O'Neill The Manchester Martyrs

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Accessible ePub/eBook
ISBN: 978-1-78117-056-4
Verlag: Mercier Press
Format: EPUB
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E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

A thrilling account of the events surrounding the execution of three Fenians known as the Manchester Martyrs. Their execution during a turbulent period of Irish history in 1867 united the Irish people in a patriotic fervour and outrage not matched until 1916. The events surrounding the dramatic rescue of Fenian leaders (resulting in the Martyrs' execution) attracted worldwide attention and sparked anti-British protests across the globe. Their trial is one of the most infamous British court cases of the nineteenth century and their hanging was Britain's last public multiple execution. In 2006 Bertie Ahern announced that the Irish government would grant the Martyrs a full state funeral and re-inter them in a grave at Glasnevin Cemetery. The plan foundered because their remains could not be located at that time. This book reveals the location of the remains and explains why they will never be returned to Ireland.

Joseph O'Neill is an ex-history teacher and is now a full-time writer. He is the author of several books including Crime City: Manchesters Victorian Underworld. He lives in Manchester and is of Irish extraction. He has written for leading British and Irish family history and genealogy publications including Ancestry, Family History Monthly, Practical Family History, Who Do You Think You Are?, Your Family Tree and Irish Roots.

Autoren/Hrsg.

O'Neill, Joseph

Leseproben

1
‘Ireland Made Me’

It takes you by surprise. This part of the cemetery is as fresh and well tended as a military graveyard. Not far from the futuristic museum with its roof like a great axe head suspended in the air, where the paving, slick with rain, runs out, you reach a narrow tarmac path. The smell of damp earth is strong and even in the shelter of the monumental masonry the fitful wind tears at your hair and coat. Then you see it: the first of a Calvary of Celtic crosses. Bolted to the grave fence, which is as tall as a baby’s cot, is a heart-shaped plaque bearing the legend ‘God Save Ireland’. In the feeble December light the sandstone cross is gunmetal grey. Inscribed on the base are three names and below them, again, ‘God Save Ireland’. The grave itself is empty.

Not six strides away is the burial place, marked only by a grave curb, of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. On the other side of the path is a monument to the hunger strikers of 1981.

Here in Glasnevin Cemetery’s Republican Plot, where the elaborate headstones speak of a love of country now lost to us, Ireland’s past appears as an unbroken tradition of patriotic self-sacrifice. In this place where death is transmuted into imperishable glory, chisel and mallet have fused nationalism and religious faith.

Another empty grave, this one dug in a Kilkenny churchyard in 1848, is part of the story of James Stephens, the man who shaped the lives of so many of those now enshrined in Ireland’s nationalist pantheon. If it is possible to say some men’s lives were determined by a single year, then Stephens was such a man and the year was 1848. Just as he was to play a major role in Irish history in the years after this crucial pivotal point, he was the product of the nation’s development in the decades before that defining year. Ireland’s past had shaped James Stephens to such an extent that he could justly claim ‘Ireland made me’.

Stephens burned with a profound sense of grievance. Since the Union of 1801, Ireland had been ruled directly from Westminster, where MPs from Kerry and Connemara sat with their counterparts from Cornwall and Kendal. When Stephens was born in 1825, practising his faith, and that of almost the entire population, was not only illegal but entailed social and economic ostracism. It was only with Catholic Emancipation in 1829 that the British government dismantled the Penal Laws – legal prohibitions which made the practice of his faith a crime, restricted his ability to own property and limited his opportunities to move up the social hierarchy.

In his campaigns to achieve Catholic Emancipation, the man known as The Liberator, Daniel O’Connell, had called ‘monster meetings’, demonstrations attended by enormous numbers of people with no previous role in the political system or experience of activism. Though committed to non-violent campaigning, O’Connell nevertheless demonstrated the effectiveness of mobilising large numbers of the powerless and impoverished. The significance of this was not lost on Stephens, who was convinced that the poor and those with no voice in politics were not simply an inert and lethargic mass: effective organisation might shape them into a force to drive a revolution.

Though O’Connell was also known as ‘the king of the beggars’, nothing he did improved the economic plight of the Catholic population during Stephens’ formative years. Irish peasants were among the poorest in Europe and their privation appalled foreign visitors. Despite Catholic Emancipation, the land remained largely in the hands of absentee landlords and the descendants of Protestant settlers. As for the bulk of the population, by 1840 forty-five per cent of Irish farms consisted of fewer than five acres and half the population relied on potatoes, with two million entirely dependent on them. Many more eked out a living on miniscule holdings supplemented by work as farm labourers. Such industry as there was, chiefly around Dublin and especially Belfast, was insufficient to sustain a population that remained perilously dependent on an agricultural economy which for decades had teetered on the brink of catastrophe.

The sense of injustice which coursed through Stephens’ veins was neither abstract nor theoretical. He didn’t construct it from propagandist tracts or works of political philosophy. The evidence for it was all around him, everywhere he turned. It stunted the lives of millions of his compatriots who lived from day to day knowing that their very survival was questionable.

What’s more, Stephens’ Ireland was in many respects an occupied country. Barracks, manned by the Irish constabulary, an armed police force, and the presence of large numbers of British troops permanently stationed in the country, maintained crown control.

The consequences of Ireland’s economic structure and British control became apparent in the 1840s in a manner impossible to ignore. The failure of the potato crop in 1845 and the following years led first to hardship and then to starvation. It threatened the families of millions of small peasant farmers and landless labourers with annihilation. The great hunger of the last European famine – Ireland’s greatest calamity since the Black Death of the fourteenth century killed half the population – gnawed deep into the Irish mentality and shaped the country’s development for the next century and a half.

The Famine killed a million people and drove another million abroad. From a pre-Famine figure of 8,500,000, Ireland’s population, alone of European countries, fell for the next 125 years. Death, terror and depopulation stamped on the mind of every politically aware Irish person the conviction that Britain was unfit to rule them. The Famine proved, at the very least, that Britain’s attitude to Ireland was one of callous indifference. Some nationalists saw it in a more sinister light: it was genocide.

Nor was its impact confined to Ireland. As a child in Liverpool, the sight of those escaping the Famine had a profound effect on the future Fenian, John Denvir. Gaunt and spectral, they stank of poverty and death. Their degradation made an indelible mark on Denvir. ‘It will not be wondered,’ he wrote in The Life Story of an Old Rebel, ‘that one who saw these things should feel it a duty stronger than life itself to reverse the system of misgovernment which was responsible.’

James Stephens

Courtesy of Mercier Archives

What’s more, the Famine created the Irish diaspora, to which Stephens was later to attribute such a key role in his strategy for Irish independence. There were Irish people in North America and ‘mainland’ Britain long before the Famine, but it was the mass exodus fuelled by fear of death that accounts for the fact that today there are seventy million Americans and one in five people in Britain with Irish ancestry. It was this vast body of embittered exiles and their descendants, with their inherited anti-English sentiments, that Stephens sought to harness to the cause of Irish independence.

In 1848, however, when Stephens decided to throw in his lot with a group of idealistic, largely middle-class nationalists, known as Young Ireland, he was still virtually unknown. William Smith O’Brien, a leading figure in the Young Ireland movement, had a national reputation, and Stephens decided to take up arms with him. The group attempted a rising at Ballingarry, County Tipperary, although the result was a few inconsequential skirmishes with the police, contemptuously dismissed by the authorities as ‘the Battle of the Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch’. Stephens was wounded in the thigh and subsequently went to ground, seeking to escape the round-up that followed the incident. To put the authorities off the scent, his friends arranged his funeral and had a coffin buried in a Kilkenny churchyard. The Kilkenny Moderator even published his obituary, assuring its readers that Stephens had been an inoffensive young man and ‘an excellent son and brother’.

Stephens escaped to France, disguised as a servant. It was then, at the age of twenty-three, that the former engineering student made a decision: he would break the power of the British Empire. Where Young Ireland had failed, he would succeed. At that time, the empire he challenged was the greatest amalgam of territory and the mightiest economic and military power in the history of the world. It far exceeded the empires of Rome and Egypt, the Greeks and the Mongols in all their pomp. It controlled a quarter of the world’s population and was master of sub-continents and great swathes of territory in every region and zone on earth. Yet Stephens set himself the task of stunting its inexorable progress and rolling it back from the place of its inception, its first colony. He never allowed any setback, disappointment or reversal to deflect him from his goal. He bore poverty, imprisonment, betrayal, rejection by his comrades, accusations of treachery and even military defeat with the stoical resignation of the first Christian martyrs. His confidence in his ultimate triumph was, from the outset, unassailable.

Energising him through all his trials was a version of Ireland’s history which he summarised in his Fenian proclamation of 1867 and which he had imbibed growing up in a Catholic, nationalist family. It was a source of inexhaustible sustenance for him and became a central...