Steven Jenkins Mitchel London Popular Books

Steven Jenkins Mitchel London Biography & Facts

Young Ireland (Irish: Éire Óg, IPA: [ˈeːɾʲə ˈoːɡ]) was a political and cultural movement in the 1840s committed to an all-Ireland struggle for independence and democratic reform. Grouped around the Dublin weekly The Nation, it took issue with the compromises and clericalism of the larger national movement, Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association, from which it seceded in 1847. Despairing, in the face of the Great Famine, of any other course, in 1848 Young Irelanders attempted an insurrection. Following the arrest and the exile of most of their leading figures, the movement split between those who carried the commitment to "physical force" forward into the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and those who sought to build a "League of North and South" linking an independent Irish parliamentary party to tenant agitation for land reform. Origins The Historical Society Many of those later identified as Young Ireland first gathered in 1839 at a reconvening of the College Historical Society in Dublin. The club at Trinity College had a history, stretching back through the student participation of the United Irishmen Theobald Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet to Edmund Burke, of debating patriotic motions. Not for the first time, the club had been expelled from college for breaching the condition that it not discuss questions of "modern politics". Those present for meeting in the chambers of Francis Kearney were, in Irish terms, a "mixed" group. They included Catholics (first admitted to Trinity in 1793), among them Thomas MacNevin, elected the Society's president, and (later to follow him in that role) John Blake Dillon. Chief among the other future Young Irelanders present were law graduate Thomas Davis, and the Newry attorney John Mitchel. The Repeal Association With others present, these four would go to join Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association. In 1840 this was a relaunch of a campaign to restore an Irish parliament in Dublin by repealing the 1800 Acts of Union. O'Connell had suspended Repeal agitation in the 1830s to solicit favour and reform from Whig ministry of Lord Melbourne. In April 1841 O’Connell placed both Davis and Dillon on the Association's General Committee with responsibilities for organisation and recruitment. Membership uptake had been slow. In the south and west, the great numbers of tenant farmers, small-town traders and journeymen O'Connell had rallied to the cause of Emancipation in the 1820s did not similarly respond to his lead on the more abstract proposition of Repeal. Patriotic and republican sentiment among the Presbyterians of the north-east had surrendered, since the Rebellion of 1798, to the conviction that the union with Great Britain was both the occasion for their relative prosperity and a guarantee of their liberty. Protestants were now, as a body, opposed to a restoration of the parliament in Dublin whose prerogatives they had once championed. In these circumstances, the Catholic gentry and much of the middle class were content to explore the avenues for advancement opened by Emancipation and earlier "Catholic relief". The suspicion, in any case, was that O'Connell's purpose in returning to the constitutional question was merely to embarrass the incoming Conservatives (under his old enemy Sir Robert Peel) and to hasten the Whigs return. In working with O'Connell, Thomas and Dillon contended with a patriarch "impatient of opposition or criticism, and apt to prefer followers to colleagues". They found an ally in Charles Gavan Duffy, editor in Belfast of the Repeal journal The Vindicator. The Nation Duffy proposed a new national weekly to Davis and Dillon, owned by himself but directed by all three. The paper first appeared in October in 1842 bearing the title chosen for it by Davis, The Nation, after the French liberal-opposition daily Le National. The prospectus, written by Davis, dedicated the paper "to direct the popular mind and the sympathies of educated men of all parties to the great end of [a] nationality" that will "not only raise our people from their poverty, by securing to them the blessings of a domestic legislature, but inflame and purify them with a lofty and heroic love of country". The Nation was an immediate publishing success. Its sales soared above all other Irish papers, weekly or daily. Circulation at its height was reckoned to be close to a quarter of a million. With its focus upon editorials, historical articles and verse, all intended to shape public opinion, copies continued to be read in Repeal Reading Rooms and to be passed from hand to hand long after their current news value had faded. It may have been a "reinforcement for which O’Connell had scarcely dared to hope", but the journal's role in the revived fortunes of the Repeal Association has to be weighed against other contributions. Legislative independence was powerfully endorsed by Archbishop McHale of Tuam. Beyond Davis and Dillon's Historical Society companions, the paper drew on a widening circle of contributors. Among the more politically committed these included: the Repeal MP William Smith O'Brien; Tithe War veteran James Fintan Lalor; prose and verse writer Michael Doheny; author of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, William Carleton; militant-nationalist priest, John Kenyon; poet and early suffragist Jane Wilde; republican and labour-rights activist Thomas Devin Reilly; former American journalist (and future "Father of the Canadian Confederation") Thomas D'Arcy McGee; and the renowned Repeal orator Thomas Francis Meagher. It was an English journalist who first applied to this growing circle the label "Young Ireland". Although there was no direct connection, the reference was to Young Italy and to other European national-republican movements (Young Germany, Young Poland... ) that Giuseppe Mazzini had sought loosely to federate under the aegis of "Young Europe" (Giovine Europa). When O'Connell picked up on the moniker and began referring to those he had considered his junior lieutenants as "Young Irelanders" it was a signal for an impending break. Conflicts with O'Connell Retreat from Repeal The Nation was loyal to O'Connell when, in October 1843, he stood down the Repeal movement at Clontarf. The government had deployed troops and artillery to enforce a ban on what O'Connell had announced as the last "monster meeting" in the Year of Repeal. (In August at the Hill of Tara crowds had been estimated in the hostile reporting of The Times at close to a million). O'Connell submitted at once. He cancelled the rally and sent out messengers to turn back the approaching crowds. Although in Duffy's view, the decision deprived the Repeal movement of "half its dignity and all of its terror", the Young Irelanders acknowledged that the risk of a massacre on many times the scale of "Peterloo" was unacceptable. Pressing what they imagined was their advantage, the government had O'Connell, his son John and Duffy convicted of sedition. When after three mont.... Discover the Steven Jenkins Mitchel London popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Steven Jenkins Mitchel London books.