Arthur Griffith

Arthur Griffith (1872-1922), Irish nationalist leader, who negotiated the treaty partitioning Ireland. Griffith was born in Dublin on March 31, 1872. In 1899 he founded the weekly United Irishman, to which such well-known Irish writers as Æ (George William Russell) and William Butler Yeats contributed. Griffith himself wrote eloquent editorials urging the Irish to work for self-government. In 1902 he founded a group that later became the nucleus of Sinn Fein; this movement initially advocated an autonomous Ireland under the British crown.

Although Griffith took no overt part in the Easter Rebellion of 1916, the British imprisoned him as a nationalist leader. He was released the following year, but was 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, or “Assembly of Ireland,” 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 separated Northern Ireland from the rest of the country. Griffith was elected first president of the duly constituted Dáil Éireann in January 1922, but he died the following August 12, shortly after the outbreak of the Irish civil war between those who accepted partition and those who opposed it.