ABSTRACT
Yet the Irish passion for politics, the fierce political nationalism which had inspired the uprisings of 1798, 1848 and 1867, was by no means dead. While Yeats believed it was the task of Ireland to uplift her voice for spirituality, ideality and simplicity, a columnist called Cuagan, the dove, writing in a new newspaper, The United Irishman, declared that the work of Ireland was to uplift herself. Cuagan was the penname of Arthur Griffith, and The United Irishman a nationalist newspaper founded by him in 1897. A printer by training, the Catholic descendant of a Protestant farming family in Ulster, the young Griffith soon made a name for himself as a brilliant, scathing journalist in the tradition of Young Ireland and The Nation.
