Shock death of Arthur Griffith from brain haemorrhage
Dublin, 14 August 1922 – The founder of Sinn Féin and President of Dáil Éireann, Arthur Griffith, has died. Griffith suffered a cerebral haemorrhage while tying his shoelace on 12 August and died a short time later.
The news was announced in a statement from the Irish government which declared Mr Griffith’s death to be a ‘great and irreparable loss’ to the nation. At the same time, the government committed to carrying on his life’s work.
A medical statement issued on the day he died and signed by his physician Oliver St John Gogarty stated that President Griffith suffered an acute attack of tonsillitis on 31 July. While he recovered after a few days, and no operation was needed, Mr Griffith was prevailed upon to rest for a week in a private nursing home on Leeson Street.
‘At 10 o’clock this morning’, Mr Gogarty noted, ‘he had cerebral haemorrhage, but regained consciousness for a few moments, but death rapidly followed.’
At the time of his death he was supported by a clergyman and there were a number of medics, including Dr Gogarty, by his side.
Born in Dublin in 1872 and educated by the Christian Brothers on Great Strand Street, Griffith was a keen student and an avid reader; he was especially interested in Irish hisotry. Along with his friend, the late poet William Rooney, he founded the Celtic Literary Society, which would meet in a room at the top of a house on Marlborough Street and debate Irish history, literature and politics.
For a period in the 1890s, Mr Griffith lived in South Africa where he worked in the mines. He returned to Dublin at the outbreak of the Boer war in 1899 and started up his own weekly newspaper, the United Irishman. This became a vehicle for ideas which found expression in the Gaelic League and, later, the Sinn Féin movement.
Although then largely unknown, Mr Griffith was an advocate of abstentionism from Westminster. Inspired by the Hungarian attitude to Austria, his idea was to ignore England rather than fight it. He shaped the Sinn Féin movement by the historical analogies he outlined in his most memorable pamphlet, ‘The Resurrection of Hungary – a parallel for Ireland’.
British Pathé footage of Arthur Griffith campaigning in Sligo in advance of the 1922 elections
After the suppression of the United Irishman by the government in 1905, he almost immediately launched a replacement weekly newspaper called Sinn Féin which was also shut down by the British authorities. Then came Scissors and Paste which consisted almost entirely of excerpts from English papers that were calculated to perturb the British government. This was also suppressed. His response, again, was to launch another newspaper, this time entitled Nationality, which ran weekly until the Easter rebellion of 1916, after which Mr Griffith was imprisoned.
On his release, he founded another newspaper, Young Ireland.
He was elected as an abstentionist MP for East Cavan in 1918 after which he was imprisoned again. On his release from prison in March 1919 he served as the de facto head of the republic owing to Éamon de Valera’s absence in America. Imprisoned again in December in 1920, he remained in Mountjoy Jail until July 1921 when a truce brought a conclusion to the Anglo-Irish war.
Griffith accompanied Mr de Valera to London for the talks that immediately followed the truce and would later serve as chairman of the Irish plenipotentiary delegation that negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty in London between October and December 1921.
That treaty was ratified by the Dáil in January and on 10 January, Mr Griffith was elected to replace Mr de Valera as President of Dáil Éireann. In June 1922, he was re-elected as a TD for the East Cavan constituency.
As the tributes which have been paid to him underline, Mr Griffith made an extraordinary contribution to Irish public life and his loss will be deeply felt. He is survived by his wife Maud and two young children, Nevin and Ita.
[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]
