fact that the organisation has no control whatever over the paper which bears its name, the Editor be requested to cease advertising the newspaper as the official organ of the movement. Protected as he was by the law, Griffith resisted this manoeuvre without any great difficulty and the group which gravitated around Hobson and O'Hegarty withdrew in disgust from the movement. This was not, however, the last time that O'Hegarty and Hobson would challenge Griffith. In November 1910, they launched Irish Freedom, another republican newspaper financed by the IRB. According to Hobson,Irish Freedom represented the militant left wing of the Irish national movement, and advocated the independence of Ireland by every practicable means, including the use of physical force. This was one competitor too many for the SFPP, which was already heavily in debt and had been forced to shut down the Sinn Féin Daily in January. The defection of hardline republican Sinn Féiners to Irish Freedom and the growing success of the Irish Parliamentary Party was having an increasingly negative impact on readership figures. A dramatic fall in advertising sales led to the dismissal of the majority of the personnel, and the SFPP was forced once again to subcontract the printing of the newspaper. Gradually, what had been "the best newspaper in Ireland" became little more than a pamphlet, stripped of its illustrations and typographical flourishes. By the time the newspaper was banned by Dublin Castle in 1914, it had dwindled to four narrow pages containing a single block of text written exclusively by Griffith. With debts of almost £5,000, the shutting down of the newspaper allowed the board to escape their creditors in a relatively honourable fashion. Ó Ceallaigh who was the only person present when the Dublin Castle official came to announce the end described this moment in his autobiography: We didn’t have a penny when we needed it most. We were heavily in debt. We couldn’t pay the printers. The proscription of the newspaper by the Castle came just in time. The military tyrants did us a real favour – they took our newspaper but they left us with our honour. Because of the increasingly seditious content of Sinn Féin (Griffith attacked the British war effort in every issue) it was inevitable that it would be banned. This may have been a deliberate strategy on his part to separate himself of the debt-ridden SFPP, blame the