Dismayed by the failure of both the formal politics of John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party and the violence of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, Arthur Griffith created first Cumann na nGaedheal and then Sinn Féin to gather and galvanize the varied Irish nationalist cultural and political movements.
Arthur Griffith was born in Dublin and was educated by the Roman Catholic Christian Brothers. He began his career as a journalist by working as a printer, his father’s trade, as a very young man. Barely in his teens, while working for the Irish Independent newspaper, Griffith was introduced to the Young Ireland Society,
All of these organizations sought an independent political existence for Ireland, but none of them had a political presence at the London-based seat of the United Kingdom in Westminster. Parliamentary politics in Ireland was virtually monopolized by the Irish Parliamentary Party
More moderate than not, Griffith had been drawn to the IPP before the political humiliation, fall, and death of its great leader Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891. He sank even deeper roots in the Irish cultural movements, whose members formed his circle of friends. When the South African Boers, whites of Dutch extraction, began their war with the English colonial government in the later 1890’s, Griffith sailed to join the fray. After his brave conduct on behalf of the Boer cause, Griffith returned to Dublin in 1898. This was the centenary of the storied Irish Rebellion of 1798, and in the spirit of the movement, he and William Rooney,
The United Irishman supported the Boers, the pro-Boer Irish Transvaal Committee, and the Irish Brigade of John MacBride, with whom Griffith had fought. It also preached resistance to English efforts to recruit Irish soldiers. Among many Irish, however, this last stance was unacceptable, since many families had sons and brothers fighting for Great Britain in South Africa. Despite a lack of wide popular support, Griffith used the Irish Transvaal Committee as a nucleus around which he created a new organization, Cumann na nGaedheal
Cumann was to be an amalgamation of as many of the existing cultural nationalist groups as possible. These included the Celtic Literary Society and the early feminist Daughters of Ireland, which had been recently founded by John MacBride’s fiery wife Maud Gonne. The Gaelic League and IRB were supportive, but they remained aloof. Symbolically, the league’s first president, elected at its first public convention in November, 1900, was the old Fenian John O’Leary, and John MacBride was chosen as vice president. The organization adopted the Gaelic motto first coined by economic nationalists in the 1880’s and later adopted by the Gaelic League: Sinn Féin, which translates as “we ourselves” or “ourselves alone.” Griffith insisted on having no exclusionary principles for membership, although some wanted to set requirements for ethnicity (Gaelic or Anglo-Irish), command of Gaelic, or dedication to violence. Despite the wide net, Cumann had few members, although its main voice, the United Irishman, had thirty thousand subscribers and many more readers.
At Cumann’s Third Convention, Griffith announced its first positive political plank: the establishment of a dual monarchy for Britain and Ireland that would mirror that established by the Hungarians in the 1860’s in the Austrian Empire. The monarch would essentially wear two crowns: one in Westminster and another as monarch in Dublin. Although this fell short of true independence, it went well beyond home rule and provided a distinctive and potentially popular position for Griffith’s organization. In 1904 he published the successful Resurrection of Hungary, in which he outlined a plan for a new Irish parliament, one that would consist of the 103 members then sitting at Westminster and of new representatives drawn from across Ireland. At about the same time, he created a political party, the National Council,
The impetus for the new party’s introduction was provided by a visit to Dublin by King Edward VII, an event that Cumann and the new party vociferously protested. As a way of presenting the party, Griffith publicized the dual-monarchist model in the pages of United Irishman and in his book The Sinn Féin Policy (1904). The National Council grew, and by January, 1905, it could hold a General Council of County Councils, at which the delegates called for the implementation of Griffith’s plan, still generally called the “Hungarian Policy.” Beginning in May, this rather un-Irish moniker was replaced by the title “Sinn Féin.” At the National Council’s First Convention, which opened in Dublin on November 28, 1905, delegates adopted the slogan, and the Sinn Féin party was born. To reinforce the fledgling party and its connections with Cumann, Griffith changed the name of the United Irishman to Sinn Féin in 1906, after Liberal Party victories in England all but ensured the tabling of home rule for the foreseeable future. This neutralized the IPP and weakened its appeal, creating what should have been a power vacuum. Indeed, an increasingly wide circle of disaffected cultural nationalists and even republicans were drawn to Sinn Féin, and this in turn led to a revitalization of the IRB in 1907. By 1908, however, Sinn Féin candidates had won only one election, and in 1909 the party agreed not to challenge the IPP in the 1910 elections.
From these rather inauspicious beginnings, Sinn Féin grew into a powerful force that supported the drive for independence from 1916 to 1922. In the 1910’s, its identification with violent republicanism earned the rebels of the 1916 Easter Rising
Once the fighting had stopped, the majority (protreaty Sinn Féin members) formed the core of the new Cumann na nGaedheal party, which was headed by William T. Cosgrave after 1923, while the opposition, led by de Valera, emerged as Fianna Fáil
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Feeny, Brian. Sinn Féin: A Hundred Turbulent Years. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. A popular and complete history that discusses the early Sinn Féin as an example of a popular-front nationalist movement. -
Kee, Robert. The Green Flag. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Vigorous narrative history of the roots and flowering of the party in the context of the failures of contemporary Irish political and cultural movements. -
Younger, Calton. Arthur Griffith. Dublin: Gill, 1981. The standard and most readily available biography of Sinn Féin’s founder.
Irish Home Rule Bill
Ireland Is Granted Home Rule and Northern Ireland Is Created
Formation of the British Commonwealth of Nations
De Valera Is Elected President of the Irish Dáil