John Boyle O'Reilly(1844–1890)

John Boyle O'Reilly was born at the schoolmaster's cottage at Dowth on the Boyne in County Meath on 28 June 1844, third son of the Dowth National School master. The household was lower-middle-class Catholic Meath of the post-Famine 1840s; the father's classical-literary library, Cicero and Virgil, Walter Scott and Thomas Moore, Shelley, Keats and Byron, was the foundational reading of his early life.

Apprenticed at eleven to a Drogheda printer, he moved to Preston in England at fifteen to work on the Preston Guardian, and at nineteen, in 1863, enlisted in the British 10th Hussars at Dublin under the instruction of the Irish Republican Brotherhood organiser James Stephens, one of the IRB sleeper agents inserted into the Irish garrisons for a future rising.

The conspiracy was broken by Constabulary infiltration in 1866; O'Reilly was arrested at the Island Bridge Barracks at twenty-one, court-martialled for treasonable conspiracy, and sentenced to death, commuted to twenty years' penal servitude. He was transported to Western Australia aboard the Hougoumont in 1867 and set to convict-road work at the Bunbury camp, from which he escaped in February 1869 to the American whaler Gazelle.

The Gazelle carried him to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in November 1869. He settled in Boston, took a junior post at the Boston Pilot, the Catholic-Irish-American weekly, in 1870, and became its editor in 1876, running it as the leading Catholic-Irish-American newspaper of the post-Civil-War period to a national circulation of about a hundred and forty thousand, the dominant voice of the Irish-Catholic-American establishment of the 1880s.

The 1876 Catalpa rescue was the political-organising achievement of his Boston career. He planned, with the Clan na Gael leadership, the operation in which the whaling-vessel Catalpa, bought by Clan na Gael, sailed to Western Australia and on 17 April 1876 took off the six remaining Fenian prisoners who had escaped from the Fremantle Convict Establishment, landing them at New York that August. He published Songs of the Southern Seas (1873) and Statues in the Block (1881), and died at his summer house at Hull, Massachusetts on 10 August 1890, forty-six years old, buried at Holyhood Cemetery, Brookline. The Reilly name, the Cavan-and-Meath patronymic Ó Raghallaigh, he carried from a Dowth schoolmaster's family through the Fenian, transportation, Catalpa and Boston Irish-Catholic-American foundation career.