - he provides an exhaustive and exhausting account of what has been written by historians and literary critics. This in itself is not problematic, but Maye fails to deliver in most instances his own interpretations or to add anything of substance.
What does follow is all too often an unqualified defence of Griffith's reputation and attempt to contradict assailants who have quoted Griffith against himself. Maye does this ably. He contextualises Griffith's role in the Treaty negotiations and most notably the reasons for his decision to give assurance that he would not break on the issue of Ulster to the then Lloyd George. Likewise Maye counters some of the more rabid attacks on Griffith that he was anti-Labour, and gives a much needed balanced interpretation of Griffith's anti-Semitic writings.
However, Maye's defence of, or at times apologia for, Griffith simply underlines the problem facing any one trying to interpret him: that based on his published writings alone, it is possible to make any argument for or against Griffith on almost any subject he chose to feed an insatiably hungry press. Maye is quite right to attempt to correct some of the more unfair interpretations of Griffith which have gained currency recently, but his own argument and approach tends to mimic those of the accusers.
Griffith was first and foremost a propagandist for a political cause which until 1916 no one other than himself, and a small number of enthusiasts dotted around the country, really believed in. The notion that within his journalism there is to be found a fully consistent exposition of Griffith's thinking is both overly reverential and na∩ve. Griffith belonged to a generation of tabloid nationalists, among them most notably the redoubtable DP Moran of th Leader, who, before an incestuous audience, indulged in petty, internecine slagging matches, invented little controversies, and endlessly debated the principles of nationality: the subtext of which may well have been minor circulation wars. The gritty reality of the Dublin print world of the 1900s is the context within which Griffith's writing must be read and evaluated.
One thing may, however, be concluded, that much of the political thought Griffith had enunciated between 1904-19, was abandoned by the founders of the new Free State. Discussing the issue of protection - which was a core issue of Griffith's Sinn Fein - in the Dail in November 1923 Kevin O'Higgins argued "...that the propaganda of a dead man cannot be allowed to dictate the policy and legislation of the new State". Not should it be allowed to dictate the agenda of his biographers.
Arthur Griffith by Brian Maye is published by Griffith College Publications tomorrow. Price £25 (hardback); £15 (paperback)
Dr John M. Regan is a Research Fellow at Wolfson college Oxford.
