John O'Mahony(1815–1877)

John O'Mahony was born at Clonkilla House, Kilbeheny, in the Galtee mountain country of east County Limerick on 12 April 1815, son of Daniel O'Mahony, a Catholic gentleman-farmer who had taken the thousand-acre Clonkilla estate from the Earl of Kingston on a long lease at the post-Union land-tenure market, and Anne Burke. The household was small-Catholic-gentry of the Munster-Limerick-Tipperary border: the father was the Catholic-Emancipation organiser of the Kilbeheny parish through the 1820s, the mother was from the Burke family of east Galway. The boy was schooled at the Catholic Latin school at Hospital, County Limerick, from eight to fourteen, then at the Jesuit-run lay school at Carlow College from 1829, and finally at Trinity College Dublin from 1832 (under the post-Catholic-Emancipation 1829 admission rule that had opened Trinity to Catholic students). He took the BA from Trinity in 1836 at twenty-one without academic distinction but with the Trinity-Gaelic-philology-and-history-class-prize on a substantial reading-and-translation of the medieval Irish manuscript Annals of the Four Masters that he had completed in his final undergraduate year.

The Trinity-Gaelic-philology training was the foundation of his subsequent scholarly career and the source of the name he later gave the Fenian Brotherhood. He inherited the Clonkilla estate at twenty-six on his father's death in 1841 (the small estate had remained in family lease, an unusual continuity for a Catholic gentry household of the post-Union period), managed it across the next seven years through the early Famine years of 1845 to 1847, and across the same period was reading the Gaelic manuscript Old-Irish texts (the Lebor na hUidre, the Lebor Laignech, the Acallam na Senórach) that were becoming available in the Royal Irish Academy publications of the period. He joined the Young Ireland Repeal-of-the-Union faction at the 1847 Confederation Hall meeting, where he met the young Thomas Francis Meagher, John Mitchel, William Smith O'Brien, and James Stephens (the future founder of the Irish Republican Brotherhood). The 1848 abortive rising at the Widow McCormack's cabbage-patch at Ballingarry, Tipperary on 29 July 1848 broke the Young Ireland movement; the senior figures were captured or fled to America. O'Mahony, who had brought a contingent of Limerick Confederates to the County Tipperary Slievenamon meeting-point of the rising, escaped over the mountains to the south Wexford coast, took a Welsh fishing boat to Cardigan Bay, and from there a packet to Paris.

He spent ten years in Paris, 1848 to 1858, as a Irish political exile in the dense small community of post-1848 European political refugees in the city. The Paris years gave him the connection with James Stephens (who had also escaped after Ballingarry and was living in a Latin Quarter apartment at 15 rue Lacépède through the same period), the Polish-Republican-and-Hungarian-Republican exile networks of the post-1848 revolutionary failure across continental Europe, and the Mazzinian-Italian-Republican working principle that the long-term Irish-independence question would be solved by an organised diaspora-and-home revolutionary network rather than by the parliamentary-Repeal route Daniel O'Connell had run through to his death in 1847. He moved to New York in 1856 at forty-one, was joined by James Stephens in 1858, and at the New York meeting on 17 March 1858 (Saint Patrick's Day) founded the Fenian Brotherhood with the core of Young Ireland exiles he had reassembled at New York.

The Fenian Brotherhood, named after the medieval Irish *Fianna* warrior bands of the Old-Irish manuscript tradition that O'Mahony had been reading at Trinity in his undergraduate years and across the Paris exile decade, was constituted as the diaspora-American counterpart of Stephens's Irish Republican Brotherhood in Dublin. O'Mahony served as the head centre (the formal title for the supreme officer of the diaspora wing) from 1858 to 1866 and again 1872 to 1877. The Fenian Brotherhood reached a peak membership of about two hundred thousand subscribed American Civil War veterans and Irish-American working-class members across the post-Civil-War 1865 to 1867 period; ran the abortive 1866 and 1870 Canadian raids (the Fenian-Army incursions across the Vermont-and-New-York frontiers into Lower Canada that aimed to provoke Anglo-American war and a British withdrawal from Ireland); and was the foundational political-and-organisational body of the post-1867 Irish-American nationalist movement.

The factional disputes of the post-1867 American period broke him. The Fenian Brotherhood split in 1866 over the Canadian-raid strategy (the O'Mahony wing held to the principle that the Fenian effort should be concentrated on Ireland; the William Roberts wing argued for the Canadian operation that the 1866 raids attempted) and again in 1872 over the Cuba-Five-prisoner-release amnesty terms that the post-1871 Gladstone government had agreed for the IRB prisoners of the 1867 Manchester and Birmingham Outrages. O'Mahony was head centre of the reduced O'Mahony-faction Fenian Brotherhood from 1872 to 1877 across a period of declining membership, declining subscription income, and declining personal health. He lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room tenement apartment at 100 Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side, in genuine poverty, doing a small piecework translation of the *Foras Feasa ar Éirinn* of Geoffrey Keating for a New York Catholic publishing house, and in a declining mental state across the period 1875 to 1877. He died at the Forsyth Street apartment on 7 February 1877, sixty-one years old, of cancer and accumulated psychiatric decline. His body was returned to Ireland on a public-subscription fund and buried at Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin on the *Fenian Plot* near the Charles Stewart Parnell and Roger Casement graves. The O'Mahony / Mahony name in the Irish-side catalogue is the patronymic *Ó Mathghamhna* (descendant of Mathghamhain, the bear), the foundational west-Cork surname of the medieval Carbery country; he carried it from a Galtee-mountain Limerick gentleman-farmer's household into the foundation of the modern Irish-American republican movement.