Sir, – Congratulations to Edmond Byrne (April 27th) for insisting that William O’Brien and his anti-sectarian All-for-Ireland League should not be forgotten during the present commemorations.
Years ago, when hosting the late FSL Lyons as extern examiner at UCC, I took him out to the O’Brien political heartland in Blackpool.
I explained to him that when the city fathers wanted to honour the native son (well, to be precise, he was Mallow-born) by a street-name, they changed Great Britain Street to Great William O’Brien Street, making sure to retain the adjective of magnitude.
The distinguished historian was no less impressed than amused by this Cork sense of priorities. At least, O’Brien hasn’t been airbrushed down here. – Yours, etc,
Sir, The standfirst to Shane Hegarty’s interesting profile of Arthur Griffith in your welcome supplement on Home Rule (“1912: Home Rule and Ulster’s Resistance”, April 25th) states Griffith’s “opinions were often controversial”. This assertion would not be true of Griffith’s lifetime, or, indeed, of most of the 20th century. In the latter period, some historians and commentators did try to make a case for some of the opinions being controversial, and I tried to deal as comprehensively as I could – and I hope fairly – with those in my biography of Griffith.
I would like to suggest that three of Arthur Griffith’s most important contributions were either not mentioned or not given sufficient emphasis in the article.
First, what mattered most to Griffith was not political independence but economic independence because he saw the former as useless without the latter. As a result, he devoted much of his writing as a journalist, pamphleteer and editor to making the case for Ireland’s economic self-sufficiency, which is summed up in the name of the movement with which his name will always be associated: Sinn Féin. Ironically, it was not his linear political successors in Cumann na nGaedheal in the 1920s but his anti-Treaty opponents in Fianna Fáil from the 1930s onwards that put most of his economic ideas into practice.
Second, whatever about his attitude to or actions during the Easter Rising, it was absolutely vital that the programme that he had evolved in the previous 20 years was there in the aftermath of the Rising. That programme provided the blueprint and framework on which future progress could be built. Terence de Vere White expressed it well: “Pearse and his comrades . . . provided by their sacrifice whatever mystical and romantic inspiration was lacking in Griffith’s work,” but “he had created the political philosophy and hammered out the framework” on which their dream could be realised.
Finally and perhaps most enduringly in terms of his contribution, Dáil Éireann was primarily Griffith’s long-advocated theory put into practice.
From the beginning of his public life, he had called on the Home Rule MPs to abstain from going to Westminster and to set up their own parliament in Dublin. He had always argued that the way to independence was to establish a rival administration which would win the confidence of the people.
Could that independence have been won without violence? Griffith believed so and is therefore one of the earliest advocates of the theory on non-cooperation or passive resistance, which had such an influence on Mahatma Gandhi and others in the 20th century. – Yours, etc,