So wrote John O'Leary to F. J. Bigger in May 1915. Not a voice from the grave but, according to his headed notepaper, the ‘Baker, Confectioner and Grocer, Stationer and Newsagent’ of Graignamanagh, Co. Kilkenny. He supplied, from his ‘General Fancy Warehouse’, earthenware, wickerware, china, and glass. He was also an artist, was active in the Catholic Truth Society, and his letters touched on the ecclesiastical antiquities of Counties Carlow and Kilkenny. Bigger had commissioned a painting of mass being held at St Mullins in the penal times. Conscious of the ironies of his own days, O'Leary observed that near the mass rock Henry Hammond was buried, a local blacksmith hung for making pikes in '98 and ‘seducing the king's soldiers from their allegiance’. What would Edward Carson's fate have been then?

Volunteering was a cathartic experience. Here was a generation of young men granted a taste of the possibilities of mass mobilisation. Their activity brought Fenianism and the United Irishmen to life, a living embodiment of the spirit of an empowered comradeship evoked in countless addresses and speeches.