CHAPTER 26

IRISH HISTORY

CHAPTER 27

THE YOUNG IRELANDERS

At the end of O’Connell’s reign, a new generation of leaders had sprung up. As a further means of helping the dreadful situation in Ireland after the Famine, the government, through its Lord Lieutenant, Lord Clarendon, hired a churl named Birch, publisher of a sheet that he called the World to invent and print the foulest slanders his filthy imagination could conceive, about the people’s leaders — the Young Irelanders — and then gratuitously circulate his lying sheet. It was only when Birch eventually sued his employer, Lord Clarenden, for more wages — blackmail, Clarenden called it — that the whole odious transaction came into the light of day.

The Young Irelanders — whose heroes were Wolfe Tone and the men of 1798 — were so called because of their differing ideology from Old Ireland, as the O’Connellites (see Daniel O’Connell) were called. The Young Ireland party broke from the powerful Repeal Association in 1846. (The Repeal Association was for repeal of the Act of Union of 1800 and was led by O’Connell’s son, John, who replaced his father as leader, but who lacked the genius of his father.) They left because they refused to pledge themselves never, in any circumstances, to resort to physical force and armed rebellion. The bitterness between the two factions was so intense that when the potato crop failed totally, the disaster took second place in the minds of the Repeal Association to the crushing of Young Ireland. ‘The famine and Repeal were forgotten’, wrote a Young Ireland leader.

The name Young Ireland was not chosen by the movement they simply became known by that name. They were initially a cultural and constitutional movement and it was not until 1848 that they adopted a policy of revolution. Like Tone and the United Irishmen they looked to France for political ideas.

Thomas Davis was Young Ireland and Young Ireland was Thomas Davis. Protestant son of an English army surgeon he died in 1845 at the age of thirty-one. Although he died prematurely, it was his ideology that motivated the movement until its end. The nationalism of Young Ireland was meant to embrace all Irishmen, as Davis explained:

It must contain and represent all the races of Ireland. It must not be Celtic; it must not be Saxon; it must be Irish. The Brehon law, and the maxims of Westminster — the cloudy and lightening genius of the Gael the placid strength of the Sacsanach, the marshalling insight of the Norman — a literature which shall exhibit in combination the passions and idioms of all, and which shall equally express our mind, in its romantic, its religious, its forensic, and its practical tendencies — finally, a native government, which shall know and rule by the might and right of all, yet yield to the arrogance of none — these are the components of such a nationality.

Thomas Davis founded a newspaper the Nation, with a Catholic journalist Charles Gavan Duffy. They wrote and published many fine poems and ballads. Their work was an inspiration for future generations. Davis hoped to win the Protestants of Ulster to the idea of an independent Ireland. The credit of the nationalist ideas of Mitchel and Fintan Tailor must go to Davis. He believed that small nations could run their own affairs if left alone.

He wanted to keep religion out of politics:

Religion has for ages been so mixed with Irish quarrels that it is often hard to say whether patriotism or superstition was the animating principle of the Irish leader, and whether political rapacity of bigoted zeal against bigotry was the motive of an oppressor. Yet in no country was this more misplaced in our day than in Ireland. Our upper classes were mostly Episcopalians — masters not merely of the institutions, but the education and moral force of the country. The middle ranks and much of the peasantry of one of our greatest provinces were Presbyterians, obstinate in their simple creed — proud of their victories, yet apprehensive of oppression. The rest of the population were Catholics, remarkable for piety and tenderness, but equally noted for ignorance and want of self-reliance. To mingle politics and religion in such a country was to blind men to their common secular interests, to render political union impossible, and national independence hopeless.

Davis clashed with O’Connell on the religious issue and he accused O’Connell of promoting Catholic interests rather than national interests. ‘Will you take the boys of Ireland and deepen the differences between them?’ Davis asked. O’Connell’s answer was to attack Young Ireland: ‘I do not envy them the name they rejoice in. I shall stand by Old Ireland; and I have some slight notion that Old Ireland will stand by me.’

The rational argument of Davis could not counter the rhetoric of O’Connell, and O’Connell prevailed. O’Connell was the practical politician, speaking for the hour; Davis was looking to the future. He has been a greater force in Irish politics than O’Connell. He did not, however, know the people as well as O’Connell, who dominated politics in Ireland for over fifty years, and he did not have the presence of the great Dan, but he had the ideology that generations after him were to shape and expand as their own.

The Young Ireland movement understood that the union with Britain could only be undone by physical force. They maintained that the proclamation banning the Clontarf meeting should have been ignored and that even if the troops had fired on the unarmed people that day, the deaths of a few hundred might have saved Ireland from the millions of deaths shortly afterwards, in the Famine.

The Catholic clergy, as was their custom, came out heavily against the Young Irelanders. In a Papal Rescript Pope Pious IX admonished the Irish priesthood who had shown any political activity. The Rescript was the result of ‘intense British pressure’. Priests who had given a pledge to the movement now turned away.

If not positively anti-clerical the Young Irelanders tended to be at least free-thinking and audacious. They were mostly intellectuals, and were not in the Catholic tradition of being submissive to ecclesiastical authority. Nevertheless, a certain number of priests had supported Young Ireland; Duffy gives the names of twenty-three. This support, however, was not evident. Father Kenyon, an eccentric but intelligent priest, exercised immense influence in Tipperary and had given his pledge to the cause on behalf of twenty parishes. He was subsequently elected to the Young Ireland council, and the leaders had implicit faith in him. After the Papal Rescript by Pope Pious IX, Father Kenyon was reprimanded by his Bishop and suspended. He did not inform the Young Ireland leaders and when Meagher went to him to fulfil his promise and call out the twenty parishes, he was received by Father Kenyon with ‘coldness and irony’.

The Young Irelanders were trying to unite and ignite the spirit of the country at a time when the vigour of the people was wasted by famine. They were trying to preach revolution to hungry people whose only concern was to eat; whose highest aim was their next meal.

The people were woefully short of arms and ammunition as well. But disastrous as might have been the foolhardiness of facing the armies of the British Empire with no weapons, that hope, forlorn as it might be, was further frustrated by the want of unified direction. Consistent with the working of the strange fatality that through centuries dogged the steps of Ireland’s liberators, the fierce desire of the people was not to eventuate into action. Although at times they came very close, as described by Meagher, of the scene in the little town of Carrick-on-Suir: ‘A torrent of human beings, rushing through lanes and narrow streets, whirling in dizzy circles ... wild, half-stifled, passionate, frantic prayers of hope, curses on the red flag; scornful, exulting defiance of death. It was the Revolution, if we had accepted it.’ Also the people had been through a generation of following a pacifist, Daniel O’Connell, and had put their trust in the goodness of human nature. They were never entirely so imprudent again.

All the unbridled dreams of the Young Irelanders ended in a scuffle between a handful of half-armed, hungry men, and a few police, in the Widow McCormack’s cabbage garden outside Ballingarry. There were around forty men who had between them some twenty ancient guns and one charge of powder each. In addition, a handful of men and women were prepared to throw stones. It is said that their leader Smith O’Brien ‘shed silent tears of shame and despair’.

Later, in a moment of bitterness, Smith O’Brien wrote, ‘It matters little whether the blame of failure lies on me or upon others; but the fact is recorded in our annals — that the people preferred to die of starvation at home, or to flee as voluntary exiles to other lands, rather than to fight for their lives and liberties’.

This statement clearly reveals how completely the Young Ireland leaders failed to grasp the effect of the famine. They were themselves comparatively wealthy, and starvation hardly seems to have entered into their calculations at all. While it is true that hunger drives men to desperation, the moment of desperation in Ireland had spent itself in the search for food amongst the rotting mass of potatoes, in the food riots and the hunger marches, in the headlong flight out of Ireland, and in the burying of the dead. All that was left was lethargic indifference, the hopelessness of despair. ‘A ration of yellow meal is the highest object of their ambition.’

The Young Irelanders were spectacularly unsuccessful, but were nonetheless sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The words of the judge, upon sentencing O’Brien, are as follows: ‘That sentence is that you, William Smith O’Brien, be taken from hence to the place from whence you came, and be there drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, and be there hanged by the neck until you are dead; and that afterwards your head shall be severed from your body, and your body divided into four quarters, to be disposed of as Her Majesty shall think fit. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.’

Due to outraged world opinion their sentences were later commuted to transportation to the penal colonies of Australia.

Charles Gavan Duffy was imprisoned before the attempted rising of 1848 and was subsequently tried no fewer than five times, under the new Treason Felony Act. He was never convicted and eventually his prosecution was dropped. He was elected to Parliament in 1852 and flung himself into land reform, working on a bill that gave tenants protection from eviction. The Bill twice passed the House of Commons, but was rejected by the Lords. Broken in heart and health Duffy emigrated to Australia in 1854. He became Minister of the Province of Victoria and in 1870 called together a Royal Commission to consider some sort of federal union for Australia. Although nothing definite proceeded from the Royal Commission the movement did lead to victory before Duffy died in 1903. He was knighted by the Queen in 1873.

(The reason for the Treason Felony Act being introduced was that under the existing laws, a prosecution for high treason was felt to be impossible. The savage barbarity of the punishment — hanging, drawing and quartering — coupled with the fact that in France the death penalty had recently been abolished, would arouse an international outcry.)

John Mitchel, born in 1815 in County Derry, son of an Ulster Presbyterian minister, founded a newspaper called the United Irishman and prepared for an armed rebellion; at least in his paper he did. With no organisation, little support, no arms and no ammunition behind him, he hurled threats and curses at the Lord-Lieutenant and the British Government. Lord Clarendon was addressed as ‘Her Majesty’s Executioner General and General Butcher in Ireland’, and he wrote of the ‘crash of the downfall of the thrice accursed British Empire’. He was the most remarkable and probably the most formidable of the Young Ireland leaders. He had the gift, which the others lacked, of arousing the masses of the people and inspiring them with intense devotion. He was, if he is to be criticised, over optimistic. He had no military command, no central authority, no headquarters, no general, no money, no arms. He knew little of the real condition of the Irish masses. He was an Ulsterman; his life had been spent in towns; he seems not to have fully grasped that the small tenant farmers, whom he visualised as his army were enfeebled and famine-stricken.

Mitchel had outstanding qualities. He was a born leader; he had courage, integrity, and fanatical sincerity. But he was wildly unpractical. His idealism was magical but his lack of realism was exasperating.

He was transported to Van Diemen’s Land before the rebellion was due to take place. He escaped to the United States in 1853. His Jail Journal has won him immortality. He gives a fascinating account of his days in exile. The English and Scottish settlers were fair-minded men who refused to regard him or his associates as felons. While the convict class were taboo among free settlers, the Irish political prisoners were accepted into normal society.

Mitchel’s Jail Journal gives a wonderful insight into life in the penal colonies at that time. The following is his description of the rural population:

Rural population! It is almost profane to apply the title to these rascals. All the shepherds and stock-keepers, without exception are convicts — many of them trice convicted convicts! There is no peasantry. Very few of them have wives, still fewer families, and the fewer the better. Their wives are clearly transported women, too: shoplifters, prostitutes, pickpockets, and other such sweepings of the London pavements. Yet, after all, what a strange animal is man! The best shepherds in Van Diemen’s Land are London thieves — men who never saw a live sheep before they were transported and what is stranger still, many of them grow rather decent — it would be too strong to say honest — by the mere contact with mother earth here. They are friendly to one another and hospitable to strangers.

His manner of writing while in Australia was usually light-hearted and witty:

January 5^th, 1853, — I am prosecuting my hay-harvest diligently, with the aid of two or three horrible convict cut-throats, all from Ireland — and all, by their own account, transported for seizing arms. This is considered among these fellows, a respectable sort of offence ... They don’t like to work too hard, and require a good deal of time. They come early from their work, smoke and chat with one another all evening in the yard, and go to sleep in their opossum rugs in the barn. Yet ... the creatures are not entirely bad — not half as bad for example, as the Queen of England’s Cabinet counsellors. They are civil, good natured with one another and not thievish at all — partly because they are so well off that there is little temptation, and partly because the punishments are savage.

He was aided in his escape by the English son of a local magistrate, and accepted on the run by Tasmanians of English ancestry who had a ‘sincere regard for Irish rebels’. Mitchel made his way to Sydney and through Tahiti to San Francisco, then on to New York where he worked as a journalist, and then to the state of Tennessee where he farmed. He returned to Ireland in 1874, and was elected MP for Tipperary but was not allowed to take his seat in the House of Commons. He died in 1875.

Mitchel was greatly influenced by James Fintan Lalor (older brother of Peter Lalor of Eureka Stockade (Australia) fame, 'The grievances under which we had long suffered, and the brutal attack of that day, flashed across my mind; and with the burning feelings of an injured man I mounted the stand and proclaimed liberty.') and his attack on the evils of Landlordism..

Lalor was imprisoned in Ireland and after his health broke down he was released. He died of bronchitis in 1848. His gospel of land for the people had a profound influence on Australian politics in the 1850s.

William Smith O’Brien was a Protestant landlord from Clare, and one of the editors of the newspaper the Nation, the mouthpiece of Young Ireland. He was primarily an Irishman and was a member of the Catholic Association and a Repealer of the Act of Union. He, with Meagher, O’Donoghue and McManus, the leaders free at the time of the attempted rising, was tried for high treason and formally sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Special legislation had to be passed through parliament before the sentence could be commuted to transportation for life. They were transported to Tasmania in 1849.

Mitchel met Smith O’Brien in Tasmania quite by accident and his description is a portrait of an Irish revolutionary in Australia: ‘He seems evidently sinking in health; his form is hardly so erect, nor his step so stately ... It is sad to look upon this noblest of Irishmen, thrust in here among the off-scourings of England’s gaols, with his home desolated and his hopes ruined and his defeated life falling into the sere and yellow leaf ... He is a rare and noble sight to see, a man who cannot be crushed, bowed, or broken...’

William Smith O’Brien, the reserved and reluctant rebel spent much of his time in Tasmania reflecting on constitutional law. In the view of some, whilst in captivity, O’Brien wrote the first draft of what was subsequently to become the Australian Federal Constitution of 1901.

Smith O’Brien was released in 1854, after his health broke down. He died in Wales in 1864.

Thomas Francis Meagher from County Waterford was dubbed ‘Meagher of the sword’ by William Makepeace Thackeary because of the speech he made against O’Connell’s ‘one drop of blood’ policy. He was a lawyer and journalist. His impression of Australia was full of admiration:

In most if not all, those features which constitutes the strength, the wealth, and grandeur of a country, it has been endowed. The seas which encompass it, the lakes and rivers which refresh and fertilise, the woods which shadow, and the genial sky which arches it — all bear testimony to the excellence of the Divine Hand, and with sounds of the finest harmony, with signs of the brightest colouring, proclaim the goodness and munificence of heaven on its behalf. The climate is more than healthful. It is invigorating and inspiring ¼Oh! to think that a land so blessed — so rich in all that makes life pleasant, beautiful and great — so formed to be a refuge and a sweet abiding place, in these latter times, for the younger children of the old, decrepit, worn-out world at home — to think that such a land is doomed to be the prison, the workhouse and the grave, of the Empire’s outcast poverty, ignorance and guilt!

Meagher and McManus escaped in 1852 to the United States; McManus settled in San Francisco; Thomas Francis Meagher possessed considerable military ability. He rose to be a general in the Union Army during the Civil War, was appointed Governor of Montana, but was drowned in 1867, in the Missouri. He is remembered by his statue in Helena, the capital city of the State of Montana.

His Eminence Cardinal Cullen made clear the church’s attitude towards the efforts of the Young Irelanders, when, in 1861, he refused to allow the remains of the veteran Young Irelander, Terence Bellew McManus, into the Pro-Cathedral or any church in his diocese for a funeral service. The body had been brought home from California and on being refused admission to any church building was taken to the Mechanics’ Institute from which the burial service was then conducted. Writing about the McManus funeral on 10 November 1861, the Cardinal (then Archbishop of Dublin) stated: ‘Some lunatic decided to bring the remains home to arouse a revolutionary spirit and a committee of Protestants, Catholics and the people of no religion were formed ... There was a large funeral, mostly artisans and mechanics; the Catholics of standing abstained.’

The decisions and remarks of the cardinal confirm not only his attitude towards the Young Irelanders but more particularly the class division in the Catholic Church in Ireland then.

(Sixteen years later the remains of the old Fenian, John O’Mahony, were brought back from New York and the procedure was repeated. Again, the body was not allowed into any church building in the diocese of Dublin, and the funeral service took place from the Mechanics’ Institute.)

Another famous Young Irelander with a strong Australian connection was Kevin Izod O’Doherty. He became a doctor, working in St Mary’s Hospital in Hobart. He helped organise the escape of his friend John Mitchel. On his release he studied in the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. He married Eva Kelly the poetess of the Nation and returned to Australia. He was elected a member of the Legislative Assembly of Queensland while a doctor in Brisbane. Sadly, the gifted man died in poverty in 1905. Sadly, too, Eva stopped writing after she left Ireland.

John Martin’s speech upon being convicted gives an excellent insight into the farcical form of trial the United Irishmen underwent:

My lords, I have no imputation to cast upon the bench, neither have I anything of unfairness towards myself to charge the Jury with. I think the judges desired to do their duty fairly, as upright judges and men, and that the twelve men who were put into the box, not to try but the convict me, voted honestly according to their prejudices. I have no personal enmity against the sheriff, sub-sheriff, or any other gentlemen connected with the arrangements of the jury panel, nor against the attorney general, or any other person engaged in the proceedings called my trial. But my lords, I consider I have not been tried! There have been certain formalities carried out here for three days, but I have not been put upon my country, according to the constitution said to exist in Ireland!

Twelve of my countrymen, ‘indifferently chosen’ have not been put into the jury box to try me, but twelve men, who, I believe have been selected by the parties who represent the crown, for the purpose of convicting and not of trying me. Every person knows that what I have stated is the fact, and I would represent to the judges most respectfully, that they, as honourable judges, and as upright citizens, ought to see that the administration of justice in this country is above suspicion. I have nothing more to say.

He was sentenced to ten years transportation.

Meagher in his speech to the judges eloquently summed up the impetus that made the Young Irelanders, all wealthy and privileged, face the high jump: ‘The history of Ireland explains my crime and justifies it. No man proudly mounts the scaffold, or coolly faces a felon’s death, or walks with his head held high and defiance on his tongue into the cells of a convict-hulk for nothing. No man, let him be ‘young’ and as ‘vain’ as you will, can do this in the wantonness of youth or the intoxication of vanity.’