Sir, - It is a pity that March was allowed to pass without marking the centenary of the launch of a remarkable and enormously influential Irish newspaper. On March 3rd, 1899, Arthur Griffith and William Rooney brought out the United Irishman. These two young Dubliners, of modest background and little formal schooling, set their enterprise going with a mere £35 capital. But what they hoped to achieve could not be measured even in millions. It was nothing less than the freedom of their country from centuries of British rule.
Rooney died in May 1901 at the tragically young age of 27, but Griffith kept the paper going. He was editor, but when contributors were scarce, late or hard to find, he was also journalist, columnist, special correspondent and, in time of need, compositor and even printer as well. Seamus MacManus has left a memorable pen-picture of Griffith in the dirty little hole that was his "office" in Fownes Street, with "toes showing through broken shoes, elbows out of his faded jacket, frayed at coat cuffs, ragged at trouser ends", working up to 18 hours a day.
P.S. O'Hegarty recalled how the advent of the United Irishman came to him `'with the headiness and bewilderingness of wine". To "advanced" nationalists (largely IRB men or Fenians), the paper's arrival was indeed momentous. When John MacBride wrote to John Devoy in America, urging him to send funds to keep the paper going, he declared that it took the place of a dozen IRB organisers.
What distinguish Griffith's weekly are the calibre of its contributors and the variety of its content. W.B. Yeats, Oliver St John Gogarty, George Moore, Robert Lynd and Katherine Tynan wrote for it. James Joyce received his first - largely favourable - review in it. Some writers, who afterwards became famous, had their first public airing in the United Irishman, such as the poets Padraic Colum, James Cousins, Joseph Campbell and Seamus O'Sullivan.
Variety was the spice of the paper's contents. In its pages one finds the Celtic scholar Kuno Meyer's Irish Bardic Tales, and Richard Irvine Best's translation of a long series of articles on the ancient Irish gods by another great Celtic scholar, Henry d'Arbois de Jubainville. William Bulfin's Rambles in Erin, his account of his travels by bike through the hills and valleys of Ireland, and the people he met on the way, were first published in the United Irishman. The gentle socialist, Fred Ryan, contributed many a thoughtful piece, and Maud Gonne sometimes enlivened a page with her fierce brand of nationalism.
The United Irishman came to an end in mid-1906 as the result of a libel action taken against it by a Co Limerick priest. The impact of a relatively short-lived weekly is not easy to measure, but many of those influenced by, and associated with it, and with the political movement it gave birth to (Sinn Fein), went on to play a leading part in the formation of the independent Irish State. - Yours, etc., Brian Maye,
Mountain View Road, Dublin 6.