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In the evening of that day Connolly hoisted over Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Citizen Army, the Irish tricolour of orange, white, and green, the flag designed by the Young Irelanders in 1848 to symbolise the union of the Orange and Green by the white bond of a common brotherhood. On Easter Monday the Irish Republic was proclaimed in Arms in Dublin."
I was often brought by my father to the weekly gatherings in the Repeal Hall, Paradise Street, where, among the speakers on the Sunday nights I can best remember were Terence Bellew MacManus, Patrick O'Hanlon, Dr. Reynolds, George Smyth, and George Archdeacon. Dr. Reynolds was another of the Young Irelanders.
He, however, again resumed the political mantle in the year 1848, during the short period of the rebellion of the so-called Young Irelanders. The priests, though they apparently sided with this party, did not approve of it, as it was chiefly formed of ardent young men, fond of what they termed liberty, and by no means admirers of priestly domination, being mostly Protestants.
He discredited his master and his cause by taking office. The fruits of Emancipation were tempting to those who had borne the heat of the day, but there was a rising school of patriots who refused acquiescence to anything less than total freedom. The Young Irelanders reincarnated the men of "ninety-eight." They were neither too late nor too soon.
For this reason the history of their failure is brighter in literature than the tale of O'Connell's triumphs. To read Duffy's "Young Ireland" and Mitchel's "Jail Journal", with draughts from the Spirit of the Nation. is to relive the period. Without the Young Irelanders, Irish Nationalism might not have survived the Famine. Mitchel, as open advocate of physical force, became father to Fenianism.
Mitchel, Barry, O'Gorman and myself repelled the charge urged against us by Lord John Russell, to the effect that we were separatists. The discussion which followed was an angry one. Fierce denunciations against the Whigs proceeded from the Seceders, which were answered by the Old Irelanders, as they called themselves, with clap-trap allusions to the name and fame of the "Liberator."
Fintan Lalor's policy, rejected by the Young Irelanders in 1846, was beginning to take hold in 1868; the movement for self-government was becoming linked on to the driving force of land-hunger. In the eyes of Lord Sligo and all his class Tenant Right meant Landlord Wrong, and Moore himself was not exempt from that feeling.
Then saying something to the bogtrotters, they instantly cleared the room of the young Irelanders, who retired sadly disconcerted; nevertheless, being very silly young fellows, they hoisted the standard of rebellion; few, however, joining them, partly because they had no money, and partly because the priests abused them with might and main, their rebellion ended in a lamentable manner; themselves being seized and tried, and though convicted, not deemed of sufficient importance to be sent to the scaffold, where they might have had the satisfaction of saying
Hugh O'Neill, Red Hugh O'Donnell, Owen Roe O'Neill, Sarsfield, Wolfe Tone, Grattan, the Young Irelanders, O'Connell, Butt, Parnell, not one of these ended his career amid the glamour of achieved success, and the result of this, I think, is an irresponsibility which looks not so much to the probability of the fruition of movements as to their inception; and, after all, a flash in the pan is apt to do more harm than good.
He was in partial sympathy with the Young Irelanders, but opposed to them on several educational questions. A leading Young Irelander and college friend of Davis. Author, in the Library of Ireland, of "The Confiscation of Ulster" and "The History of the Volunteers." A prosperous Irish merchant in Liverpool who relinquished his prosperity to join in the insurrection.
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