‘A Man Who Has Both Arms’: Arthur Griffith,the Economy and the Anglo-Irish Treaty Agreement 1921

Abstract

Arthur Griffith founded Sinn Féin. From 1899 onwards, through detailed articles in his weekly papers and otherwise, he strongly advocated the economic development of Ireland and the adoption of qualified protectionism to achieve it. As minister for foreign affairs in the revolutionary government of Ireland in 1921, he chaired the Irish delegation that negotiated with Lloyd George's government articles of agreement for an Anglo-Irish Treaty. In January 1922 he was elected president of Dáil Éireann, the revolutionary Irish parliament, but died suddenly in August 1922 before the new Irish Free State formally came into existence. This essay underlines the importance that he attached to economic affairs, not least in making fiscal autonomy a central ambition of his negotiations with the British. The author concludes that Griffith was far-sighted, and calls for a discrete and empathetic study of his economic ideas.

Introduction

In April 1922, shortly before the Irish civil war began, Arthur Griffith came to believe that he was already in danger of being killed by anti-Treaty forces. Some republicans were enraged that he and other members of Sinn Féin with whom they disagreed had approved the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Before leaving on a fraught visit to Sligo, Griffith wrote a short message to the Irish people that he gave to a friend to keep. After he collapsed and died in August 1922 his message was opened. It read,

Let the people stand firm for the Free State. It is their national need and economic salvation. Love to the Irish people, to all my colleagues and friends. ¹

This reference to ‘economic salvation’ was a reminder that Griffith had always cared deeply about the material welfare of Ireland. Griffith's grasp of the relationship between economic and social realities notably informed his approach to the talks about a Treaty that took place in London from October to December 1921. As chairman of the Irish plenipotentiaries in London, he was acutely conscious of the importance of financial autonomy. He believed that he achieved more in that respect during the talks than might have been expected not long before. The economic significance of the Treaty is too often overshadowed by political debate, although one interesting recent exception analyses Article 5 of the Treaty that saw Griffith insist that the Irish Free State accept only a qualified, ‘fair and equitable’ share of the UK public debt. ²

According to the late Patrick Lynch, professor of political economy at UCD from 1975 to 1980, ‘Unlike Griffith, not even the ablest members of Cosgrave's government [the first government of the Irish Free State] had a completely coherent economic philosophy’. ³ Insofar as Griffith's philosophy was coherent, it was reliant on a balance between natural resources and manufacturing or, as he famously put it when he spelt out his Sinn Féin policy in 1905:

An agricultural nation is a man with one arm who makes use of an arm belonging to another person, but cannot, of course, be sure of having it always available. An agricultural-manufacturing nation is a man who has both arms of his own at his disposal. ⁴

More than half of Griffith's life had passed by the dawn of the twentieth century. However, his major contributions to Irish public life followed his return from South Africa to Ireland in 1899 and his foundation of Sinn Féin. His work thereafter, both as a journalist and a politician, made a great impact on a younger generation that embraced advanced nationalism and that later created the independent Irish state. It is that work and the economic philosophy that informed it that is outlined below.

Griffith Founds Sinn Féin

Arthur Griffith (1871–1922) grew up in the heart of Dublin. Areas of the city that had been prosperous before the Act of Union 1800 were declining into slums. He became a printer, following his father into that trade. In 1897 he emigrated to South Africa, where he found employment as a clerk in a mining company and turned his hand to editing a very small local paper.

Less than two years later, Griffith returned to Ireland to launch and edit the weekly United Irishman, funded partly by the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Although its circulation remained small, it was to be influential, as were other weekly papers he edited and produced between then and 1920. Living on a very modest income in Summerhill, in central Dublin close to an area known as Monto that was notorious for prostitution, he supported his widowed mother and his sister. His best friend and collaborator, William Rooney, died of typhoid.

In 1905 Griffith founded the Sinn Féin movement. Its Irish language title means ‘We Ourselves’, an evocation of self-reliance that was less isolationist than the ‘We Alone’ translation sometimes given. Sinn Féin was a nationalist political force active in advocating and promoting the development of Irish industry, its members believing the condition of the Irish economy to have been determined to a significant extent by British policies and priorities. ⁵ Preoccupied with the consequences of Anglo-Irish conflict, nationalists blamed the British connection–as consolidated by the Act of Union 1800–for holding Ireland back developmentally. Cullen writes that textbooks on Irish economic history ‘written in a period of growing political consciousness’ in the first quarter of the twentieth century–such as that by Prof. George O’Brien–are ‘ample testimony’ to the perceived role of these political influences. ⁶

Objectively, as the joint authors of a recent overview of the argument have observed, ‘The question of how well the Irish economy fared during the Union with Great Britain has always been politically fraught’. ⁷ For the purpose of this paper, which does not attempt to resolve that argument, it is sufficient to note the strong belief of nationalists that Ireland had been overtaxed and its industrial potential neglected, that the 1825 customs union with Britain had been nefarious, that massive and continuing emigration, unemployment and poverty would be better addressed by the legislative and policy innovations of independent Irish governments than by British officials and ministers. Griffith's Sinn Féin certainly did not think that success would spontaneously follow independence, or that speeches and resolutions were enough. On the contrary, as one acquaintance of Griffith (and a future long-serving Secretary of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs) later wrote of the movement's belief, ‘the Nation could be saved only by effort, only by the slow rebuilding of the national life in Ireland itself, a rebuilding of individual and group effort.’ ⁸

Griffith's concerns were clearly articulated in an editorial of 1905 that can leave no doubt as to what he saw then as the chief economic evils:

It is of concern to us that 12,000 of our people emigrated during the last quarter, that our birth-rate in the same period was 3¼ per cent lower than England's, and our death-rate 3½ per cent higher, while our paupers numbered 2,000 more than they did a year ago. It is of concern that this year we have 12,600 acres less under crops than we had in 1904, and that in a country three-fourths agricultural, the urban population is day by day subsisting more and more on foreign food, and the agricultural population physically degenerating through its substitution of oaten bread and milk by white bread and tea. It is of concern that the highways of our commerce–our railways–are being absorbed by English systems in English interests, and that by a system of false bookkeeping and cooked figures our local taxation accounts are being systematically robbed by the British Treasury–that our Stock Exchange is directly controlled by the Government, and our banking system worked against our interests; ⁹

The traumatic extent of emigration, with its many impacts on personal and economic levels, is highlighted by the authors of a late twentieth-century overview of Irish development who point out that in 1841–prior to the Great Famine–the population of Ireland was more than three times that of Scotland and more than one-half that of England and Wales. By 1921 the population of Ireland was 10% less than that of Scotland and only one-ninth that of England and Wales. ¹⁰

Seán Kenny and his co-authors have recently attempted to reconcile suggestions that ‘industry was dwindling’ with ostensibly contradictory conclusions that ‘industry was flourishing’ in Ireland in the nineteenth century. They noted in particular that much of an improvement in production was due not to the sort of structural transformation that was associated with the kind of industrialisation driving catch-up growth in other countries but to a decline in the labour force employed in Irish industry. Even if the latter decline in the form of massive emigration had some sort of economic silver lining for the national economy, it was a personal and political disaster. The authors identify indicators that help to explain why Griffith thought that Ireland might perform better if entrusted with the management of its own economic and fiscal policy rather than having to continue to trust in a government in London. They write that, notwithstanding a ‘substantial’ growth of Irish industry after the Great Famine–‘albeit at a slower pace than was previously thought’, the ‘slower growth in Ireland relative to Great Britain implies that the Irish share of industrial production in the United Kingdom declined’. Moreover:

Between 1840 and 1913, Irish industrial growth of 1.4 per cent per annum was slow compared with growth of 3.5 per cent in Denmark, 2.6 per cent in Britain, and 5.4 per cent in the US. Not only that, it was slower in every individual decade during the period. ¹¹

One might say that structural change was going in the ‘wrong’ direction: while there was a decline in the labour force, those that remained in it tended to become more productive due to capital improvements and technological change. However, for living standards, such ‘improvement’ mattered little as the overall share of industry in output and employment had declined under the union. In such circumstances it was scarcely surprising that advanced nationalists such as Griffith argued that the Irish might do better at managing their own economic affairs.

Practical Policies

When it came to economics, Arthur Griffith saw himself as a realist rather than an ideologue, an active politician committed to change more than a theorist. ¹² As he struggled to sustain his own small publishing operation, he formed a practical outlook on business and sympathised with others trying to keep their ventures afloat. In 1903 an Industrial Development Association had been founded in Cork, and was soon emulated in other Irish towns including Dublin. ¹³ The federation of these associations represented small and medium-sized enterprises, rather than the bigger and older concerns that dominated the Chambers of Commerce, and Griffith strongly welcomed this. ¹⁴ Following the passing of the Trade Marks Act 1906, the Industrial Development Association (the original ‘IDA’) registered an ‘Irish Trade Mark’, which bore the Gaelic words ‘Déanta i n-Éirinn’(meaning ‘made in Ireland’). Griffith supported this move too, printing lists of manufacturers who were entitled to use the trade mark. He claimed that the only paper produced in a manner that qualified it to bear the distinctive Irish trade mark was his own Sinn Féin organ. ¹⁵

One of those who appreciated Griffith's efforts to infuse economic consciousness into nationalist politics at that time was the writer James Joyce, who was later grateful for Griffith's advice in respect to finding a publisher for Dubliners. In 1906, from Italy, Joyce wrote to his brother:

As far as my knowledge of Irish affairs goes, he [Griffith] was the first person in Ireland to revive the separatist idea on modern lines nine years ago. He wants the creation of an Irish consular service abroad and of an Irish bank at home … He said in one of his articles that it cost a Danish merchant less to send butter to Christiania and then by sea to London than it costs an Irish merchant to send his from Mullingar to Dublin. A great deal of his programme perhaps is absurd but at least it tries to inaugurate some commercial life for Ireland and to tell you the truth once or twice in Trieste I felt myself humiliated when I heard the little Galatti girl sneering at my impoverished country. You may remember that on my arrival in Trieste I actually ‘took some steps’ to secure an agency for Foxford Tweeds there. ¹⁶

For readers of a Trieste newspaper, Joyce proudly explained that Sinn Féin was ‘attempting to develop the industry of the whole country’ and ‘mechanising industrial produce, without the intervention of England’. ¹⁷

In 1908 Sinn Féin launched Aonach na Nodlag (a Christmas Fair) in Dublin, with Griffith's Sinn Féin paper noting on 12 December that year that ‘The Christmas market in Ireland has hitherto been left solely to the foreign producer’. The annual Aonach or industrial fair was held under Sinn Féin auspices between 1908 and 1914, serving to popularise that political movement amongst Dublin businesses and to emphasise its importance. Sitting on the Aonach committee with Griffith were Seán McDermott (Mac Diarmada)–whom the British were to execute in 1916, Bulmer Hobson, Helena Moloney, Tom Kelly, Jennie Wyse-Power and others who included Kevin J. Kenny. ¹⁸ The latter was one of those small businessmen active in the Dublin IDA. He had founded an advertising agency. ¹⁹ Kenny was also the sole proprietor of an annual Irish manufacturers’ directory that first appeared from 1902. It gave a description of each county and listed its manufacturers. Being one of the first Irish databases of its kind in Ireland, this was intended to stimulate Irish trade and was well-received nationally, including by Griffith's United Irishman. ²⁰

Griffith soon decided that Sinn Féin should try its hand at its own year books, and four such annuals were published from 1908 to 1911. In his introduction to the first, Griffith wrote that the object of the books was to ‘render available to the whole people of Ireland that information on the affairs of their country which is necessary for their defence and essential to their progress’. ²¹ As chairman of Sinn Féin's Publication Committee, he reorganised both the contents and production of the Year Book for 1910, stating in a foreword to that edition that ‘many former omissions have been repaired’, and pointing out that ‘the business side of the book has been entrusted to the capable hands of Mr. Kevin J. Kenny’. During 1910 Griffith described the annual Sinn Féin Year Book, the Aonach and the Sinn Féin Cooperative People's Bank, Ltd., as three institutions Sinn Féin had established that ‘could claim to be successful from the first’. ²²

Among articles in the Irish Year Book 1910 that promoted industry was, for example, one entitled ‘The Advertising Problem’. ²³ The following year the Sinn Féin Irish Year Book included a preface in Irish along with its sections on agriculture, education, economics, industry, literature and art, history, religion, politics and general matters. Meanwhile, Griffith continued to produce his Sinn Féin newspaper, which was described in the Sinn Féin Year Book 1911 as ‘The weekly national industrial journal of Ireland’.

Banking

Griffith was very critical of the existing banks when it came to the development of Irish industries and he promoted credit for start-ups in towns across Ireland. ²⁴ He claimed in 1906, for example, that Irish banks put the bulk of the ‘enormous sum’ that Irish people deposited in them into British stocks ‘at 2½% of less’, and he complained that ‘During the Boer War, the Bank of Ireland lent, free of interest, to the British Government the money of its Irish depositors to help in the extirpation of the Boer people.’ ²⁵ Together with Maud Gonne, his socialist friend James Connolly and the young poet W.B. Yeats–whose career he boosted in his weekly paper–Griffith had campaigned actively against that war. ²⁶ Among articles in his papers on the way that banks did business was one during 1908 headed ‘Business Banking’. This complained about the low level of interest paid to savers and low dividends to investors, and about the banks’ conservatism when it came to investment in Ireland: ‘our national existence is threatened by the sluggishness of the moribund institutions’. The author argued that schemes for afforestation and for the development of Irish universities, amongst others, were delayed by a lack of capital that would be forthcoming for similar schemes in Britain. ²⁷ In 1910, the author of new ‘Notes on Banking’ in Griffith's paper wrote that it was ‘proposed to review in this column each week the banking operations of the world of finance, and to show by example the difference between the forward policy of Banks abroad and the strict conservatism of our Irish Banks at home.’ ²⁸ If Irish banks improved their financial services throughout the nineteenth century and were stable overall–and reading Ó Gráda on banking and industrial finance from 1850 it seems difficult to fault them very significantly in those respects – it was not enough for Griffith and others who regarded bankers in Ireland as fundamentally unionist in sentiment and who thought that banks could and should do more to boost the developmental ambitions of nationalists rather than invest in English securities. ²⁹

Griffith's Sinn Féin bank, set up at the Sinn Féin offices on Harcourt Street in Dublin, was intended to ‘assist in the development of Irish Industries, and to promote popular credit in the towns of Ireland’, and Griffith hoped to open branches of it in towns around Ireland. He had been inspired by developments in Germany and Italy and saw his foundation not as competing with but as subsidiary to the Joint Stock Banks: ‘Our people need the financial assistance so essential to the erection of a strong self-supporting nation. The Small Industrialist must be made to feel that his effort at producing something will receive encouragement. A nation cannot be healthy industrially unless its units are active.’ ³⁰

Business Journalism

In Griffith's successive weekly papers (and for a few months his Sinn Féin appeared daily) there are many articles referring to economic matters. Fortunately these papers have recently been digitised as part of the Irish Radical Newspapers database, and are now far more accessible to researchers than hitherto. There follow here a few examples of early relevant articles in them.

In the United Irishman on 21 April 1900 there is a review of a paper on the economic development of Ireland. On 29 December 1900, the socialist Fred Ryan was given almost two full columns to discuss capitalism and nationalism. On 23 March 1901 the United Irishman indicated that invested capital in Ireland was one-forty-fourth of that available throughout the United Kingdom but that taxation revenue was one-twelfth of the whole. On 1 June 1901, Griffith welcomed the first annual report on the agricultural statistics of Ireland, issued by the new Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. Griffith wrote that ‘Politics or no politics we must have the facts, and the better and more widely these facts are known, the sooner we shall get rid of talking and theorizing, and get down to work to lift the country out of its present beggarly condition.’

Indeed, eighteen years later, when a brilliant young journalist and future renowned London theatre critic named Ivor Brown was dispatched by the Manchester Guardian to interview Sinn Féiners during the War of Independence, that correspondent met Griffith and described him as having ‘a Fabian capacity for handling facts and figures as well as ideas’. ³¹ Brown's view is echoed today when, in his entry for Griffith in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, Michael Laffan writes of Griffith ‘inundating his readers with demographic, financial, and other statistics’.

F.S.L. Lyons, a leading historian of his generation, later wrote in his history Ireland Since the Famine as follows:

That the United Irishman made the impact it did was largely due to the editor himself … Griffith was an inspired journalist who combined style and temper in a way no one else could match. He recalled both the savagery of Swift and the ruggedness of John Mitchel, but to these he added his own intensity and his own intimate knowledge of the political and economic environment about him. ³²

Griffith's personal opinions on economics become even clearer when one reads his Resurrection of Hungary. This first appeared in 1904 as a long series in his United Irishman weekly paper, and later that year as a pamphlet. It is said that 5,000 copies were sold within twenty-four hours ‘a record in the Irish publishing trade’. ³³ It expressed Griffith's particular brand of nationalism. Referencing the dual parliaments of Ireland and Britain before the Act of Union, it held up the dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary as an approximate model for the United Kingdom, but was also a platform for economic arguments in support of Griffith's ideal Ireland. Among its readers was James Joyce, whose literary work was influenced by its content. In 1907 Joyce's brother wrote that James regarded Griffith's economic policy as ‘the most ingenious and well-thought out political scheme he had ever heard of …’ ³⁴

Protectionism

Griffith professedly derived his economic ideas from those of the German economist Frederick List (1789–1846), who had developed his nationalist critique of free trade in the United States before returning to Germany as a US consul. ³⁵ Griffith saw List as having ‘thwarted England's dream of the commercial conquest of the world’. ³⁶ However, he appears to have represented List's views on economics much as he did the Austro-Hungarian constitutional or political model of dual monarchy, that is to say selectively to suit his own arguments in respect to Ireland. For List was by no means a strong believer in the power of small nations to thrive behind protective barriers. Yet Griffith advocated protectionism for Ireland, albeit his views on this were qualified as he struggled to articulate a realistic political programme. ³⁷ It is significant, if seldom noticed, that the period in which he most notably evoked List was 1904–5, during the run-up to the 1906 UK general election when the principle of free trade came under strong attack even from politicians in England itself. ³⁸

On 28 November 1905, at the first annual convention of the ‘National Council’, Griffith's ‘Sinn Féin policy’ was carried by acclamation. ³⁹ He was not naïve about the pitfalls of protectionism, particularly given Ireland's general dependency on the proximate British market. Thus, spelling out at some length his ideas for economic development, Griffith told delegates to that convention that, among other things:

Protection does not mean the exclusion of foreign competition–it means rendering the native manufacturer equal to meeting foreign competition. It does not mean that we shall pay a higher profit to any Irish manufacturer, but that we shall not stand by and see him crushed by mere weight of foreign capital. If an Irish manufacturer cannot produce an article as cheaply as an English or other foreigner, solely because his foreign competitor has larger resources at his disposal, then it is the first duty of the Irish nation to accord protection to that Irish manufacturer. If, on the other hand, an Irish manufacturer can produce as cheaply, but charges an enhanced price, such a man deserves no support–he is, in plain words, a swindler. It is the duty of our public bodies in whose hands the expenditure of £4,000,000 annually is placed to pay where necessary an enhanced price for Irish-manufactured articles, when the manufacturers show they cannot produce them at a lesser price–this is Protection. It is also the duty of the individual; but it is contrary to the principle of Protection and the interests of the country that a manufacturer in Ireland who can produce as cheaply as his foreign competitors should receive an enhanced price. The movement is one to give Ireland back her manufacturing arm, not to make fortunes for dishonest manufacturers. With the development of her manufacturing arm will proceed the rise of a national middle class in Ireland and a trained national democracy–and–I here again quote List against the charlatans who profess to see in a nation's language and tradition things of no economic value–‘in every nation will the authority of national language and national literature, the civilising arts and the perfection of municipal institutions, keep pace with the development of the manufacturing arm.’ ⁴⁰

Griffith stands accused of being blind to the special interests of the Belfast shipbuilding industry, ‘dependant as it was on raw materials from Great Britain’. ⁴¹ The denominational aspect of Irish society, where unionist or Protestant areas overall may have fared better economically and Catholics felt uncomfortable or even discriminated against seeking finance from Protestant bankers, needs to be borne in mind by historians–not least because global economic data for the island can obscure such possible factors and underestimate their impact on political sentiment.

Griffith took his cue on protectionism from the ideas of John Mitchel and Thomas Davis whom he greatly admired. ⁴² His views were more palatable to nationalists than the laissez-faire doctrines of the so-called ‘Manchester School’ that suited British manufacturers in the mid and late nineteenth century, advocating as they did free trade, and that also were potentially no less coloured by opportunism and ideology. Griffith was certainly not alone in preaching the benefits of selective protectionism. In the United States and Russia too it had its advocates, and Griffith cannot be blamed for thinking that it could scarcely be less effective than existing policy in creating jobs to help stop the massive and continuing exodus of Ireland's population since the Great Famine. In 1909 Griffith sarcastically threw in the faces of critics of his policy the example of new American tariffs that were then introduced:

The Manchester economists with their formula of As-good-and-as-cheap can now set about explaining to an amused world how utterly ignorant of economics is the United States. The rigid protectionism of the new tariff, if advocated by an Irishman as applied to Ireland, would be derided by all the Manchester-mad Irishmen in Ireland. We produce in this country a number of people believing themselves thinkers and Nationalists who think the thoughts of third-rate Englishmen and whose nationalism begins and ends with a desire for freer political institutions in Ireland. They are sincere people; but [….] it is to them we owe the great economic delusion which held, and partially still holds, Ireland in its grip. ⁴³

Two years later, writing in 1911 about customs and excise, Griffith claimed the right for Ireland to determine its own commercial policy, whether protectionism or free trade, and not be bound to share with Britain a common external tariff. He noted that, ‘Eighty years ago England pursued the most rigidly protective policy in Europe. Ireland was forced [as a member of the United Kingdom] to pursue the same policy without regard to whether it suited her or not. Sixty years ago, England reversed her fiscal policy and Ireland was forced to do the same. Five years hence England may return to Protectionism, and […] Ireland must be forced into Protection.’ ⁴⁴

‘The Way A Thing Is Said’

When Griffith's United Irishman went out of business following a successful defamation action taken by a priest, Griffith launched his next paper entitled Sinn Féin. Again we find him giving a platform to articles that come as a surprise to those who think of Griffith as solely interested in politics. On 16 January 1909, for example, he urges the institution of a faculty of economics and commerce with a degree (in the context of the University Bill passed into law in 1908). On 30 September 1909, eight years before the Ford Motor Company began its operations in Cork, Griffith was raising the potential of the motor industry as ‘a fair test of the respective efficiency of a Protective Tariff and Free Trade to stimulate industry’. He compared the experiences of England and the United States, the former enjoying ‘the boasted Freedom of Trade’ as well as proximity to the expertise of France where ‘the industry originated’, while the latter ‘is (excluding Japan) the most highly protected country in the world’. He observed, ‘The results to-day are that Great Britain's total manufacture of motor cars does not exceed 10,000 annually, while in the United States there is one firm alone, the General Motors Co., that turns out 33,000 cars every year.’ ⁴⁵

On 26 October 1909, railway economics were under consideration in Griffith's paper. The following month (12 Nov. 1909) he provided readers with an opportunity to consider the economics of advertising. On 27 November 1909 his paper chided the professor of commerce in the National University (C.H. Oldham) for giving a public talk on ‘The Education of American Businessmen’ yet making ‘no remarks whatever on Irish education, the problem of the Irish manufacturer, nor the status of Irish businessmen, nor had he, apparently, any views to offer on a subject vital to his country’. The editor thought. ‘There is a feeling amongst statesmen that the industrial king will be the real ruler of states.’ On 11 November 1911 his paper compared the Irish and Scottish fishing industries. And so on.

Although Griffith at times gave a platform to the socialist Fred Ryan to write in his weekly paper, he himself was a social democrat and not a socialist, closer to the mainstream of Irish political sentiment throughout the twentieth century than to the far left. In 1909, the socialist James Connolly responded to a suggestion in the weekly Peasant that he and Griffith might combine politically: ‘With its economic teaching, as expounded by my friend Mr Arthur Griffith in his adoption of the doctrine of Friedrich List, Socialists have no sympathy, as it appeals only to those who measure a nation's prosperity by the volume of wealth produced in a country, instead of the distribution of that wealth among its inhabitants.’ ⁴⁶ The two men were indeed on friendly terms, having in the past been arrested together when protesting against British imperialism in Africa, and continued to be on talking terms to the end. The same cannot be said of Griffith and James Larkin, but caricatures of Griffith as a political reactionary or even an enemy of the workers show little awareness of his actual writings and policies. ⁴⁷ In 1917 the socialist Cathal O'Shannon told the Irish Labour Party leader Tom Johnson that:

Arthur Griffith of course is narrow and stubborn–always was and I suppose always will be. I, however, have found that I can always get along with him even when we differ. Most of our people on both sides have a way of saying things that might be more effectively said in another way–there is a great deal in the way a thing is said. ⁴⁸

The Dáil and The Treaty

Griffith was first elected a member of parliament in 1918, both for the constituency of Cavan East and for that of Tyrone North-West. With Sinn Féin sweeping to victory in Ireland then, its representatives declined to take their seats in Westminster but convened instead a new revolutionary assembly in Dublin, Dáil Éireann. When this met in 1919 he became first its Secretary (minister) for Home Affairs. However, on 17 June 1919 the Dáil ratified him as its acting President-Substitute. It did so when Éamon de Valera, elected its president just two months earlier, left for the USA–where he was to remain for most of the War of Independence. Griffith was de facto president of the house for seventeen months–longer than was de Valera himself –even before he replaced de Valera as full President in January 1922 after the Treaty was approved. On 18 June 1919, on the day following his ratification as President-Substitute, he moved ‘the appointment of a National Commission of Inquiry into the resources and industries of Ireland, and subject to its report, the establishment of a National Exhibition of Irish Products and Manufactures and Resources.’ ⁴⁹ The text was copied word for word from a notable House of Commons resolution of the 1880s that had been informed by the pioneering work of Robert Kane on Irish natural resources, and Meenan writes that ‘The deliberate symbolism may confidently be attributed to Griffith’ who long championed the development of such resources. More ‘National Economic Council’ than ‘committee of inquiry’ in Meenan's view, its membership transcended Sinn Féin to include a leading botanist as chairman of its committee on food and UCD's professor of chemistry as chairman of its committee on power. If there were limitations to the extent of the island's natural resources, Griffith cannot be blamed for trying to define them scientifically. ⁵⁰

In June 1920 some of Griffith's views on Ireland's economic situation were published in a pamphlet in Washington DC, by the Friends of Irish Freedom organisation. It is a short but powerful tract attacking the idea that England somehow supported the Irish economy, an idea posited on the fact that Ireland ostensibly contributed to the UK Treasury somewhat less in taxes than Ireland received from the Treasury in public expenditure. Besides challenging the official data, Griffith also raised ways in which Britain benefited from (as he saw it) driving Irish trade into British ships, and from effectively preventing Irish farmers from ‘selling their foods anywhere else except to the kindly and most “philanthropic” John [Bull]’, and benefited too from obtaining large amounts of listed Irish raw material by ‘killing off any industries which might make too great a draft on our nerves…’ He also pointed out that much of what was spent in Ireland went on paying the wages of police and officials and suggested a simple answer for Britain: ‘If England is losing on Ireland, why the deuce doesn’t she clear out of the country?’ ⁵¹ Some of Griffith's writings on economics were also to be collected and published by Seumas Whelan in the 1920s. ⁵²

In 1921, after a truce in the War of Independence was agreed between the British and Irish, Ireland's revolutionary parliament Dáil Éireann chose Minister for Foreign Affairs Arthur Griffith to be chairman of the five delegates sent to London with full powers to reach an agreement for a treaty. Accompanying him was Minister for Finance Michael Collins, the latter being discreetly briefed by a high-ranking civil servant Joseph Brennan who was soon to become Secretary General of the Irish Free State's Department of Finance. An Economic Relations Committee was established to support the Treaty delegates. This included Timothy Smiddy (professor of economics at University College Cork), Diarmaid Fawsitt (a co-founder of the Cork Industrial Development Association who helped to bring the Ford motor company to that city and who had raised finance for the Irish Republic in America) and Sir Lionel Smith-Gordon (managing director of the Irish National Land Bank), all three of whom went to London during the negotiations. It also included Ernest Blythe TD, who was to be the new state's minister for finance from 1923 to 1932. ⁵³

One of Griffith's particular objectives was to achieve unfettered fiscal freedom for the emerging Irish state. As the British cabinet secretary Thomas Jones noted: ‘They ask to be protected against unfair competition and want the right to antidump.’ Jones found the Irish willing to agree to independent arbitration in respect to what share of the UK exchequer debt their new state ought to shoulder. ⁵⁴

On this latter point it is instructive to see how Griffith was to have the question of potential debt offset by reference to factors that were not explicit but that in his mind would have to include past inequities in the balance between revenue extracted by London from Ireland and investment in the country. Article 5 of the agreement for an Anglo-Irish Treaty as signed stated that:

The Irish Free State shall assume liability for the service of the Public Debt of the United Kingdom as existing at the date hereof and towards the payment of War Pensions as existing at that date in such proportion as may be fair and equitable, having regard to any just claim on the part of Ireland by way of set-off or counter-claim, the amount of such sums being determined in default of agreement by the arbitration of one or more independent persons being citizens of the British Empire.

On the recent anniversary of the signing of the Treaty on the night of 5–6 December 1921 a writer in the Financial Times complained that, ‘All the emphasis was on the political with scant attention paid to financial or economic details. A clause that transferred part of the UK's national debt to the Irish state-in-waiting went undisputed, with economic implications that would lie unattended until 1925.’ ⁵⁵ Yet, however scant the attention that some paid such matters, Griffith was alert to economic affairs and he believed that Article 5 was beneficial for Ireland, just as he and Collins both believed that the provision in Article 12 for a Boundary Commission to delimit the border was favourable to their ultimate objectives of greater independence for the new state. Their early deaths in 1922 meant that it would be left to others to attend to the details and to realize their ambitions, even as the outbreak of civil war blighted them. In the event Article 12 was a dead letter, although its failure encouraged the creative use of ambiguity in Article 5 to soften that disappointment. ⁵⁶

During two months of negotiations, from early October to early December 1921, random visitors sought Griffith out at the rented house in Hans Place that had become the Irish HQ. One was Ezra Pound, who came to promote his economic theories. Besides being a poet Pound had political interests. Of this meeting in London Pound later said: ‘One of the most illuminating hours of my life was that spent in conversation with Griffith’ – who Pound acknowledged as ‘the inventor of Sinn Féin’. At one point, wrote Pound, Griffith replied ‘All you say is true. But I can’t move ’em with a cold thing like economics.’ According to a biographer of the poet this remark would ‘stay with Pound for the rest of his life, as a constant reminder that intelligence by itself did not bring about change, that it counted for very little without the will to change.’ ⁵⁷

Griffith resisted a British suggestion that the Treaty should include as its Article 9 an explicit provision against protectionism. ⁵⁸ The Irish quickly responded to that British suggestion by a memorandum dated 22 November 1921, said to have been drafted by their secretary Erskine Childers with help from delegates Robert Barton and Gavan Duffy. This memo declared ‘We are prepared to execute a Trade Convention which, while recognising the advantage to both countries of the fullest freedom of trade, transport and commerce, will not derogate from Ireland's complete fiscal autonomy.’ However, the memo rather oddly went on to offer, as a kind of olive branch, that ‘An Agreement be reached as to the commodities that shall be dealt with on the basis of free trade’, while adding that each Government would be ‘free to deal with all other commodities as seems suitable to its own requirements.’ ⁵⁹ This irritated Prime Minister Lloyd George who is said to have asked his cabinet secretary ‘What is the use of drawing up a list of commodities some of which are to enter freely and some of which are to be taxed?’ ⁶⁰

On a number of occasions during the Treaty negotiations Griffith appears to have chosen to appear flexible, while at the same time qualifying his assurances on key issues and taking care not to bind his fellow delegates who might thus hold out as being harder to please. It is a fairly standard ploy in negotiations: ‘good cop/bad cop’. However, in respect to his economic views, this ostensible flexibility was particularly remarkable when it came to free trade, given his consistent advocacy of selective protectionism in his weekly papers and in The Resurrection of Hungary over the previous two decades. According to the UK Cabinet Secretary Thomas Jones, Griffith insisted ‘that on the question of free trade he himself was a free-trader, but that some of his Cabinet were protectionists, and that Clause 9 (Free Trade) of our [British] document reduces Ireland to a position of economic subordination.’ ⁶¹ Much to the frustration of Prime Minister Lloyd George, the Irish delegate Robert Barton turned up at one meeting to play the role of hard line protectionist against the foil of Griffith's ostensibly laissez-faire attitude. The Cabinet Secretary later noted that the prime minister asked him privately, ‘“Why did they bring that pip-squeak of a man Barton with them? I would not make him a private secretary to a Under-Secretary.” I suggested they had failed to cure him of his protectionist heresies and had brought him in to be faithfully dealt with by the P.M. He thought that not unlikely.’ ⁶²

Griffith may have cannily realised that while the British were unlikely to accept an Article in the Treaty explicitly permitting protectionism, winning the exclusion of a prohibition on protectionism such as the prohibition proposed by the British in Article 9 would leave a future Irish government free to restrict trade as it wished. To this end he might well offer reassurances that he generally favoured free trade.

In the event, Article 9 as originally proposed by the British was omitted from the final agreement for a treaty. This was a success for the Irish negotiators under Griffith. Instead, the final and agreed Article 9 consisted of a simpler and less constricting text, which read as follows:

The ports of Great Britain and the Irish Free State shall be freely open to the ships of the other country on payment of the customary port and other dues. ⁶³

Indeed, a state's ports might be open to foreign ships without this necessarily preventing that state's government from restricting trade. This was demonstrated in practice some years later when Kevin J. Kenny, who had once helped Griffith to produce his annual Sinn Féin year books, joined with Tom Laurie of Esso in Ireland, to bring an exhibition of Irish goods to New York – on board a ship ‘as they were not allowed to show the goods on shore’. The ship's owners placed a saloon at the disposal of Irish manufacturers for the display of many Irish goods while the ship was in New York harbour, and buyers for the big Manhattan department stores had to visit it there. ⁶⁴

To the very end of negotiations with the British in London, Griffith had pushed for economic freedom. The agreement for a Treaty was signed in London at 2.20 in the morning on 6 December 1921. The last few days were fairly chaotic, as has been described elsewhere. ⁶⁵

Griffith reported to de Valera that week that, before signing the agreement, he had told Lloyd George that ‘provided we came to agreement on other points, I would accept inclusion in the Empire on the basis of the Free State. After that they went on and gave way on Fiscal autonomy wholly, yielded more on defence and some minor matters.’ ⁶⁶ According to the economist Patrick Lynch, ‘Griffith had set great store by the advantage and importance of fiscal and financial independence; these the treaty offered.’ ⁶⁷

On 7 January 1922 Dáil Éireann approved the Treaty, as proposed by Griffith and by all the other Irish negotiating plenipotentiaries in London. This was against the wishes of Éamon de Valera, who immediately stepped down as its president. Griffith was elected in his place. That same month the New York Times carried on the front of one of its supplements a full-page picture of a seemingly confident Griffith, describing him boldly as ‘head of the Irish Free State’. ⁶⁸ He was to die just seven months later.

Conclusion

If some nationalists had exaggerated the extent to which political independence could determine economic outcomes, or overestimated the capacity of Ireland to be self-sufficient, future generations were to have little or no inclination to return their state to British overrule. Citizens of the present Republic of Ireland vote for parties that share the views of a recent author who concluded that ‘in the longer run the south benefited from independence’. ⁶⁹ If Ireland has not always used most wisely the fiscal autonomy won in 1921, its overall performance proved Griffith's approach far-sighted in demanding such freedom. Fitzgerald and Kenny believe that, while there have been ‘a number of notable economic policy failures’ since the foundation of the state, the independent state's management of Ireland's debt ‘has helped finance the different crises in a sustainable manner’. These economic historians conclude that the authorities managing the debt have learned from successive crises and that, with the exception of the crises in the 1980s and the recent financial crisis, ‘Ireland has been able to borrow at competitive rates’. ⁷⁰ Ó Gráda and O’Rourke commented during 2021, ‘The Irish economy is among the world's richest today, though perhaps not as rich as sometimes portrayed.’ ⁷¹

Griffith's collapse and death in August 1922 meant that he did not live to see the playing out of his aspirations for the economy of the independent Irish state on the world stage. And civil war pitched Ireland into economic self-harm, and into the kind of political division that Griffith–influenced by his memory of the Parnellite split– had always dreaded. Popular memory in Dublin has it that he died of a broken heart, and the memory of his death was an embarrassment to the survivors. He had been too socially and economically interventionist for Cumann na nGaedheal/Fine Gael, not verbally anti-partitionist enough for Fianna Fáil, too adverse to violence for more militant republican groups and too mainstream for Labour and parties further left. It has been said that in the 1920s, with some of the nationalist proponents of industrialisation such as Griffith dead, ‘better off farmers and professionals believed they would be worse off as a result of tariff policies’ and that when Fianna Fáil got into power ‘its advocacy of protectionism, unlike that of Griffith, was not directed towards the establishment of infant industries which would ultimately be expected to be competitive internationally.’ ⁷² During the first decade of independence the new government did not in fact embrace protectionism, ⁷³ albeit the Irish state later adopted a form of it before developing a more open approach to commerce and trade. The latter would involve welcoming foreign direct investment, a free trade agreement with Britain in 1965 and membership of the EEC/EU in 1972. It should not be assumed that the later protectionist policies were those envisaged by Griffith, or that later enthusiasm for membership of the European Union is equivalent to earlier acceptance of the forms of free trade embraced by the United Kingdom when all of Ireland was a member of it.

In calling for ‘the facts’ as early as 1901, ‘politics of no politics’ (above), Griffith asserted the primacy of an evidence-based approach to economic and social planning. He had not the benefit of the kind of analysis conducted much more recently by writers such as Bielenberg or Geary and Stark, for example. ⁷⁴ Yet, no matter the level of quantitative data available, interpretation remains a matter for considerable debate relative to the perspective of the writer and the spectrum of data invoked.

In reviewing the period between the foundation of Griffith's Sinn Féin movement in 1905 and the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922, it is worth considering Griffith's ideas and concerns in greater depth than has been the case. He left school early but became an influential editor of weekly advanced nationalist papers, in which he developed those ideas. They deserve to be understood in the context of their time and with reference to what if any were the ideas of his political associates such as de Valera on social and economic affairs. Griffith had had a long and sustained interest in economic matters, more so perhaps by far than that of any other senior republican at the time. He deserves greater acknowledgement and academic attention in that respect than he has hitherto received.

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