Tag Archives: O’Donovan Rossa

Best of the Blog, 2015

This is my third annual “Best of the Blog” (BOB, as my wife calls it), a look at some of the most important news stories, historical anniversaries and personal favorite posts of the past year. The items are not numbered, so as to avoid the appearance of rank. Most links are to my own posts, but a few are to outside websites.

Enjoy. Thanks for supporting the blog. And Happy New Year!

  • Four years into the “Decade of Centenaries,” 2015 proved that even as Ireland remembers its past, Ireland is not bound by its past. This was most dramatically demonstrated in May as Irish voters enshrined same-sex marriage rights in the Republic’s constitution, becoming the world’s first nation to give such approval through popular referendum. The outcome prompted Catholic Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin to comment: “The Church needs a reality check right across the board, to look at the things we are doing well and look at the areas where we need to say, have we drifted away completely from young people?”
  • Other long-standing Irish institutions also changed in 2015. Clerys, a landmark department store on O’Connell Street in Dublin, closed in June after 162 years in business. … In August, Aer Lingus was acquired by British Airways owner IAG for €1.5 billion after nearly 80 years of state ownership.
  • The erosion of the Irish language continued at “a faster rate than was predicted” by a 2007 study and “demands urgent intervention,” a government agency reported in an update this year.
  • 2015 was the 150th anniversary of the birth of William Butler Yeats. His poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” was celebrated during the year. And, of course, “Easter, 1916.”
  • The Republic’s official remembrance of the Easter Rising began in August with a commemorative re-enactment of the funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. The original Dublin funeral of the Fenian leader, who died in New York, set the stage for the Rising eight months later. Pádraic Pearse’s oration at Rossa’ graveside became a call to arms that continues to inspire Irish patriots. One of my Kerry relatives kept a copy of an August 1933 reprint of the speech, cut from the pages of The Gaelic American.
  • I also reflected on my copy of a 1953 St. Patrick’s Day greeting from another Kerry relation.
  • In Northern Ireland, the International Fund for Ireland launched a new “Community Consolidation-Peace Consolidation” strategy for 2016-2020 focused on removing some of the more than 100 “peace walls” that separate Catholic and Protestant communities. “We have a role to take risks that governments can’t take,” IFI Chairman Dr. Adrian Johnston said during a September briefing at the Embassy of Ireland in Washington, D.C. … But a new poll showed that support for removing the physical barriers has dropped to 49 percent, compared to 58 percent in 2012.
  • The British and Irish governments announced a new political accord to overcome various crises in the North. … Seventeen years on from the historic 1998 Good Friday Agreement, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell told a Washington audience the peace talks got off to “a very rocky start” due to the long history of mistrust in Northern Ireland and “no habit of listening to the other side.”
  • An RTÉ/BBC poll revealed two-thirds of respondents living in the Republic favor political reunification of the island within their lifetime, while just under one third of those surveyed in the North share the view. … In what was described as a “rogue action,” the Republic’s tricolour flag flew over Stormont for a few hours in June.
  • Irish Minister for Diaspora Affairs Jimmy Deenihan, speaking at the  Embassy of Ireland in Washington, announced “a new strategy to improve Ireland’s connection with the diaspora.”
  • More historical records continued to be made available in 2015 for online inspection, including:

Dublin Metropolitan Police Detective Department’s “Movement of Extremists” reports leading up to the Rising, held at the Irish National Archives;

Long-awaited Catholic parish records, held by the National Library of Ireland; and

Fenian Brotherhood records and O’Donovan Rossa’s personal papers, held by The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

River Shannon by Therea M. Quirk.

Departed in 2015:

  • Six college students, five from Ireland and one holding Irish and U.S. citizenship, were killed 16 June in Berkeley, California, when the fifth floor apartment balcony where they were partying collapsed and plunged them 50 feet to the ground.
  • Dublin-born actress Maureen O’Hara, who co-stared with John Wayne in the 1952 screen hit, “The Quiet Man,” died at 95. … More than three dozen other notable Irish and Irish American deaths from the arts, sports and politics are listed here.

From the Archive:

Reconsidering Ireland’s centennial remembrances

UPDATE:

More on the tone of centennial commemorations from Irish historian Diarmaid Ferriter in the Times: “How do you prefer our long-dead Irish Fenians? Revered or reviled?”

ORIGINAL POST:

The recent 100th anniversary of the Dublin funeral of Fenian O’Donovan Rossa is raising tough questions about how Ireland will recognize other events in the “Decade of Centenaries,” 1912-1922. Some events are more significant, or controversial, than others.

Marie Coleman, a lecturer in Modern Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast, says she was “perplexed and concerned by the nature and extent of the [Irish] State’s official commemoration” at Glasnevin cemetery, which was attended by Taoiseach Enda Kenny and President Michael D. Higgins. She writes in The Irish Times:

It was unclear whether the focus of the event was Rossa himself or the significance of the funeral as signifying the rejuvenation of republicanism as a precursor to the Easter Rising. If the former, the State’s endorsement of an archaic form of irredentist Irish nationalism will sit uncomfortably with many in 21st-century Ireland and with unionist opinion in Northern Ireland. …

I would question if either Rossa or his celebrated obsequies were of sufficient historical significance to warrant a full commemorative ceremony from the State. It would appear that the construct of the “Decade of Centenaries” has created a need to find events to commemorate every year until 2023, even if such events are not of equal significance. …

[Like other anniversaries North and South] [c]ommemorating events that predominantly involved men with guns is highly problematic in a society still going through a fragile process of conflict transformation.

The Slugger O’Toole blog also delves into this issue under the headline, “Can we ever lay 1916 to rest?” The column raises questions about remembering anniversaries associated with the violence of The Troubles in the North.

An 82-year-old clipped copy of Pearse’s graveside oration

A few years ago I inherited some family-related personal items upon the death of one of my mother’s sisters, my aunt. She had saved many of the items for decades, including correspondence from Ireland, and the U.S. citizenship papers of her father (my grandfather Willie Diggin) and mother, and her mother’s brother and sister. All four emigrated from Kerry a few years before the 1916 Easter Rising, each sailing separately to Pittsburgh.

Also among the items was a copy of “History of Ireland,” a text book written in 1903. Stuffed inside the book were several yellowed newspaper clippings, mostly poems cut from The Gaelic American, an Irish nationalist weekly published in New York from 1903 to 1951 (Limited scanned issues available online from Villanova University.) One clipping, dated 13 December 1941 and headlined “America First, Last and All the Time,” says the new war with Germany and Japan “will have the fighting support of every worth-while drop of Irish blood in the United States.”

Willie died four days later, 10 days after the Pearl Harbor attack. It is the inclusion of an Irish Times editorial from 19 June 1974, that makes me believe the book and its collection of clippings belonged to his brother-in-law, John Ware. I knew “Uncle John” to be an avid newspaper reader and follower of Irish politics. I was 15 at the time the editorial was written, which was two and a half years after Bloody Sunday. The piece begins, “Loyalists and Republicans are marching around in the North, like lost legions, in the dark.” We know a lot more darkness followed.

pearseclipAll this is the background to the clipping shown at left, a 19 August 1933 reprint of Pádraic Pearse’s oration at the graveside of Fenian leader O’Donovan Rossa. The clip dates 18 years after the 1 August 1915 funeral and Easter Rising, which soon followed in April 1916. It is 11 years after the creation of the Irish Free State and four years before the 26 counties adopted a Constitution in 1937. In America, the Great Depression was four years old. Roosevelt was just past his first 100 days in office.

In August 1933 John Ware was 47 years old, a veteran of World War I who fought in France. I wonder what Pearse’s stirring speech represented to him? What did he think of the history of Ireland to that point, especially the partitioned North the Times would write about 41 years later?

The oration “has been published more than once in The Gaelic American,” the newspaper’s editors wrote by way of introduction. “At the earnest request of a reader we give it again. Repetition cannot take away from it and it cannot be read too often. A great many people have memorized it.”

John Ware clipped the speech from the newspaper and carefully placed it in the history book that contains not one word about O’Donovan Rossa in a three-page section titled, “The Fenian Movement in America.”

Here’s an online link to the speech that’s easier to read.

Centennial of Pearse’s oration at O’Donovan Rossa’s funeral

One of the seminal events of Irish republican history marks its 100th anniversary 1 August: the Dublin funeral of Fenian leader O’Donovan Rossa. As the Irish Independent recalls, “it was a brilliantly choreographed pageant of separatist propaganda.”

Rossa died 29 June 1915 in New York. The revolutionary’s body was returned to Ireland a month later for five days of public viewings. The political highlight was the masterful graveside panegyric delivered by writer and poet Pádraic Pearse, with its stirring climax:

“They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but 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.”

The entire speech is read aloud in the video below by an unknown narrator. It contains actual footage from 1915 funeral, plus images from the Easter Rising, which occurred nine months later.

Fenian, O’Rossa archives at Catholic Univeristy

I’ve been fortunate this year to visit three Irish/Irish-American archives:

In March, I visited Quinnipiac University’s An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger) archive and museum in Hamden, Conn.

In September, I viewed the Allegheny County Ancient Order of Hibernians archive at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh.

And now in December, I’ve spent a few hours at the Fenian Brotherhood/O’Donovan Rossa collection at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Timothy J. Meagher, curator and archivist at The American Catholic History Research Center & University Archivist, and his staff were most helpful during my brief visit. Meagher has written extensively about Irish America.

Among the items that caught my eye was a pamphlet by Rev. C. F. O’Leary reflecting his October 1884 lecture in New York titled, “The Church and Irish Revolution.” In the speech the priest worried that efforts by the hierarchy to suppress grassroots Irish nationalism would “leave the people without hope and tyrants without restraint.” Fr. O’Leary also dismissed church criticism of the agrarian and republican secret societies associated with the land war of the period.

In conclusion, he said:

The Church does not condemn the bonding together in secret societies for a true and just cause. … Secrecy is necessary to success in Irish revolution; and, even if that secrecy is oath-bound it is not thereby sinful. No Irish revolutionist swears to anything not based on truth, justice and judgement. He swears to nothing that is not already defined. He but swears to what every Irishman swears in his heart, that he would be willing to strike for Ireland.

Thus do we stand before the Church and the world claiming in sight of high Heaven our long-lost rights, and having but the one elevated and avowed aim to give our country her rightful place among the nations of the earth. Thus do we stand, as we have stood for centuries, determined to fight the battle over again for freedom and right –– resolved that on the cause must go, emanating from the nation’s will.