Mary Jane O’Donovan Rossa, dated 22 October 1864. (Image courtesy of the Cole/O’Donovan Rossa family)
4.The Fenian executive were the most senior staff of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. All men photographed belonged to the Irish People newspaper. O’Donovan Rossa is in the photograph in the bottom right of the image. (Image from author’s collection)
5.Dublin Metropolitan Police raid the offices of the Irish People newspaper on 14 September 1865. Following this raid widespread arrests were made including the arrest of O’Donovan Rossa. (Image courtesy of Aidan Lambert)
6.Mugshot of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa taken at Mountjoy Gaol following his arrest. (Image courtesy of the Cole/O’Donovan Rossa family)
7.James Maxwell O’Donovan Rossa, who was born on 30 April 1866 during O’Donovan Rossa’s imprisonment. This photograph had been suppressed from O’Donovan Rossa on account of prison regulations. (Image courtesy of the Cole/O’Donovan Rossa family.)
8.John Devoy, Charles Underwood O’Connell, Henry Mulleda, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa and John McClure. Released from prison on 7 January 1871 the five men became known as the Cuba Five. Their arrival in America was a scene of pandemonium as various political parties and Irish-American organisations sought their favour. (Image from author’s collection)
9.Dynamite O’Donovan Rossa had spearheaded a bombing campaign against Britain seeking Irish independence. Establishing a new organisation called The United Irishmen of America, their militant wing, known as the skirmishers, had undertaken a number of small-scale bombings in London. (Image courtesy of the Cole/O’Donovan Rossa family.)
10.Red Jim McDermott was Agent Provocateur who had used O’Donovan Rossa to infiltrate a skirmishing conspiracy. He had been responsible for the arrest of several Fenian conspirators between March to April 1883 and had planned simultaneous bombings in Britain and Ireland, clandestinely funded by British intelligence. He was one of the most notorious exposed British Agents of the late nineteenth century. (Image from author’s collection)
11.Captain Thomas Phelan was stabbed in O’Donovan Rossa’s office. A British Agent, he had been exposed by fellow British Agent John Francis Kearney, who deemed his exposure necessary for his personal protection within O’Donovan Rossa’s company. (Image from author’s collection)
12.Yseult Dudley, who attempted to assassinate O’Donovan Rossa at Broadway on 2 February 1885. (Image from author’s collection)
13.Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa delivering the oration at the unveiling of the Manchester Martyrs Memorial, Birr, Co. Offaly in July 1894. (Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)
14.Jeremiah and Mary Jane O’Donovan Rossa with their daughters at the family home in Staten Island. Note that O’Donovan Rossa looks frail and emaciated by the time of this photograph as he had developed chronic neuritis as a result of his earlier prison treatment, which affected his motor skills. (Image courtesy of the Cole/O’Donovan Rossa family)
15.Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa died in St Vincent’s Hospital, Staten Island on 29 July 1915. In this photograph, taken prior to his death, the once unconquerable O’Donovan Rossa is prostrate in his hospital bed. Suffering from dementia, in addition to chronic neuritis, he increasingly regressed and believed himself to be in prison once more. (Image courtesy of the Cole/O’Donovan Rossa family)
16.Mary Jane O’Donovan Rossa, Fr Michael Flangan, Eileen O’Donovan Rossa and Thomas James Clarke. Clarke, a former Dynamitard, believed the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa could awaken a national spirit amongst the Irish people. (Image from author’s collection)
17.Patrick Pearse delivering the oration over the grave of O’Donovan Rossa on 1 August 1915. Note Major General John MacBride, who is standing behind Pearse and Thomas J. Clarke in the far right of the photo. All three would be shot for their part in the Easter Rising the following year. (Image courtesy of Glasnevin Museum)
A colour foldout of a new work by Robert Ballagh of the O’Donovan Rossa funeral.
INTRODUCTION
On 29 June 1915 Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa died in St Vincent’s Hospital, Staten Island. The following day the pro-British Irish Times newspaper announced his death, stating that ‘there was a time in Ireland when his death would have created a sensation, but it is no exaggeration to say that today there are many who had almost forgotten his existence’.1 Dying aged 84, throughout his long life, O’Donovan Rossa was perhaps one of the most famous Fenians of his generation. John Devoy described O’Donovan Rossa’s life as ‘an epitome of the history of Fenianism’.2 Devoy was also confident that historians of future generations examining the history of Fenianism would come to regard O’Donovan Rossa as ‘the very incarnation of its spirit’.3 James Connolly, perhaps one of the most famousfigures in the the great pantheon of Irish Revolutionaries, similarly agreed, believing O’Donovan Rossa to be ‘an unconquerable fighter’.4 Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin and a future signatory to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, eulogised O’Donovan Rossa as a man ‘whose spirit was the free spirit of the Irish Nation’.5 His daughter, Eileen, regarded her father as ‘unconquerable’.6 Finally, Patrick Pearse, a name forever associated with the Easter Rising of 1916, regarded O’Donovan Rossa as a revolutionary chieftain, as ‘a man that to the masses of his countrymen then and since stood most starkly and plainly for the Fenian ideal’.7 Pearse also celebrated O’Donovan Rossa as an ‘unrepentant Fenian’.8 While his entire life was the very personification of the Fenian struggle, paradoxically, his death was similarly so. The death of O’Donovan Rossa in June 1915, despite what The Irish Times had suggested, had transformed his life of unyielding resistance to British rule in Ireland into a symbol of resistance for Irish nationalism. His death was almost prophetic and symbolised the beginnings of great change in Ireland. Thomas MacDonagh, himself a future leader of the Easter Rising, eulogised him with a poetic prophesy:
Grieve not for him: speak not a word of sorrow;
Although his eyes saw not his country’s glory,
The service of his day shall make our morrow:
His name shall be a watchword in our story.
Him England for his love of Ireland hates:
This flesh we bury England’s chains have bitten:
That is enough; for our deed he waits;
With Emmet’s let his epitaph be written.9
It is clear from this that O’Donovan Rossa’s life and death play an important part in the understanding of the Easter 1916 Rising. In many respects his death can be seen as the precursor to the great Revolutionary Epoch in Irish history. O’Donovan Rossa’s final wish was to be buried in Ireland; he was desirous to be taken home to his home in Roscarbery, West Cork, where he would be buried in a humble Famine graveyard alongside his father and other victims of the Great Hunger. With the permission of his family, however, Clan na Gael and the IRB, through John Devoy and Thomas James Clarke, buried O’Donovan Rossa in Ireland’s national graveyard: Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. Both men had realised that the return of O’Donovan Rossa to Ireland, and his burial in Dublin, could act as a precursor to rebellion and a show of strength for advanced Irish nationalism. They predicted that the funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa could re-awaken a national spirit in the Irish people, whom they feared were becoming more British than the British themselves. It was at this funeral that Thomas James Clarke instructed
