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For the better part of seven centuries, to be Irish in Ireland was to live in a land not your own. You called a lake next to your family home by one name, and the occupiers gave it another.
You could not marry, conduct trade or go into business with a Christian Protestant. You could not have a foster child. If orphaned, you were forced into a home full of people who rejected your faith. You could not play your favorite sports—hurling was specifically prohibited. You could not own land in more than 80 percent of your country; the bogs, barrens and highlands were your haunts.
You would not think in Irish, so the logic went, if you were not allowed to speak in Irish.
Your ancient verses were forbidden from being uttered in select company. Your songs could not be sung, your music not played, your Celtic crosses not displayed. You could be thrown in prison for expressions of your folklore or native art.
“The law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic,” said John Bowes, an eighteenth-century lord chancellor of the island. “Nor could any such person draw a breath without the Crown’s permission.”
The melodies of this nation and its favorite instrument were a particular target of English hatred. At one point, your fingernails could be removed if you were caught playing the harp.
In 1603 it was proclaimed that “all manner of bards and harpers” were to be “exterminated by martial law.” That same year, a few months before her death, it was said in Ireland that Queen Elizabeth had ordered her troops to “hang the harpers, wherever found, and destroy their instruments.”
To encourage the elimination of one musical aspect of that culture, the government paid a bounty to anyone who turned in outlaws of the harp.
What had the Irish done to deserve these cruelties? They had refused to become English.
Thomas Francis Meagher was born on August 3, 1823, in one of the largest houses of the oldest city in Ireland—Waterford.
Every street and structure bore some scar of defeat. A cannonball was lodged inside that Viking tower, left over from Cromwell’s rampage of 1650. King Richard II had landed there in 1394, leading the largest armada ever to sail into an Irish port—duly noted on a much-vandalized plaque. King Henry VIII had converted a monastery in the center of town into an almshouse.
The seven-plus centuries of organized torment originated in a letter from Pope Adrian IV in 1155, which empowered King Henry II to conquer Ireland and its “rude and savage people.” It was decreed that the rogue Irish Catholic Church, a mutt’s mash of Celtic, Druidic, Viking and Gaelic influences, had strayed too far from clerical authority, at a time when English monarchs still obeyed Rome.
Legend alone was not enough to save it—that is, the legend of Patrick, a Roman citizen who came to Ireland in a fifth-century slave ship and then convinced many a Celt to worship a Jewish carpenter’s son. Patrick traveled with his own brewer; the saint’s ale may have been a more persuasive selling point for Christianity than the trinity symbol of the shamrock.
The Vikings, after much pillaging, forced interbreeding, tower-toppling and occasional acts of civic improvement (they founded Dublin on the south bank of the Liffey), eventually succumbed to the island’s religion as well.
So with the blessing of God, a Norman force landed not far from Wexford in 1169, followed by an invasion of Henry and his army two years later in Waterford. He was the first English king to leave a footprint on Irish soil, and would not be the last to pronounce the people ungovernable. He could have learned from the Romans, who called the island Hibernia and deemed it not worth the lost lives needed to force it into their empire.
The sons of men named James and Edmund became Seamus and Eamann. The daughters of Mary and Evelyn became Maire and Eibhlin. To the horror of the royal court, these offspring of the invaders had become ipsis Hibernicis Hiberniores—more Irish than the Irish.
The remedy was one of the most exhaustive campaigns to strip a people of their pride of place that any government had ever devised—the Statutes of Kilkenny. Starting in 1367, assimilation was outlawed. Nearly three dozen laws criminalized Irish dress, Irish hairstyle, Irish sport, down to a detailed description of the lawful way to mount a horse.
Though most people on the island, no matter their ancestry, were Roman Catholic, religion was strictly a nationalistic affair for one side. No Irish could enter a chapel, church, cathedral or any other house of prayer in his homeland if an Englishman was present. Speaking Gaelic, or using
Irish place names, could result in forfeiture of land and property to the king.
English power was clustered around Dublin, an urban fortress, a nation within a nation. The siege mentality grew even stronger when a physical boundary went up—the Pale, from the Latin word palus, for stake. In places, it was an actual fence, marked by said stakes. By the late 1400s, the Pale covered four counties.
Beyond the Pale—that was beyond all civilization, an unruly Ireland living on its own terms.
the early 1500s, the Irish inside the circumscribed area were acting freely Irish again. Power flowed back to families with ancient ties to the land. One of those clans produced a fine-robed young rebel by the name of Silken Thomas Fitzgerald, who raised a sizable force and launched a revolt in 1534.
Thomas was powerless in the face of English artillery. Captured, carted off to England, he was dragged through the streets and left to slow-starve in the Tower of London.
Thereafter, an English army garrison would remain in Dublin for nearly four centuries.
The Crown then launched a second big wave of suppression—against the religion that had clung to the land since just before the time of Saint Patrick, more than a thousand years earlier. The change of faith came about because of a change of wives by the English king, Henry VIII. Yes, him. Athletic before an accident led to a life of sloth and overindulgence, the king grew fat, hateful and murderous in his middle age.
After breaking with a corrupt Rome that would not grant him his first divorce, Henry declared himself leader of a new English church—from now on, the state religion of Ireland as well.
Henry’s legacy in Ireland was a religion planted by force but never to flourish in most of the country’s soil. But not for lack of trying.
To populate these newly stolen lands, the English brought in Protestant settlers, many from Scotland, and were generous with their handouts. So was born another hyphenate from this soil: the Scotch-Irish.
The dispossessed took on their oppressor again in 1641. Sick with hatred for those who had cast them from their homes, they killed innocents and tyrants alike, rampaging through the north. Children and women—it didn’t matter, if they were Protestants they were massacred. At least a hundred people were drowned in one town.
Extermination on a mass scale would be carried out over the next ten years. The most horrific slaughter arrived in the form of Oliver Cromwell, leading his New Model Army of 12,000 men, with another 7,000 in reserve. North of Dublin, he laid siege to the well-fortified town of Drogheda. For several days in late summer of 1649, his cannons fired away at the town walls. On September 11, troops stormed the broken city, using Irish children as human shields. By evening, the conquest well in hand, soldiers took swords to anyone still alive—no matter that they’d been offered safety if they
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In his letters and official papers back to England, Cromwell gloated. He believed he had performed a righteous killing “upon these barbarous wretches.” In describing his triumphs, he gloried in the intricacies of bloodlust by his fighting machine—death by sword to the heart and lungs, by fire to hair and face, by the crushing of skulls, the gouging of eyes, the strangling of throats, drowning and smothering, all for the greater good. “It hath pleased God to bless our endeavors at Drogheda,” he wrote.
Under the Act of Settlement, Cromwell’s soldiers and their supporters would seize more than half of all the good land in Ireland, about eight million acres. Any landowner who took part in the fight against Cromwell was arrested and sentenced to a life of bondage, his land confiscated. In this way, another 40,000 Irish were deported to the West Indies as slaves on sugar plantations.
Ever since Henry VIII tried to make the Irish bow to the king as the highest spiritual authority, persecution had been haphazard and poorly enforced. The Penal Laws would show the world how a well-armed minority could snuff out the native worshiping habits of a majority by criminalizing the faith of eight out of ten residents of Ireland. It was the Penal Laws that made it illegal for a Catholic to own a horse worth more than £5, to live in major cities, to pass property on to the eldest son.
“No person shall bury any dead in any suppressed monastery, abbey or convent.” In all, the Penal Laws were a marvel of institutionalized racial and religious supremacy. The British had thought of everything.
The laws were enforced by an occupying army of at least 15,000 men and by schools of informants.
poor man showing lack of respect to his Protestant superior could be whipped until he collapsed or beaten until his bones snapped. It was not uncommon, as on the cotton plantations of the American South, for a master of the estate to summon from his tenants an Irish girl to his bed.
But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses, From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses, For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes. A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand, And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.
Meagher conceived an idea for a flag: one third green, one third orange, as a nod to the Protestant north, and a unifying white in the center.
“And I trust that the old country will not refuse this symbol of new life from one of her youngest children.” A few days later, the banner flew over Waterford, and in time became the national flag of Ireland.
“The sentence of the court is that you be transported beyond the seas for the term of fourteen years.”
Throughout his life—at home with his father, at Stonyhurst, in courts where he studied when he first moved to Dublin—Meagher had been taught that the English, for all their faults, revered the rule of law. What he witnessed in 1848 was a farce,
Then, free of Waterford at last, the police escort
Wearing a green cap with a gold band, Meagher trudged up the mountain under a blistering summer sun. Near the top, at 2,300 feet above sea level, he looked out at the rumpled, rock-fenced spread of three counties, Tipperary, Waterford and Kilkenny, staring down at slight, gaunt-faced men ready for battle, squinting in the bright light.
pleas from the elder Meagher were over. The plan now was to start the revolution in Kilkenny, the lovely medieval town built along a kink in the River Nore. It was chosen for its strategic position—inland, safe from the Royal Navy’s gunships. And think of the symbolic importance: a free Ireland rising from the very place where an enslaved Ireland had been designed with the Statutes of Kilkenny.
Meagher had no sooner left for Kilkenny than the British government dropped a legal bomb on the Irish: habeas corpus was suspended immediately, the country placed under martial law. Anyone could be arrested and held without cause, without hearing, without bail, even without being told what they were held for—indefinitely.
“England has done us one good service at least,” she wrote. “Her recent acts have taken away the last miserable pretext for passive submission . . . We appeal to the whole Irish Nation—is there any man amongst us who wishes to take one step further on the base path of suffering and slavery? Is there one man that thinks that Ireland has not been sufficiently insulted, that Ireland has not been sufficiently degraded in her honour and her rights, to justify her now in fiercely turning upon her oppressor?”
To the Castle, this was the final slight they would take from these rhymesters and revolutionaries.
Nor was the condition of the congregants encouraging—they were weak, thin-limbed, dazed. “The truth,” said Meagher, was “cold and nakedness, hunger and disease, to the last extremity.” He saw no future Irish warriors in this chapel; they were the kneeling dead. It should have been obvious that a people mortally weakened by hunger could not be moved to anything but a prayer and an extended hand begging for crumbs. Famine was supposed to be the motivation for revolt. Instead, it was the undoing of it.
McCormack’s.
In a hideout provided by a priest, Meagher was told to try the MacManus option, to leave the shores of his homeland. The cleric had it all arranged—ship, travel logistics, connections in New York. Meagher never gave it a thought. It would be unfair, he explained, to run away while his brother rebels faced a vengeful Crown.
