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Death of Charles Cunningham Boycott, Land Agent

Charles Cunningham Boycott, land agent and the man who gave the English language the word “boycott,” dies in Flixton, Suffolk, England, on June 19, 1897.

Boycott is born on March 12, 1832, at Burgh St. Peter, Norfolk, England, eldest surviving son of William Boycatt (1798–1877), rector of Wheatacrebury, Norfolk, and Elizabeth Georgiana Boycatt (née Beevor). The family name is changed to Boycott by his father in 1862. Educated at a boarding school in Blackheath, London, and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, he is commissioned ensign in the 39th (Dorsetshire) Regiment of Foot on February 15, 1850, and serves briefly in Ireland. He sells his commission on December 17, 1852, having attained the rank of captain, marries Annie Dunne of Queen’s County (County Laois) in 1852, and leases a farm in south County Tipperary.

In 1855, Boycott leaves for Achill Island, County Mayo, where he sub-leases 2,000 acres and acts as land agent for a friend, Murray McGregor Blacker, a local magistrate. He settles initially near Keem Strand but after some years builds a fine house near Dooagh overlooking Clew Bay. He clashes with local landowners and agents and is regularly involved in litigation. Twice summonsed unsuccessfully for assault (1856, 1859), he is involved (1859–60) in a bitter dispute with a land agent over salvage rights for shipwrecks, one of the few lucrative activities on the island. Achill’s remoteness and the difficulties of wresting a living from its harsh environment adds a roughness to the island’s social relations and probably aggravates Boycott’s tendency to high-handedness.

In 1873, Boycott inherits money and moves to mainland County Mayo, leasing Lough Mask House near Ballinrobe and its surrounding 300 acres. He also becomes agent for John Crichton, 3rd Earl Erne‘s neighbouring estate of 1,500 acres, home to thirty-eight tenant farmers paying rents of £500 a year, of which he receives 10 per cent as agent. He also serves as a magistrate and is unpopular because of his brusque and authoritarian manner, and for denying locals such traditional indulgences as collecting wood from the Lough Mask estate or taking short cuts across his farm. In April 1879, he purchases the 95-acre Kildarra estate between Claremorris and Ballinlough and an adjoining wood for £1,125, taking out a mortgage of £600 which stretches his finances.

Boycott is no brutal tyrant, but he is aloof, stubborn, and pugnacious, and believes that the Irish peasantry is prone to idleness and require firm handling. Such qualities and beliefs are unremarkable enough, but in the peculiar circumstances of the land war in County Mayo, they are enough to catapult this rather ordinary man to worldwide notoriety.

In autumn 1879, concerted land agitation begins in County Mayo, and on August 1, 1879, Boycott receives a notice threatening his life unless he reduces rents. He ignores it and evicts three tenants, which embitter relations on the estate. Lough Mask House is placed under Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) surveillance beginning in November 1879. In August 1880, his farm labourers, encouraged by the Irish National Land League, strike successfully for a wage increase from 7s. –11s. to 9s. –15s. Since the harvest is poor, Lord Erne allows a 10 per cent rent abatement. But in September 1880, when Boycott demands the rent, most tenants seek a 25 per cent abatement. Lord Erne refuses, and on September 22, Boycott attempts to serve processes against eleven defaulters. Servers and police are attacked by an angry crowd of local women and forced to take refuge in Boycott’s house. Almost immediately he is subjected to the ostracism against land grabbers advocated by Charles Stewart Parnell in his September 19 speech at Ennis, County Clare. This weapon proves as devastating against an English land agent as an Irish land-grabber. His servants leave him, labourers refuse to work his land, his walls and fences are destroyed, and local traders refuse to do business with him. He is jeered on the roads, is hissed and hustled by hostile crowds in Ballinrobe, and requires police protection.

The campaign against Boycott is largely orchestrated by Fr. John O’Malley, a local parish priest and president of the Neale branch of the Irish National Land League. It is probably O’Malley who coins the term “boycott” as an alternative to the word “ostracise,” which he believes would mean little to the local peasantry. Propagated by O’Malley’s friend, the American journalist, James Redpath, it is adopted by advocates and opponents alike.

On October 22, 1880, before his story breaks on the world, Boycott gives evidence of his treatment to the Bessborough Commission in Galway. He publicises his plight in an October 18, 1880, letter to The Times, and in a long interview with The Daily News on October 24, which is reprinted in Irish unionist newspapers and arouses considerable sympathy for him. Although he rarely uses his former military rank, he becomes universally known as “Captain Boycott,” since it suits both sides to portray him as someone of social standing. Letters of support appear in unionist papers and the Belfast News Letter sets up a “Boycott Relief Fund” and proposes a relief expedition, portraying Boycott as a peaceable English gentleman unjustly subjected to intimidation.

The prospect of hundreds of armed loyalists descending on County Mayo alarms the government, who announced on November 8 that they will provide protection for a small group of labourers to harvest Boycott’s crops. On November 12, fifty-seven loyalists from counties Cavan and Monaghan, “the Boycott Relief Expedition,” arrive at Lough Mask with an escort of almost a thousand troops. After harvesting Boycott’s crops, they leave on November 26. The entire operation costs £10,000 – about thirty times the value of the crops. Although the expedition passes off largely without incident, it focuses international media attention on the affair and establishes the word “boycott” in English and several other languages as a standard term for communal ostracism.

On November 27, Boycott and his wife go to the Hammam hotel, Dublin, where he receives death threats. On December 1, he travels to London and then to the United States (March–May 1881) to see Murray McGregor Blacker, the friend from his time on Achill Island who has since settled in Virginia. In an interview with the New York Herald, he criticises the liberal government’s weakness toward the Land League and claims that the Irish land question is an intractable problem that can only be solved in the long term by emigration and industrialisation.

Boycott returns to Lough Mask on September 19, 1881, and at an auction in Westport is mobbed and burned in effigy. This, however, is the last outburst of hostility against him, and as the land agitation wanes so does his unpopularity. Although unsuccessful in efforts to win compensation from the government, he receives a public subscription of £2,000. He remains in County Mayo as Lord Erne’s agent until February 1886, when he obtains the post of land agent for Sir Hugh Adair in Flixton, Suffolk, but he keeps the small Kildarra estate, where he continues to holiday. On December 12, 1888, he gives evidence of his treatment to the parliamentary commission on “Parnellism and crime.”

After suffering from ill-health for some years, Boycott dies at Flixton on June 19, 1897, and is buried in the churchyard of Burgh St. Peter. A British-made film, Captain Boycott (1947), stars Cecil Parker in the title role.

(From: “Boycott, Charles Cunningham” by James Quinn, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Photo credit: Granger NYC/© Granger NYC/Rue des Archives)


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Unveiling of the James Larkin Memorial Statue

The memorial to James Larkin on O’Connell Street, Dublin, is unveiled on June 15, 1979. Larkin, a revolutionary socialist, dominated the Irish Trade Union movement. George Bernard Shaw once described him as “the greatest Irishman since Parnell.”

When Oisín Kelly completes his statue of the union leader James Larkin in 1978, he does not know that it is to be among his final works. He is at the height of his power, the go-to sculptor for public commissions in Ireland.

That Larkin would be commemorated by a monument in Dublin is proposed in 1959 by the Workers’ Union of Ireland (WUI), which Larkin had set up in 1924, after his expulsion from the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU), which he had also established. But it is 1974, the centenary of Larkin’s birth, before the commemoration gets under way. Larkin had claimed to be two years younger than he was, which results in his centenary celebrations taking place in 1976 and the date of his birth inscribed on the monument having to be corrected to read 1874.

The memorial committee, comprising the great and the good of the union, includes Donal Nevin, who is instrumental in choosing the sculptor. Kelly is an inspired choice, as the resulting statue is one of the most dynamic public works in the centre of Dublin. Only John Henry Foley’s representation of Henry Grattan, from 1876, on College Green, exudes a similar energy. In these two works, emphatic gesture and naturalistic treatment of the men’s clothing create a liveliness in the figures. Foley’s 19th-century concern is to create a contrast with his statues of Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke, positioned opposite, in the grounds of Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Kelly’s 20th-century aspiration is to please both his patron and the public.

Kelly, who had not known Larkin, chooses to use a familiar image of the man. Joseph Cashman had photographed Larkin addressing a crowd in Dublin in 1923. He looked so vital and passionate that the photograph has become iconic.

Once his maquette is approved, Kelly begins work on the plaster model in the backyard of his family home, in Firhouse, outside Dublin. His neighbour Eddie Golden, the actor, poses for the statue. When the full-size model is completed, it is transferred to Dublin Art Foundry, where it is cast in bronze by Leo Higgins and John Behan.

Although ready for unveiling in 1978, a delay ensues while attempts are made to quarry a colossal stone for the pedestal. Larkin’s son Denis is keen that it be carved from a single piece of granite, which proves impossible. Also, President Patrick Hillery’s decision to perform the unveiling necessitates careful consideration of his speech. The writing of several drafts ensures that his language is neither controversial nor ambiguous. The word “comrades,” present in early drafts, does not appear in the final text. The statue is unveiled on June 15, 1979.

The sculpture has a commanding presence on O’Connell Street, where it has become one of the most popular monuments in Dublin. It regularly serves as a site of celebration and demonstration and is often a central motif in photographs of union members and politicians of the left gathering for anniversaries, or of crowds of the aggrieved and dissatisfied marching past.

The quotation on the pedestal, in French, Irish and English, dates back to the French Revolution: “The great appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise.”

(From: “Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1978 – James Larkin statue, by Oisín Kelly” by Paula Murphy, The Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com, January 30, 2016)


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Land League Organizer Michael Davitt Released from Dartmoor Prison

Michael Davitt, Irish republican and agrarian agitator, is paroled from Dartmoor Prison on December 19, 1877, having served seven and a half years of a fifteen-year sentence, following pressure from the Home Rule League for an amnesty for all Irish political prisoners.

Davitt is born in Straide, County Mayo, on March 25, 1846. He is the founder of the Irish National Land League, which organizes resistance to absentee landlordism and seeks to relieve the poverty of the tenant farmers by securing fixity of tenure, fair rent, and free sale of the tenant’s interest.

Davitt is the son of an evicted tenant farmer. After their eviction, the family emigrates to England. In 1856, at the age of 10, he starts work in a cotton mill, where he loses an arm in a machinery accident a year later. In 1865, he joins the revolutionary Fenian Brotherhood, an international secret society that seeks to secure political freedom for Ireland. He becomes secretary of its Irish analogue, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), in 1868. Arrested in Paddington Station in London for sending firearms to Ireland on May 14, 1870, he is sentenced to 15 years in Dartmoor Prison and there lays plans to link Charles Stewart Parnell’s constitutional reform with Fenian activism to achieve political-agrarian agitation.

Paroled from prison in 1877, Davitt rejoins the IRB and goes to the United States, where the Fenian movement originated. There he is deeply influenced by Henry George’s ideas about the relationship between land monopoly and poverty.

Back in Ireland, using funds raised by John Devoy and Clan na Gael in the United States, Davitt wins Parnell’s cooperation in organizing the Land League in 1879, which leads, however, to his expulsion from the supreme council of the IRB in 1880. He is elected member of Parliament for North Meath in 1882 but is disqualified as he is a convict. He is also imprisoned for seditious speeches in 1881 and 1883.

Because of his public championing of Henry George’s theories of land reform, Parnell repudiates him. Davitt actively defends the Nationalists before the Parnell Commission, which meets between 1887 and 1889. When the Irish party splits in 1890 over Parnell’s involvement in Capt. William Henry O’Shea’s divorce case, Davitt is among the first to oppose Parnell’s continuance as leader.

Davitt is elected to Parliament in 1892 and 1893 but is unseated in both cases. He is elected again, for South Mayo in 1895, but resigns in 1899 in protest against the Second Boer War.

Davitt dies in Elphis Hospital, Dublin on May 30, 1906, at the age of 60, from blood poisoning. The fact that the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland attends his funeral is a public indication of the dramatic political journey this former Fenian prisoner has taken. There is no plan for public funeral, and hence Davitt’s body is brought quietly to the Carmelite Friary, Clarendon Street, Dublin. However, the next day over 20,000 people file past his coffin. His remains are taken by train to Foxford, County Mayo, and buried in the grounds of Straide Abbey at Straide, near his place of birth.

Davitt’s book, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (1904), is a valuable record of his time.


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Death of Elizabeth Burke-Plunkett, Countess of Fingall

The Rt. Hon. Elizabeth Mary Margaret Burke-Plunkett, Countess of Fingall, dies in Dublin on October 28, 1944.

Burke is born in Moycullen, County Galway, a daughter of George Edmond Burke of Danesfield and his wife Theresa Quin. She becomes an activist in Irish industrial, charitable and cultural groups, serving as second president of the Camogie Association and first president of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. She is also a noted literary hostess, whose salon at Earlsfort House is a centre of Dublin intellectual life for many years.

In 1883, Burke marries Arthur James Francis Plunkett, 11th Earl of Fingall, 4th Baron Fingall (1859–1929), state steward to the administration in Dublin Castle and one of the few Catholics to hold an Irish peerage, thus becoming Countess of Fingall.

Burke-Plunkett befriends unionists such as Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, and Chief Secretary for Ireland George Wyndham and also nationalist leaders such as Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera, as well as activists like the cooperative pioneer Sir Horace Plunkett. Her colourful memoir of those circles is published in 1937. She establishes a famous literary salon and for many years she is “at home” every Thursday at Earlsfort House to the leading figures in Dublin intellectual circles. Her main rival as a literary hostess is the artist Sarah Purser, who is “at home” every Tuesday.

A friendship with Máire Ní Chinnéide, forged through theatrical circles, leads to Burke-Plunkett accepting the patronage of Camogie Association of Ireland from 1910 to 1923. She also presents a cup and medals for the winners of the Dublin League. She serves largely in an honorary role, attending a few meetings of what is then known as Cualacht Luithchleas na mBan Gaedheal.

A liberal unionist, Burke-Plunkett becomes active in the promotion of Irish agriculture, industry and culture. She is a founder member of Horace Plunkett’s Irish co-operative movement, is the first president of the Society of United Irishwomen from 1912 to 1921, and of its successor, the Irish Countrywomen’s Association until 1942. She presides at suffragette meetings in Dublin, is a founder of the Irish Distressed Ladies Committee, and serves on the board of the Irish Industries Association. She is also the chairperson of the Irish Central Committee for the Employment of Women.

Burke-Plunkett dies on October 28, 1944, at Earlsfort House, her Dublin home, where she had held her famous Thursdays “at home” for many years. She is buried on the grounds of Killeen Castle, County Meath, following a Requiem Mass at University Church in Dublin.


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John Dillon Announces the “Plan of Campaign”

John Dillon announces the “Plan of Campaign” for Irish tenants against unfair rents on October 17, 1886.

The Plan of Campaign is a stratagem adopted in Ireland between 1886 and 1891, co-ordinated by Irish politicians for the benefit of tenant farmers, against mainly absentee and rack-rent landlords and the tyrannical regime of enforced massive rents and evictions. It is launched to counter agricultural distress caused by the continual depression in prices of dairy products and cattle from the mid-1870s, which leaves many tenants in arrears with rent. Bad weather in 1885 and 1886 also cause crop failure, making it harder to pay rents. The Land War of the early 1880s is about to be renewed after evictions increase and outrages become widespread.

The Plan, conceived by Timothy Healy, is devised and organised by Timothy Harrington, secretary of the Irish National League, William O’Brien and John Dillon. It is outlined in an article headed Plan of Campaign by Harrington which is published on October 23, 1886, in the League’s newspaper, the United Ireland, of which O’Brien is editor.

Dillon is among those who organise a campaign whereby tenants pay their rents to the Land League instead of their landlords. If the tenants are evicted, they are to receive financial assistance from a general fund established for that purpose. As a result of his involvement in this campaign, Dillon spends a number of months in jail.

The measures are to be put into operation on 203 estates, mainly in the south and west of the country though including some scattered Ulster estates. Initially sixty landlords accept the reduced rents, twenty-four holding out but then agreeing to the tenant conditions. Tenants give in on fifteen estates. The chief trouble occurs on the remaining large estates.

The organisers of the Plan decide to test a number of their measures, expecting the remainder will then give in. Widespread attention is focused on it being implemented by Dillon and O’Brien on the estate of Hubert de Burgh-Canning, 2nd Marquess of Clanricarde, at Portumna, County Galway, on November 19, 1886, where the landlord is an absentee ascendancy landlord. The estate comprising 52,000 acres, or 21,000 hectare, yields 25,000 sterling annually in rents paid by 1,900 tenants. The hard-pressed tenants look for a reduction of twenty-five percent. The landlord refuses to give any abatement. The tenant’s reduced rents are then placed into an estate fund, and the landlord informed he will only receive the monies when he agrees to the reduction. Tenants on other estates then follow the example of the Clanricarde tenants, the Plan on each estate led by a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) Campaign activists including Pat O’Brien, Alexander Blane or members of its constituency organisation, the National League. Some 20,000 tenants are involved.

In 1887, a rent strike takes place on the estate of Lady Kingston near Mitchelstown, County Cork. Another of the Land Leaguers, William O’Brien, is brought to court on charges of inciting non-payment of rent. Dillon organises an 8,000 strong crowd to demonstrate outside the courthouse. Three estate tenants are shot by police and others are injured. This incident becomes known as the “Mitchelstown Massacre.”

In December 1890, following the verdict in the O’Shea v O’Shea and Parnell divorce case, the IPP splits. This diverts attention from the Campaign which slowly peters out. The IPP also wants to disassociate itself from the more violent aspects on the approach to the Second Home Rule Bill that narrowly succeeds with a majority of 30 in the House of Commons but is then defeated by the House of Lords in 1893.

The Irish land question is addressed after the 1902 Land Conference by the main reforming Land Purchase (Ireland) Act 1903, during Arthur Balfour‘s short tenure as Prime Minister in 1902–05, allowing Irish tenant farmers to buy the freehold title to their land with low annuities and affordable government-backed loans.

(Pictured: Eviction scene, Woodford Galway 1888, during the Plan of Campaign. The Woodford evictions become some of the most highly resisted with numerous pamphlets, during the period, referring to them)


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Birth of T. P. O’Connor, Politician & Journalist

Thomas Power O’Connor, PC, Irish nationalist politician and journalist known as T. P. O’Connor and occasionally as Tay Pay (mimicking his own pronunciation of the initials T. P.), is born in Athlone, County Westmeath, on October 5, 1848. He serves as a Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for nearly fifty years.

O’Connor is the eldest son of Thomas O’Connor, an Athlone shopkeeper, and his wife Teresa (née Power), the daughter of a non-commissioned officer in the Connaught Rangers. He is educated at The College of the Immaculate Conception in Athlone, and Queen’s College Galway, where he wins scholarships in history and modern languages and builds up a reputation as an orator, serving as auditor of the college’s Literary and Debating Society.

O’Connor enters journalism as a junior reporter on Saunders’ Newsletter, a Dublin journal, in 1867. In 1870, he moves to London and is appointed a sub-editor on The Daily Telegraph, principally on account of the utility of his mastery of French and German in reportage of the Franco-Prussian War. He later becomes London correspondent for the New York Herald. He compiles the society magazine Mainly About People (M.A.P.) from 1898 to 1911.

O’Connor is elected Member of Parliament for Galway Borough in the 1880 United Kingdom general election, as a representative of the Home Rule League, which is under the leadership of William Shaw, though virtually led by Charles Stewart Parnell, who wins the party’s leadership a short time later. At the next general election in 1885, he is returned both for Galway Borough and for the Liverpool Scotland constituencies, which has a large Irish population. He chooses to sit for Liverpool and represents that constituency in the House of Commons from 1885 until his death in 1929. He remains the only British MP from an Irish nationalist party ever to be elected to a constituency outside of the island of Ireland. He continues to be re-elected in Liverpool under this label unopposed in the 1918, 1922, 1923, 1924 and 1929 general elections, despite the declaration of a de facto Irish Republic in early 1919, and the establishment by the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty of a quasi-independent Irish Free State in late 1922.

From 1905, O’Connor belongs to the central leadership of the United Irish League. During much of his time in parliament, he writes a nightly sketch of proceedings there for The Pall Mall Gazette. He becomes “Father of the House,” with unbroken service of 49 years, 215 days. The Irish Nationalist Party ceases to exist effectively after the Sinn Féin landslide of 1918, and thereafter he effectively sits as an independent. On April 13, 1920, he warns the House of Commons that the death on hunger strike of Thomas Ashe will galvanise opinion in Ireland and unite all Irishmen in opposition to British rule.

O’Connor founds and is the first editor of several newspapers and journals: The Star, the Weekly Sun (1891), The Sun (1893), M.A.P. and T.P.’s Weekly (1902). In August 1906, he is instrumental in the passing by Parliament of the Musical Copyright Act 1906, also known as the T.P. O’Connor Bill, following many of the popular music writers at the time dying in poverty due to extensive piracy by gangs during the piracy crisis of sheet music in the early 20th century. The gangs often buy a copy of the music at full price, copy it, and resell it, often at half the price of the original. The film I’ll Be Your Sweetheart (1945), commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, is based on the events of the day.

O’Connor is appointed as the second president of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) in 1916 and appears in front of the Cinema Commission of Inquiry (1916), set up by the National Council of Public Morals where he outlines the BBFC’s position on protecting public morals by listing forty-three infractions, from the BBFC 1913–1915 reports, on why scenes in a film may be cut. He is appointed to the Privy Council by the first Labour government in 1924. He is also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, the world’s oldest journalists’ organisation. It continues to honour him by having a T.P. O’Connor charity fund.

In 1885, O’Connor marries Elizabeth Paschal, the daughter of a judge of the Supreme Court of Texas.

O’Connor dies in London on November 18, 1929, and is buried at St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green, in north-west London. He is the last Father of the House to die as a sitting MP until Sir Gerald Kaufman in 2017.


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Death of James Stephens, Fenian & Co-founder of the Irish Republican Brotherhood

James Stephens, Irish republican, dies in Blackrock, County Dublin, on March 29, 1901. He is a founding member of an originally unnamed revolutionary organisation in Dublin. This organisation, founded on March 17, 1858, is later to become known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).

References to Stephens’s early life, according to one of his biographers, Desmond Ryan, are obscure and limited to Stephens’s own vague autobiographical recollections. He is born at Lilac Cottage, Blackmill Street, Kilkenny, County Kilkenny, on January 26, 1825, and spends his childhood there. No birth records have ever been located, but a baptismal record from St. Mary’s Parish is dated July 29, 1825. There is reason to believe that he is born out of wedlock in late July 1825. However, according to Stephens, his exact date of birth is January 26. He is educated at St. Kieran’s College, Kilkenny, for at least one quarter in 1838. He is later apprenticed to a civil engineer, and from 1844 onwards works for the Waterford–Limerick Railway Company.

When the Young Irelanders split from Daniel O’Connell‘s Repeal Association and found the Irish Confederation in January 1847, Stephens becomes involved in the activities of the Kilkenny Confederate clubs. After the government suspends habeas corpus and issues warrants of arrest against the Confederate leaders, William Smith O’Brien appears in Kilkenny on July 23, 1848, seeking support for a popular insurrection, and two days later Stephens joins him. For four days he follows O’Brien’s wanderings and takes part in all his encounters with government forces, including the affray at the home of Widow McCormack on July 29 when O’Brien’s followers besiege a party of policemen in a house near Ballingarry, County Tipperary. They are finally dispersed by gunfire and the arrival of reinforcements, thus ending O’Brien’s revolutionary efforts. Stephens reportedly receives two bullet wounds but manages to hide and evade arrest.

Three days later, Stephens proceeds to Ballyneale, near Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, in search of John O’Mahony. He accompanies O’Mahony to meet Michael Doheny, and for six weeks Stephens and Doheny avoid arrest by roaming around the south of Ireland, an adventure that Doheny records in The Felon’s Track (1849). On September 12, Stephens is smuggled out of Ireland by the family of the Skibbereen attorney McCarthy Downing, and four days later manages to reach Paris. O’Mahony and Doheny join him shortly afterwards, although Doheny soon emigrates to the United States.

From their exile Stephens and O’Mahony watch the failure of the ’49 conspiracy of James Fintan Lalor and Philip Gray and witness the barricades against Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1851. Stephens later claims to have joined the French republican insurgents, but according to O’Mahony this is merely a frustrated intention. Equally without foundation is the rumour that Stephens and O’Mahony at this time join a republican secret society as a training ground for their future Irish enterprise.

Stephens remains in Paris from 1848 to 1855, supporting himself by teaching English. He attends Sorbonne University and has plans to obtain a professorship that never materialises. Towards the close of his exile, he is employed by the Le Moniteur Universel, for which he allegedly translates Charles Dickens‘s Martin Chuzzlewit. Late in 1855 he returns to Ireland and undertakes a series of tours throughout the island. He later magnifies the venture as “the 3,000 miles’ walk” and reformulates it as an attempt to measure the country’s nationalist temperature. However, his primary intention at the time is to collect information for a book he is planning to write. The following autumn he returns to Dublin, becomes tutor of French to the children of several well-to-do families including that of the Young Irelander John Blake Dillon, and joins the nationalist circle of Thomas Clarke Luby, Philip Gray, and other veterans of the ’49 conspiracy.

When Gray dies in January 1857, Stephens asks O’Mahony, then living in New York, to collect funds for a funeral monument. This evidence of nationalist activity, coupled with the prospect of “England’s difficulty” awakened by the recent Crimean War and the insurrection in India, give life to O’Mahony’s and Doheny’s Emmet Monument Association (EMA). That autumn the EMA sends an envoy to Ireland with a proposal for Stephens to prepare the country for the arrival of a military expedition. Stephens offers to organise 10,000 men in three months, provided he is given at least £80 a month and absolute authority over the enterprise. On March 17, 1858, Saint Patrick’s Day, he receives the first installment and his appointment as “chief executive” of the Irish movement. The same day he and his associates take an oath to make Ireland “an independent democratic republic.” The nameless secret society thereby inaugurated eventually becomes known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). It is organised in cells, each led by a “centre” with Stephens being known as the “head centre.”

The EMA’s failure to send a second installment prompts Stephens to travel to New York in October 1858. While in America he attempts, and fails, to engage the support of the Young Irelanders John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher, but succeeds in establishing a solid partnership with Irish nationalists based in New York. Late in 1858 the surviving members of the EMA reorganise themselves into a modified replica of the IRB, and under John O’Mahony’s inspiration adopt the name of the Fenian Brotherhood (FB). Eventually the label “Fenian” comes to be applied to the members of both organisations. As part of the new arrangements, Stephens obtains a new appointment as head of the movement “at home and abroad.”

Despite Stephens’s success, his labours in America and the secrecy of his own activities in Ireland are almost spoiled in December by the arrest of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa and other members of the Phoenix National and Literary Society of Skibbereen, which had been incorporated into the IRB the previous May. On his return from America in March 1859 Stephens takes refuge in Paris and delegates management of the organisation to Luby. He only returns to Dublin in April 1861 when O’Mahony, then on a tour of inspection, suggests establishing an executive council to share Stephens’s power. Stephens succeeds in frustrating this plan, but from the time of O’Mahony’s visit the tension between the two leaders never subsides.

In the autumn of 1861 Stephens takes lodgings on Charlemont Street at the house of John and Rossanna Hopper, owners of a small tailoring establishment, and soon falls in love with their daughter Jane, almost twenty years his junior. The two are married on January 24, 1864, at the church of SS Michael and John, Exchange Street. The marriage produces no children.

The first success for Stephens’s IRB comes on November 10, 1861, when the IRB-dominated National Brotherhood of Saint Patrick stages the funeral for the Young Irelander Terence MacManus after an intense tug-of-war with both the Catholic church and constitutional nationalism. Stephens plays a central role in promoting IRB control of the funeral arrangements and although the event lacks the mythical nationalist significance claimed by Fenian apologists, it serves to boost Fenian self-assertion and hasten the divorce between middle-class nationalist elites and a new militant republican working class which has different interests at stake in an independent Ireland.

Despite the McManus funeral success, the IRB continues to endure financial difficulties throughout 1862. In 1863, Stephens resolves to address these difficulties and consolidate the movement’s position by founding a newspaper. The Irish People is first issued on November 28, 1863. He contributes leading articles to its first three numbers but finally abandons his literary efforts in favour of Luby, John O’Leary, and Charles J. Kickham, thereafter the paper’s leading writers and guiding spirits.

In the meantime, the relationship between Stephens and O’Mahony continues to deteriorate. In November 1863 O’Mahony has turned the tables and persuaded the FB to acknowledge Stephens merely as “its representative in Europe.” In March 1864 Stephens again travels to the United States in order to stimulate the flow of funds towards the IRB and regain some hold on the FB. As part of his new policies, he makes the sensational announcement that 1865, at latest, is to be the movement’s “year of action.” After the end of the American Civil War in April 1865, Fenian activity increases spectacularly, and demobilised soldiers travel to Ireland. However, on September 15, 1865, the government takes action, suppresses The Irish People, and arrests most of Stephens’s closest collaborators, including Luby, O’Leary and O’Donovan Rossa. Stephens himself is arrested on November 11 but, in a daring operation that proves a propaganda coup for the Fenians, is rescued from Richmond Bridewell penitentiary thirteen days later and eventually makes his way to America via Britain and France. By the time he arrives in the United States, the FB has split into two “wings,” the partisans of John O’Mahony and those of William R. Roberts, the president of the Fenian “senate,” who advocate shifting military efforts towards invading Canada. The split ends Stephens’s already slender chances of launching a successful rising before the end of December, and he calls a postponement.

On February 17, 1866, the government suspends habeas corpus in Ireland and arrests multiply. Stephens braves the members’ impatience, calls a new postponement, and in May travels to New York in order to try and solve the American crisis in the IRB’s favour. He accepts O’Mahony’s resignation, takes control of his wing, and starts an intensive campaign of propaganda and fund-raising. Again, he proclaims 1866 as the “year of action,” but by December the movement is weaker than ever, and he tries to call a new postponement. This time his lieutenants, led by Col. Thomas J. Kelly, lose patience, depose him from leadership and prepare to launch the insurrection themselves. The result is the ill-fated Fenian Rising of March 5-6, 1867.

After his deposition, Stephens spends most of his remaining years in France, in dire financial distress, but still hoping against hope to regain his position at the head of the movement. However, the IRB is now under the control of the anti-Stephens supreme council, and the FB is quickly losing its influence to the newly emerged Clan na Gael. His reputation, always tainted by his controversial personality and autocratic management, had been ruined forever by the 1866 events and his repeated failure to order the rising. With the exception of a small core of diehard partisans, the majority of his former associates and followers have grown resentful of his leadership and are vehemently opposed to his return.

Apart from occasional English tutoring and a ruinous venture as a wine merchant that takes him to the United States from 1871 to 1874, Stephens’s post-Fenian years are mainly spent in poverty while awaiting the next opportunity to resume leadership of the IRB. In 1880, after a last unsuccessful trip to the United States and a crushing defeat by John Devoy and Clan na Gael, he gives up hope, returns to Paris, and settles down to earn a living as an occasional newspaper contributor. In 1885 he is expelled from France under the unfounded suspicion of involvement in dynamiting activities with his cousins Joseph and Patrick Casey and the journalist Eugene Davis. He then takes up residence in Brussels but is able to return to Paris two years later. Finally, through Charles Stewart Parnell‘s intervention in 1891, he is allowed to return to Ireland. He moves into a cottage in Sutton, near Howth, and settles into retirement. After his wife’s death in 1895 he moves to the house of his in-laws in Blackrock, County Dublin, where he dies on March 29, 1901. Two days later he is given a solemn nationalist funeral and is interred in Glasnevin Cemetery.

Stephens’s controversial historical reputation never accords him a comfortable place in the post-independence nationalist pantheon. His egotism and defects as a leader overshadow the credit he is given as a founder and organiser. Yet his notorious personality is arguably the key to his success and ultimate historical significance. His obsessive self-confidence and single-mindedness turn the EMA’s half-matured proposal into a solid partnership that inaugurates an enduring pattern of American involvement in Irish nationalism. At the same time, by impressing the IRB with his own assertiveness he enables it to break the tacit monopoly of the middle classes on Irish political life. By the time of his downfall, Irish republicanism has acquired a definite shape and a marginal but stable position in the Irish political scene.

Stephens’s name has been incorporated into Kilkenny local heritage in institutions as diverse as a swimming pool, a military barracks, and a hurling team. In 1967 a plaque is unveiled at the site of his childhood home on Blackmill Street. The main collections of his documents are the James Stephens papers, MSS 10491–2, in the National Library of Ireland, and the Michael Davitt papers addenda, MS 9659d, in Trinity College Dublin.

(From: “Stephens, James” by Marta Ramón, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, last revised March 2021)


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The Assassination of Alan Bell

Alan Bell, policeman and resident magistrate, is tasked by British Intelligence to track down Michael Collins’s war chest. By March 26, 1920, he has successfully confiscated over £71,000 from Sinn Féin‘s headquarters and by investigating banks throughout the country and is set to seize much more. On that day he is pulled off a tram in South Dublin and shot three times in the head.

Bell is born in Banagher, King’s County (now County Offaly), one of at least two sons of the Rev. James Adamson Bell, Church of Ireland clergyman. His mother’s name is unknown. Educated locally, he joins the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in September 1879 as a cadet, serving in the counties of Cavan, Galway, Roscommon, Westmeath, and Cork up to the rank of district inspector. During the Land War (1879–82) he investigates sources of Irish National Land League funds and in 1882 arrests the American land reformer and journalist Henry George in Athenry. He, along with District Inspector William Henry Joyce, compile evidence against the nationalist and agrarian agitation for the special commission of 1888–89 which investigates charges against the nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell and his associates. His actions make him popular with unionists but a marked man among nationalists.

After almost twenty years’ police service, Bell becomes a resident magistrate on November 12, 1898, a civil service post under the Constabulary Act, 1836. His districts included Athenry, Claremorris, Armagh, Belfast, and Portadown. With many years’ experience in criminal intelligence, he is transferred to Dublin Castle early in the Irish War of Independence as a special investigator and intelligence gatherer. In December 1919 he questions suspects for the attempted Irish Republican Army (IRA) assassination of the viceroy, Lord French, and place suspect premises under surveillance. His vulnerability is made evident by the shooting in January 1920 of Dublin Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner William C. Redmond, one of his informants. He remains in Dublin to investigate the “republican loan” raised by Michael Collins and Sinn Féin, believed to be hidden in suspect bank accounts. Refusing protective accommodation in Dublin Castle where other officials have already retreated, he opts to live with his wife at a private suburban residence, 19 Belgrave Square, Monkstown, County Dublin. He summons bank managers to his office in early March 1920 and progresses sufficiently to force Collins into taking action.

Carrying a pocket revolver for protection, Bell travels to work daily by tram until the morning of March 26, 1920. At the busy junction of Simmonscourt Road, Sandymount Avenue, and Merrion Road, Ballsbridge, a group of men immobilise the crowded vehicle and surround their target, declaring, “Come on, Mr. Bell, your time has come.” Bundling him on to the street, they shoot him dead in public view and run from the scene. In spite of vivid eyewitness accounts in the press, no killer is identified. His death comes amid almost daily violence and barely a week after the shooting of the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, Tomás Mac Curtain, allegedly by police assassins. He acts fearlessly, perhaps expecting a violent death as the outcome of his mission.

Bell is buried privately in Dean’s Grange Cemetery, Deansgrange, County Dublin. Some Irish republican prisoners at Gloucester during the influenza epidemic of 1918–19 may have been saved from infection by his brother, who as prison doctor there had advised that the jail be evacuated.

(From: “Alan Bell” by Patrick Long, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Formal Establishment of the Irish Republican Brotherhood

James Stephens formally establishes the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in Peter Lanigan’s timber yard, Lombard Street, Dublin, on Saint Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1858. It is originally named the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, but soon comes to be known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood. At the same time, John O’Mahoney is founding the American branch of the revolutionary group. O’Mahoney gives the organization the better-known name Fenians, in honor of the Fianna, the soldiers led by Fionn mac Cumhaill, the heroic warrior of Irish legend.

The IRB is a small, secret, revolutionary body whose sole object is to “establish and maintain a free and independent Republican Government in Ireland.” Stephens is a Young Irelander and is a lieutenant to William Smith O’Brien at the Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch in Ballingary, County Tipperary, in August 1848. He is wounded three times and is smuggled onto a ship to England and then to France, where he spends the next eight years. Upon his return to Dublin in 1856, he determines to organise a revolutionary movement and that leads to the founding of the IRB.

The IRB becomes known as the Fenian movement in the 1850s and 1860s and is committed to the use of force to establish an independent Irish republic. After organising an abortive rising in March 1867, it suffers deep internal divisions over its leadership and strategy in both the United States and Ireland—whether it is best to strike at England, in Ireland or in Canada. The issue is resolved after a series of failed interventions in Canada in 1866, 1867 and 1871, and after bombings in England that do not lead Ireland closer to independence. The IRB is unable to exploit the weaknesses and divisions in the constitutional movement following Charles Stewart Parnell’s divorce scandal (1890–91).

The IRB is eventually rejuvenated in Ireland about 1907, led by Bulmer Hobson and Tom Clarke, thus preparing the way for all that follows.The governing body is the Supreme Council. Before 1916 this consists of eleven members, and after the 1917 reorganisation it contains fifteen members. When not in session, all powers of the Supreme Council, except for declaring war, devolve onto an executive of three: the president, secretary and treasurer.

The constitution provides for the establishment of a military council, subordinate to the Supreme Council. The seven signatories of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic constitute the entire military council at the time. The constitution is dedicated to the use of force against England at any favourable opportunity, but this is to be a democratic decision: “The IRB shall await the decision of the Irish Nation as expressed by a majority of the Irish people as to the fit hour of inaugurating a war against England and shall, pending such an emergency, lend its support to every movement calculated to advance the cause of Irish independence, consistent with the preservation of its own integrity,” a clause adopted in 1873 in response to the controversies arising from the 1867 Fenian Rising.

The IRB plans the 1916 Easter Rising but the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army make it possible. The establishment of the Irish Volunteers gives the IRB the great opportunity to train and equip its members as a military body for the purpose of securing independence for Ireland by force of arms and securing the cooperation of all Irish military bodies in the accomplishment of its objectives. Numerically the IRB probably never exceeds 2,000 members, but they are all extremely loyal and well trained, and there is very tight security. The executions of 1916 just about wipe out the Supreme Council, and after the prisoners are released, the IRB has to reconstitute itself.

Following the Easter Rising some republicans—notably Éamon de Valera and Cathal Brugha—leave the organization, which they view as no longer necessary, since the Irish Volunteers now perform its function. The IRB, during the Irish War of Independence (1919-21), is under the control of Michael Collins, who is secretary, and subsequently president, of the Supreme Council. Volunteers such as Séumas Robinson say afterwards that the IRB by then is “moribund where not already dead,” but there is evidence that it is an important force during the war.

When the Anglo-Irish Treaty is signed on December 6, 1921, it is debated by the Supreme Council, which votes to accept it by eleven votes to four. Those on the Supreme Council who oppose the Treaty include former leader Harry Boland, Austin Stack and Liam Lynch. Anti-Treaty republicans like Ernie O’Malley, who fought during the Irish Civil War against the Treaty, sees the IRB as being used to undermine the Irish Republic. The IRB becomes quiescent during the Irish Civil War, which ends in May 1923, but it emerges again later that year as a faction within the National Army that supports Minister for Defence Richard Mulcahy against the “Old IRA,” which fought against the recruitment of ex-British Army personnel and the demobilization of old IRA men. This comes to a head with the Irish Army Mutiny of 1924, in the wake of which Mulcahy resigns and other IRB members of the army are dismissed by acting President of the Executive Council Kevin O’Higgins. The IRB subsequently dissolves itself, although it is not known whether a formal decision is taken, or it simply ceases to function.


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Death of Richard Pigott, Journalist, Newspaper Owner & Forger

Richard Pigott, Irish journalist, newspaper owner, and forger, best known for his forging of evidence that Charles Stewart Parnell of the Irish National Land League had been sympathetic to the perpetrators of the Phoenix Park Murders, dies of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound on March 1, 1889, in Madrid, Spain.

Pigott is born in Ratoath, County Meath, in 1835, the son of George Pigott of Ratoath, and his wife, a woman from Roscommon. As a young man he supports Irish nationalism and works on the publications The Nation and The Tablet before acting as manager of The Irishman, a newspaper founded by Denis Holland. James O’Connor later claims Pigott embezzled funds from The Irishman and covered his tracks by not keeping written records. He also works for the Irish National Land League, departing in 1883 after accusing its treasurer, Mr. Fagan, of being unable to account for £100,000 (equivalent to £10,700,000 in 2021) of its funds and for keeping inadequate records. Nothing is done about his accusation, and he turns against the League, which is allied to the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) led by the League’s president, Charles Stewart Parnell.

In 1879 Pigott is proprietor of three newspapers, which he soon sells to the League. Hitherto a zealous nationalist, from 1884 onwards he vilifies his former associates and sells information to their political opponents. In an effort to destroy Parnell’s career, he forges several letters which purport that Parnell had supported the perpetrators of the Phoenix Park murders of 1882.

The Times purchases Pigott’s forgeries for £1,780 (equivalent to £211,000 in 2021) and publishes the most damning letter on April 18, 1887. Parnell immediately denounces it as “a villainous and barefaced forgery.” In February 1889, the Parnell Commission vindicates him by proving that the letters are fake. They included misspellings (specifically ‘hesitency [sic]’) which Pigott had written elsewhere. A libel action instituted by Parnell also vindicates him, and his parliamentary career survives the Pigott accusations.

The Commission eventually produces thirty-seven volumes of evidence, covering not just the forgeries but also the surrounding violence that follows from the Plan of Campaign.

After admitting his forgeries to Henry Labouchère, Pigott flees to Spain and apparently shoots himself on March 1, 1889, in a hotel room in Madrid, a city in which O’Shea has a network of connections, and Pigott himself apparently has none. Parnell then sues The Times for libel, and the newspaper pays him £5,000 (equivalent to £588,000 in 2021) in an out-of-court settlement, as well as considerably more in legal fees. When Parnell next enters the House of Commons, he receives a hero’s reception from his fellow Members of Parliament.

(Pictured: Pigott as caricatured by Spy (Leslie Ward) in Vanity Fair, March 1889)