In 1912, Home Rule seemed likely, but the Loyalists of the North armed themselves against the possibility and, along with Loyalist officers in the British Army who threatened to mutiny, dissuaded the British government from proceeding. As the First World War began, an understanding existed that Home Rule would be broached again once the war was won, and decided in the light of Irish participation in the British forces. The Irish enlisted, fought lustily, suffered plentiful casualties. But even amongst the Anglo-Irish gentry, in the case of Lady Gregory’s flying ace son, Major Robert Gregory, as depicted by Yeats, there prevailed a detached stoicism.
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Stephens’s old Irish Republican Brotherhood had at the start of the war taken over control of the Irish Volunteers, a force founded in response to the Ulster Volunteer Force who had armed themselves in 1912 to thwart Home Rule. In the late summer of 1914, the Volunteers numbered 80,000. They were supported by Clan na Gael in the United States. MacManus was revisited—when O’Donovan Rossa died in New York in 1915, the Volunteers organised a splendid funeral for him in Glasnevin at which a young poet and schoolmaster, Patrick Pearse, assumed Rossa into the tradition of resistance. ‘The Defenders of this Realm … think that they have pacified Ireland … 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 Easter Rising of 1916 was ill-managed, the chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers delaying orders for a general uprising because arms had not arrived on the Kerry coast from Germany. But 1,500 Dublin Volunteers were led out by Pearse, and supplemented by more than 200 of James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army. The failure of the uprising and the execution of its leaders led to what Smith O’Brien had failed to arouse, popular resistance to British rule. The bitter era known as ‘the Troubles’ ended in an Irish Free State, made up of twenty-six counties, including Ulster ones such as Monaghan and Donegal, and Meagher’s flag flew over those counties, as it still does. The treaty was narrowly passed by the Irish Cabinet, and a Civil War between pro-treaty (Free State) and anti-treaty (Republican) resulted. Meanwhile, behind the northern border itself, the ancient quarrel between Catholic Republicans and Protestant Loyalists proceeded through the twentieth century, with a fixation and denial of civil fraternity which would have appalled Davis, Meagher or O’Reilly.
This book is entitled The Great Shame because in spite of all the struggles and travails of the Australian-transported activists with whom we have shared our hours, the population of Ireland had by the time of the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922 shrunk to barely more than half the population of 1841. Such a phenomenon made Ireland unique in Europe, where, despite the imperial follies of the major European powers, population had uniformly risen. The title might be seen in its most direct sense as referring to the misgovernment of Ireland under British rule, and the continuing discrimination against northern Catholics in the decades following the treaty. At the time of writing, through the goodwill of the governments of the Republic of Ireland, Britain, the United States, of the mass of Republicans and Loyalists in the North, and in the context of an increasingly unified Europe where Davis’s or Mitchel’s nineteenth-century concept of sovereignty seems less and less realistic, there is hope of peace in Ulster, and an end to shame.
In a different sense of the word ‘shame,’ this great Irish crisis has produced in the Irish themselves a certain amount of that survival shame which one encounters also in certain survivors of the Holocaust: the irrational but sharp shame of still standing when so many fell; the shame of having been rendered less than human by cataclysm.
Again, and in a more intimate sense, the title has reference to the failures of all the principals of this tale to produce by agitation, constitutional or otherwise, a successful nineteenth-century state in a Europe where many other states were emergent. And finally, it might stand for a redolence of the shame of transportation itself, without which, of course, we would have been deprived of the tales here told, and Australia deprived of the piquant blood, and potent ghosts, of the characters to whom we now bid goodbye.
Tom Keneally
Sydney, 1998
Acknowledgements
At the close of this book, it is an especial pleasure to thank all those who gave aid and comfort in the writing of it.
In Australia, I am indebted to the Librarian of the Mitchell Library, Sydney, Alan Ventress, and his staff; to the Director of the Archives Office of New South Wales, David Roberts, the Manager of Reference Services, Christine Yeats, and their staff; to the Curator and staff of the Archives Office of Tasmania, Hobart; to the Librarian and staff of the John Oxley Library in Brisbane; and, via the skilled researcher Helene Charlesworth, to the Librarian and staff of the Battye Library and to the Curator and staff of the Western Australian Archives in Perth.
In the United States I found vast and material help at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, from its Director of Research, Dr Robert Ritchie, from Catherine Babcock, Jennifer Watts, Curator of Photographs, Olga Tsapina, Curator of American Historical Manuscripts, and from all the staff. The delightful Huntington was for several months my second home. But I must also thank the Curator and staff of the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the Public Library of New York, especially Wayne Furman of the Office of Special Collections, and the Curator and staff of Special Collections at the Boston Public Library. I remember the welcome extended to me by Steve Cotham, Head of the McClung Historical Collection at the East Tennessee Historical Center, Knoxville, Tennessee, and by his people. In Thomas Francis Meagher’s Montana, the Society Librarian of the Montana Historical Society Archives, Mr Robert Clark, his colleague Brian Shovers, the Curator of Photographs, Lory Morrow, and their assistants provided me, without my having to consult any catalogue, with every document they held on Meagher’s extraordinary Montana gubernatorial career. Ellie Arguimbau, Archivist, later helped me with the necessary references.
In Ireland, where the tale begins, I received genial aid from Michael Flynn, Curator, National Museum of Ireland, the Librarian, curators and staff of the National Library of Ireland, the Librarian of Trinity College Library, the Librarian of the Royal Irish Academy, Siobhán O’Rafferty, and the Director and staff of the National Archives of Ireland. Patrick Melvin, Librarian of the Oireachtas Library at the Irish Dial, gave considerable help.
I was also fortunate to have splendid research assistants. Gillian Johnston and David Chan, then graduate students at the University of California, Irvine, respectively hunted out sources on the impact on the United States of the Irish, the Famine and Fenianism, and on the influence of the Irish question upon Canada. Mark Duncan, then a Tutor at the University College Dublin, provided further valuable research from the National Archives of Ireland and the National Library of Ireland. Helene Charlesworth, a professional researcher from Perth, Western Australia, scrupulously gathered documentation from the Western Australian Archives and the Battye Library, Perth, on Western Australia’s Fenian prisoners, and their connections with the authorities and free society. My daughter Jane Keneally applied her remarkable skills as a researcher at various Irish archives, at the National Archives in Washington, DC, and at the Boston Public Library. In many of my own researches in Australia, the United States and Ireland, I had the robust help and companionship of my wife, Judy.
At the end of the process, the unedited manuscript was read for solecisms by the Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature, University College Dublin, Declan Kiberd, whose input, encouragement, scholarship and suggested strategies for dealing even-handedly with controversial phases of Irish history had a large and creative impact on the book. Needless to say, none of its errors, if they exist, are Declan
’s fault. His predecessor in the chair of Anglo-Irish Literature, the late Augustine Martin, and his wife Clair, were cherished supporters of the project. Professor Cormac O Gráda, also of University College Dublin, and an economic historian of great distinction, gave me the use of his wonderful article on oral sources, and answered some of my anxious questions.
Other notable friends of this narrative include Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who successfully lobbied for a monument to Thomas Francis Meagher and the Irish Brigade to be erected on Antietam battlefield, whose forebears knew John Boyle O’Reilly, and who was throughout a splendid patron to The Great Shame. Michael Larkin of Lismany, County Galway, descended from Larkin contemporaries of Hugh Larkin, shared with me the fruits of his extraordinary memory of East Galway history, and introduced me to the direct descendants of Hugh who still live in Galway. In Australia, my sister-in-law Therese Johnson, also a descendant of Hugh Larkin, generously offered her research to me. The well-informed Leon O’Donnell of New Norfolk, Tasmania, accompanied Judy and me on a pilgrimage of Young Ireland sites in that state, and selflessly pointed me to various fascinating documentary and physical traces of Smith O’Brien and his fellow prisoners. Jack McGee of St Clair, New South Wales, another Young Ireland enthusiast, assisted through indefinite loans of rare sources on these extraordinary convicts. Professor Richard Davis of the University of Tasmania, the leading Australian expert on Young Ireland, and his wife and fellow researcher, Marianne, gave consistent guidance and encouragement. Professor Alex Castles of Adelaide, South Australia, spaciously shared information on John Mitchel’s sons, and handed me an article he had written on John Mitchel junior, commander of Fort Sumter. Professor Patrick O’Farrell of the University of New South Wales kindly sent me his article on the Famine as cultural property. John Boyle O’Reilly’s most recent biographer, A. C. Evans, historian Anne-Maree Whitaker and Young Ireland enthusiast Peter O’Shaughnessy offered open-handed counsel.
For their generous agency services, and their enthusiasm, I thank three exceptional women: Jill Hickson, Deborah Rogers and Amanda Urban. I also have an unpayable debt to my editors, Penelope Hoare and Roger Cazalet of Random House UK, and Nan Talese of Nan Talese/Doubleday. Penelope Hoare read the unmanageable 2,000-page version of this book, and, despite all the research clogging the veins of the narrative, discerned something of potential value there. Roger Cazalet managed an extensive editing-down with great skill, fraternity, understanding and generosity. Nan Talese dealt with the early, inchoate book and proposed many of the devices by which it might be reduced to readable form. If you enjoy this book, much of praise belongs to these three editors.
It is to state mere fact to say that I could not have survived this exercise in non-fiction without the love, nurture and protection offered by my wife, Judy, and by my daughters, Margaret and Jane. Friends also carried the burden, listening to repeated versions of the narrative and to reiterated biographies of its leading characters. I promise all of them I shall now behave more normally.
The writing of The Great Shame was an experience akin to being locked in a cupboard with a Tyrannosaurus rex, and I could not have finished without the kindnesses of all those mentioned above, and of many who go unmentioned, who—I hope—will excuse the oversight.
Notes
Abbreviations
ADB, Australian Dictionary of Biography
AONSW, Archives Office of New South Wales
BPL, Boston Public Library
BPP, British Parliamentary Papers
HRA, Historical Records of Australia
HRNSW, Historical Records of New South Wales
ML, Mitchel Library, Sydney
NAI, National Archives of Ireland
NLI, National Library of Ireland
NYPL, New York Public Library
PRO, Public Record Office
TSA, Tasmanian State Archives
WAA, Western Australian Archives
Abbreviations relating to newspapers, groups or individuals
CGD, Charles Gavan Duffy
FB, Fenian Brotherhood
ILN, Illustrated London News
IRB, Irish Republican Brotherhood
JBOR, John Boyle O’Reilly
N, Nation
NYT, New York Times
SMH, Sydney Morning Herald
SOB, Smith O’Brien
TFM, Thomas Francis Meagher
TL, Times of London
YI, Young Ireland
Newspaper reports to which a date is explicitly appended in the text are generally not referred to in these notes.
PREFACE
The Kennedys and Thomas Francis Meagher: Conversation between the author and Senator Ted Kennedy, April 1995.
Esther Larkin Petition: The Irish Gift, FS 23/1840, National Library of Australia.
1 HUGH LARKIN’S IRELAND
Mount Street accident: Galway Weekly Advertiser, 20 July 1833.
Hugh Larkin’s appearance: Ship’s Indent, Parmelia (2), 4/7076, MF reel 2426, AONSW.
Larkin’s temperament and oral remembrance of Larkin: Letter of Michael Larkin, Lismany, Galway, Irish descendant of Larkin and Tully, to Therese Johnson, Australian direct descendant of Larkin and Shields, undated, c. 1992; interview of Michael Larkin by author, July 1995; September 1997.
Hugh Larkin’s locality: O Lorcáin, David, Larkin Family History: Ireland to Illawarra, Brisbane, 1983; MacLochlainn, Tadg, A Signpost of Ballinsloe and District, n.d.; parish, barony and other maps of East Galway Family History Society, Woodford Heritage Centre, Woodford, Co. Galway; Annala Muinter Lorcáin, Journal of Larkin Clan Association, Burpengary, Queensland, Volume 6, 1990.
Expectation of resurrection of old Gaelic system: Clark, Samuel and Donnelly Jr, James S. (eds.), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914, Dublin, 1983.
Hugh’s marriage and children: Ship’s Indent, Parmelia, AONSW; Returns of Applications, 1837–43, 21 December 1841, 4/4492, MF reel 700, AONSW; Parish of Clontuskert, Church Records of Baptisms, Volumes 6 and 11 (8 August 1830; 19 February 1833), supplied by Woodford Heritage Centre, Woodford, Co. Galway.
The Gaelic-speaking West: O Tuathaigh, Gearóid, Ireland before the Famine, 1798–1848, Dublin, 1972.
Irish courtship and marriage: Tocqueville, Alexis de, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Journey in Ireland, July–August, 1835, trans. and ed. Emmet Larkin, Dublin, 1990; Donnelly, S. J., Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland 1780–1845, Dublin, 1982.
Gaelic love poem: John Montague (ed.), The Faber Book of Irish Verse, London, 1974.
Earlier threat against Seymour, and Terry Altism generally: Galway Free Press, 31 March 1932.
Clancarty estates, Ballinasloe, Co. Galway: Inglis, Henry D., A Journey Throughout Ireland During the Spring, Summer and Autumn of 1834, Volume II, London, 1835.
Seymour’s ultimate landlord and acreages: Griffith’s Valuation Lists, Clontuskert, Co. Galway, 1855.
Seymour’s status and East Galway wool breeding: Royal Society survey, East Galway, 1824, in O Gráda, Cormac, Ireland Before and After the Famine: Explorations in Economic History, 1800–1925, Dublin, 1993; indirect evidence of Seymours found in Householder’s Index, Co. Galway, 1823–6 and 1852–5, NLI, and in Griffith’s Valuation Lists, Clontuskert, Co. Galway, 1855.
Earlier prosperity and post-Napoleonic slump: O Gráda, O Tuathaigh, as above; Otway, C. G., A Tour in Connaught, Dublin, 1839; Kinealy, Christine, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52, Dublin, 1994; Hoppen, K. Theodore, Ireland Since 1800: Conflict and Conformity, London and New York, 1989.
Emancipation and O’Connell: MacDonagh, Oliver, O’Connell, London, 1991; O’Faolain, Sean, King of the Beggars, Dublin, 1980.
Shrinkage of franchise: Foster, R. F., Modern Ireland 1600–1972, London, 1988.
Class III families: O Gráda, as above.
Conacre: O Gráda, as above; Salaman, Redcliffe N., The History and Social Influence of the Potato, Cambridge, 1949; Mokyr, Joel, Why Ireland Starved, London, 1
983.
Pressure on landlords and their attitudes to eviction: O Gráda, O Tuathaigh, as above.
Labourers in Ballinasloe area: Inglis, as above.
The Penal Laws and their impact on the native Irish: Moody, T. W. and Martin, F. X., The Course of Irish History, Niwot, CO, 1994; Smith, Cecil Woodham-, The Great Hunger, London, 1962.
Landlords and their behaviour: Lewis, George Cornwall, On Local Disturbances in Ireland, London, 1836; Johnson, James, A Tour in Ireland with Meditations and Reflections, London, 1844.
Peasant meals: Póirtéir, Cathal, Famine Echoes, Dublin, 1995.
Irish diet: First quotation from O Gráda, Cormac, The Great Irish Famine, Dublin, 1989; second from Salaman, Redcliffe N., FRS, ‘The Influence of the Potato on the Course of Irish History,’ Tenth Finlay Memorial Lecture, Dublin, 1943.
Whiteboyism, Ribbonism, Terry Altism, including derivation of terms: McCartney, Donal, The Dawning of Democracy: Ireland 1800–1878, Dublin, 1987; Clark, Samuel and Donnelly, James S. (eds.), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914, Dublin, 1983; Beames, Michael, Peasants and Power: The Whiteboy Movements and Their Control in Pre-Famine Ireland, New York, 1983.
Presence of troops and story of Ned Lohan: Flynn, John S., Ballymacward: The Story of an East Galway Parish, Galway, 1982.
Switching of terms ‘Ribbonism’ and ‘Terry Altism’: Galway Free Press and Galway Advertiser, 1832–3, passim.
Ribbon activism in Clontuskert: Galway Advertiser, 24 March 1832. Tithes: O Tuathaigh, as above; Hickey, D. J. and Doherty, J. E., A Dictionary of Irish History 1800–1980, Dublin, 1980.
The Lord Courtown case: TL, 18 July 1833.
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