Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa: Unrepentant Fenian
By Shane Kenna
Merrion Press £17.99 pp296
One benefit of commemoration in this decade of centenaries is that it encourages both the public and historians to focus on iconic but semi-forgotten figures such as Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa (1831-1915), whose funeral 100 years ago at Glasnevin cemetery foreshadowed the Easter Rising. This was because of the famous speech by Pádraic Pearse, concluding with the line: “The fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.” As a result of his oration, Pearse, a latecomer to the IRB, was thrust to the forefront and ended up in command of the Rising and reading the Proclamation outside the GPO on Easter Monday, 1916.
The funeral of O’Donovan Rossa was an event of such importance that on August 1 this year there was a full state commemoration in Glasnevin, and a programme of events in his native West Cork. Although few, then or now, would have loudly supported, as he did, the dynamite campaign in Britain in the 1880s, his funeral was a catalyst on the road to independence.
Shane Kenna provides much-needed information to allow us to form a judgment of O’Donovan Rossa’s role in Fenianism, even though he had long faded from the front line by the end. He did write an engaging memoir of his own, Rossa’s Recollections 1838 to 1898, published in New York. These are best read in the original in order to get the human story, since commemoration inevitably tends to be somewhat pietistic. It is the task of the biographer and historian to provide a rounded critical picture.
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O’Donovan Rossa is the closest approximation to a direct link between the Famine and the Rising. He was born at Reenascreena, into an Irish-speaking family who were tenant farmers but also ran a linen shop near Rosscarbery. After a relatively happy childhood, older family members emigrated to America, then the Famine struck. His father died of fever in 1847, and his mother was served with an eviction notice. Politically, he was drawn to the Young Ireland movement and then to proto-Fenian organisations such as the Phoenix Society, while working in a cousin’s hardware store in Skibbereen, serving customers from all backgrounds.
For his membership of the society, he was put in Cork jail and tried in 1859, essentially for being a member of an illegal organisation with republican aims. He and others reluctantly accepted a deal whereby they regained their freedom by pleading guilty and being bound to the peace.
In correspondence with another cousin, John O’Donovan of Ordnance Survey fame, O’Donovan Rossa’s resentment at culpable British inaction during the Famine was compounded by an awareness of the confiscations of the 17th century. Those who worked on the Ordnance Survey have sometimes been unfairly pilloried as British lackeys. In fact, they strengthened national consciousness.
After a short visit to America during the US civil war, he returned to Ireland and became a manager of the Irish People newspaper — until it was suppressed in September 1865 and he, along with the main Fenian leaders, was arrested. While O’Donovan Rossa was undoubtedly involved in plans for rebellion with the aid of some returning Irish-American soldiers, the prosecution case against him for treason-felony relied on his involvement in seditious journalism.
He was held in Pentonville and then Portland prison. Openly rebellious in his attitudes, he was harshly and even sadistically treated for a period, even though the prime minister William Gladstone had earlier complained about infamous prison conditions in Neapolitan jails under the Bourbons pre-1860.
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His mistreatment in prison was a mistake for which the British would pay dearly. In the short term, it led to his by-election victory in Tipperary in 1869, followed by disqualification. Constitutional nationalists joined in calls for an amnesty. The prisoners were eventually released, and went into American exile, still determined on revolution.
From America, O’Donovan Rossa organised a bombing campaign of Britain. While it caused some alarm, it had little political impact and is now only a footnote in British history. It did nothing for the cause, except increase UK hostility to all ambitions for self-government, and the secret service managed to negate the campaign.
He visited Ireland twice in later years, but effectively in retirement. Yet O’Donovan Rossa did leave one prescient conclusion, acted on effectively by his fellow Corkonian Michael Collins. This was that the Irish “needed to show England that she is losing more than she is gaining by holding us”.