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Abstract
This article examines how Arthur Griffith, arguably the most significant political journalist in Ireland during the first two decades of the twentieth century, tried to circumvent United Kingdom government censorship at the outset of World War I. It recalls that Griffith, ‘father’ or founder of Sinn Féin, edited and substantially wrote a succession of publications that frequently annoyed the authorities, which had already suppressed two of his titles. The author describes how, in an effort to tell stories that would otherwise be censored, Griffith twice weekly from late 1914 to early 1915 published a newspaper entitled Scissors and Paste in which he reproduced certain reports from other newspapers that were not banned, relying especially upon British titles. The author examines Griffith's selective methodology, identifies sources of news and their frequency of citation in Scissors and Paste and charts the fate of this test of press freedom during war.
Notes
1 Kenny, “‘An Extraordinarily Clever Journalist’.”
2 United Irishman, 17 March 1906; Freeman's Journal, 12 Mar. 1906; Irish Times, 12 Mar. & 22 Feb. 1906 (includes offending text), 13 and 20 July 1907; Sunday Independent, 11 Mar. 1906; Lyons, Recollections, 69.
3 Meehan, “‘The Prose of Logic and of Scorn’.”
4 Newsinger, “‘A Lamp to Guide Your Feet’,” 90; Curry, “The Worker,” 75.
5 Griffith and Seaghan T. O’Ceallaig to readers of Éire Ireland 1914. Printed letter. A copy at the end of the microfilm run of Éire Ireland in the National Library of Ireland.
6 Ó Drisceoil, “Keeping Disloyalty within Bounds?”; Pennell, “Presenting the War in Ireland”; There is a file of confidential official censorship orders of 1915–1918 among Kevin J Kenny's papers in the DCU Media Archive (Kenny, Irish Patriot, Publisher and Advertising Agent, 106).
7 Seán T. O’Kelly Witness Statement (Bureau of Military History WS1,765, part 2 [1951–2]).
8 This total is for news stories. It excludes items quoting only the nineteenth-century Freeman's Journal.
10 Chicago Herald and Examiner, 23 Jan.1928.
11 Scissors and Paste, 3 and 6 Feb. 1915; New York Times 7, 11 and 17 Sept. 1914, 17 and 24 Jan. 1915—and on 6 Feb. 1915 a riposte by Conan Doyle that Griffith did not republish (https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php?title=Germany%27s_Policy_of_Murder); Klekowski, Americans in Occupied Belgium, 61–6; Kenny, Irish-American Odyssey, 193–5.’
12 Nationality, 8 June 1918.
13 Keller, States of Belonging, 141–8.
14 United Irishman, 1 April 1899.
15 Gogarty, ‘A talk on Arthur Griffith’ (undated), W.T. Cosgrave Papers 285/345, Royal Irish Academy.
16 For this title see Curry, “The Worker.”
17 For this body see Cook, The Press in War-Time.
18 For references see Putnis and McCallum, “Reuters, Propaganda-inspired News.”
19 Monger, “Press/Journalism.”
20 Scissors and Paste, 23 and 27 Jan. and 20 Feb. 1915.
21 Kenny, “Arthur Griffith.”
22 Davison and Altman O’Connor, “‘Altman the Saltman’.”
23 Kenny, “Sinn Féin, Socialists and ‘McSheenys’.”
24 New York American, 8 Dec. 1914; Scissors and Paste, 13 Jan. 1915 citing the San Francisco Examiner.
25 O’Keeffe, A Thousand Deadlines, 52; Scissors and Paste, 13 and 16 and 27 Jan. 1915, 3 Feb. 1915.
26 See Scissors and Paste nos 4 (re Parnell), 16 (re Fitzgerald, Grattan, Tone, Stephens, O’Leary, Kickham, Parnell), 18 (re Parnell) and 20 (re Parnell). These items are separate from the eleven where Griffith used the Freeman's Journal as a source of news reporting or analysis.
27 Larkin, “Arthur Griffith and the Freeman's Journal.”
28 Curran, Life of John Philpot Curran, i, 362–2.
29 Kenny, Irish Patriot, Publisher and Advertising Agent, 22–4, 30.
30 Scissors and Paste, 30 Dec. 1914, 9 Jan. and 17 Feb. 1915.
31 Scissors and Paste, 9 and 13 Jan. 1915.
32 The Spark, 7 March 1915, cited at Maye, Arthur Griffith, 63,
33 Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 223; Rockett et al., Cinema and Ireland, 33.
34 Kenny Papers (DCU Media Archive); Kenny, Irish Patriot, Publisher and Advertising Agent, 26.
35 Maume, The Long Gestation, 156.
36 Irish Times, 3 & 6 March 1915; Freeman's Journal, 3 March 1915.
37 O’Brien, “‘With the Irish in France’.”
38 cf. note 7 above; Freeman's Journal, 3 March 1915.
39 HC Deb., 10 March 1915, vol 70 cc1423-4.
40 In 1952 O’Kelly recalled that, ‘ … some weeks expired before we had another newspaper and then, again provided with money by the I.R.B, we started Nationality. We could not get a printer in Dublin to take the risk of publishing such a paper so we went to Belfast and there we [employed] a man named Davidson who had a good sized printing establishment with suitable printing machinery which could turn out our paper weekly—as many copies as we wanted. I explained to him what we wanted and he was prepared to do the job at a price. We paid him his price which was not very much in excess of the printing rates in Dublin at that time. Davidson was well-known to the police authorities. Re was a loyal Orangeman, one hundred percent pro-British, but as the newspaper was, for him a profitable business he took his chance and continued loyally printing the paper for us up to, as far as I remember, the Rising of 1916 when, of course, the paper ceased publication. We had, however great difficulty from time to time in sending our copy for the paper to Belfast’ (See n.7 above; Irish Press, 10 July 1961, for O’Kelly writing that Griffith only agreed to take I.R.B. money ‘provided he were given a free hand’).
41 Nationality, 8 June 1918.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Colum Kenny
Dr Colum Kenny BCL, BL, Ph.D is Emeritus Professor of Journalism at Dublin City University and a former chairperson of the Masters in Journalism programme there. In 2017 he was awarded the gold medal of the Irish Legal History Society. His books include The Power of Silence: Silent Communication in Daily Life (Karnac, London, 2011 and Geulnurim, Seoul, Korea, 2016).