Rebel Rossa – Century-old British propaganda repeated at Fine Gael/Labour Government event

A CLAIM by the Daily Telegraph in 1915 that O’Donovan Rossa was reconciled to the British Government in his last days and hoped that Ireland would assist it in fighting Germany was repeated at the Fine Gael/Labour Government ceremony at Rossa’s grave in Glasnevin Cemetery last Saturday.

This claim was ridiculed and refuted in August 1915 and is an early example of British ‘black propaganda’ in war-time.

The Telegraph claimed Rossa hoped Ireland would assist in crushing “the common enemy of civilisation” (Germany) and “lamented his part in the doctrine of assassination”. John Green of the Glasnevin Trust regrettably repeated this claim at the Government ceremony although he inserted the one word “disputed” before “interview” – raising the question of why it was deemed appropriate to mention it at all.

In the Irish Volunteer newspaper of 7 August 1915, a few days after the actual funeral of Rossa, Mary Jane O’Donovan Rossa (pictured) totally refuted the story:

“Mrs O’Donovan Rossa indignantly denied that her husband had ever wavered in his opinions. She had been married to him for 50 years, she said, and during all that time he had consistently maintained that absolute separation from England was Ireland’s only hope, and that this could be obtained only by fighting.

“Moreover, she added, Rossa spent the last two years of his life in a semi-comatose condition and was incapable of forming a new impression at that time. He could hardly be made to understand that the Irish Volunteers had been formed and only dimly realised that a European war was raging.”

On his attitude to Home Rule, Mary Jane said Rossa believed England would never give it but if she did “Ireland should only take it as a step to complete separation”.

Mary Jane also wrote a letter confirming her husband’s separatist principles to the end of his life. (This letter is in the funeral brochure reprinted by Sinn Féin for the centenary, pictured.) 

She said that Rossa in his last days “became, if possible, more purely Irish than before”. Addressing him in English, his family could get no answer but if he was spoken to in Irish, the language of his boyhood, “his face would light up, and he would keep up the conversation in that language till he was exhausted”.

What a pity a speaker at the Fine Gael/Labour Government ceremony did not choose to use these words rather than the propaganda of the Daily Telegraph.