The Enigma of Arthur Griffith: 'Father of Us All' by Colum Kenny (review)

Abstract

Reviews The Enigma of Arthur Griffith: ‘Father of Us All’, Colum Kenny (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Merrion Press, 2020), 323 pages. Just inside the entrance to Leinster House hang imposing portraits of seminal figures from the history of Ireland’s long and often bitter struggle for freedom from the cosh of British imperialism and the baleful consequences of colonisation. It is not necessary to be a history buff to quickly recognise the names and faces of Robert Emmett, W T Cosgrave or Michael Collins, but the face of Arthur Griffith is more likely than not to provoke a vaguer response. Yet Griffith is the man whom Collins insisted was the ‘Father of us all’, a glowing accolade from a credible source and one that makes its way into the subtitle of Colum Kenny’s fascinating biography of Griffith. Not yet a century dead, after a life lived right at the heart of the maelstrom of the events leading to partition and the foundation of ‘the Free State’, and indeed often in the driving seat, it seems odd that Griffith’s memory has faded so quickly while other names have found a fixed, if disputed, place in the firmament of founding heroes. If this book is about anything it is about the placing of Griffith high in that firmament. The main title of the book, The Enigma of Arthur Griffith, suggests that perhaps the answer to public disregard of Griffith lies in Griffith himself. Was he an enigmatic person, mysterious and difficult to comprehend? As Kenny unfolds the Griffith narrative, it becomes clear that the real enigma is not Griffith at all but the fact of his consignment to the margins of memory. Certainly, by the end of this meticulously researched biography Griffith himself is no enigma. Rather, his life and times, his context, persona, principles and perceptions are laid bare. Stripped away, too, are layers of misunderstanding, clouded judgement, skewed analysis and misrepresentation which have done Griffith’s memory no favours. By the end, it is possible to see that Collins’s powerful accolade was laid on deserving shoulders. Griffith lived in times of political high drama, his life an endless swirl of associations and friendships with the entire cast of legendary names that brought Ireland out of the doldrums and on the pathway to the modern world. He took no active part in the Rising, but he was no mere spectator. A man of action and ideas, who drove the debate, his writings, his ideas and principles, are both warp and weft in the rough fabric of that watershed time in Irish history. He was the Studies • volume 109 • number 434 237 Summer 2020: Book Reviews founder of Sinn Féin, President of Dáil Éireann and, crucially, chairman of the team which negotiated the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. He was destined to be the man who carried the blame for partition in many eyes but, as Colum Kenny points out early on, the Northern Ireland Parliament was already up and running when the Treaty negotiations commenced. I sometimes walk past the house in which Griffith and his wife and children lived in Clontarf, and which remembers him in a simple plaque at the front door. It reads: ‘From 1911 until his death in 1922 this was the home of Arthur Griffith, Patriot and Statesman. His Monument. An Ireland Free’. Left to his own devices, it is unlikely he would ever have owned his own home, for the workaholic artisan printer turned writer, editor, polemicist, politician, did not know the meaning of rest or personal reward when it came to promoting the cause of Irish freedom. He was one of Dublin’s poor who, by his own innate curiosity and genius, made of himself a self-educated intellectual who could hold his own and shine in any company in the arts, music, politics and the pub. He never earned enough to buy the house in Clontarf. Instead, his friends and supporters took up a collection after he married and bought the house for him. The list of contributors tells its own story of how highly he was regarded. Look at some of the names among the two hundred and fifty...