For a month, the Young Ireland Four—Meagher, Smith O’Brien, MacManus and a heavy-drinking law clerk named Patrick O’Donoghue—marked the days in Kilmainham. O’Donoghue, with his rough-whiskered face and mournful eyes, had been thrown in with the leaders of the uprising because he’d been a close associate of Smith O’Brien’s in the days leading up to the cabbage patch debacle. At summer’s end, the prison filled with people who preferred the loss of freedom over death by starvation. Each cell had a tiny
