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SINN FEIN
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
THE INDESTRUCTIBLE NATION: A Survey of Irish History from the Invasion.
The First Phase: The Overthrow of the Clans.
JOHN MITCHEL: An Appreciation. With some Account of Young Ireland.
_IN PREPARATION:_
ULSTER: A Brief Statement of Fact.
SINN FEIN
AN ILLUMINATION
By P. S. O'HEGARTY
MAUNSEL & CO., LTD.,
DUBLIN AND LONDON
1919
[Gaelic: Do Liaimin Beag Dub,
i gcuimne ar gceud casad le ceile]
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 "Cumann 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
reconstitute 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.
CONTENTS
(_As Passed by Censor._)
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE POLICY OF PEACEFUL PENETRATION IN IRELAND 1
II. THE TURNING POINT 6
III. THE GENESIS OF THE SINN FEIN MOVEMENT 13
IV. THE SINN FEIN POLICY 19
V. ARTHUR GRIFFITH--THE TRUTH 28
VI. THE SINN FEIN MOVEMENT--1905 TO 1913 34
VII. THE IRISH VOLUNTEERS 41
VIII. SINN FEIN 49
NOTE.--The first seven chapters were written in October, 1917, and passed
for publication in November, 1918. Chapter viii represents a
re-arrangement of such portions of the last three chapters of the original
manuscript as it is permissible to publish at the present time.
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
extinguishing 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 classes, which towards the end of the eighteenth
century had come dangerously near to making common cause with the Nation,
had shifted 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 mass 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-emancipated 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 classes 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
constitution 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 "emancipation" 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 space and time--all these
combined to throw English civilisation with an impetus on our shores. 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. Assimilation 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 assimilated 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.