Sinn Féin (newspaper)

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This article is about Sinn Féin, the newspaper. For the political party, see Sinn Féin.

Sinn Féin was a weekly Irish nationalist newspaper edited by the Dublin typesetter, journalist and political thinker Arthur Griffith. It was published by the Sinn Féin Printing and Publishing Company Ltd. (SFPP) between 1906 and 1914, and replaced an earlier newspaper called the United Irishman which was liquidated after a libel suit. Sinn Féin was essentially the same newspaper refounded under a different title. The SFPP brought out the Sinn Féin Daily in 1909 but had to abandon it when it plunged the company into enormous debt. The Sinn Féin weekly and the SFPP both came to an end when they were suppressed by the British government in 1914. Griffith went on to edit Éire-Ireland, Scissors and Paste and Nationality.

While much of the work of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) was abetted and financed from the United States by the Clan Na Gael, or Fenian Brotherhood, Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin was more dependent on support from home. And though Griffith’s beliefs were as uncompromising as that of the Fenians, he distanced himself from the IRB’s belief in the efficacy of physical force. The United Irishman, Griffith’s moderate and monarchical paper, was published in 1897 with the above hesitations in mind. An unlikely merger occurred between Griffith and the IRB, as the Fenian Brotherhood offered their sympathetic support to Griffith while his Sinn Féin Party (it’s inception delayed until 1906) and the Nationalist Party never cooperated. This reason, expounded upon in The United Irishman, is to be understood as a distrust in the Parliamentary tendencies Griffith saw in the other parties loyal to Ireland. Griffith wrote in The United Irishman (later to be titled "Sinn Féin" as the original paper collapsed due to a libel suit), “We have opposed the sending of Irishmen to sit in the British Parliament on two grounds: That it is a recognition of the usurped authority of a foreign assembly to make laws to bind Ireland and that the policy of Parliamentarianism has been morally and materially disastrous to the country.” Through The United Irishman and Sinn Féin Griffith demonstrated the need to arrogate legislature from the hands of the British by transferring Irish Parliament back to Dublin. However, Irish Parliamentary parties quite clearly could agree to Griffith’s urgings, as such a move would undermine the foundation of their existence in Westminster. Sinn Féin thus served as conduit for Griffith’s opposition to The Act of Union 1800. The paper briefly became a daily in 1909 but toughening British censorship caused the publication to be dissolved in 1914.