Sinn Fein Part 1

Sinn Fein.

by P. S. O'Hegarty.

FOREWORD

I was a member of the "National Council" formed in 1902 by Mr. Arthur Griffith on the occasion of the visit of the late Queen Victoria, and of the Executives of "c.u.mann na nGaedheal," the "Dungannon Clubs," and the "Sinn Fein League," by the fusion of which the old "Sinn Fein"

organisation was formed. I was a member of the Sinn Fein Executive until 1911, and from 1903 to the present time I have been closely connected with every Irish movement of what I might call the Language Revival current.

This book is therefore, so far as the matters of fact referred to therein are concerned, a book based upon personal knowledge.

My object in writing it has not been to give a history of Sinn Fein, but to give an account of its historical evolution, to place it in relation to the antecedent history of Ireland, above all to show it in its true light as an attempt, inspired by the Language revival, to place Ireland in touch with the historic Irish Nation which went down in the seventeenth century under the Penal Laws and was forced, when it emerged in the nineteenth, to reconst.i.tute itself on the framework which had been provided for the artificial State which had been superimposed on the Irish State with the Penal Laws. The quarrel between Sinn Fein and the Irish Parliamentary Party is really the quarrel between the historic Irish Nation and the artificial English garrison State; the quarrel between de-Anglicisation and Anglicisation.

The scope of the book precluded any detail in regard to the evolution of events since 1916, as it precluded any mention of individuals, save Mr.

Arthur Griffith, who is the Hamlet of the piece.

CHAPTER I

THE POLICY OF PEACEFUL PENETRATION IN IRELAND

When Pitt and Castlereagh forced through the Act of Union, they forged a weapon with the potentiality of utterly subjecting the Irish nation, of extinguis.h.i.+ng wholly its civilisation, its name, and its memory; for they made possible that policy of peaceful penetration which in less than a century brought Ireland lower than she had been brought by five centuries of war and one century of almost incredibly severe penal legislation. In the history of the connexion between England and Ireland the vital dates are 1691, 1800, and 1893: in 1691 Ireland lay for the first time unarmed under the heel of the invader; in 1800 began the peaceful penetration of Irish civilisation by English civilisation; and in 1893 by the foundation of the Gaelic League Ireland turned once more to her own culture and her own past, alive to her separateness, her distinctiveness, alive also to her danger.

The defences of a nation against annihilation are two, physical and spiritual. Until 1691 Ireland retained and used both, and not even Cromwell was able to deprive her of her fighting men and their arms. But when Sarsfield signed the Treaty of Limerick in 1691 and carried the bulk of the fighting men out of Ireland, and when those remaining in Ireland suffered themselves to be disarmed, Ireland was left to rely upon spiritual defence only--upon language, culture, and memory. And these sufficed. Not even the Penal Laws could penetrate them, and behind the sure rampart of the language the Irish people, without leaders and notwithstanding the Penal Laws, re-knit their social order and peacefully penetrated the Garrison, so that at the end of the century they emerged from the ruins of the Penal Laws a Nation in bondage but still a Nation, with the language, culture, traditions and hopes of a Nation, and with the single will of a Nation.

Up to that time there had been nothing to turn their attention out of Ireland, and all their hopes of action, political or otherwise, naturally centred within Ireland. They had had little cause to love the Dublin Parliament of the eighteenth century, in which they had neither representation nor franchise, but they had had no cause whatever to be hopefully conscious of the existence of the London Parliament. The Penal Legislation inevitably threw them back on themselves, preserved their language, culture, and traditions, preserved their national continuity.

And as the century wore on the more conscious and strengthened Irish Nation swayed the Garrison into something which, in time, would have developed into complete nationalism and fusion.

By changing the seat of government from Dublin to London, the Act of Union not alone killed the incipient Nationalism of the Garrison, but it, in time, totally alienated them from the Nation, by attaching them to English Parties, English ways, and making their centre London, and not Dublin. The landed proprietors and aristocracy followed the seat of government, and London became their capital also. So that, early in the nineteenth century, the Garrison cla.s.ses, which towards the end of the eighteenth century had come dangerously near to making common cause with the Nation, had s.h.i.+fted their political and social centre to London, and became a strength to England and a weakness to Ireland.

At the same tame the relaxation, and eventual abolition, of the Penal Laws manoeuvred the ma.s.s of the Irish People also Londonwards. English was the language of the courts, of the professions, of commerce, the language of preferment, and the newly-emanc.i.p.ated people embraced English with a rush, and with English there came a dimming of their national consciousness, a peaceful penetration of Irish culture by English culture in every particular. The middle and upper cla.s.ses were the first to be caught by it, but every influence in the country favoured it, all the popular political movements being carried on in English, and having the London Parliament as their field of operations. O'Connell, who was a native speaker of Irish, but one without any reasoned consciousness of nationality, refused to speak anything but English, the newspapers printed nothing but English, the Repeal Movement and the Young Ireland Movement, both appealing to a people which was still seventy per cent. Irish speaking, used nothing but English, and the National Schools, also using nothing but English, imposed English culture from the first on the children and set the feet of the Nation more and more steadily Londonwards.

The English attack upon Ireland had begun with the most obvious and the most easily disturbed portions of the National machinery, and then, as it developed strength, it struck at other portions. It began by obstructing, and continued obstruction eventually annihilated, the then dawning political unity of Ireland as exemplified in the growing power of the Ard-Ri, and even when its own strength was weakest it managed to upset all subsequent attempts at Irish unity. It went from that to the development of an actual grip over the whole soil of Ireland, which it got in 1691, and ensured by the planting of a resident Garrison, not military only, but social also, and the placing of all place and power under the Garrison const.i.tution in their hands. It followed that by the Penal Laws, which were an attempt to crush a whole people out, to degrade them bodily and mentally, so that they would ever afterwards be negligible. And when that failed, because of the spiritual resources of the people, it attacked those resources. The granting of the franchise to the Irish gave them an interest, even the interest of a spectator, in Parliamentary elections and happenings: the removal of that Parliament to London did not abate that interest: O'Connell's proceedings intensified it: the "emanc.i.p.ation" of 1829, by conceding representation in the London Parliament, and doing so after a struggle and in the guise of an Irish victory, set the people's imagination fatally outside their own country, and every other movement of the century, save the Young Ireland and Fenian Movements, was just an additional chain binding the Irish imagination to London. At the same time there flowed over from England the English language, and English culture, habits, customs, dress, prejudices, newspapers. And transit developments, telegraph and telephone developments, trust developments--the whole modern development of machinery to render nugatory s.p.a.ce and time--all these combined to throw English civilisation with an impetus on our sh.o.r.es. And right through the century it attacked, with ever increasing success and vehemence, every artery of National life.

And so the nineteenth century, which on the surface saw the development of an Ireland intensely conscious of its nationality, merely saw an Ireland intensely conscious of one manifestation of it, and that the least essential, and increasingly unconscious of the realities of nationality.

While Ireland, as the century wore on, grew more vocal about political freedom, all the essentials of its nationality--language, culture, memory--faded away into the highlands and islands of Kerry and Donegal and the bare West Coast. a.s.similation proceeded apace, London was as near as Dublin, and the end of the century saw the popular Political Party merely the tail of an English Party. In the islands and bleak places of the bare West Coast the remnants of the Irish-speaking Nation still kept their language and their memory, and lived a life apart, but away towards the East there was only a people who were rapidly being a.s.similated by England, unconsciously but none the less certainly. One century of peaceful penetration had done more to blot out the Nation than five centuries of war and one century of incredible Penal Legislation.

CHAPTER II

THE TURNING POINT

It is not easy to say whether the policy of peaceful penetration which was pursued in Ireland in the nineteenth century was planned beforehand, whether Pitt actually carried the Union with a comprehensive a.s.similating policy in his mind. The probabilities are against that, and in favour of the supposition that, the one vital step of the Union having been taken, the rest of the policy followed inevitably. At any rate, once it did get going, its operations continued and developed logically and methodically, with ever-increasing ramifications, until it had the whole of Ireland in a strangle grip, a grip mental as well as physical. And while the political fervour of the people, under Parnell, seemed to be most strongly and determinedly pro-Irish, yet in reality they were becoming less and less Irish with every year. Silently but relentlessly English culture flowed in and attacked every artery of Ireland's national life.

Up to the Sinn Fein Movement Irish Patriotic Movements have all been specialist rather than comprehensive. They aimed at political freedom, or they aimed at the control of the land, or they had some definite one object which at the time stood for everything, and often they mistook the one thing for the whole. Their non-comprehensiveness has been made a reproach to them in certain Nationalist speculations of recent years, but this cannot with justice be done. The first thing which Ireland lost was her political independence and naturally it was the thing she then tried to recover. She had not lost her language, or her culture, or her memory, and naturally she could only frame a movement for the recovery of what she had actually lost. In the eighteenth century, which in some ways was the darkest, she was yet much more of a Nation than ever she was in the nineteenth; for, even though her thoughts in that century were directed to the bare hope of keeping herself alive, of not starving and not becoming a herd of illiterates and degenerates, even then her full National consciousness went on, _en rapport_ with her past and undisturbed in the broad sense by the froth and fustian of the Garrison persecutions: and at the end of the century she had lost nothing but her political independence and her owners.h.i.+p of the land. The nineteenth century, therefore, saw her devoted to the recovery of these two things, of the loss of which she was conscious; and the closing years of the century, which brought her the perception of the loss of other things, of language and all that goes with it, brought with them for the first time the possibility of a comprehensive movement for the recovery of everything lost, for an attack upon the dominant civilisation at every point of contact. And the twentieth century brought the movement itself in the Sinn Fein movement.

There were throughout the nineteenth century various short and ineffective attempts at a revival of Irish industries, but the first evidence of a sense of spiritual loss was the successful attempt in the eighties at a revival and strengthening of Irish games and athletics, which resulted in the removal of English games and athletics from the dominant position and their gradual decline to their proper position as the games of a Garrison.

But the turning point of all modern Irish development was the foundation of the Gaelic League in 1893. That definitely and irrevocably, insignificant though it seemed at the time and for a long time, arrested the a.s.similating process, provided a last fortification, as it were, behind which the still una.s.similated forces of the Nation gathered strength, and unity, and courage, and turned the mind of Ireland away from everything foreign and inward towards herself and her own concerns. There had always been in Ireland Archaeological a.s.sociations and learned persons who studied Irish as a dead language, and there actually was in existence at the time the present "Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language": but the Gaelic League was a League of common men and women who took up Irish not for antiquarian or academical reasons, but because it was the national language of Ireland, and because they were convinced that Ireland would be irrevocably lost if she lost it. They were seers and enthusiasts, not archaeologists, and in twenty years they had all Ireland, all Nationalist Ireland at any rate, behind their banner.

It would be difficult to over-emphasise the influence which the Gaelic League has had upon Ireland. It may be said with absolute truth that it stemmed the onflowing tide of a.s.similation to English civilisation, and not alone stemmed it but turned it back. Its fight for the Irish language reacted upon everything else in Ireland, set up influences, currents, out of nowhere, which fought firmly for this or that Irish characteristic, dinned into the ears of the people everywhere an insistence upon things Irish as apart from things foreign. And it gave the first great example of the support of a thing because it is Irish. The Gaelic Leaguer had, and has, many weapons in his armoury, and the reasons for the revival of Irish are many. But although in case of necessity he is prepared to justify the revival upon utilitarian grounds, upon philological grounds, and upon historical grounds, the chief weapon in his armoury is a sentimental one, being "[Gaelic: ar dteanga fein]"--Our own language. That is the battle-cry which has appealed irresistibly to the man in the street, and the principle behind it, first enunciated as a fighting principle by the Gaelic League, has come to be applied to all Irish questions and practically to mould the thoughts of the present generation.

The foundation of the Gaelic League has been attributed to the _debacle_ which had just then overwhelmed the Parliamentarian Movement, but the two things had no connexion. The young men who founded the Gaelic League, and who did the desperate work of its early years, were men whose interests were intellectual rather than political, and who neither had, nor were likely to have, any intimate connexion with any political movement such as the then Parliamentarian Movement. The origin of the Gaelic League goes farther back, back to the early days of the century when the Nation began to lose the language. Once the people began to shed their own language a movement for its recovery was inevitable if the Nation was not to be wholly annihilated; and as in other things a perception of loss rarely arises until a thing is either lost or well on the way to it, so in this case a perception of the meaning of the loss of the language did not come until the language was almost lost. But it did come. And to a few young men it was given to see that Ireland might gain riches, gain empire, gain everything, but that if she lost her language she lost her soul. And they raised their battle-cry accordingly, and led their Nation out of the bog of Anglicisation, took the people's eyes from the ends of the earth and turned them towards the West, where their language still lived and their national life kept its continuity.

The Gaelic League was not, is not, a mere movement for the revival of a language. Literally it is that, but philosophically it is a movement for the revival of a Nation. Resurrecting, as it did, the chief essential to Nationality, it inevitably resurrected also the subsidiary ones. Its const.i.tution debars it from taking any part in politics, and it holds within its ranks men and women of all parties, but no const.i.tution can prevent the leaven of the language working on the individual to its fullest extent once it gets into him. And the language brought with it old ideas, old values, old traditions. There is in the very sound of Irish music a quality which wipes out at once the whole of the nineteenth century and brings one face to face with the days when Ireland had an individuality and a proud civilisation: the roots of the language are away back in the very golden age of Irish civilisation; and the enthusiast who began with the language has been irresistibly impelled to a quest which embraces many things besides, industries, games, government--everything which concerns a Nation.

Since its inception the Gaelic League has influenced, in one way or another, the best of the young men and women of Ireland. It has set them thinking, with the language firm in them. And it has led them irresistibly to disregard altogether the whole current of Irish evolution since 1800, to realise that when Ireland began to lose her language she began to lose her Nationality, and to send them back to take up the broken thread of Irish civilisation where the English onrush broke it, and rebuild it.

That force has worked just as all-embracingly as the English aggressive onrush of the nineteenth century worked. It has neglected nothing. And while the older politicians went on in their well-worn grooves, uneasy at the apathy of the young people towards them, but ignorantly content so long as they were undisturbed, the leaven of the Gaelic League self-reliance principle was undermining their political foundations, in common with all other foundations in Ireland which were the result of a b.a.s.t.a.r.d connexion with any of the manifestations of English civilisation in Ireland. That is also the secret of the Irish Literary Movement in English. It gets its inspiration from Irish tradition, Irish convention, Irish speech, and even though it expresses itself in English it is an English which is half Irish. Its whole spirit is the spirit of an Ireland which is looking back to Eoghan Ruadh and Keating rather than forward to a development of the perfectly reputable, perfectly colourless, and perfectly uninspiring work of, say, Mr. Edward Dowden. That work is the work of a mind perfectly a.s.similated to English civilisation, and it has no future save absorption. The Gaelic League leaven has driven it home to the people of Ireland that any similar work or effort in any sphere has no future save absorption, and it has sent them, in everything, in literature, politics, economics, back to their native culture and its traditions.

CHAPTER III

THE GENESIS OF THE SINN FEIN MOVEMENT

It may be a.s.serted with truth that the youth of Ireland, in every generation, are by instinct Separatist, that "their dream is of the swift sword-thrust," and that therefore in every generation there is the full material for a Separatist Movement. The question, then, of the adhesion of any given generation to a Separatist Movement resolves itself practically into the question of the formation, at the right time, of a Separatist Movement _with an open policy_; and practically any generation of Irishmen is liable to be drawn from a moderate movement to a Separatist Movement if the Separatists should develop a sufficiently attractive and workable open policy. But, in the absence of that, or in the presence of a more workable or attractive moderate policy, the ma.s.s of the people are more liable to be deflected to the moderate policy and to leave Separatist principles to the minority who will not compromise and who will carry on a secret movement in default of an open one. That minority always exists, and the key to Irish political history in the years since Fenianism may be found in the fact that Fenianism has never died out of Ireland since its foundation in 1858 by James Stephens and Thomas Clarke Luby, and that the Separatist Minority had always worked through it. Given a suitable open policy, that minority may become a majority at any time.

Now a Separatist Movement may have a choice of open policies, but it can have only one kind of secret policy, viz., a policy of arming and insurrection. And that is why insurrectionary movements which failed at an attempted insurrection and had no open policy to fall back upon have invariably been succeeded by moderate movements. Emmet was followed by O'Connell, Young Ireland by the Tenant Right Parliamentarian Movement, Fenianism by Parnell.

Fenianism held the field, as a partly secret and partly open movement, although it had no open policy, for many years after '67, because there was no moderate policy either workable or attractive put forward. But when Parnell developed his machine of Opposition in Parliament and Organisation outside Parliament, and demonstrated that that policy, at any rate, held some possibility of wresting material concessions from England, there was a great landslide from the Separatist Movement, which finally went underground and became again a Separatist minority working in secret. With the death of Parnell died all chance of the policy of Parliamentarianism achieving anything for Ireland, but his fighting personality and record cast a glamour over the Nation for many a year after his death and secured to his successors something of his authority if, unfortunately, it could not secure to them his courage or his ability.

The Separatists, however, were reviving, and gradually the younger generation came into play. The Gaelic League had turned men's thoughts towards the old independent Ireland when the language and with it native culture were secure, and that spirit when it sought political expression naturally found it in Separatist form, and as naturally in literary form.

So that there came a Separatist revival, largely in literary form, and Literary Societies were established in Dublin, Cork and Belfast which preached Separation and which fell back upon the propaganda methods of the Young Irelanders--ballad, lecture, history, with the significant addition of the language. The movement was to some extent drawn together by the publication (January, 1896, to March, 1899) at Belfast of the "Shan Van Vocht," a monthly journal projected and edited by Miss Alice Milligan, which printed both literary and political matter, but in form was preponderatingly literary, printed notes of the doings of the various clubs and societies, and in general kept the scattered outposts of the movement in touch with one another. The celebration throughout Ireland of the centenary of '98 gave further impetus to the growing Separatist sentiment, and when, in 1899, some of the Dublin Separatists established "The United Irishman," with Mr. Arthur Griffith as editor, the modern Separatist Movement was definitely on its feet.

The influence of the "United Irishman" in accelerating the development of the movement and in drawing it together was immediate. Its chief writers were William Rooney, whose character and whose work were akin to those of Thomas Davis, with again the significant addition that he knew Irish fluently, but of course far behind him in ability, and Mr. Griffith, who brought to the paper a clear, logical, virile and convincing style which is the best that has come out of Ireland since John Mitchel. The paper gave the movement expression, acted, so to speak, both as secretary and organiser, and was very soon in touch with every club and every convinced Separatist in Ireland, holding them together, encouraging them, increasing them. Clubs grew, and were gathered together in convention and formed into an organisation, "c.u.mann na nGaedheal," which took up organisation work vigorously, and which, though at the outset in 1902 it had the misfortune to lose William Rooney, who was its chief inspiration, yet made progress.

Separatists grew more confident, more informed, and more numerous.

The propaganda of c.u.mann na nGaedheal consisted of the Irish language, history study, Irish industries, and self reliance generally, with a pious expression of opinion that everybody ought to have arms. Arming was, however, no portion of its policy, nor had it any public policy in the nature of a platform policy. It was, practically speaking, an educational movement, on the same lines as the Gaelic League, save with a definite political basis, and was carried on on identical lines--cla.s.ses (language and history), lectures, national concerts, and celebrations of national anniversaries. As such, its influence was limited, and the great majority of the people, who will not go to cla.s.ses or lectures and are reachable only through some public platform and platform policy, were quite untouched by it. Its members were practically wholly young men and young women with a studious or intellectual bent, and although the "United Irishman" was a very severe and very pungent critic of the Irish Parliamentary Party, yet "c.u.mann na nGaedheal" and the Party never crossed swords, because their spheres of action were so widely different that they had no point of contact. Neither set of followers was reachable by the other propaganda.

Although, however, they had no direct point of contact, the Parliamentarian movement began to be conscious of the growing Separatist movement. Its Press sparred a little with the "United Irishman," and individual members occasionally met and argued. At that time neither the Parliamentary Party nor its Press had developed any open Imperialism: and while in conversation Parliamentarians generally admitted that the Parliamentarian policy was a compromise and indefensible as such, they vigorously defended it on the ground that it was the only alternative to insurrection, which was impracticable: and Separatists, while maintaining that insurrection was the natural and inevitable culmination of any national policy, and that all plans and preparations should have it in view as the ultimate plan, yet could not well contest the argument that in the then state of the country insurrection was impracticable. After a couple of years of intensive educational work, therefore, there sprang up in the rank and file a demand for the framing of a public policy which should preserve principles and yet be a workable alternative to the Parliamentarian policy. And that policy was produced by Mr. Arthur Griffith. He had made, in the "United Irishman," constant references to the policy by which Hungary had won her freedom from Austria, had constantly recommended the Parliamentarians--who at the time, be it remembered, defended their policy only on the ground that there was no alternative but insurrection--to adopt a similar policy for Ireland. For a long time he and his friends did not wish to initiate any such policy for Ireland, holding that it was a policy to be initiated and carried on by moderate men rather than by extreme men, but one in which all extreme men might without any sacrifice of principle join. In the first six months of 1904, however, he wrote in the "United Irishman" a series of articles ent.i.tled the "Resurrection of Hungary," in which the history of Hungary's struggle with and victory over Austria is told with the closest possible a.n.a.logy to the affairs of Ireland, and containing a final chapter showing how a similar policy, applied to Ireland, could be made equally successful. These articles were republished as a pamphlet and had a wide circulation, with the result that a demand went up from the readers of the "United Irishman" that the "Hungarian Policy," as it was then called, should be adopted as the alternative to armed insurrection and should be propagated against Parliamentarianism. And, after some manoeuvring, that was done, and all public Separatist organisations were fused together in one organisation called "Sinn Fein," governed by an executive called the "National Council," with its policy as the "Sinn Fein Policy," as the "Hungarian Policy" had now been renamed.

CHAPTER IV

THE SINN FEIN POLICY

"The policy of Sinn Fein purposes to bring Ireland out of the corner and make her a.s.sert her existence to the world. I have spoken of an essential; but the basis of the policy is national self-reliance. No law and no series of laws can make a Nation out of a People which distrusts itself."--ARTHUR GRIFFITH (1906).