Historians have largely neglected the activities of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the 1880s, tending to focus on the two great flash-points of 1867 and 1916. R. V. Comerford, when concluding his brilliantly iconoclastic The Fenians in Context, dismissed Dublin Fenianism in 1882, claiming it had ‘deteriorated into a miscellany of purposeless gangs’. John Newsinger's critique of Comerford offers a cursory and Marxisant reading of Fenianism in the years following the excitement of 1867. Even P. S. O'Hegarty, ever the advocate of the centrality of the I.R.B. in pre-1922 Irish politics, was muted on the subject of the 1880s. Writing in 1952, O'Hegarty argued that ‘Parnell had crowded the I.R.B. out of public life, and out of the public mind, but it was there, underground, all the time, small in numbers, very often divided, without effective leadership, and without any current policy save that of keeping the separatist spirit alive and maintaining the framework of a separatist organisation.’ Against the ascendancy of Charles Stewart Parnell, a disciplined and highly organised home rule party, and the land war, the military stratagem of the Fenians appeared outmoded and irrelevant, consigned to the melancholic bar-room reminiscences of the increasingly aged men of '67.

Yet something more penetrating than merely political marginalisation had afflicted the Fenians. A number of violent and dramatic departures from the Fenian orthodoxy of Kickham, O'Leary, and Stephens seemed to have debased the creed.