From Sinn Féin, September 6, 1913. Written under the pen-name Lasairfhíona, which is credited as Griffith by Pádraig Yeates’s Lockout Dublin 1913.
The present scenes of riot and bloodshed in Dublin are very terrible not only in themselves, but as indications of trouble ahead. The world is changing rapidly, and what is euphemistically termed ‘labour unrest’ is a startling feature in most countries to-day. We need not hope to escape it in Ireland, nor, in so far as it is just and right, should we wish to. Rather, it should be our aim to build the nation on the most solid foundation we can lay, to leave as few undressed grievances within our boundaries as possible. With luxury and extravagance flaunting themselves on all sides, there are unplumbed depths of misery and sordid grinding poverty in every fetid court and alley in Dublin and other Irish cities, want and disease in every crumbling tenement. Smouldering discontent and a sullen sense of enduring wrong, shared by a large section of the population, do not make for social stability and progress. On the contrary, it is one of the greatest menaces, not alone to the present social structure (which would be no great harm, for evil, in its origin, an exotic growth in Ireland, it has not justified itself by its results), but to the continuity of the historic Irish nation.
Anglicisation has spread like a canker in our cities, within the memory of many comparatively young people. The richer folk have long been un-Irish in their sympathies and outlook, but the poorer people and the middle class, until quite recently, were distinctively Irish in most things. The middle classes are still not too far gone on the road to denationalisation, at least Gaelic Leaguers, Sinn Féiners, and Irish Irelanders, generally leaven the mass, but the people who were the backbone of all national movements in the past, from ’98 to Parnell’s days, have steadily kept out of ours, and are devoting any energies which are left in them to improving their own status. They fought for the nation, and asked no reward; they fought for the farmers and got none. One must not blame them, whose condition is worse than that of serfs, for striving for the elementary right to live according to some decent standard of existence. If we cannot secure it for them, we at least need not alienate them, and throw them into the arms of England.
It seems to me that if we do not evolve a national policy designed to give the working classes (almost a term of reproach if not of contempt in these days) justice and fair play, as far as we can secure them for them in their own country, we must be prepared to see the people throw in their lot with the English Labour Party, who, at least give them smooth words and specious promises. While the majority of the Irish people of the classes above the poverty line have nothing but hatred and contempt to pour out upon them if they venture to rebel against the conditions imposed by England, certainly, but acquiesced in and abetted by Irish men and women.
The right of working people to form any kind of a Trades Union which seems good to them, appears to me to be beyond question. The parallel right of public meeting and free speech is denied at the ukase of a glorified policeman, and the ordinary rank and file of Bashi-bazouks over-run our capital, and baton inoffensive men, women, and children, to the point of murder, and the chief protest comes only from labour leaders. We are all assailed when such things can occur, and all the national-minded elements in the country, should resent them unitedly. All Ireland that mattered was at the people’s side in the Land War. I fear we are at another crisis in our history to-day, and that the fight under different conditions is still the same. If we do not give countenance and support to the people’s claim to live in Ireland, they will be flung into the ranks of the enemy for good and all, and another stage on the road to absorption by England will have been passed.
The title of ‘the people’ is not to be usurped by any one class or section of a class in Ireland—it is the common property of all sections and classes, and any section of class which attempts to prohibit free speech and liberty of the Press to the remainder of the population assails the right of the whole nation. We have seen in the last few weeks an attempt on the part of one section of the population to destroy liberty of the Press in Ireland by the same means that Dublin Castle uses—terrorism.
Between the terrorist with the baton and the terrorist with the bludgeon, the faint conception of personal freedom and manhood is being bashed out of a section of the population of Dublin to the accompaniment of much hypocritical and inane talk about liberty, progress, and order. Those who desire the country to be speedily Anglicised and to merge its own individuality in that of England have had an admirable object-lesson in the last week or so of what that means. The cast-off clothes of the Continent come to England, and when she has worn them until they are threadbare, they are sold to Ireland at the price of a new suit. That is what the Anglicisation of Ireland must always mean. The labour problems of Ireland are not to be solved, but to be aggravated, by swallowing English quack remedies. They are to be solved through a study of the conditions in countries near akin to ourselves—countries such as Denmark, Norway, Roumania, and even Servia. That a world with ideas exists outside England and America, and that such problems as ours have been present to that world and dealt with by it is one of the facts that our Anglicisation renders us incapable of realising. It is the right of every Irishman willing to work to be secured a fair living in his own country. That he can never secure while his country is exploited and governed in the interest of England, and so long as any section of Irishmen can be led to think that earthquake pills are the cure for all ills, and that there is no colourable difference between the green flag of Irish Nationalism and the red banner of English Socialism, so long will such a section of Irishmen be catspaws of England.