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  • The Enigma of Arthur Griffith: "Father of Us All," by Colum Kenny
  • Greg Winston (bio)
THE ENIGMA OF ARTHUR GRIFFITH: "FATHER OF US ALL," by Colum Kenny. Dublin: Merrion Press, 2020. 323 pp. $29.99.

In October 1921, Arthur Griffith was part of the delegation sent to London for treaty talks that ended years of war and proclaimed self-governance in an Irish Free State; yet, stipulations of a loyalty to the Crown and dominion status were non-starters to many back in Dublin, including Dáil Éireann President Éamon de Valera. He had remained at a distance, appointing Griffith, Michael Collins, and four others as plenipotentiaries to negotiate and sign the Treaty, which they finally did on 6 December 1921. It still required ratification by simple majority in the Dáil. Griffith and his co-delegates considered the result an incremental step towards independence, while de Valera and his followers believed it to be an unacceptable concession, because Ireland would still be subject to the British king and Empire. The narrow (64-57) ratification vote on 7 January 1922 in a divided Dáil led to de Valera's resignation two days later. Griffith, who had yielded the presidency to de Valera in 1919, was elected as his successor, and, along with Collins and others on the pro-Treaty side, suddenly found himself squared off against de Valera and other longtime comrades.

By April, anti-Treaty forces took over the Four Courts in Dublin, and by June the Civil War had begun to spread throughout Ireland. The rapid turn of events had as adverse an effect on Griffith as it had on the nation. He threw himself so completely into the work that by early summer he suffered from a combination of psychological exhaustion and physical maladies. His doctor, Oliver St. John Gogarty, prescribed bed rest, but Griffith insisted on returning to work where, on 12 August, he succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage and heart failure. He was just fifty-one.

A few months later, James Stephens published a brief biography of Griffith, in which he referred to his subject in the closing pages as "an enigma,"1 presumably "mysterious or difficult to understand" (1). It was an apt label for a figure who inspired both sympathy and controversy in the divided Ireland of 1922. No matter one's political leaning, "enigma" suggested something of Griffith's inscrutable rationale, especially with regard to the Treaty. If detractors wondered how such a tireless figure in the independence movement could so easily give up the shop and agree to terms that left Ireland no better off than before six years of armed struggle, supporters must have found it increasingly difficult, amid the growing propaganda and polarization of civil war, to recall Griffith's nuanced, gradualist reasons for accepting those terms.

In the longer view, Stephens's equivocal descriptor posed a challenge to historians to decipher the complexity of Griffith's role in the [End Page 565] new state. At first, there were not many takers. In de Valera's Ireland, he was at best neglected, at worst, deliberately "airbrushed from history."2 There would not be a substantial biography of him for nearly four decades until a 1959 study by Padraic Colum.3 After that, it was only in the 1970s and 1980s with a revisionist wave of historical scholarship that additional studies began to reconsider Griffith.4

Colum Kenny joins in this reassessment with The Enigma of Arthur Griffith: "Father of Us All." The title and opening words echo Stephens's metaphor, setting about the task of solving the puzzle of Griffith's life and legacy. Sometimes the answers reside more with others than with Griffith himself. For example, when relating the divisive consequences of the Treaty, Kenny suggests that if de Valera had made himself leader of the delegation he "would have had to take ownership of those talks in a way he never did" (96). This rings with the fascinating accusation of ulterior political motive: had de Valera deliberately arranged to keep himself out of the fray, leaving Griffith responsible? From the start, the Irish delegation had little leverage, being far from home and with the...

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