Seán Treacy and the Tan War E-Book

Joe Ambrose

• Herausgeber: Mercier Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Seitenzahl: 292

Beschreibung

A ground-breaking new book that looks back on Ireland's struggle for freedom with a refreshingly new perspective and attitude. This is a journey into a turbulent period in Ireland's past and covers the exploits of charismatic guerrilla leader Seán Treacy, Tipperary's flying columns and the horrors of Croke Park's 'Bloody Sunday'. Tipperary's role in the War of Independence has been greatly under-played and this book analyses the main events and personalities of the time.

Leseprobe

SEÁN TREACY

AND THE

TAN WAR

JOE AMBROSE

MERCIER PRESS

3B Oak House, Bessboro Rd

Blackrock, Cork, Ireland.

www.mercierpress.iehttp://twitter.com/IrishPublisherhttp://www.facebook.com/mercier.press

© Joe Ambrose, 2007

ISBN: 978 1 85635 554 4

ePub ISBN: 978 1 78117 080 9

Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 081 6

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Premier County?

Bold Fenian Men

Confusion or Revolution?

Tipperary, 1917

The Enigma of Seán Treacy

Prison Letters

From Republican Brotherhood to Republican Army

Attacks and Battles

Spies, Spying, and Fellow Travellers

Tipperary So Far Away – The Death of Seán Treacy

Flying Columns

Bloody Sunday

Appendices

Glossary

Sources by Chapter

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

MAP OF COUNTY TIPPERARY

INTRODUCTION

This is the story of how a colonial power went from enjoying its self-image as a paternal benefactor looking after the interests of those who couldn’t look after themselves, to being called ‘the enemy’ by a community it had previously seen through slightly comic, Somerville and Ross-style, rose tinted glasses. This is a story about how a revolutionary organisation, one which incorrectly believed that there was a ‘little spark of nationality’ in each Irish heart, forced a colonial power to leave its territory.

The process kicked off in Tipperary in the late 1840s when Ireland was ravaged by famine. The Tipperary part of the story concluded in the early 1920s when the last British soldiers left that county.

One of the people who turned the woolly romanticism of the Young Irelanders and the Fenians into an authentic revolutionary force on the ground in Tipperary was Seán Treacy. One of Treacy’s comrades said that he was, ‘a man who knew precisely what he was doing and why he was doing it.’ This self-knowledge characterised Ireland’s revolutionary generation and made their IRA a hard-nosed remorseless foe.

The revisionist historian Roy Foster has suggested that cosmopolitanism is the opposite of nationalism, but the women and men who adopted a nationalist stance during the Tan War were the very essence of political sophistication. They identified an intractable predicament – the British colonial presence in their country – and they resolved that problem.

Reading through the Witness Statements which the Tipperary veterans of the Tan War gave to the Bureau of Military History* between 1947 and 1957, one comes across repeated references to the fact that the witnesses involved – by then middle-aged or approaching old age – wanted their accounts of war to be written down and filed away for the benefit of future historians. Such declarations seem terribly poignant today as I read the carbon copies of their efforts in Dublin’s National Archive before walking out into the optimistic sunshine of contemporary Ireland. The contradictory blend of idealism, realism and bloody-mindedness which informed those veterans’ actions during their war also informed their testimonies. The naïve sense of civic duty which brought about their participation in the war, and their subsequent co-operation with the Bureau of Military History, is entirely alien to the acquisitive money-orientated consensus which defines the Ireland of today. Their keen engagement with the Bureau was inherently sophisticated, as were their hardboiled, unadorned statements.

Many of them made it clear that the events they were talking about had happened long ago and that their recollections might, therefore, be deficient or imprecise. They remembered as best they could and the impressive thing about their collective testimonies is the fact that, in most cases, their narratives neatly dovetail with one another. This gives their assertions a certain integrity and dependability. In one or two cases – where different witnesses use almost identical turns of phrase and excuses for actions – the men and women involved had clearly rehearsed, between themselves, what they were going to say. Such duplications represent a miniscule percentage of the whole.

By the time their stories were collected, many of these people had long abandoned their unassuming youthful rural lifestyles in favour of middle-aged bourgeois comforts and were resident in some of the nicer parts of Dublin, beneficiaries of the Ireland they had helped create. Others stayed down the country, working the farms or businesses they had inherited from their fathers. Still others moved from the land into the big towns in the county such as Clonmel and Nenagh.

They hoped that – as a result of their taking time out to reminisce about events which had played out thirty or forty years before – their actions and motivations would be better understood at a time and in a place which was essentially inconceivable to them, since none of us can really identify with a future world in which we will no longer exist.

The result of the Bureau’s activities is an unprecedented meat, potatoes, and two veg narrative concerning the evolution of an insurrection and revolution. It is just as well that those people took the opportunity to set the record straight because a lot of time, money and oblique energy has since been put into setting the record crooked.

Contemporary academic historians scrutinising the war have tended to reject traditional narrative history in favour of a rather tedious statistically-based analysis and high-falutin jargon. Such a methodology conveniently down-plays exciting legends, implications of daring, and any sense one might get of plucky rural communities taking on a powerful global empire. The conclusions consistently drawn from this sort of research – undertaken by people like Foster, Peter Hart and Joost Augusteijn – tend to suggest that the War of Independence IRA didn’t enjoy the support of the entire population. This conclusion isn’t exactly rocket science; one doesn’t need to do years of painstaking heavily-funded research to prove that violent revolutions are never universally popular. Most decent people favour peace and quiet over violence and trouble. The need to assert, repeatedly, that the IRA was not unanimously loved serves an entirely political but unhistorical purpose. The unspoken implication is that, since their actions were not always popular, what the IRA was doing was morally wrong. Whether they were morally right or wrong is a subject which deserves to be addressed directly, not at an angle. This book attempts to do so.

The motivations which underpin past wars and campaigns of coercion entered into by states and empires are rarely subjected to the same forensic examination which now stalks our collective remembrance of the Tan War. The mandate of the state is deemed sufficient moral authority for any belligerence. Consequently, today, we have ‘peacekeeping forces’ being sent by the ‘international community’ to inflict ‘democracy’ on vast unwilling swathes of humanity.

Academic reliance on state papers to plot the evolution of the Tan War serves the same contemporary political purpose as the statistical approach. The correspondence and reports penned by policemen, civil administrators, spies and representatives of the British establishment are cheerfully accepted as if this occasional ‘parcel of rogues’ were men of inherent integrity. It is intellectually comfortable to make value judgments which conclude that such sources are reliable. Most academics are cheerleaders for, and employees of, the state. Writing the history of revolutionary organisations and individuals requires a psychological grasp of the revolutionary spirit and process which is anathema to academic thinking and lifestyle. This book attempts to take on board the emotional landscape within which the War of Independence came about.

The rejection of narrative history – best exemplified by Richard English’s dull study of Ernie O’Malley – is symptomatic of the disservice being done to the writing of Irish history by university-employed historians. The notion that history is a branch of literature has been jettisoned in favour of a pseudo-scientific academic style and approach which serves the purposes of inept over-excited non-entities.

The story of the long-ago and important war which started in Tipperary can’t be left in the hands of such people. Neither can we rely on the braggadocio of the ‘party line’ post-colonial memoirs and histories (by the likes of Dan Breen, Tom Barry and Desmond Ryan) which tell the story in a more traditional way. The books those people wrote served another, inspirational, political purpose. Proud of the achievements of the revolutionary generation, they wrote it like they saw it. Their books captured the spirit of a ‘nation’ which was partially very real and partially an imaginative construct with roots in Fenianism.

This book is the story of the violent attempt that a substantial section of Irish society made to bridge the gap between their ideals and the actual world in which they lived and died.

Joe Ambrosewww.joeambrose.net

1

THE PREMIER COUNTY?

The troops live not on earth could stand

The headlong charge of Tipperary.

Thomas Davis

‘Where Tipperary leads, Ireland follows,’ wrote John Mitchel, the Young Ireland propagandist and intellectual. Mitchel had such faith in that county’s innate rebelliousness that he also called it the Premier County and, along with his Young Irelander pals, hoped that it was a place from which the momentum needed to drive the British out of Ireland would come.

They imagined that Tipperary was special because it had a long tradition of social and land disturbances most recently manifested in the Whiteboy* and Ribbonmen* agitations. For Mitchel’s romantic and idealistic comrades, the county seemed to be a lofty spot full of noble souls imbued with a pure and ancient sense of separateness from Britain.

Was Tipperary unique, was it in thrall to a vision of freedom, and did it make a notable contribution to the eventual fight for independence?

Cultural commentator Michael Murphy thinks that Tipperary was different from other parts of Ireland. ‘It comes as no surprise to discover that the county played an inordinate role in many Irish Ireland or separatist campaigns,’ he says. ‘When one thinks of what constitutes the idea – or the ideal – of “Ireland” one is really thinking about Tipperary, Limerick, Cork and Kerry. Those counties played inordinately significant roles, over the last two centuries, in the resistance to British rule. Tipperary has the rural landscape and the tone of voice which we think about when we think about “Ireland”. They have a great sense of identity down there. Places like Tipperary or north Cork are prosperous enough, and far enough away from the British influence, to have a self-confident sense of culture and identity. People there are pretty determined and assertive.’

Land and the relationship with the land was always a substantial part of the Tipperary psyche. Mountains – and mountain people – played their part. The Comeraghs and Galtees were good fighting, hiding, and escaping terrain. The people who lived in those hills, like hill people everywhere, had an air of independence about them.

Down on the plains there was good land on which a lot of people lived in relative comfort. Nancy Mitford, at one time a regular visitor to Fethard, commented on the quality of the land and the ease which this brought into the lives of the people. In The Other Island she wrote: ‘The plane of Tipperary is the richest farm land in western Europe, so fertile that farming there requires little skill; beasts are simply left in the fields until they are fat enough to be sold. It is beautiful beyond words and empty.’

There was, however, a bit more to farming than sitting about watching the cattle or the horses growing up. ‘There was a love of discussion,’ IRA leader Ernie O’Malley wrote about country people, ‘and argument that would take up a subject casually without belief and in a searching way develop it … Deferential to a stranger, they evoked in themselves a sympathetic mood, changing gears in conversation to suit his beliefs and half believing them through sympathy whilst he was present. Afterwards when they checked up on themselves it might be different; they would laugh at the stranger’s outlandish opinions when their mood had hardened … The weekly market was a break in routine. The men were able to drink double or triple porter to their hearts’ content. Then the boisterous drove home, often without lights, careering along the country roads in a bone-shaking cart. The countryman, to himself, was worth what he had in his pocket at any given moment. The land was his wealth; unlike the townsman, he had few ornate possessions. He would look with envy at the many knick-knacks and furniture of a town house. His total wealth would be greater, but his living was simpler. He had no useless possessions.’

Historian Joost Augusteijn, questioning whether or why Tipperary played such a significant role in the Tan War, wondered if the county’s alleged uniqueness was due to its prosperity, its tradition of rebellion, or to a dependable local nationalist leadership over a long period of time.

In Augusteijn’s essay debunking the myth of Tipperary as an innate hotbed of rebellion, Why was Tipperary so Active in the War of Independence? he asserts: ‘Tipperary was indeed a county with a strong tradition of emigration and agrarian violence in the late nineteenth century, which seems to have established a greater willingness to oppose the authorities with force. The relatively high numbers of local police indicates the continued expectation of such unrest among the authorities … The big questions, however, remain; how did these elements predetermine Tipperary to violence, why was there early activity in Tipperary, and how did this early activity lead to the outbreak of high levels of conflict in 1920-21? … The correlation with agrarian agitation and emigration in the nineteenth century tells us little about those in Tipperary who became active in the War of Independence. It may have established some sort of radical tradition in which the use of force was an accepted form of political expression, one in which at least a part of the population was willing to acquiesce.’

Augusteijn looks to Tipperary’s past agrarian extremism in his search for the roots of ‘some sort of radical tradition’ but neatly sidesteps the self-evident nineteenth century political legacy passed down from one generation to the next, which started with the Young Irelander clashes of 1848-9.

The Young Irelanders, sophisticated cosmopolitan writers and theorists, made their Francophile plans in the coffee houses of Dublin but they struck out for their principles in and around Tipperary’s rainy streets and hills. Their romantic but unsuccessful agitations soon gave rise, seamlessly, to Fenianism, a covert political belief system which flourished in some Tipperary minds. From the ashes of Fenianism arose the revived twentieth century Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). Tipperary members of the IRB, styling themselves the Irish Republican Army (IRA), led the 1919 Soloheadbeg ambush which is usually credited with being the first engagement in the War of Independence.

The radical tradition which took advantage of Tipperary’s forthright spirit first established itself in the county via the Young Irelanders.

A mass meeting of Irish Confederation supporters was held on Slievenamon mountain, just north of Carrick-on-Suir, on Sunday 16 July 1848. The Irish Confederation, the organisation within which the Young Irelanders operated, was a breakaway from Daniel O’Connell’s ineffective Repeal movement. Repealers sought to undo the Act of Union* between Britain and Ireland by constitutional means. The Repeal strategy involved, in practice, operating in cahoots with the Whig faction in the London parliament. The Young Irelanders, mostly journalists and agitators from privileged backgrounds, provided O’Connell with intellectual backbone until, in the aftermath of the 1845 famine, they grew disillusioned with him and felt that a more extreme response was needed to the British presence in Ireland. Drawing inspiration from French revolutionary stances, these angry eager, young men sought to fundamentally alter the Irish situation.

Their trump card was their newspaper, The Nation, which enjoyed a large circulation and substantial influence.

Confederate Club members from Fethard, Carrick, Kilsheelan, Cashel, Clonmel, and Kilcash planned the Slievenamon mass meeting and chose that location because of its iconic status. The Nation saw the mountain as the epitome of Tipperary’s alleged rebel heart. For the Young Irelanders, says Patrick C. Power in his History of South Tipperary, the county had, ‘become a symbol of hardy resistance to British rule because of its rather violent history of faction-fighting and Whiteboy struggles’.

Slievenamon and the nearby village of Kilcash enjoyed both local and national symbolic prominence. Slievenamon’s legend went back into the mists of Irish mythology. Folk singer Liam Clancy from the Clancy Brothers explains the mountain’s exotic nature: ‘It is shaped like a beautiful female breast and on its summit sits a cairn of stones, like a nipple. The name Slievenamon comes from the Gaelic, Sliabh na mBan, the mountain of the women … Some say the mountain got its name from the profile it presents when seen from Carrick-on-Suir, the town in which I was born. A more intriguing story tells how the legendary giant Fionn McCool would need a new wife each year and, because of his mighty demands, would put all the candidates vying for the job to a test. On a certain day of the year they would all race to the top of Slievenamon and back. The winner, he considered, might have the stamina to cope with his virility for the next year.’

In the lead up to the Young Irelander Slievenamon gathering, the local authorities operating out of Carrick grew paranoid and anxious about the possibility of an actual insurrection taking place. The town’s resident magistrate reported to Dublin Castle on 14 July that: ‘This town Carrick is the very hot-bed of sedition. There are I understand twelve hundred persons connected with Clubs … the leprous distilment of bad advice poured among them in every possible manner. If a rising broke out, the greater number of the inhabitants of this populous town will be found ready to enter upon any treasonable project, however fatuous and visionary it may be.’

Given the tense circumstances, a member of the Irish Constabulary was sent out to Slievenamon on the Sunday to gather evidence and intelligence at the gathering. In the early morning he reported back, Kilcash’s catholic church’s bell rang out, summoning protestors and indicating to strangers unfamiliar with the terrain in that part of the country exactly where the meeting was due to take place.

Future Fenian leader John O’Mahony, a gentleman farmer who lived nearby at Ballyneale, led a large crowd towards Slievenamon. These people marched in military formation but, significantly, no leader was seen to give them anything that could be construed as military orders or instructions. Because O’Mahony didn’t give out any such instructions, he was not subsequently arrested when five other individuals were charged, the day after the meeting, with giving military commands.

Those arrests gave rise to a protest meeting in Carrick where one of the most able and famous of the Young Irelanders, Thomas Francis Meagher – known as Meagher of the Sword because of his fiery oratory – was the main attraction. The well educated Meagher, who spoke in an urbane style which caused some to question his ‘Irishness’, knew how to stir a crowd into rebellion. Commentators have suggested that his familial connections with that part of Tipperary were responsible for the district being the site of the entire Young Ireland rebellion.

The escalating subversive buzz within the nationalist community made the authorities tense and some minor local radical leaders were arrested. Rumours began to circulate which suggested that the Constabulary had arrested Meagher and Michael Doheny, the Young Irelander thought to have written poetry for The Nation under the pseudonym ‘A Tipperary Man’. The Fethard-born Doheny, along with John O’Mahony, would eventually found the Fenian Brotherhood in the United States.

Rumour, a powerful force within society, fanned the flames of revolt. The only substantial media available to the people were newspapers and magazines which reported the news days or weeks after the events involved. It was often rumour, therefore, which dictated events on the ground in the towns and villages.

On 24 July William Smith O’Brien, one of the most prominent Young Irelanders, a man treated like a revolutionary leader, showed up in Carrick and indulged in local rabble rousing. Patrick C. Power writes that, ‘he did not have the support of the leaders of the Confederate movement in the town, who were all men of property, and he hesitated before taking any irrevocable step.’

Approximately four hundred men, who were minded to march on Carrick, gathered in the nearby village of Ballyneale. Eighty of these men had firearms; others carried pikes or farm implements. The Ballyneale parish priest persuaded them to disperse, convincing them that Meagher and Doheny were not locked up.

Then Smith O’Brien and his companions went northwards to the village of Ballingarry where over five hundred men are said to have joined them. Barricades were erected and the people of Ireland were invited to rise up in open rebellion against the British. Apart from a few minor spats in Killenaule and Mullinahone, nothing much along those lines seemed to happen. When a group of Irish Constabulary men, withdrawing from Ballingarry under pressure, sought sanctuary at the Widow McCormack’s house they were besieged by Smith O’Brien’s forces.

Playwright Donagh MacDonagh wrote that Smith O’Brien and other Young Ireland leaders had, prior to making a stand at Ballingarry, been touring the famine-ravaged countryside urging people to be ready to rise up. They, ‘passed through Kilkenny where they were told that reinforcements would be necessary, and then into Tipperary where they held enthusiastic meetings, which became rather less enthusiastic as time passed and the people, hungry and thirsty, found nothing to eat or drink. At Mullinahone Smith O’Brien bought them some bread himself, but told them that in future they would have to provide for themselves and that he would requisition nothing from any man. They returned home faint with hunger. Gradually, the crowds which had been so great and which had cheered so loudly began to fade away, and when the Catholic clergy came among them begging them to return home, pointing out their utter unpreparedness, their lack of weapons, the ignorance of military tactics of their leaders, the utter lack of food, most of them forgot their warlike spirit. To the majority Smith O’Brien’s name was completely unknown, but his danger of immediate arrest without cause shown, the old tradition of revolt, and the appeal to them to risk an honourable death in action rather than one by starvation in a corner of their cabins, appealed strongly to them, and those who remained were willing to risk everything under the leadership of the Young Irelanders. At Boulagh Commons, where he gathered the miners from the local coal mines about him, Smith O’Brien found many eager volunteers, some of them already armed, others prepared to fight with their mining tools or to use their technical skill in trenching the roads against the police and military. While the meeting was still going forward the police and military were approaching Ballingarry … The police from Callan were first to arrive, long before their time, and when the miners saw them riding forward in the distance they hastily threw up a barricade expecting a sudden assault. The police, on the other hand, when they saw a hundred or so miners gathered on the spoil-banks being harangued by a number of strange gentlemen, were not at all anxious to provoke an engagement and made for a substantial farmhouse which they saw some distance away. This was the Widow MacCormack’s farm. In they went, tumbling over one another in their haste, for the miners, when they saw their change of direction, had made a rush to reach the farmhouse before them.’

Smith O’Brien, a Protestant radical from Limerick, refused to fire on the house because the Constabulary trapped inside were holding the Widow MacCormack’s five children as hostages. ‘Glory be to God, Sir,’ the Widow is reported to have said to Smith O’Brien, going down on her knees, ‘You can’t risk the lives of those little innocent children for the sake of a couple of Constabulary men!’

The miners and other rebels, little by little, gave up the fight and dispersed. Their leader escaped into in the adjacent countryside.

On 2 September the Carrick authorities reported that pike-handles were being prepared in the town and that fires on the surrounding hills suggested a rebellion. On 12 September rumours reached Carrick to the effect that a large body of rebels were close at hand and that the bell of Kilcash church had once again rung out to rally disaffected elements.

Barges on the River Suir which were due to sail from Carrick to Clonmel were delayed because it was feared that they might be captured by rebels or that their horses might be seized. One barge did undertake the perilous journey and was intercepted by men under the command of John O’Mahony who ordered the ferrymen to transport one hundred of his supporters. A police station was attacked. Six policemen in the station, assisted by reinforcements, held off the attackers, killing two of them.

Those were the only substantial incidents which took place in the whole of Ireland during the much vaunted rebellion of 1848. The Young Irelanders either disappeared or were arrested. John O’Mahony went initially to Paris and subsequently to New York. Smith O’Brien was arrested at Thurles railway station on 5 August and was put on trial with several others at Clonmel on 21 September charged with ‘marching with great force and violence’ at Ballingarry, erecting obstructions, making a warlike attack and firing on the police. The Young Irelander ‘false traitors’ were sentenced to death.

The young John O’Leary from Tipperary town was one of the Young Irelander stragglers who gathered at the Wilderness, a remote spot just outside Clonmel, with a view to rescuing the men incarcerated in Clonmel jail.

Smith O’Brien and his companions were, much to their chagrin, reprieved. Plans were made to move them to Thurles when their captors became aware of the Wilderness plot. O’Leary vacillated about whether to attempt a rescue in Clonmel or to ambush the party taking Smith O’Brien to Thurles. Eventually O’Leary and sixteen other men were arrested at the Wilderness on the night of

8 November, 1848. They were treated leniently by the courts and received only short sentences.

When he got out of prison O’Leary travelled by boat to Carrick. There he met up with Phil Gray, one of the last important Young Irelanders still at large. These two set about organising a covert anti-British organisation, complete with an oath of loyalty and a commitment to ending the Act of Union. John O’Mahony, cowering in Paris, was very much in league with them on this conspiracy.

Gray and O’Leary, remorseless rebels, started selling daggers to their Tipperary followers. ‘The boatmen on the Suir were very active in the new secret organisation,’ writes Patrick C. Power. ‘A bitter boatmen’s strike on the Suir between Clonmel and Carrick was looked upon as the prelude to a rising … The substance behind all this was that a council of three leaders was leading the secret society, which had now succeeded the [Confederate] Clubs, and had decided to stage a revolt.’

During June 1849 O’Leary played host to James Fintan Lalor, the first Irish radical to adopt a neo-socialist agenda, and to the Tipperary-connected Thomas Clarke Luby. Lalor and Luby lived for a time with O’Leary in his Tipperary town home. The three planned yet another optimistic rising for 16 September. This time the weather went against them and the only manifestation of rebellion was a skirmish at Cappaquin, Co. Waterford.

Desmond Ryan wrote that, ‘before it could get under way the mobilisation was crippled by the government drafting troops in force into Tipperary and Waterford. [ Joseph] Brenan led an attack on a police barracks at Cappaquin, but had to call off the attack after several casualties on both sides. Lalor waited all night with a hundred and fifty men to attack Cashel, but had to abandon it when contingents from other districts failed to arrive. Many groups that turned out were too small or totally unarmed and had to be sent home. John O’Leary dismissed his fifty men at Garnacarty for this reason. Luby was arrested in Cashel and shortly afterwards released.’

James Connolly* said that the Young Irelanders had been handed ‘revolutionary material’ (by which he meant favourable circumstances) and that they were ‘unfit to use’ that material. The significance of all their coming and going was not that a serious blow had been struck against British rule in Ireland – if anything the case for armed resistance had been grievously undermined by the multiple comic opera-style fiascos. Nevertheless, a self-image of Tipperary was created wherein its rebels would never say die, would never lie down or back down, no matter how hopeless the odds. Equally significant was the fact that a covert oath-bound organisation, supported by the majority of the prospective Fenian leadership, was up and running in Tipperary a decade before the actual Fenian organisation came into existence.

2

BOLD FENIAN MEN

The heart of the country always goes out to the man who lives and dies an unrepentant rebel.

John O’Leary

Fenianism’s leaders were an odd, dark and gifted bunch. James Stephens, Chief Organiser, was a long-winded, arrogant schemer, ruthless and ultimately incompetent. T.W. Moody said that Stephens had ‘a genius for organising and for inspiring loyalty, but had few of the other qualifications of a successful leader of rebellion’. John O’Leary, in effect a trust fund kid, was a bibliophile and a curiously modern man of refreshingly sophisticated opinions. Michael Doheny was a troubled, idealistic, rough diamond on a doomed trajectory. Charles J. Kickham, blind and half deaf, took his place at every Irish hearth via the sentimental maudlin ballads which he wrote and via his novel, Knocknagow or the Homes of Tipperary (1879).

None was odder than the scholarly, passionate, perpetually cash-strapped John O’Mahony who ended up in New York leading a fixated life which resembled, in many ways, that of the heroin or opium addict.

All of the aforementioned men, and other prominent Fenians besides, played some part in the abortive Young Ireland rebellions which took place in Tipperary in 1848 and 1849. Most of them were very young at the time. Only Michael Doheny, a middle-aged self-made barrister, had played a significant part in the Irish Confederacy.

Doheny was born near Fethard but, after many vicissitudes, eventually based himself in Cashel. While a law student in London he had grown sympathetic to Chartist* thinking. By January 1847 he, like the other Young Irelanders, had become totally disillusioned with Repeal. He worked with Smith O’Brien, Meagher, Terence Bellew McManus and Thomas Darcy McGee on bringing the Irish Confederation into existence.

He addressed the 1847 Holycross meeting at which James Fintan Lalor founded the Tipperary Tenant League. He was more sympathetic than other Young Irelanders to Lalor’s leftist vision. Following the 1848 Paris uprising, Doheny addressed a Chartists rally at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. Soon afterwards, sharing a platform with Chartist leader Fergus O’Connor, he announced, ‘I am an Irish Chartist’.

By May 1848 it was Doheny, along with Thomas Francis Meagher, who was addressing the gathered Young Irelander supporters on the slopes of Slievenamon. He told the crowd who had come together on that conspicuously sunny day: ‘How proud I am at meeting so many of my school-fellows who are here today to shed their last drop of blood for their country.’

It would be fair to say that Doheny’s real Homeric political adventure only started once his starry-eyed Young Irelander hopes had been dashed. His subsequent exciting journey is well known because he wrote a widely read book about it, The Felon’s Track (1867).

After the Ballingarry debacle Doheny and John O’Mahony retreated to Fethard where they were looked after and hidden by sympathetic locals. Then they walked to Carrick-on-Suir, eventually crossing the Suir and heading for Rathgormack, Co. Waterford, where O’Mahony went his own way and Doheny was joined by James Stephens. These two proceeded to walk across Munster together, keeping one another company until they could escape from Ireland. Initially they headed for the Cistercian (Trappist) monastery at Mount Melleray, crossing over the mountains into Dungarvan. Unable to gain passage to England from that port, they trudged on towards Dunmanway in West Cork.

For two months Doheny, a well fed comfortably off barrister in his early forties, lived in the hills, leading the life of the outlaw rapparee. ‘Our destination was Dunmanway,’ Doheny wrote in The Felon’s Track, ‘near which a friend of mine lived, in whose house I hoped we might remain concealed, while means of escape would be procured somewhere among the western headlands. A short journey brought us to this house. My friend was absent, but daughters of his, whom I had not seen since childhood, recognised and welcomed us. We had then travelled 150 miles.’

At one stage the two fugitives, fearing imminent arrest, abandoned Dunmanway for Killarney. Outside the town they followed a mountain stream which led them into a remote valley before they crossed over a mountain summit and clambered downhill into Killarney.

Stephens, long after the event, wrote of their escapade criss-crossing Munster: ‘I can never resist wondering at and admiring the heroic way he [Doheny] bore himself in the face of his difficulties and the hazardous stands we were forced to make and confront throughout that felon’s track of ours. It was nothing for a young man like me, without wife or child, to have gone on my way singing; but that he, having a woman he loved, and an interesting family he adored, bore up as he did, as well, if not better than myself, raised him to a heroic level in my estimation.’

Stephens, who didn’t always make his points succinctly or well, hit the nail on the head on this occasion. There was something oddly noble or gallant about Doheny during those days.

Back in Dunmanway, their escape was finally organised. Stephens got away first, heading to Paris via England. Ultimately Doheny was sent by boat to Bristol. From there he too headed for Paris, arriving on 4 October 1848. Stephens acted as Doheny’s guide to the Parisian social whirl but, whereas Stephens took to Parisian bohemian life like a duck to water, Doheny was just passing through. When he was joined by his family he sailed from Le Havre, bound for New York City. After a turbulent voyage, they reached the city on 23 January 1849. Doheny soon got dug into Irish-American affairs and was admitted to the New York Bar. In 1855 he brought together, in his law offices, the men who founded the Fenian Brotherhood. Doheny, Michael Corcoran and John O’Mahony were the Brotherhood’s earliest leading lights in New York.