YOUNG IRELAND, ARTHUR GRIFFITH, AND REPUBLICAN IDEOLOGY: THE QUESTION OF CONTINUITY* PATRICK MAUME We fell a-debating the old controversy, Young Ireland v. Old Ireland, Parnell holding largely with O’Connell, who had difficulties of which the selfconfident “young men” knew not, but appraising higher than any of the Young Irelanders Fintan Lalor, who alone had a workable plan, if there had been any railways then. . . . William O’Brien, 19261 this article explores neglected themes connected with the perception of continuity in the Irish separatist self-image. The apostolic succession from Theobald Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen to Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and the Young Ireland movement, which Patrick Pearse claimed in his 1915 pamphlet Ghosts for the rebellion in which he was about to engage, figured prominently in the later writings of such “synthetic” historians as P.S. O’Hegarty, Desmond Ryan, and Brian O’Higgins.2 Even when the cult of the Rising was challenged, first by post-Civil War conservative commentators and more recently in reaction against the 1956–62 IRA border campaign and the post-1969 Northern Ireland troubles, many critics implicitly accepted the original separatist view while inverting its YOUNG IRELAND, ARTHUR GRIFFITH, AND REPUBLICAN IDEOLOGY 155 * This essay was written during my tenure as a British Academy Fellow in the Department of Politics, Queen’s University of Belfast, and draws upon research for my book, The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Political Culture, 1891–1918 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1999). I thank Gary Owens for commissioning it and Brian Murphy and Paul Bew for helping me to develop my ideas on the subject. 1 William O’Brien, The Parnell of Real Life (London, 1926), 27. 2 I owe the term “synthetic historian” in this context to Professor Tom Dunne; for its original usage, see Eoin MacNeill, “The Irish Synthetic Historians,” in Celtic Ireland (Dublin, 1921). value judgments.3 They saw post-Parnellian separatist ideology as irrational purism living off traditions independent of contemporary circumstances , kept alive by a minority of dreamers and occasionally bursting forth to infect a susceptible general population. This image has recently been challenged by writers who link northern republicanism to the discontents of the Catholic ghettos and to the heavy-handed reactions of the British state apparatus.4 There is much to be said for this revision, but it leaves unanswered the question of where the perception of republican continuity originated. This article suggests that in its modern form the theme of republican continuity began with the efforts of post-Parnellian separatists to present themselves as the true heirs of pre-Parnellian nationalism—particularly that of Davis and Mitchel—and to exclude their parliamentarian rivals from any claim to the nationalist canon. This project was given plausibility by the political constraints of the union and the outward continuity of the Dublin Castle apparatus of government with that denounced by Young Ireland and the Fenians. After the downfall of that apparatus commentators whose intellectual formation occurred under the old regime maintained the theme of continuity. Only with the disappearance of this generation were Davis and Mitchel finally transformed from guides in contemporary politics to shadowy figures in the nationalist pantheon. In a final ironic twist present-day republicans have reacted to their surroundings by developing theories of active citizenship similar to those of their Edwardian predecessors. In so doing, they have remained largely unconscious of their resemblance to their unionist opponents who, in perceiving themselves as heirs to the nineteenth-century Presbyterian/Liberal tradition, have eclipsed the origins of many of their attitudes in nineteenth -century Anglican Toryism. I The nationalist conflation of the history of Ireland with the history of the nationalist movement obscures the extent to which nationalist theorists YOUNG IRELAND, ARTHUR GRIFFITH, AND REPUBLICAN IDEOLOGY 156 3 See, for example, Sir James O’Connor, History of Ireland, 1798–1924, 2 vols. (London, 1925); Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices (Dublin, 1994); Padraig O’Malley, Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair (Belfast, 1990); A.T.Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: Aspects of Ulster, 1609–1969 (London, 1977). For a critique of the cultural-determinist view, see John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary...