The lost rising

By Aengus O Snodaigh

It is very easy to lose track of minor figures or minor events in history, but to mislay a rising or to have total amnesia regarding the organisation which conducted - or attempted to conduct - it is virtually unheard of.

The Stalinist bureaucracy set about writing events and people out of the Soviet Union's history, but in the case of the subject matter in hand, it seems that it was just forgotten.

Following the failure of the Young Ireland rising at Ballingarry and the petering out of John O'Mahony's campaign in the south east, the revolutionaries still at large went to ground. In April of 1849 Thomas Clarke Luby, James Fintan Lalor, John O'Leary, Philip Grey, and Joseph Brenan emerged as members of a new highly-secretive group. So secretive that its title still eludes us. There is talk that it may have been called the Irish Democratic Association. The group seems at first to have been based around Dublin and the remnants of some of the Confederate clubs.

Contact was made with James Stephens and John O'Mahony in exile in Paris and their support was secured for a fresh attempt to launch a rebellion. The group planned to rescue Young Irelanders being moved for transportation, but lack of resources led to the aborting of that operation. The next target for the conspirators was Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's visit to famine-ridden Ireland. They planned to kidnap the British monarch and 200 armed Volunteers were mustered for the operation, but it was called off as the garrison guarding her posed a bigger obstacle than they'd anticipated.

The only major engagement of this organisation occurred in Cappoquin, County Waterford on 16 September 1849. An attempt at capturing the local police barracks by a group of 50 men was thwarted. One of their number, James Donohue, was shot dead, while a sub-constable James Owens was piked to death. Forty-four pikes were recovered in surrounding streets afterwards.

Other attacks were scheduled for that night in Tipperary, Cashel, Clonmel, Carrick on Suir, Dungarvan and several other towns. There were reports of gatherings of men, including Dublin men, some armed with pikes, occurring in the towns and villages of the surrounding countryside. But in most cases it seems as if the signal they were waiting for didn't materialise or there were not sufficient of their number to carry out the task allotted them. In Dungarvan members of the British army garrisoned there were sworn in on the night, but lack of numbers led to the aborting of the operation.

In follow up searches and raids many were arrested and a lot of the evidence which survives comes from their court cases. Transportation to Australia was the punishment meted out by the courts for most.

Some of the leaders remained at large, Brenan escaping to America, Gray, described as ``the most untiring and most indomitable of all men that ever took the field for Ireland'' remained active in Ireland, writing also for Luby's Tribune, while Stephens and O'Mahony were reported as being on the barricades in Paris in 1851. O'Mahony then went to the US where he joined the Emmet Monument Association.

Stephens returned to Ireland and on his travels throughout the country he met Luby and the embryo of a new more influential organisation was set in motion. A connection was made with the Emmet Monument Association and on St Patrick's Day 1858 the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fenian Movement were set up simultaneously 3,000 miles apart.

The importance of the 1849 rising may not be in its actions but in its effects and in the drawing together nine years later of many of its leaders in the IRB/Fenian movements.

Anthony M. Breen has done us a great service in publishing the results of his research. It is an easy read and illuminates the period for the reader. Hopefully further research on this mysterious episode in Irish history will elaborate on Breen's research, and in the future we will have a complete history of the rising of 1849 which was to have a major influence on the evolution of revolutionary republican organisations.

Copies of the book can be ordered from the author at 72 Anderson Close, Needham Market, Suffolk IP6 8UB. Cost £6 (stg) and 50p for postage & packaging.







John J Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations, the umbrella organisation for trade unions in the United States), was in Dublin on Monday 23 November at the launch of James Larkin: Lion of the Fold. He spoke of the debt that the Irish and US working classes owe to Big Jim Larkin. Below we carry an edited version of his speech:

Brothers and sisters, we're here to launch a splendid new book about a hero of the Irish working class who was also a hero of the American working class.

``The Rebel Girl'', Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, recalled her first meeting with big Jim Larkin in the Bronx, New York, which is my neighbourhood, not too many years before my mother and father arrived in America from Ireland, and I quote:

``One day in 1914, a knock came on our door at 511 East 134th Street, in the Bronx. We lived up three flights of stairs and the bell was usually out of order. There stood a gaunt man with a rough-hewn shock of greying hair, who spoke with an Irish accent. He asked for Mrs Flynn. When my mother went to the door, he said simply, `I'm Jim Larkin, James Connolly sent me'.''

Larkin went on to spend ten years in America doing what he did in Belfast in 1907 and in Dublin in 1913 - organising and agitating from Greenwich Village in New York to Chicago to San Francisco.

His voice reached its highest and most dramatic pitch when he delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Joe Hill, when he preached, ``Arouse! Arouse! Ye sons of toil from every rank of labour! Ye are not murderers such as they who break ye day and hour! Arise! Unite! Win back your world with a whirlwind stroke of power!''

Much of brother Larkin's time in America was, of course, as a ``guest'' of ``Uncle Sam'' in posh accommodation like Sing Sing prison, the Toombs, Auburn and Dannemora.

Those were tough times for the American working class and Jim Larkin roused the unskilled workers, the low-paid workers, non-Irish as well as Irish.

He caught the imagination of writers and artists as diverse as Charlie Chaplin, Sean O Faolain and Brendan Behan.

And he awed political leaders like Eugene Debs, George Lansbury and New York Governor Al Smith - who commuted his latest sentence and allowed him to go back to Ireland in 1924.

I'm sad to say that we need brother Larkin back now in the worst way, because in America worker-bashing and union-busting are once again the sport of choice for employers and our government has become a bystander in the struggle for economic justice.

For workers trying to organise, freedom of speech is a sometimes thing - if you speak up or out, you get singled out for harassment, intimidation and discrimination.

For union sympathisers, there's no freedom of assembly - if you assemble you get fired, just like 10,000 American workers who get fired every year for union activities.

When do you get your job back?

Maybe never because American employers spend $500 million a year twisting our labour laws and delaying justice for workers.

In America, we're now dealing with the legacy of Ronald Reagan and if you have any young Jim Larkins to spare, we'd thank you to send them over.


Correction


In a review of `John Hume and the SDLP' by Gerard Murray on 12 November we gave the wrong publisher for the book. It is in fact published by Irish Academic Press.

Apologies for the error.