Arthur Griffith

Arthur Griffith was a man of ink and iron will, whose political imagination was forged in the fervent nationalist journalism of late 19th-century Dublin. As editor of the United Irishman and later Sinn Féin, he articulated a powerful, pragmatic alternative to parliamentary obstruction: abstention from Westminster and the creation of a dual monarchy under the British Crown, a model he drew from the Austro-Hungarian compromise. This doctrine of 'Sinn Féin' (Ourselves) became a rallying cry for economic and cultural self-sufficiency. Though a moderate compared to the militant Irish Republican Brotherhood, the 1916 Easter Rising was carried out in his party's name, transforming Sinn Féin into a mass movement. In 1921, this former typesetter found himself leading the Irish delegation in tense treaty negotiations with Lloyd George and Churchill. The resulting Anglo-Irish Treaty, which created the Irish Free State, split the nation and his own party. Exhausted, he served as President of the Dáil for a mere seven months before a cerebral hemorrhage killed him, a founding father who lived just long enough to see the state he envisioned born into civil war.