On Saint Patrick’s Day 1858, at a timber yard on Lombard Street in Dublin, six Irishmen founded a secret society dedicated to establishing an independent democratic Irish republic.
This society became known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). Its counterpart in the United States, founded a year later by John O’Mahony, a veteran of both the 1848 rising and the American Civil War, was called the Fenian Brotherhood. IRB members soon came to be known as Fenians by the British press.
Ireland in 1858 was a country prostrate with oppression. The people had been profoundly traumatised by the Great Hunger which ravished the land from 1845 to 1852. The countryside was devastated and laid waste by starvation, fever, disease and forced emigration. Most landless labourers lived in abject squalor, their only possessions a pig and a manure heap. A French observer noted that the poorest beggar in Europe lived like royalty compared to an Irish peasant. Shattered, shocked, overwhelmed and overpowered by an Empire that never took its boot off their necks, most Irish people were in no condition to resist nor capable of imagining the possibility of doing so.
Into this black hole of hopeless and helpless despair stepped the Fenians. Little could those six men have foreseen that within a decade they would have tens of thousands of members on five continents, launch a rebellion in Ireland and invade British Canada. Not for the first or last time in Irish history, the right men and the right moment combined to change the narrative and inject hope and inspiration into a cause the British government had confidently assumed was a beaten docket.
The fact that only one IRB leader in its sixty-five-year history had any professional military training was a principal reason they tasked John Devoy with recruiting Irishmen from within the British Army. While attracting some outstanding men, they also recruited informers.
Poor planning, a lack of arms, infiltration by spies, and the prior arrest of much of its leadership led to the failure of the Rising in 1867. Yet things did not end there. There was strong support for the release of Fenian prisoners, and Amnesty Associations sprang up across Ireland to campaign for their freedom. The Fenians Allen, Larkin and O’Brien’s cry from the dock of ‘God Save Ireland’ before they were hanged in Manchester in 1867 added an inspirational slogan to the lexicon of resistance and became the title of one of Ireland’s most stirring rebel songs.
In 1871, the British succumbed to mounting pressure and began releasing Fenian prisoners on the condition that they exile themselves from Ireland. Prominent Fenians, including John Devoy and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, were released and went to America, where they received a rapturous reception. A resolution of welcome was passed by the United States House of Representatives.
However, this amnesty did not extend to Fenians who had served in the British Army. Known as the ‘Military Fenians’, they were transported to Western Australia, where they were sentenced to hard labour under appalling conditions.
In 1874, Fenian prisoner James Wilson smuggled out his ‘Letter from the Tomb’, describing the mental and physical torture they endured and appealing for rescue. The letter eventually reached John Devoy in New York. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Fenian Rising combined with a bombing campaign in London in the late 1860s had a profound effect on British Prime Minister William Gladstone. When informed by a messenger in December 1868 that he had been charged with forming his first cabinet, he remarked, ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’.
A major concern for Gladstone was that, largely because of the Great Hunger, over a million Irish now lived in America, hostile to England yet beyond British jurisdiction and reprisals. Worse still, these Irish were experiencing life in a democracy within a republic that had thrown off the shackles of British rule. Many had money and resources denied to them at home, and, because of service in the American Civil War, many thousands had first-class military training and combat experience.
The British government came to the conclusion that the Irish people had to be protected and insulated from what the London Times called ‘the despicable ideas’ inspired by ‘American democracy’. In addition, events within the UK such as the 1867 Reform Act doubled the electorate, and the rising tide of democracy had to be manipulated and managed so as not to threaten the status quo.
Achieving Irish assent to British authority has dominated British thinking since Gladstone first jettisoned his Liberal Party’s hostility to Irish Home Rule and embraced it as a buffer between Irish independence and British sovereignty. Nurturing a loyal nationalist leadership is a major strategic objective for the British government. This political class, who refer to themselves as Constitutional Nationalists (despite the fact that Britain has no written constitution), has never clarified at what point in history Britain gained democratic title in Ireland; when, precisely, the Brits achieved political and legal legitimacy over whatever section of the Irish people they could control, their laws elevated to a moral imperative, and the British soldiers and constables enforcing those laws invested with a sole monopoly on the lawful use of force. It is simply taken as a given that the Irish people were lawfully subjugated and that the fundamental principles of British sovereignty and the primacy of British law are sacrosanct on every inch of Irish soil where Britain claims jurisdiction.
Today, we are told that the struggle for Irish freedom is about achieving a United Ireland. Furthermore, we are assured that the only way to unite our country, now referred to as this island, is to await a judgement call on a border poll by a British politician from an English constituency who hasn’t personally secured a single vote in Ireland.
If the struggle for Irish freedom was merely about ending partition, why were there Risings in 1867 and 1916 when there was no partition? What was Wolfe Tone determined to achieve when he helped form the United Irishmen in 1791? What did he mean by a united Ireland? There was no partition in 1791. His objective, of course, was to break the connection with England and to embrace national unity across the sectarian divide.
Republicans are continually told we must compromise. Republicanism is the compromise - a compromise between plantation Protestantism and monoethnic Catholic nationalism. A compromise first proposed by the founders of the United Irishmen. The proposition that Ireland should be an independent sovereign republic, adopting a citizen-based view of Irishness rather than the divisive ethnic and sectarian spin Britain imposed on it.
Our national flag is a compromise. Its colours of green, white, and orange denote peace through national unity. The tricolour does not represent an ‘Agreed Ireland’ in which the two traditions agree to disagree in peace and harmony over the constitutional source of Irish sovereignty and the legitimacy and extent of British influence in constraining Irish democracy. It represents a national community of citizens, comprising all traditions and persuasions. The tricolour symbolises the republican vision of a United Ireland. That is why it flew over the GPO in 1916.
We are told we must reach out to Unionists. We certainly should. But when Republicans speak of reaching out to Unionists, we mean reaching out to them as fellow citizens, not as foreigners who happen to live here. Foreigners are born in another country. The vast majority of Ulster Unionists were born in Ireland. They must not be treated as the civil garrison of an alien state. That is not a progressive reimagining of pluralism; it is submitting to the social and political modelling of colonial conquest.
The United Irishmen called upon us to abolish the memory of all past dissensions. The signatories of the 1916 Proclamation called on us to be oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past. Neither Wolfe Tone nor Padraic Pearse claimed that those differences did not exist, nor did they say they could be dismissed as irrelevant. They were saying that these differences should never be used to shape the political architecture of Ireland.
In contrast, the Good Friday Agreement bakes in the British/Irish cleavage in national allegiances, regardless of constitutional change. It enshrines the sectarian dynamic in perpetuity. It guarantees that the political malignancy through which Britain historically manipulated and controlled Ireland will remain intact, ensuring that a unitary state, should it ever come to pass, remains a divided country.
Those who argue for making concessions for a United Ireland often begin by assuming that Irish Protestants are British and can be nothing else.
Despite the reactionary, racist, and sectarian mindset of settler colonialism, we must never forget that it was Irish Protestants, inspired not by the plantations but by the Enlightenment, who were the founding fathers of Irish republicanism.
Of the 28 founding members of the United Irishmen in 1791, 26 were Ulster Presbyterians, and two, Wolfe Tone and Thomas Russell, were Anglicans. Protestant Robert Emmet led the 1803 Rebellion. He did not request his epitaph be withheld until his country had taken its place as two nations among the nations of the earth. Protestants were founding members of the Young Irelanders; it was a Protestant member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Thomas Clarke Luby, a Dubliner present at that meeting in Lombard Street in 1858, who wrote the oath, which read in part:
I…do solemnly swear allegiance to the Irish Republic, now virtually established, and…I will do my very utmost, at every risk, while life lasts, to defend its independence and integrity…
It was a Protestant Thomas Davis who wrote: “A Nation Once Again”. Thomas Darragh, one of the Freemantle Six whom we honour today, was a Protestant from County Wicklow and a former member of the Orange Order who became a Fenian while serving in the British Army.
Many Unionists in Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal had signed the Ulster Covenant in 1912 and were as loyal to the Crown in their day as their brethren a mile up the road in Fermanagh or Tyrone are today. Many still attend Orange Lodges and Orange marches. Yet, 104 years after Britain withdrew from those three Ulster counties, this community are now equal and valued citizens of the Irish State and, those born since the Ireland Act 1949, have no claim to British citizenship or a British passport. No one would refer to them as the British presence in Ireland.
We are told that in order to reunite Ireland we must persuade Unionists of its merits. Unionists did not partition Ireland - England did. It did so for deeper and far more strategic reasons than the refusal of a pro-British minority to submit to the democratic decision-making of a national electorate that contains a Catholic majority. Nor can Unionists end partition of their own volition. That decision lies exclusively with the British government. Unionists are not the problem in Ireland. The British government in Ireland is the problem.
Abraham Lincoln put it best while struggling to overcome divisions within his own Republic when he said, ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand’. We must not be seduced by the false narrative that the British/Irish cleavage in national loyalties should be embraced for the sake of peace. We must end it for the sake of peace, and the first step is ending British jurisdiction in Ireland. Until then, we cannot begin to repair the damage done to our national cohesion. In the meantime, Britain will continue to encourage, manipulate, and co-opt as many Irish citizens as possible into becoming willing accomplices in Ireland’s constitutional division along broadly sectarian lines.
The American Fenian Memorial Committee and the Irish National Graves Association have done invaluable work in honouring and memorialising our patriot dead. Their initiative and resolve in dedicating this beautiful monument are a credit to them that will one day be acknowledged in a free and grateful nation. Let us strive to achieve the ultimate monument to these men. A national democracy within an All-Ireland Republic.
Glory O to the bold Fenian Men.
Up the Republic!
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| John Crawley is a former IRA volunteer and author of The Yank. |
