Sir Charles Gavan Duffy(1816–1903)

Charles Gavan Duffy was born in the market town of Monaghan, on the southern Ulster border, on 12 April 1816, second son of a Catholic shoemaker. He was schooled at the Catholic Latin school at Monaghan and a Belfast hedge-school on a scholarship his parish priest arranged, and left school at fifteen for a Dublin printer's office, the move into the printing-and-journalism trade he worked in for the next sixty years.

He worked at the Dublin printing house, moved to Belfast in 1834, and edited the Catholic-Emancipation weekly the Vindicator from 1837, at twenty-one. The Vindicator years gave him the editorial register, the connections to the Repeal Movement of Daniel O'Connell, and the journalism-and-printing-economics apprenticeship of the Catholic press of the time. He was admitted to the Irish bar in 1845.

The Nation, the weekly Dublin newspaper that became the principal organ of the Young Ireland Movement, was founded by Duffy, Thomas Davis and John Blake Dillon on 15 October 1842. Its editorial principle was foundational to nineteenth-century Irish cultural-political journalism: Irish-historical and Irish-literary material, the ballads and the poetry of Mangan and Davis, in the same columns as the current journalism on Repeal, Catholic Emancipation and Famine relief. At its peak it had a circulation of about ten thousand and was the principal vehicle of the movement's cultural-political programme.

He was tried five times for sedition between 1844 and 1849 and never convicted by an Irish jury, and emerged from the trials as the Catholic-press public figure of post-Famine Dublin. He was elected MP for New Ross in 1852 and led the Independent Irish Party at Westminster on the platform of tenant-right land reform, resigning the seat in 1855 in frustration at the parliamentary refusal to bring the tenant-right bills to a vote, and emigrated to the new colony of Victoria that November.

The Australian career was the second register of his life. He was elected to the Victoria Legislative Assembly in 1856, served as Minister of Lands, was Premier of Victoria from 1871 to 1872, the first Catholic-Irish and first foreign-born Premier of the colony, and Speaker of the Assembly from 1877. He was knighted and made KCMG in 1873, retired in 1880, and wrote the memoirs of the Young Ireland generation, Young Ireland, Four Years of Irish History and My Life in Two Hemispheres, that have been the primary source for its historians since. He died in Nice on 9 February 1903, eighty-six years old, and is buried, by his own bequest, at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. The Duffy name, the Ulster patronymic Ó Dubhthaigh, he carried from a Monaghan shoemaker's house through the foundation of The Nation into the Irish-nationalist establishment at home and across the diaspora.