One hesitates to make generalisations about any nation’s political parties and Ireland provides more cause for hesitation than most.
Like most countries, there are parties with identifiable although often fluid leftishnesses and rightishnesses.
But this all comes with a complex backdrop. There is of course the initial difficulty of “what is Ireland?” Then – or perhaps irretrievably not yet then – there is Catholic/Protestant, North/South, all now with a touch of “part continental Europe and part Brexit”.
Sinn Féin is one of Ireland’s largest political parties. “Sinn Féin” means “We ourselves”. While it may seem tautological, this is Ireland and may be oxymoronic.
Sinn Féin’s first phase of the first person plural was from 1905 to 1970, its second since then. Fine Gael, or “Soldiers of Destiny” and Fianna Fáil or “the Irish Tribe” are the two other leading parties of today, results of the waning of the first phase.
To say that each of these parties is vitally concerned with ideas of the republic and the idea of a united Ireland is to state the obvious. But the obvious should not obscure the obscure.
The founding of Sinn Féin by Arthur Griffith is a case in point. Although much less remembered than Éamon de Valera or Michael Collins, he was an important figure in the vital first quarter of the 20th century, the years that formed the Ireland of today.
In 1903, Griffith and others including Maud Gonne, republican, suffragette and WB Yeats’s lover, founded the National Council. In 1904, Griffith published The Resurrection of Hungary. Forgotten now, its thesis was that Ireland could be Hungary, an independent nation doing independent things not by fiat from Vienna but for itself, all the time a full half of the Austria-Hungary dual monarchy.
It is easy for us to say that a dual monarchy would never have worked. Yet Griffith had some history on his side.
During Grattan’s Parliament, the period from 1782 until the Acts of Union of 1801, the Kingdom of Ireland was granted significant legislative and judicial independence, partly out of concern of American-like dissent.
Of the US dissent, it may also be noted that it had operated with some ambiguity. The nation’s first flag, the Grand Union flag, had the Union Jack as canton. Or more correctly the first Union Jack. St Patrick’s cross only came on with the aforesaid Acts of Union.
A United States with a Union Jack… so it is that Irish such as Griffith looked to a “united” Ireland with the possibility of a separate kingdom of Ireland while north Irish protestants such as Edward Carson looked to a continuing “union” with England called the “United” Kingdom.
When Griffith came to present his Hungarian policies to the first annual convention of the National Council, he was looking for an expression and another female friend, Mary Ellen Butler, suggested that his ideas were “the policy of Sinn Féin”. Butler was a distinguished Irish linguist and her suggestion is no surprise. Although the fact that she was also Edward Carson’s cousin has caused some Irish smiles down the ages.
Griffith made his proposals – duly called “The Sinn Féin Policy” – at the National Council convention on 28 November 1905. In true Irish spirit, the blandly-named council disappeared and the day is now regarded as the birth of Sinn Féin.
