‘The fenians were dreadful men’
The 1867 Rising
Pádraig Ó Concubhair
MERCIER PRESS
Cork

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction   
1    The Fenian Story   
2    Preparations in Kerry and by Kerrymen   
3    Dublin Castle and Its Agents   
4    The Fenian Rising in Kerry   
5    The Fenians in Listowel and Tarbert   
6    The Rising Elsewhere in Ireland   
7    Kilmallock Barracks and the Rising in Limerick   
8    The Erin’s Hope   
9    The Clerkenwell Explosion   
Conclusion   
Appendices   
Bibliography   
Index   

Introduction
Thanks to the men of Cahersiveen and Foilmore, who ‘jumped the gun’ and began their long, cold and weary march to Killarney on the night of 11–12 February 1867, Kerry appears on maps that show the places in Ireland where the Irish Republican Brotherhood took the field during the short-lived Fenian rising. The Brotherhood had been established in 1858, another Irish revolutionary movement that would vainly attempt to establish an Irish republic. But the Fenian rising was much more than a series of isolated and sporadic outbreaks and failed attacks on various constabulary barracks in different parts of the country. For the first time since 1798, a countrywide organisation had been established to seek Irish independence through force of arms, and defeat in the field did not mean the death of that movement. ‘The Fools, the Fools, they have left us our Fenian dead,’ Pádraig Pearse later declaimed at the grave of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. It was men like O’Donovan Rossa and the many other members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the secret organisation which survived after the failed rising, who while they were alive nurtured and conserved the republican tradition and tended the ‘Phoenix Flame’ which blazed into light in the General Post Office in Dublin at Easter 1916. A deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the Fenian movement is needed, and by concentrating on the movement in Kerry and Limerick and the involvement of men from these two counties in the wider movement, not only in Ireland but also in the United Kingdom and in the United States, we can progress towards this understanding. The Fenian threat to the established order was ever present, not just in the 1860s but for many years afterwards, so to the Castle and to Westminster the Fenians indeed ‘were dreadful men’.

Chapter 1: The Fenian Story
Being at an Irish seaport in 1847 I spoke to a man about to emigrate to America. I advised him to remain at home.
‘No, Sir!’ said he, ‘I will go to the Land of Liberty.’
‘But what of your sons?’ was my reply.
‘Oh! They will come back,’ was his response, ‘with rifles on their shoulders.’
‘Young’ Henry Grattan, House of Commons, July 1848
The Fenian Brotherhood, founded in 1858, resembled neither its precursor (the Young Ireland movement of 1848) nor the United Irishmen (the instigators of the rebellions of 1798 and 1803). No longer did the leaders of the struggle for freedom come from the intelligentsia and the gentry of Ireland. They were now ‘of the people and from the people’. So, in his introduction to Devoy’s Post Bag, P. S. O’Hegarty wrote: ‘The first two [i.e. the United Irishmen and Young Ireland] had been in origin upper-class and middle-class movements. They came to the people from above and they began as constitutional and reforming movements, but Fenianism was a popular movement from the beginning and a separatist movement from the beginning.’ Or, as Sir Robert Anderson, the British ‘spymaster’, so elegantly put it in a police report: ‘It is worthy of observation with what regular gradations sedition and treason have been declining in respectability, ever since 1798. Thus Fenianism is all the more dangerous as the members have little else to lose besides their lives.’ The Illustrated Police News of 27 April 1867 commented on:
the remarkable difference between those charged in 1848 of high treason and those now lying in gaol for the same crime. With exception of four medical students, four commercial clerks and fourteen drapers’ assistants, the rest are mechanics [i.e. workmen] or agricultural labourers. There are no gentlemen, no poets, no orators, no public writers as there were in 1848.
Another difference was that the leaders no longer looked for aid to France, the country of the tricolour. They sought help from the First Republic, the United States of America. In the draft notes for his Historical Sketch on Fenianism (Larcom papers), Anderson wrote: ‘Now, there commenced, on the other side of the Atlantic, a conspiracy differently organised and upon different methods from that [of the Young Ireland party], which preceded it.’
Emigration to America during and following the Great Famine, meant that America now had a significant Irish population. In 1851 alone, 221,100 Irish people had emigrated to the United States and in that same year Michael Doheny, one of the leaders of the 1848 rebellion, founded the 69th Regiment, ‘The Fighting Irish’, one of the many militia groups in New York where the use of arms could be learned. ‘They were,’ he said, in a speech recorded in the New York Phoenix and kept in police files, ‘the unpaid bearers of the free flag of this enlightened and liberal state, the sons of sires who, on their deathbeds, bequeathed to them the treasured and exhaustless legacy of hatred of Saxon rule in their native land.’ It was no wonder then that these emigrants felt the need to avenge the deaths from fever and hunger that happened during the Great Famine of 1845 and the evictions that followed it.
Their natural leader was John Mitchel, who had been transported before the beginning of the 1848 rebellion and escaped from Van Diemen’s Land (present-day Tasmania) in July 1853. On his arrival in New York in January 1854 he founded the Irish nationalist newspaper, The Citizen. He saw the Crimean War (1854–5) between England, France and Turkey on the one side and Russia on the other as a clear example of the maxim of ‘England’s difficulty being Ireland’s opportunity’, but it seemed that very few of the leaders of the 1848 rising agreed with him.
Someone who did agree, albeit writing five years later, was Sub-Inspector (later Superintendent) Thomas Doyle, who had been sent to America by Dublin Castle to keep an eye on the new Irish revolutionary society there. In November 1860 he reported: ‘It was when the British army stood before Delhi and Lucknow and the affairs of India required the presence there of a powerful British force that the Phoenix [i.e. Fenian] Society, as now organised, was initiated in New York.’
One of those who had not agreed with Mitchel was Charles Gavan Duffy, his comrade in the Young Ireland movement. Disheartened by the numbers of Irishmen joining the British army to fight in the Crimea, as well as the collapse of the Tenant Right Movement which had aimed to secure land reforms for all tenants regardless of religious affiliation, Duffy sold his interest in The Nation newspaper and emigrated to Australia. There he became prime minister of Victoria and was the first former Irish rebel for many hundreds of years to be knighted by a queen.
Despite the opportunity he felt was presented by the Crimean War, Mitchel saw no hope of organising a successful rebellion at this point and this fact, together with his support for slavery which made him very unpopular with the liberal leaders in New York, caused him, in 1855, to sell his paper and move to Knoxville, Tennessee. Following this, he remained on the periphery of the Fenian movement.
Nevertheless, in December 1857, Michael Doheny and John O’Mahony, another 1848 exile living in New York, contacted a third of their number, James Stephens, who had fled to Paris after the 1848 rebellion, but had returned to Ireland in 1856 and was teaching French in Dublin. They sent him a clear message: would he explore the opportunities for a new rebellion and instigate preparations for an Irish-American military invasion? This was something they felt they could not do themselves for fear of re-arrest if they came back to Ireland but Stephens could – since according to official record he had been dead and indeed buried since the 1848 rebellion! As Anderson recorded: ‘What were represented to be his remains were actually interred with considerable ceremony in Kilkenny.’ Stephens did as he was asked. He felt uniquely qualified for the position and made himself provisional dictator of the new Fenian movement, travelling all round Ireland meeting many like-minded, or, as in the case of William Smith O’Brien and John Blake Dillon, two more of the 1848 leaders, unlike-minded, people. Strange as it might seem, at one time Dublin Castle considered Smith O’Brien to be the éminence grise of the Fenian Brotherhood, a view encouraged no doubt by a letter written by him from his house at Cahermoyle, County Limerick, on 5 April 1861:
I wish it to be understood that while I labour (I fear with little success) to persuade my countrymen to abstain from looking to a foreign nation for the establishment of our National Welfare, I ask no man to pledge himself against the adoption hereafter of whatever course of action may appear to him best suited for the eventualities which may arise.
Stephens had promised that he would have 10,000 men enrolled in four months, but he would need £80 a month to do this. The American leaders agreed and their envoy, Joseph Deniffe, reached Dublin on St Patrick’s Day, 1858. On that day, Stephens founded a revolutionary society and called it the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, a name that later was transmogrified into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). It was to be a secret society; indeed Anderson wrote: ‘Stephens has frequently attributed the failure of Smith O’Brien’s attempt to the want of a secret oath binding the members of the conspiracy together and enjoining obedience to their superior officer.’
The society was organised in ‘circles’ of 810 men. The leader of each such circle was called a centre. Each centre was responsible for a group of nine captains, each captain for nine sergeants and each sergeant for nine men. It was a system based on that used in revolutionary societies on the continent, with which Stephens had become familiar during his sojourn in Paris. The organisation was thus centred on cells of ten members, which in theory cut down the opportunities for successful infiltration by spies, but it was unsuitable for the mass movement into which the IRB shortly developed. As Fenian historian Seán Ó Luing wrote, ‘it was impossible to keep a large-scale organisation free of leakages’, while John Devoy remarked, ‘the Irish are a loquacious people’.
Stephens’ journeys were not unknown to the Irish Constabulary, a police force that, according to their inspector-general, ‘might be compared to a spider’s web, which when touched caused the almost instant approach of the spider to that spot’ and whose principal raison d’être was to keep a sharp eye on any revolutionary societies that might develop. This mysterious stranger, christened An Seabhach by Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, figured in police reports as Mr Shooks. Sub-Inspector Curling in Kenmare came nearer the mark when he reported that: ‘The members of the society only wanted instructions [to rise] from America or from a Mr Stephenson who is supposed to be in France – who he is I cannot say.’
By 1865 the police were able to provide a more exact description of Stephens for their colleagues across the Irish Sea:
He is forty to forty-five years of age, five foot seven or eight inches tall, pretty stout build with an active appearance. He has the accent and demeanour of a Frenchman, and speaks French tolerably well as he has resided for a long time in France. He is an Irishman by birth and the French accent may be affected to suit his purpose. He dresses very respectably, chiefly in dark clothes and wears a silk hat or a cloth cap. When travelling he wears a brown Inverness cape, in damp or wet weather gaiters, and he carries a small cloth bag in his hand.
One of the few places Stephens discovered an existing revolutionary organisation was in the Skibbereen–Killarney–Kenmare area of south-west Cork and south-east Kerry, where O’Donovan Rossa had founded the Phoenix Society to keep alive the desire for an independent Ireland. In October 1858 Constable James Guider reported from Kilgarvan that the people of the district were forming themselves into a secret society, ‘sworn to oppose the government and to aid a foreign foe’. He requested permission ‘to dress in plain clothes on Sunday nights and be out after hours in the village, to enable him to watch the suspects’ movements closely’. Later in the year Sub-Constable Connor identified Daniel Shine of Gortbrack as ‘a dangerous ringleader – an expelled student [from Maynooth] of the Roman Catholic Church and talented accordingly, he being seven years in the college’. By the end of November the police were able to supply a list of forty-one members of the society in Kenmare, whose occupations ranged from that of national teacher – four of them – through various tradesmen, farmers and publicans, to one who was described as having ‘no trade or calling but that of a drunkard’. On 13 December 1858, egged on by reports received from some of the Catholic clergy in the area, the Castle ordered the arrest of the leaders of the organisation. Archdeacon John O’Sullivan, the parish priest of Kenmare, wrote to the Tralee Chronicle:
In the middle of December the lads were seized by the police in the dead of the night and on the following day they were, in the height of the rain, carried off to the county gaol on the Long Car, handcuffed, with their parents and friends rending the air with their shrieks, and the lads, who had escaped the informer, with their knees knocking with fright, only then they said, ‘Father John was right!’
A Fair Trial Fund was established by The Nation to pay their defence lawyers and among the subscribers was William Smith O’Brien. Prosecutions followed, but as Anderson remarked: ‘They were not at the time as successful as expected.’ One that was, albeit at the second attempt, was the prosecution of Daniel O’Sullivan of Ardgroom, who was teaching at Shelburne School, Kenmare. On 7 March 1859, he was tried before Baron Green in Tralee and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for ‘conspiracy to levy rebellion on the queen’, by someone described by the Castle as ‘one of the most merciful judges on the bench, after he had given the matter a night’s consideration’. The two other ‘conspirators’, Florence O’Sullivan and John D. O’Sullivan (despite the surnames, all three were unrelated), were freed having pleaded guilty to the charge against them, as it was felt that Daniel’s sentence would serve as an example to the young men of the area. Daniel himself was released a year later and emigrated to the United States. In June 1860 in answer to a parliamentary question by Mr White, the member for Trinity College, the home secretary said: ‘He [O’Sullivan] was released on licence and as a convict on licence he was bound to report from time to time to the constabulary and not permitted to leave the country.’ Despite this a police report of June 1861 stated that: ‘When John O’Mahony, that truculent intriguing man and the proprietor of the Phoenix newspaper, returned to America in that month [of May], he was accompanied by Sullivan [sic], the Phoenix convict.’ This is confirmed by a cutting in police files from the New York Phoenix, which mentioned that when they landed in New York from the SS Edinburgh on 21 May, Daniel O’Sullivan, responding to an address of welcome presented to him by the Fenians of New York, said:
It was not in pursuit of personal fame or glory that I have come to the United States. No, it was the threatened vengeance of a tyrant landlord who had the power to ruin my family and who might do so had I remained at home; it was this that compelled me to fly my own mountain home. Besides being constantly watched for by the bloodhounds of the law, I could not serve the cause of Ireland with the same efficiency as before.
In the United States, some time before April 1859, John O’Mahony founded a support movement, the Fenian Brotherhood, the name by which the whole Fenian body soon came to be known. By November 1859, according to the New York Phoenix, military training was widespread in North America and forty different regiments (i.e. companies) were regularly drilling in New York. These men later became the nucleus of the Irish Brigade of the Union army in the American Civil War. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, the former Young Ireland leader and by 1859 a member of parliament in Canada, stated at the time: ‘The Fenians were regarded as a recruiting agency by the Federal administration.’
The movement also spread to Britain where Thomas Clarke Luby, yet another of the 1848 men, was one of the chief organisers and where it made many contacts with various British radical associations. Those were the years of the Great Rebellion, as the Indian Mutiny (1856–8) is called in that subcontinent, and the Franco-Austrian War (1859), which was fought in Italy and led towards the unification of that country. These events strengthened radical ideas in Britain and encouraged those who were working towards a rebellion in Ireland. As Anderson commented: ‘The Crimean war and the absence of the English army in India were [each] a fresh stimulus to the [Fenian] movement.’
Stephens’ first great coup was the organisation in Ireland in October 1861 of the funeral of Terence Bellew McManus, an 1848 man who had died in San Francisco in January 1861 at the age of fifty, ten years after his escape from the convict settlements of Tasmania. At San Francisco 22,000 people took part in the funeral procession to the docks. From there the body was sent by SS Uncle Sam to Panama, across the isthmus via the Panama Canal Railway and on to New York on the SS Champion. News of the funeral (partly carried by the Pony Express) had reached New York by 7 September and when the coffin reached the city on 13 September it was escorted to the cathedral by the New York Police Department, followed by ‘O’Connell’s Band’ and ten men from each company of the 69th Regiment of Militia. Archbishop Hughes of New York presided at a solemn requiem mass for the dead patriot in St Patrick’s Cathedral. When the remains arrived in Ireland, the bishop of Cloyne allowed the rosewood coffin (described in The Nation of 2 November 1861 as ‘complete with elegantly chased silver handles and an engraved representation of the goddess of Freedom, holding a cap of liberty and pointing to a sun rising upon a broken column’) into his parish church in Queenstown (Cobh), County Cork. But the bishop of Cork refused to allow the body into any of the city churches and it was taken to the hospital chapel of the Sisters of Mercy. An account of the funeral in the Tralee Chronicle of 9 November 1861 gave an idea of the extent of successful recruitment of soldiers by the Fenians:
As the cortege crossed Benson’s Bridge into Bridge Street, on its way to the railway station, a group of military men, mostly non-commissioned officers in full dress uniform, joined it in a body. One private soldier stated that, in the course of his duty, he had fallen in with McManus in Australia and such was his regard for him, he would have come from any part of the world to attend his funeral.
In Dublin, the Archbishop, Cardinal Cullen, would neither allow the body into any church in the diocese nor permit any of his priests to take the funeral service. McManus lay in state for a week in the Mechanics’ Institute in Abbey Street and Anderson reported that on most days upwards of 9,000 people passed by the bier. It was left to Father Peter Lavelle, from Partry in County Mayo, to bury the patriot, an act that earned him the undying enmity of Cardinal Cullen. He was afterwards ‘the subject of inveterate persecution, arraigned before the highest ecclesiastical tribunal on earth’, as he himself wrote in a pamphlet now in the Castle files, and it was only due to the support he received from John McHale, the archbishop of Tuam, that he was able to defend himself from severe ecclesiastical punishment. Whatever may have been McHale’s views on the Fenians, Father Lavelle could do no wrong in his eyes because of his leadership in the struggle against the New Reformation (when strenuous efforts were made to convert Catholics to the Established Church) in Partry, County Mayo. Lavelle later told an audience that it was written in Colmcille’s prophecies that ‘a red-headed bishop in Leinster would bring about Ireland’s ruin’. Cardinal Cullen had red hair.
Meanwhile, the American delegates to the funeral had stayed in the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin, causing Thomas Clarke Luby to remark that their presence was anything but welcome to many of the usual guests: ‘Our transatlantic braves would hardly prove personae gratae to old Martin Burke’s [the then owner] ordinary patrons’ (Fenian briefs).
Daniel O’Donoghue (commonly known as The O’Donoghue), MP for Tralee, who at the time was the leading figure of the Irish Parliamentary (Home Rule) Party, subscribed £20 towards the funeral expenses. He would have been very surprised that his letter to the secretary of the funeral committee ended up in the police files of Dublin Castle accompanied by a pencilled note: ‘Although not sworn (as far as is known), he has always been suspected as a member of the Fenian Brotherhood.’