WILLIAM NOLAN
Geography Publications
€120
ISBN 9780906602997
YOUNG IRELAND: A GLOBAL HISTORY
CHRISTOPHER MORASH
New York University Press
$35
ISBN 9781479822218
REVIEWED BY Peter Gray
The Young Irelanders, that pioneering group of writers, thinkers and activists who did so much to shape modern Irish nationalism, had a relatively brief period of collective existence, book-ended by the foundation of The Nation newspaper in 1842 and the attempted rising of 1848. In his monumental two-volume work, William Nolan sets out to trace their origins, individual biographies and collective endeavours as writers and members of the Irish Confederation movement from 1846, their revolutionary endeavours in 1848 and subsequent careers scattered across the globe. At first sight the work appears exhaustive, running to nearly 1,900 pages of text, notes, images and numerous appendices, organised into 64, largely chronologically organised, chapters. The sheer heft of the volumes tends to render them rather unwieldy, although the dedicated reader in possession of a robust bookstand will find much of value, and important original contributions to the Young Ireland story, while perhaps also regretting in places the absence of a more analytical thread.
Nolan is professor emeritus of Geography at UCD, a founder of the invaluable ‘History and Society’ series of county histories and co-editor of several of those volumes. A native of the Slievardagh district of south-east Tipperary, born two miles from the 1848 ‘warhouse’, he introduces the book by asking ‘how could I explain why men of such prominence walked the roads of my childhood and convened a meeting in a public house in the village of The Commons to plan their own and Ireland’s destiny?’. What follows reads as the fruit of a lifetime’s labour of love to answer that question and explain its significance. Reflecting such a ‘grounded’ geographical-historical approach, the book really comes into its own in its detailed micro-histories of the dynamics of revolutionary action, counteraction and inaction in the urban streets of Dublin, the towns of the Suir Valley and, above all, the upland mining district near the village of Ballingarry where the insurrection flared briefly in the final days of July 1848. Nolan painstakingly draws in the biographical backgrounds of the principal protagonists; this is already well-trodden historical ground but comes into its own in a rich discussion of the Tipperary contexts of Michael Doheny in particular. Where the author adds something new and distinct is in the close attention devoted to the specific economic, social and political contexts of the ‘disturbed’ localities, and in shining light on the participation of non-élite actors (whether members of Confederate clubs or local recruits), who are listed in his biographical appendices.
Piecing together a detailed narrative of the events of 1848 is particularly difficult given the sheer weight of contradictory accounts generated at the time and retrospectively by a wide range of actors. These include the Confederates themselves in both contemporary accounts and what were often fanciful, self-serving and sometimes feuding narratives penned after the event; a multiplicity of officers, informers and witnesses serving the legal bureaucracy of the State determined to apprehend and convict the rebels; the highly polarised effusions of the press and its correspondents; and surviving oral traditions. It is to Nolan’s great credit that he approaches the task of constructing a plausible narrative of events from this plethora of conflicting claims, opinions and recollections with forensic rigour. He gives particular weighting to a recently acquired (2009) cache of documents that includes the brief prepared for William Smith O’Brien’s defence counsel prior to the State trial at Clonmel, arguing that these reveal most clearly the thinking of the Confederation’s leader in the lead-up to the rising, and especially his determination to resist arrest under the Suspension of Habeus Corpus Act by armed insurrection (although at his trial his defence strategy was to claim the opposite).
Other sources given close analysis include the detailed reports of the spy James Dobbin (one of many effective infiltrators) to Dublin Castle. These allow the author to reconstruct the membership and social composition of the Garryowen Club, one of a number of Dublin Confederate Clubs in 1847–8 in which the movement placed its greatest hope for popular support. Drilling down beneath the exaggerated rhetoric of both their promoters and alarmists in the administration, Nolan finds the enthusiasm around these bodies to have been real enough but their active membership probably not to have exceeded several thousands, and their revolutionary potential to have been greatly overestimated both by contemporaries and by later historians such as Gary Owens. This weakness, rather than failure of leadership, goes furthest to explain the failure of Dublin to ‘rise’, in reaction either to the transportation of John Mitchel in May or to the full imposition of coercion against the Confederate movement in July.
Rather than make a stand in Dublin, Smith O’Brien and his associates sought more conducive fighting ground in the countryside, first in Kilkenny and then Tipperary—largely persuaded, Nolan notes, by equally unreliable reports of massive popular support for the recently established clubs in those famine-ravaged districts. In summarising the reasons for the insurrection’s failure, Nolan adds to rather than undermines the historical consensus: the Young Ireland Confederates were ‘prisoners of their own rhetoric’ and ill prepared for the practicalities of armed uprising; they had been driven into premature action by effective State coercion and the deployment of its great resources; and, perhaps above all, their recruitment attempts stood little chance when confronted by a Catholic clergy that remained solidly O’Connellite and suspicious of Young Ireland ‘anti-clericalism’ and which retained the loyalty of the bulk of the peasantry. Nolan’s detailed narrative makes clear the effectiveness of clerical interventions in dispersing the curious and often despairing crowds that turned out to hear the Confederate leaders who travelled from village to village in a vain attempt to raise the countryside. Smith O’Brien’s fastidious refusal to countenance any seizure of property (apart from weapons) further reduced the forces loyal to him to the few dozen armed men (with perhaps several hundred spectators) who besieged a party of police who had occupied Widow McCormack’s house at Farranrory Upper on 29 July only to flee with the arrival of Crown reinforcements, leaving two dead. As Nolan concludes, the battle had already been lost long before.
The State’s retributive strategy was to make examples of Smith O’Brien and the other leading rebels without making them into ‘martyrs’. In this it was only partly successful: O’Brien and a number of others were convicted of treason felony but subjected to transportation to Australia rather than execution. Other leaders evaded capture to escape to America or France, throwing themselves into diasporic political organisation and plotting, and they would later be joined by John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher on their escape from Van Diemen’s Land.
The post-1848 history of the Young Irelanders is complex, reflecting the already highly heterogeneous social and political stances of a group temporarily united by the exigencies of the 1840s. Nolan devotes much of his second volume to these diverse pathways, alliances and feuds, which would continue to dominate much of Irish nationalist life for the remainder of the century, and draws particular attention to the centrality of junior participants in the 1848 rising, such as James Stephens and John O’Mahoney, in the formation of Fenianism. There is much valuable material here, even if it inevitably tends towards the fissiparous.
The book ends with two chapters on the historiography and commemoration of Young Ireland, the first tracing their immense impact on later nationalist thought, the second standing in for a conclusion. There are a few well-directed swipes at the mocking or marginalisation of the Young Irelanders by some well-known recent Irish writers, but here, as elsewhere, the default is towards the descriptive rather than the analytical. The most recent critical writings on the subject, such as James Quinn’s 2015 book on Young Ireland and the writing of Irish history, do not warrant a mention; nor do Gerry Kearn’s insightful articles on the mentality of Thomas Davis and John Mitchel. The author seems reluctant to engage with any of the most recent (and plentiful) biographical material on the Young Irelanders. Herein lies one of the weaknesses of what is otherwise a work of great value—in focusing in such great detail on what his subjects did, Nolan tends to neglect what they thought. Although Thomas Carlyle appears in a number of places, largely as a correspondent of the protagonists, there is little attempt to offer an intellectual history of the movement, or to engage much with the existing literature on the nature of transnational romantic nationalist thought and its Irish manifestation. Readers will need to turn elsewhere for that.
In contrast, Christopher Morash’s Young Ireland: a global afterlife is a much shorter (275 pages) and more tightly focused monograph. Morash’s objective is to subject the post-1848 careers of a smaller group of leading Young Irelander émigrés to thematic analysis with a view to assessing the impact of their political thought and action on their host countries. His key subjects are Charles Gavan Duffy after his emigration to Victoria in 1856, Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel in the United States following their escape from transportation, and Thomas D’Arcy McGee first in the United States and later in Canada, each of whom attained prominence and, in some cases, high political office in their host societies. While each continued to look back to Ireland and to write Irish political tracts and histories, and several, such as Duffy and Mitchel, would ultimately return, each sought to build their own political constituencies in the diaspora, facing towards domestic as well as Irish politics.
Concluding his study of each of his subjects in context, Morash concludes that much united them in their thought and action. Given their shared formation in the Irish maelstrom of the 1840s, the centrality of the nation and of the nation state to their world-views should come as no surprise. Equally striking, however, was (with the important exception of Mitchel) their attachment to liberalism as a political principle, as a mode both of integrating their Irish Catholic ethnic constituencies into the body politic of their host countries and of projecting those countries as democratic models for a future self-governing Ireland. For Duffy and McGee, that involved making peace with the British Empire and conforming to the reality of colonial politics, albeit with a rationale (at least in Duffy’s case) that such a compromise might pave the way over time for the evolution of a more independent Australian national identity. Mitchel remained the outlier, convinced that liberalism had played a leading role in Ireland’s ‘great starvation’ of the 1840s, emotionally attached to the great illiberal cause of the defence of slavery, and prepared to defy his adopted country over the South’s ‘peculiar institution’ during the Civil War. If his writings continued to hold great sway in Ireland, his impact on America was thus constrained. A very different book in style and approach to Nolan’s forensic narrative, this book is equally recommended for readers seeking to understand Young Ireland in all its permutations.
Professor Peter Gray lectures in History at Queen’s University, Belfast.