Young Ireland Rebellion (1848): Rising During the Famine

The Young Ireland rebellion was a brief, unsuccessful armed rising in Ireland in July 1848, led by the nationalist Young Ireland movement at the height of the Great Famine. Its only significant clash took place on 29 July 1848 at a farmhouse near Ballingarry, County Tipperary, where rebels besieged a party of police. The rising failed within days, but its leaders became celebrated figures of Irish nationalism.

Background

The Young Irelanders were a group of writers and activists who gathered around The Nation, a weekly newspaper founded in 1842 by Thomas Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy and John Blake Dillon. They supported Daniel O’Connell’s campaign to repeal the Act of Union, but they promoted a broader, non-sectarian cultural nationalism and grew impatient with O’Connell’s alliance with the Whigs. In July 1846 they left his Repeal Association after refusing to accept that physical force could never be justified.

In January 1847 they founded the Irish Confederation, led by the Protestant landowner and MP William Smith O’Brien. The Great Irish Famine radicalised some members. John Mitchel argued that tenants should resist rents and evictions and openly called for revolution in his paper, the United Irishman, launched in February 1848.

1848: from Paris to Tipperary

The revolution in Paris in February 1848 raised hopes. Thomas Francis Meagher first flew a green, white and orange tricolour in Waterford in March 1848, and after he and Smith O’Brien led a delegation to Paris in April to congratulate the new French republic, he presented a tricolour made by French sympathisers at a meeting in Dublin. This flag later became the national flag of Ireland.

The government responded firmly. A new Treason Felony Act was passed in April 1848, and in May Mitchel was convicted under it and sentenced to 14 years’ transportation. In July, as the Confederation began to form armed clubs, the government suspended habeas corpus in Ireland. Facing arrest, O’Brien, Meagher, Dillon and others left Dublin to try to raise the countryside, moving through Kilkenny and Tipperary. Crowds gathered, but people weakened by famine had few weapons, little food and were under pressure from Catholic clergy, many of whom opposed a rising.

The siege of Widow McCormack’s house

On 29 July 1848 a force of about 40 to 50 police under Sub-Inspector Thomas Trant, moving to arrest the leaders, encountered a crowd of rebels near Ballingarry. The police took shelter in the two-storey farmhouse of Margaret McCormack at Farrenrory, barricading themselves in with her five children, who were inside while she was away.

Mrs McCormack returned and pleaded for her children, and Smith O’Brien went to a window to negotiate. Shots were then exchanged; at least two rebels were killed and others wounded. When police reinforcements arrived, the rebels, short of ammunition, dispersed. The affair was soon mocked as “the battle of Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch”.

Arrests and transportation

Smith O’Brien was arrested at Thurles railway station on 5 August 1848. He, Meagher, Terence Bellew MacManus and Patrick O’Donoghue were tried for high treason at a special commission in Clonmel in September and October 1848. All four were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, but after appeals for mercy the sentences were commuted to transportation for life.

In 1849 they were sent to Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, where Mitchel and the treason-felony convicts John Martin and Kevin Izod O’Doherty also served sentences. MacManus escaped to America in 1851, Meagher in 1852 and Mitchel in 1853. Smith O’Brien was conditionally pardoned in 1854 and fully in 1856, returned to Ireland and died in 1864. Dillon, James Stephens and John O’Mahony escaped abroad without being tried.

Consequences and legacy

Militarily the rising was insignificant, but it had lasting effects. Meagher became a brigadier general in the Union army during the American Civil War, commanding the Irish Brigade. Stephens and O’Mahony, both veterans of 1848, founded the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fenian Brotherhood in 1858, which organised the Fenian Rising of 1867. Charles Gavan Duffy, tried several times but never convicted, emigrated to Australia and became Premier of Victoria. The tricolour that Meagher introduced was used by the Irish Free State from 1922 and confirmed as the national flag in the 1937 Constitution.

The house at Farrenrory survives as the Famine Warhouse 1848, a national monument and museum.

Timeline

• 1842, October: The Nation newspaper is founded.
• 1846, July: Young Ireland leaves O’Connell’s Repeal Association.
• 1847, January: The Irish Confederation is founded.
• 1848, March–April: Meagher introduces the tricolour and visits Paris with Smith O’Brien.
• 1848, May: John Mitchel is sentenced to transportation.
• 1848, late July: Habeas corpus is suspended in Ireland.
• 1848, 29 July: The siege of Widow McCormack’s house near Ballingarry.
• 1848, 5 August: Smith O’Brien is arrested at Thurles.
• 1848, October: Four leaders are convicted of high treason at Clonmel.
• 1849, July: The leaders sail for Van Diemen’s Land.

Why it matters

The Young Ireland rebellion was a small, poorly prepared rising, but it linked Irish nationalism to the European revolutions of 1848 and created a generation of exiles who carried the republican cause to America and Australia. It gave Ireland its tricolour flag and helped inspire the Fenian movement that followed.