The organization which would become the political arm of the Irish Republican Army began as one of numerous nationalist pressure groups. The name means ‘Us’ or ‘Ourselves Alone’, a proclamation that the solution to Ireland’s predicament lay in the hands of its people and nobody else.
Sinn Fein was an amalgamation of groups founded by Arthur Griffith and Bulmer Hobson. In 1899 Griffith, a Dublin-born journalist, had founded the weekly United Irishman, which lambasted the Irish MPs at Westminster. The following year he established an organization called Cumann na nGaedhael (‘Tribe of the Gaels’), which was to be the principal ancestor of Sinn Fein, and merged it with the republican Dungannon Clubs, flourishing mainly in Ulster and organized by Hobson, a Belfast-born Quaker, who described them as ‘semi-literary, semi-political and patriotic’.
Griffith believed Fenian-style reliance on armed rebellion had failed and the effective tactic was passive resistance. This would involve a withdrawal from Westminster and the establishment of a national assembly in Ireland, refusing to pay British taxes, creating independent Irish courts and an Irish civil service, taking control of local authorities and boycotting British products. He wanted Ireland as part ....
