Arthur Griffith

Arthur Griffith (1871-1922) was the founding father of the Sinn Fein Party. Originally the party was not Republican, but an advocate of a dual-monarchy system similar to that of Austria-Hungary. Arthur was also a proponent of protectionism and as a result his party followed through with his convictions. Although Arthur himself was opposed to violence as a legitimate form of political activism, he could not stop the Sinn Fein party developing into a political wing of organisations such as the Irish Volunteer Force (later the Irish Volunteers and the National Volunteers) and the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Nonetheless he was a signatory of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and a firm Collins-ite. Griffith died from heart failure but is commonly said to have died from a broken heart during the outbreak of the Irish Civil War, as the conflict hurt him deeply.

Although Griffith took no overt part in the Easter Rising of 1916, the British imprisoned him as a nationalist leader. He was released the following year but again imprisoned in 1918. After the armistice of 1918, a general election put the Sinn Fein leaders into power, and the new members of Parliament, meeting as the Dáil Éireann, elected Griffith vice-president of an Irish republic, under President Eamon De Valera. In 1921 he accepted the responsibility of leading a delegation to London to negotiate the treaty that established the Irish Free State and partitioned Northern Ireland from the rest of the country. Griffith was elected first president of the duly constituted Dáil Éireann in January 1922, but died the following August 12, shortly after the outbreak of the Irish civil war between those who accepted partition and those who opposed it.

See Also

• First Sinn Fein party
• The Anglo Irish Treaty