Background
Arthur Joseph Griffith was born at 61 Upper Dominick Street, Dublin on 31 March 1871.
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Arthur Joseph Griffith was born at 61 Upper Dominick Street, Dublin on 31 March 1871.
He was educated by the Irish Christian Brothers.
In 1899 he founded the United Irishman (newspaper with his associate William Rooney), in which he advocated that Irish members of Parliament should withdraw from Westminster and organize their own assembly.
In September 1900, he established an organisation called Cumann na nGaedheal ("Society of Gaels") to unite advanced nationalist/separatist groups and clubs. In 1903 he set up the National Council to campaign against the visit to Ireland of King Edward VII and his consort Alexandra of Denmark.
His goal was the creation of a dual monarchy of England and Ireland, like that of Austria-Hungary.
His ideas found adherents who, in 1905, formed the Sinn Féin.
Griffith took no part in the Easter Rebellion of 1916, but he was imprisoned several times (1916–18) by the British.
Elected to Parliament in 1918, he joined the other Sinn Féiners in forming Dáil Éireann and was elected its vice president.
In May 1918, along with Éamon de Valera and 72 other Sinn Féiners, he was arrested on the pretext that they had conspired with Germany. He spent the next ten months interned in Gloucester jail, being released on 6 March 1919.
In September 1921, de Valera, President of the Irish Republic, asked Griffith to head the delegation of Irish plenipotentiaries to negotiate with the British government. The delegates set up Headquarters in Hans Place, London. After nearly two months of negotiations it was there, in private conversations, that the delegates finally decided to recommend the Treaty to the Dáil Éireann on 5 December 1921. Griffith was the member of the treaty delegation most supportive of its eventual outcome, a compromise based on dominion status, rather than a republic. After the ratification by 64 votes to 57 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty by the Second Dáil on 7 January 1922, he replaced de Valera, who stepped down in protest as President of the soon-to-be abolished Irish Republic.
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
Biographer Brian Maye noted that while Griffith criticised Catholic associationssuch as the Knights of Saint Columbanus he was never indicted as anti-Catholic.
He defended anti-semitic rioters in Limerick, and denounced socialists and pacifists as conscious tools of the British Empire. Griffith also supported movements seeking national independence from the British Empire in Egypt and India and wrote a highly critical description of the British government action at Matabele.
On 24 November 1910, Griffith married his fiancée, Maud Sheehan, after a fifteen-year engagement; they had a son and a daughter.