Courtney McGrailJeremiah O’Donovan Rossa: Unrepentant Fenian
by Shane Kenna
(Merrion Press, €21.99)
Donal McCartney
Should the Government have commenced the commemoration of 1916 with the State- sponsored re-enactment of the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa?
In the controversy that ensued some commentators asserted that Rossa was a terrorist, an alcoholic, mentally unstable, cantankerous and denounced by fellow Fenians and nationalists. On the other hand, it could be argued that what was being celebrated was not O’Donovan Rossa, the ‘terrorist’, but the funeral with Pearse’s historic oration and the significance which that funeral of August 1915 had for the rising of April 1916.
Controversy
The controversy at least should boost the sales of this new biography of Rossa. But we are left with the unanswered question posed by historian Diarmaid Ferriter: “Should the Fenians be revered or reviled?”
It is not, however, the function of the historian to stand by the gallows cursing the victims as they pass, but to try to understand and explain the context. If for no other reason we can welcome this book by Shane Kenna because it was written before the controversy over the centenary celebrations of O’Donovan Rossa’s burial at Glasnevin Cemetery had begun.
He was not affected, therefore, by either having to condemn or condone the actions of the person whom Pearse said “was not the greatest man of the Fenian generation, but he was its most typical man”. What we get instead, as outlined in detail in this biography, is the career of an interesting, if extremely militant Irish nationalist.
Curiously enough, this is the first full-length biography in English of the man who had been founder member of the Phoenix Society which was to be absorbed into the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood when that organisation was founded two years later by James Stephens.
He was the man whose shocking treatment in English jails included 34 days handcuffed with his hands behind his back, and at another stage 28 days in a darkened cell in solitary confinement on bread and water.
When exiled to America he set up a ‘skirmishing fund’ to launch a dynamite campaign in Britain in the 1880s. And his tempestuous life among the Fenians in America involved him in rows, splits, financial difficulties, threatening letters and an assassination attempt on his life by a deranged Englishwoman.
The book is well-documented and is based on a wide variety of sources, American, British and Irish. It has a number of previously unpublished photographs and a large colour fold-out of a reproduction of a new painting by Robert Ballagh of the Glasnevin grave scene with Pearse, Tom Clarke and Major McBride among those readily identifiable.
While the tone of the writing could never be described as ‘revisionist’ in the pejorative sense, Kenna does recognise that O’Donovan Rossa did have a “maverick streak” and was “never one to be discreet” (p.148).
The concentration is on the narrative. There is far less attempt at analysis. In a reference to the Parnell Split, the author writes that Parnell “was exposed as maintaining a relationship with a married woman in 1890 and died in disgrace the following year”.
Some readers may find this peculiar, jolting shorthand for a great personal tragedy. Parnell, certainly, saw no disgrace to himself in his relationship with, and later marriage to, Mrs O’Shea.
On a brief lecture tour of Ireland in 1894, Rossa was nominated and supported by Fenians for the post of Dublin City Marshal. To say that his overwhelming defeat happened “despite the support of nationalist Ireland” (p.216) seems an extremely narrow definition of nationalist Ireland.
But these are quibbles in what is a very informative book.