Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Mr Casey's tears
- 1 Dublin Fenianism in the 1880s: ‘the Irish culture of the future’?
- 2 Parnell and the Fenians: structuring the split
- 3 ‘Parnell's Old Brigade’: the Redmondite–Fenian nexus in the 1890s
- 4 Literary Fenianism and Fenian faction: ‘In the past of a nation lives the protection of its future and the advancement of its present’
- 5 The end of Parnellism and the ideological dilemmas of Sinn Féin
- 6 Fenian orthodoxies and volunteering, 1910–14: ‘Not coming believe volunteers will kill home rule’
- Epilogue: Fenian song and economic history
- Bibliography
- Index
Epilogue: Fenian song and economic history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Mr Casey's tears
- 1 Dublin Fenianism in the 1880s: ‘the Irish culture of the future’?
- 2 Parnell and the Fenians: structuring the split
- 3 ‘Parnell's Old Brigade’: the Redmondite–Fenian nexus in the 1890s
- 4 Literary Fenianism and Fenian faction: ‘In the past of a nation lives the protection of its future and the advancement of its present’
- 5 The end of Parnellism and the ideological dilemmas of Sinn Féin
- 6 Fenian orthodoxies and volunteering, 1910–14: ‘Not coming believe volunteers will kill home rule’
- Epilogue: Fenian song and economic history
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This Volunteer movement is the greatest shakeup [sic] we have had for a century: language, and all you can say for it does not appeal to all the sleeping instincts of our race with anything like the power of the tramp of marching men – our very own, not our own in the hire of the stranger.
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.
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- Information
- The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882–1916 , pp. 237 - 258Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006