Arthur Griffith

Arthur Griffith

Arthur Griffith ( Irish : Art Ó Gríofa ; born March 31, 1872 in Dublin , † August 12, 1922 ibid) was an Irish politician . He was President of the Republic of Ireland from January 1922 until his death .

Life

The son of Catholic parents of Welsh origin was raised by Christian Brothers . Griffith was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in his youth . From 1897 to 1898 he visited South Africa . In 1899 he was one of the founders of the weekly newspaper The United Irishman . Griffith founded the Sinn Féin party in 1905 by merging various Irish patriotic associations . His idea was to transform the Kingdom of Great Britain into an Anglo-Irish kingdom with a common monarch but separate governments, as was the case in Austria-Hungary at the time. In 1918 he was elected as a member of theBritish Parliament elected. Like other Sinn Féin politicians, however, he did not take the seat, but together with them founded the - unrecognized - Irish Parliament , known as the First Dáil .

In 1921, Griffith and Michael Collins negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the Free State Act with Great Britain . As the successor of Éamon de Valera , he was from January to August 1922 by the British unrecognized President of the First Dáil and the Irish Republic and thus head of government, while Collins at the same time led the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State called for by the British as chairman.

He died of heart failure on August 12, 1922. Michael Collins also died just ten days later, but was shot dead by opponents of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. On August 22, WT Cosgrave succeeded the two and took over the Provisional Government before he became President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, which came into force, in December of that year.

Griffith married Maud Sheehan on November 24, 1910. They had a son and a daughter.

1959 published a biography of Griffiths by Padraic Colum under the title Ourselves Alone . Colum had met Griffith about 55 years earlier when he was the editor of The United Irishman , which Griffith co-founded in 1899 and in which Colum published his first poems.

Web links

Commons : Arthur Griffith  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• 1916 Easter Rising - Profiles - Arthur Griffith 1872–1922. In: BBC . September 24, 2014(English). 
• Newspaper article about Arthur Griffith in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Arthur Griffith Dies Suddenly - Heart Attack Follows an Operation a Few Days Agofor Tonsilitis. (No longer available online.) In: The New York Times . August 13, 1922, formerly in the original ; accessed on November 28, 2020 (English).  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )