The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  Many of Kenealy’s relatives had garrulous tendencies. John Kenealy, however, possessed a restrained cast of mind. He had been less than ten years old when the blight manifested itself in 1845. Though North Cork was not the unspeakable catastrophe that West Cork was, by late 1846 there were already private soup kitchens in Kanturk, the local Poor Law union for Kenealy’s family. By 1847 nearly all small farms of less than 2 acres had lost their cows and pigs. That summer, in the baronies of Duhallow and Fermoy, 10,000 were employed on the public works at an average wage of 10 pence per day, and though John Kenealy is sparing in his recollections of childhood, members of his larger family were probably amongst them. In the Kanturk district in 1847–8, forty out of every hundred people were receiving Poor Law relief. In 1848–9, the time of greatest need for North Cork, as it was for Esther Larkin in East Galway, the number rose close to six out of every ten. If 10-year-old Kenealy was not one of them, he knew plenty of their number, and observed their shame. Once the Gregory or Quarter-Acre Clause came into operation in the summer of 1847, those women whose husbands were still at home trying to hold the land were turned away from the Mallow workhouses by many Poor Law guardians. Destitute tenants had to give up everything first, and their cabins were knocked down once they were admitted to the workhouses. Perhaps the guardians of neighbouring Kanturk Poor Law union were more merciful—the relief figures would suggest it—but the countryside was rife with instances of smallholders willing to perish rather than give up soil on which they had expended lime from the quarries along the Listowel road, kelp brought in by cart or man-hauled from the Kerry coast, and years of care and love.

  At fourteen or fifteen years of age, John would have heard his father and turbulent uncles raging against the failures of Tenant Rights Movement, which had held out the hope of secure tenure, rent arbitration and compensation for any improvement on the rented land, particularly to farming tenants like James and Hannah Kenealy. John Sadleir, a leader of the movement elected to the Commons, had formed a Tipperary joint-stock bank, set up to buy back large estates for small tenants, and tens of thousands of Munster small farmers had invested in it. Bought off by Lord Aberdeen in 1853 with the Cabinet post of Lord of the Treasury, Sadleir also embezzled £1,250,000, threatening James Kenealy with ruin and bringing it to others. So John Kenealy learned at an early age that constitutional stratagems were always brought down by corruption.

  In Newmarket’s National school, he no doubt participated in the sort of political catechism witnesses reported having heard recited by classes in republican areas of Ireland.

  MASTER: For what crime was John Mitchel sent to Bermuda by the Saxon government?

  BOYS: For his love of Ireland; and for his noble and brave attempt to save her from starvation, degradation, misery and slavery.

  MASTER: When John Mitchel comes back to Ireland, what will he do?

  BOYS: He will make Ireland a nation once again.

  Kenealy was one of those Irish autodidacts not utterly uncommon amongst marginally prosperous farmers’ sons. He went to Cork City in late adolescence and escaped for ever the drudgery of farming which befell his elder brother Daniel, by finding work in the fabric and clothing business at a company named the Queen’s Old Castle, or Fitzgibbon’s. By the age of twenty years John had somehow met the Fenian chief, James Stephens. One of the factors which attracted him to Fenianism, said Kenealy, was Stephens’s motto, Silent Action: ‘he would not tolerate any member going on the public platform to talk politics.’ This embargo suited Kenealy, who had observed that Ireland was to its own ruin a land of cheap talk.

  As for the delicate-framed, balding Stephens, he had learned his radicalism in Paris, after escaping Ballingary, as a member of the International Working-man’s Association of which Karl Marx was also an enthusiastic member. Yet there was an intermittent and strange conservatism in him. He would at one stage propose Marshal MacMahon, the French general of Irish origins, as a possible king of Ireland. He advocated presidencies for life for the Irish Republic, and would not be averse to envisaging one for himself. Stephens and his lieutenant Thomas Clarke Luby, a man then in his mid-thirties, had crossed from France to England in 1856 with the strategy of liberating Ireland by means of republican revolution in England itself. Though they found much discontent in the industrial cities, Britain, victorious in the Crimea, was in an expansive state of hope and self-confidence. Stephens now applied himself more directly to Ireland. He had some modest savings from his years of teaching English in Paris, and he and Luby began a 3,000-mile walking reconnaissance of Ireland, a long march from which he derived the nickname ‘the Wandering Hawk,’ An Seabhac Siubhalach, or Shooks. He had visited veterans of the ’48 uprising, including Smith O’Brien at Cahirmoyle. Some of the ’48 leaders introduced him to local Ribbonmen, who were seeking a national structure, an indication in itself that Ribbon crimes such as the one committed by Hugh Larkin had a dimension of politics. On his wanderings he proved susceptible to fairly innocent but high-blown romantic attachments to young women. But, above all, he assessed how a decade had changed Ireland. Few of the bourgeoisie and nobility, so prominent in Young Ireland, were any longer in favour of achieving a republic by physical force. There were few equivalents to Meagher, Thomas Davis, Kevin O’Doherty, and certainly there was no Smith O’Brien. But the young men of the lower classes, he found, the clerks, artisans, schoolteachers, Irishmen serving in the British army, were ready for a new republican enterprise.

  Stephens had been promised that substantial money for a new body would come from the United States. He did in time receive $400 from a New York group named the Emmet Monument Association, of which Michael Doheny was a founder, and so initiated in 1858 the oath-bound Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, soon to be renamed the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), or—popularly—the Fenians. The American Fenians were content with a pledge, but in Ireland an oath which competed with the oath of loyalty to the Queen taken by all holders of public office was needed.

  In 1860 John Kenealy had participated in a remarkable test of the intentions of the British government. Lord John Russell defended in the British Parliament the right of the Italian people to choose their own form of government. Kenealy and other young men set up a petition for an Irish plebiscite and manned tables outside parish churches on Sundays. In the end, with over a million signatures, it was taken to England and ignored by the government. ‘But it afforded a great opportunity of bringing men together publicly without attracting the attention of the Government, and it enabled active workers to recruit and spread the work of the organization.’

  Kenealy’s elevation to the post of lace purchaser made him a suitable Fenian. Stephens used commercial travellers to carry coded instructions for Fenian circles in Ireland, Scotland and England. His trips were to Dublin, Nottingham, Manchester, Liverpool, London, and regional towns. Kenealy often conscientiously travelled by train at night to make up time spent with members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood amongst the Irish of England and Scotland. Within Ireland, the early carefully planned meetings of the relatively small, secure IRB were held in National reading-rooms in the principal towns and cities. In Cork itself, Kenealy lived in employees’ dormitories, sharing rooms with a friend, and this domestic closeness favoured political talk and the cautious spread of Fenianism.

  Only two persons were to be present when the Irish Republican Brotherhood oath was administered. A Bible was never used, because its bulk precluded it. Catholic and Protestant generally swore on a small pocket-size prayer book. But Kenealy was concerned that growing recruitment brought in its train an amount of sloppiness. By the last year of the war in America, the IRB had spread to almost every town and hamlet in Ireland, and the caution which went into early enlistments became impossible. Nonetheless the brotherhood remained organised for security in divisions, or ‘circles.’ The commanding officer of a circle was known as A, a rank equivalent to colonel. Each A had nine Bs or captains, and each B, nine Cs or sergeants. Finally, each C
had nine Ds. The use of nines was based on the significance of the number in the mythology of the Fianna.

  The growth of the organisation demanded the appointment of officers to arrange details and preserve discipline nationally. Kenealy’s rank was that of a staff level A working for Stephens. ‘In Cork City,’ the Fenian John Devoy would later write, ‘the chief organiser all looked up to was John Kenealy … Although the system of County Centers did not exist in the old Organisation, John Kenealy practically exercised all the functions of that office for Cork County. He was an even-tempered man with a judicial mind and fine judgement, and was highly respected by everybody.’

  Because of police surveillance and British garrisons, urban opportunities for the military training of Fenians were limited. Yet citified Fenians nonetheless tended to believe themselves the core of the movement. Young John O’Leary, a bourgeois Fenian, warned that 1848 showed peasants did not make good revolutionaries, and it would be better to recruit Orangemen than Ribbonmen. Michael Davitt, a clever young man from Mayo, was aware that there was a divide between rural and city Fenians. Local land struggles of the sort which normally concerned Ribbonmen were more important to rural Fenians than the dream of a republic. Davitt would later say with a little contempt for Fenian priorities that landlords enjoyed a decade of peace while the Fenians were educating ‘peasantry and working class in the principles of Wolfe Tone and Emmet … This, perhaps, accounts for the fact that from the year 1858 to that of 1870, these same landlords succeeded in evicting close upon fifteen thousand families from homes and holdings.’

  The majority of Fenians, with such notable exceptions as John O’Leary and Thomas Clarke Luby, were Catholics. But they were not great admirers of Dr Cullen, Catholic Archbishop of Dublin. In 1864, Cullen became a founding patron of the National Association, designed to attract young men towards peaceful agitation for justice for Ireland and away from radical Fenianism. Kenealy complained that Dublin Castle was happy to see the constitutional agitators at work in the National Association. ‘The British Government simply enjoyed these harmless vapourings, and the vanity of the professional patriot was tickled.’

  In the meantime, Cullen wanted Fenians denied the sacraments. The meaning of a papal document dealing with secret societies, Quo Graviora, issued by the Vatican in 1826, figured prominently in all arguments on whether priests could give absolution in the confessional to Fenian youths. There were two Dominicans ‘and a Spartan Vincentian’ (a priest of the Vincentian Order), to whom Cork Fenians could turn for confession and absolution. Dr Keane, bishop of Cloyne, also offered the consciences of the Fenians some assistance; Kenealy described him as ‘the most patriotic bishop in Ireland at that time.’

  However the church thought of Fenians, John O’Leary—later to be immortalised in Yeats’s dismal refrain on 1913: ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone / It’s with O’Leary in the grave’—who came from the Protestant professional and landowning class, found meeting a number of Cork Fenians a spiritually exhilarating experience. He met Kenealy, ‘to be well known to me afterwards in Portland’ (that is, Portland prison on England’s south coast). The Cork Fenians ‘afforded me a fair example of the manner of young men I was to meet otherwise afterwards.’

  O’Leary was himself Cork-born. He had attended the newly opened Queen’s College, Cork, and had inherited a modest share of a large property. By the time of his father’s death in 1849, he was a veteran of two insurrections, that of the Young Irelanders at Ballingarry in 1848, and an ill-starred attack by Fintan Lalor’s men on a police barracks in the autumn of 1849. A professional medical student, he spent thirteen years attending lectures in Cork, Galway, Dublin, London and Paris. His beloved brother Arthur had died of tuberculosis in 1861, and during his mourning he took to Fenianism, and his sister Ellen began writing Fenian verse.

  Because Fenians were lambasted by what Kenealy called ‘the regular press,’ James Stephens started a newspaper of his own. On 28 November 1863, the first issue of the Irish People appeared. It had a remarkable staff. John O’Leary was editor. The highly accomplished literary men Thomas Clarke Luby and Charles J. Kickham were the chief writers, and the former West Cork grocer O’Donovan Rossa was manager. From the start one of the Irish People’s particular targets was ‘felon-setters,’ those—clerics or not—who betrayed, by deliberate indiscretion or condemnations from pulpits, the names and opinions of certain Fenians. O’Leary also published the names of those who harried newsagents out of stocking the Irish People. ‘A friend has just informed me that he heard from the agent here that after this week he should discontinue selling your paper,’ wrote a correspondent to the Irish People. ‘For this kindness you are indebted to the parish priest, the Rev. John Fitzpatrick, formerly Parish Priest of Skibbereen, over which he presided in the famine years with what benefit to himself is well-known.’ When a West Cork Fenian named Con Keane was temporarily arrested, Father Collins was burned in effigy in Skibbereen. Though some priests praised the Irish People—‘I have been a constant reader … and I solemnly assert that I have never read in it a single sentence that … was opposed either to sound doctrine or morality’—others warned that the employers of those who read or possessed the paper would be informed and asked to dismiss the men or women in question. The paper itself condemned ‘another kind of priest … who in the Confessional gives it as penance to refrain from reading the Irish People, and even from entering a shop where it is sold.’

  Charles Kickham, who wrote most of the anti-clerical, anti-Cullen material for the Irish People, on the grounds that he could get away with it when a Protestant such as Luby could not, was a self-taught man whose sight and hearing had been impaired by an accidental explosion of gunpowder he was playing with when he was thirteen. He was hard on all clerical denunciations of the movement. ‘Hunger and despair,’ Kickham wrote in one article, ‘sit by the poor man’s hearth … What must be the feelings of this man’s heart when he thinks that the dignitaries of his church, who know not wanton nakedness themselves, are the allies of his tyrant?’ Cardinal Cullen struck back against the Irish People with what Kickham called ‘a furlong or two of Pastoral.’ But many former Young Irelanders, including John Martin and Pat Smyth, both now back in Ireland and members of the National Association, approved of the cardinal’s cannonade against the Fenians.

  As with Gavan Duffy’s Nation, poetry was considered by the Irish People to be both a humanising and a political tool, and as with the Nation, women poets were the stars. Amongst the contributors was the teenage Miss Fanny Parnell, and O’Leary’s sister Ellen. Miss Irwin of Clonakilty, who, fresh from convent school, was to become Mrs O’Donovan Rossa, also wrote well and, like Eva earlier, saw her beloved as an incarnation of the revolution:

  O, but my love is fair to see!

  And Erin his fairness is all to thee

  Strong with a lion’s strength is he,

  And gentle with doveling’s gentle is he,

  My love and thine, oh, Erin.

  Eva of the Nation, now living in the remote Australian colony of Queensland with her surgeon husband, Kevin Izod O’Doherty, also sent a verse:

  Oh! Ye dead,—ye well beloved dead!

  Great souls, fond hearts, that were once linked with mine …

  But though women were welcomed as the poetic strain of the Irish People, their role as defined by Luby was limited. ‘The influence of woman appears in its grandest form, when a true and noble housewife endeavours to sustain and cheer, in the dark hour of trial and discouragement, the hopes and faith of her husband.’

  In 1863, Shooks, the brotherhood’s Captain, James Stephens, a man nearing forty years of age, married a charming young woman named Miss Hopper. Unlike other Fenians, Kenealy would not leave behind any written opinion. But some bitterly criticised him and O’Leary said that some Fenians felt he had married beneath him, ‘—Miss Hopper being the daughter of a tailor in a small way of business. Most of the men were furious democrats in theory, but not without a certain leaven o
f that aristocratic feeling which I think, lies … in the breasts of most Irishmen.’

  Under the name of Mr Herbert, Stephens rented Fairfield House in Sandymount, the Dublin seaside suburb. In the end, the marriage did not seem to alienate either the Irish provinces or the Americans as much as did Stephens’s increasingly dictatorial manner. Though he sometimes chastised them, many of the American Fenian Brotherhood were doing all they could to supply the men at home in Ireland with the sinews of war. At a Fenian Fair in Chicago in the summer of 1863, organised by an as yet informal Fenian Sisterhood, an auction of Wolfe Tone and Emmet memorabilia was held to feed the Irish organisation. The San Francisco Fenians contributed a full gold brick and a few silver ones to the IRB. During his own journey to the United States and the Union army, Stephens said, ‘In the small town of Peoria, $1455 was subscribed by some fifty or sixty men I met there at a single meeting … Quincy, where all are poor men, $505 were subscribed.’ The irregularly paid 90th Illinois contributed $507. Stephens’s air would always be that he had, by right of Ireland’s exclusive and eminent grievances, the final authority over all Fenian sums raised in the new world, and some would challenge that.

  Though William West, the American consul, was issuing free tickets to young Irishmen willing to join the Union army, Fenians were not tempted. Kenealy drilled with his men in glens outside Cork City, depending on former British army NCOs for guidance. Rifles were only occasionally seen, sometimes an old pike, more commonly staves. Fenian rolls recognised the fact that a particular man possessed a rifle or pistol by placing an inverted V beside his name; a horizontal stroke denoted a pike; and a zero indicated that the IRB man in question had no weapons at all. Now, with the end of the American Civil War in the spring of 1865, Stephens raised in the young men of Ireland, as indeed in many young veterans of both American armies, the expectation that the Irish Republican Brotherhood would be able to take to the field in Ireland in the fall of that year.