Latest / The History of Ireland: Rebellion, Empire, and Independence — Fexingo History / The Fenian Brotherhood: Ireland's Transatlantic Rebellion
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the 1798 rebellion, the Young Irelanders in 1848, the Land League — but there's this whole chapter in between that often gets a bit overlooked, even though it directly set the stage for the revolutionary period a few decades later. Luna: The Fenians, right? Lucas: Exactly. The Fenian Brotherhood, and its Irish counterpart, the Irish Republican Brotherhood — the IRB. They were founded in the 1850s, right after the Great Hunger and the failure of the Young Irelander Rebellion. And they were the first truly secret, oath-bound revolutionary society in modern Irish history, with a clear goal: an independent Irish republic, by force if necessary. Luna: Why 'Fenian'? That's from the old myths, isn't it? Lucas: Yes — named after the Fianna, the warrior band of Fionn mac Cumhaill. The American founder, John O'Mahony, was a scholar of Irish mythology, and he saw the Fenians as a modern revival of that ancient martial spirit. Meanwhile, on the Irish side, James Stephens — who had fought in the 1848 rising — set up the IRB in Dublin in 1858. Stephens was a brilliant organiser, a bit of a visionary, but also very secretive and autocratic. Luna: So it was a transatlantic movement from the start. Lucas: Absolutely. The IRB in Ireland and the Fenian Brotherhood in America were supposed to be two wings of the same bird. The American wing had money and arms from the huge Irish-American population, many of them veterans of the American Civil War. The Irish wing had the local knowledge and the network of secret cells. In theory, they'd coordinate a rising. In practice, there were huge tensions — over strategy, over leadership, over whether to wait for the right moment or strike immediately. Lucas: Stephens was cautious. He wanted to wait until Britain was embroiled in a major war — a war with the United States, for instance. But the American Fenians, especially after the Civil War ended in 1865, were itching to act. They'd just fought a war for freedom, and they wanted to bring that fight to Ireland. Luna: And what did the British authorities make of this? Lucas: They were deeply worried. The Fenians were a secret society, and the British had informers inside, but not enough to fully penetrate the network. In 1865, they got a break — they raided the offices of the Irish People, a Fenian newspaper in Dublin, and seized incriminating documents. They arrested Stephens and several other leaders. But Stephens escaped from Richmond Prison in Dublin just a few weeks later, which was a massive embarrassment for the British and a huge morale boost for the Fenians. Luna: How did he escape? Lucas: With the help of a prison warder who was a Fenion sympathiser. Stephens simply walked out the front gate, dressed in different clothes. He fled to France and then to America. But the damage was done — the British had broken the core of the IRB leadership in Ireland. The rising that was planned for 1866 was postponed, and then postponed again. By early 1867, the American Fenians, frustrated with the delays, decided to go ahead on their own. Lucas: So the Fenian Rising of 1867 was really a series of scattered, poorly coordinated attempts. There were small risings in counties Tipperary, Cork, Limerick, and Dublin. But the British had been tipped off, the leaders were arrested, and the Fenians were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. The most famous incident was the attack on a police van in Manchester in September 1867, where two Fenian leaders, Thomas J. Kelly and Timothy Deasy, were rescued. But during the rescue, a policeman was shot dead. Luna: That led to the Manchester Martyrs. Lucas: Right. Three men — William Philip Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O'Brien — were hanged for the murder of the policeman, even though they probably weren't the ones who fired the shot. They became martyrs for the Irish republican cause. Their funeral in Dublin drew tens of thousands of mourners. And then there was the Clerkenwell explosion in London in December 1867, a Fenian attempt to rescue another prisoner from a London jail, which killed twelve civilians and caused outrage in England. That backlash actually set back the Fenian cause, but it also terrified the British government. Luna: And there were also the Fenian raids into Canada, right? Lucas: Yes — that's one of the most extraordinary chapters. Many Irish-American Civil War veterans, led by John O'Mahony's rival, William R. Roberts, believed they could pressure Britain by attacking its North American colonies. Between 1866 and 1871, there were a series of raids across the border into Canada — from New York, Vermont, and Minnesota. The most significant was the Battle of Ridgeway in June 1866, where a force of about 800 Fenians defeated a Canadian militia unit. But the raids ultimately failed — the US government cracked down on the Fenians to avoid a diplomatic crisis with Britain. Lucas: Now, this is actually a good moment to mention something. If you've been coming with us on this journey through Irish history, episode by episode, you might have noticed we don't have ads. That's entirely because some listeners choose to support us directly. A couple of dollars a month at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo genuinely makes a difference — it helps us keep episodes ad-free and invest in research. So if you've gotten something out of these conversations, that's where to go. Luna: Yeah, it's such a small thing that adds up. And it really does let us do deeper dives, like this one on the Fenians. Lucas: Exactly. So back to the Fenians — even though the 1867 rising was a military failure, the IRB didn't disappear. It went underground, regrouped, and became the seedbed for the next generation of republicans. Men like Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, who was imprisoned for Fenian activities, later organised the dynamite campaign in Britain in the 1880s. And the IRB itself was the organisation that eventually launched the Easter Rising in 1916. So the Fenian tradition of secret, oath-bound republicanism — that's the direct lineage. Luna: So it's not a side story — it's the connecting tissue. Lucas: Exactly. The Fenians kept the flame alive during a period when constitutional nationalism, like that of Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell's Home Rule movement, seemed more promising. But the Fenians insisted that only physical force would win Irish freedom. And that belief, passed down through the IRB, ultimately shaped the revolution of 1916-1921. Lucas: There's also a fascinating cultural legacy. The Fenians inspired a whole body of ballads — 'The Bold Fenian Men', 'God Save Ireland', which became an unofficial anthem. And the term 'Fenian' itself became a catch-all for Irish republicans in the British popular imagination, often used as a slur, but reclaimed by nationalists as a badge of honour. Luna: It's amazing how a failed rebellion can have such a long afterglow. Lucas: That's often the case in Irish history. Failure — romanticised, martyred, remembered — becomes a source of strength for the next attempt. The Fenians didn't win in 1867, but they proved that the desire for an Irish republic was still very much alive, on both sides of the Atlantic. And they built the organisation that would eventually succeed.