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THE O’DONOVANS OF WEST CORK

Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa was born Jeremiah O’Donovan, in Reenascreena, in the idyllic setting of West Cork on 10 September 1831. As will be seen, he adopted the appellation of ‘Rossa’ later in life.1 He was the second of four children. His parents, Denis O’Donovan and Nellie O’Driscoll, were reasonably well to do, and they owned a Linen bleaching business, a linen shop, which included four working looms and employed a team of weavers, and they also rented a sizable plot of land for £18 a year. From the age of 3 the young Jeremiah was sent to live with his maternal grandparents, Cornelius and Anna O’Driscoll (nee O’Leary), near the village of Reenascreena. His mother had given him over to her parents as she was pregnant with her third child and it was decided that they could provide better for him until he was prepared for his First Holy Communion at the age of 7. Here he lived with his four aunts: Nance, Johanna, Bridget and Anna, and his three maternal uncles: Denis, Conn and Michael. Life at his grandparents’ home was tranquil, sublime, and at times, utopian. Their home was one of music, song, poetry and history and the young O’Donovan Rossa was enchanted by ghost stories and tales of the fairies roaming mischievously throughout the rural countryside; indeed, for much of his life he believed in fairies and superstition. The nostalgic fireside talks about rebellions and his families’ revolutionary antecedents also served to inspire him and shape his beliefs. The family were well-off tenant farmers and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa recalled that there were always servants about the house. They had a large proportion of livestock consisting of over twenty cows, as well as a number of horses, goats, pigs and sheep. The family was brought up entirely in the Irish language, and despite learning English at school, it was understood that Irish was the family tongue and ‘the language of the table, the language of the milking [woman], the language of the sowing and the reaping’.2

It was from these fond experiences that O’Donovan Rossa developed a life-long love of the Irish language and an image of an idealised Ireland that was rural and Gaelic. As a boy he adored the wild and verdant surroundings of the farm and was regarded as a wanderer. He was a gentle and polite boy who was slow to anger. He was inspired by the ideas of Gaelic mythology and the existence of fairies roaming throughout the land, the nostalgic fireside talks about rebellions and his families’ revolutionary antecedents. At 7- years-of-age O’Donovan Rossa left his grandparents’ home and returned to his father and mother in Roscarbery. He had returned to his parents to prepare for the sacrament of Communion in their home, which was constantly visited by neighbours, he was embraced by a culture that enjoyed a Gaelic tradition called scoruíocht, where friends would sit by the fireside and tell stories of fairies, history, gossip and familial news, similar to the fireside stories he so enjoyed in his grandparents’ homestead. Surrounded by a strong circle of friends in school, he excelled as a pupil and despite being nurtured in the Irish language; he was commended in his use of English. The initial adoption of English was not easy for O’Donovan Rossa; he had grown up using the Irish language and recalling a youthful struggle to learn English, found that all he could say was A, B, C. He was a quick learner, however, and was recognised as a great pupil by his teachers, to such an extent that he ran ahead of his class.3 In his recollections Rossa recalled joyful schooldays where he would memorise all his lessons, and thoroughly read his schoolbooks, many of which enflamed his burgeoning nationalism in future years. Of these, he recalled textbooks which nursed ‘the Irish youth into a love of country, or a love of freedom’.4 At the time of his childhood, however, rebellions and revolutionary antecedents were confined to the fringe of nationalist politics, where advanced nationalist thought was dominated by the charismatic and eloquent Daniel O’Connell.

O’Connell was one of the most revered and respected politicians of his generation. He had become known as ‘the Liberator’ for his role in securing Catholic Emancipation in 1829, following his election as the first Roman Catholic to the British Parliament the previous year. He also represented a rising Irish-catholic middle-class that was not prepared to be treated with condescension within politics. O’Connell had instilled Irish catholics with a real sense of purpose and made them feel part of an important movement for social change. Inspired by his victory for Catholic Emancipation, O’Connell next sought to achieve a peaceful repeal of the Act of Union, which had abolished the Irish Parliament and united the Kingdom of Ireland with Great Britain. Establishing the Repeal Association to build a viable campaign to rescind the Act of Union, the O’Connell name continued to command respect amongst nationalist families. The O’Donovans were equally inspired by O’Connell and actively supported the Liberator; the young Jeremiah’s uncle, Patrick O’Donovan, become a campaigning activist within the Repeal Association. Through his uncle, he had been introduced to a world of political demonstration, oration and activism. He recalled seeing his Uncle Patrick out canvassing for O’Connell and pinning badges onto supporters who eagerly approached him to show their support for the Liberator. He was mesmerised by the great spectacle of monster meetings as thousands of O’Connell’s supporters descended en-masse to hear about the Repeal Campaign and learn of how Ireland could function with its own parliament. Each monster meeting represented a great spectacle for the young Jeremiah; he gazed at the green banners and flags proudly unfurled by the nationalist supporters, enjoyed the almost military processions of O’Connell’s uniformed police and were enthralled by atmospheres that resembled carnivals rather than political rallies. As a child he had even met the great man and recalled that on a visit from Skibbereen, O’Connell had passed through Roscarbery in 1843, and the young Rossa was picked up over a crowd of people to glance at the arrival of the Liberator in the town. Making his way through the crowd, ‘between the legs of some of them, I made my way up to the carriage that the Liberator was in. I was raised up, and had a hearty handshake with him’.5 He was also introduced to repeal songs and ballads by an apprentice weaver, Peter Crowley, who was employed by his father. The young Rossa was by now introduced to a political culture that disapproved of the Union and saw the great potential of an independent Ireland. The name of O’Connell seemed to magically promise a bright, new future.

While O’Connell enjoyed popular adulation amongst the ordinary people of Ireland, and while his Repeal Association was in the ascendency within Irish politics, privately, he was challenged by younger members of the association who became known as ‘Young Ireland’. This grouping was an intellectual gathering, the progenitor of which was the radical newspaper, The Nation. Amongst its luminaries were Charles Gavin Duffy, Thomas Francis Meagher, John Mitchel and Thomas Davis. Young Ireland rejected what they saw as O’Connell’s increasing sectarianism, his pandering toward the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, his willingness to advance his children within the movement through patronage and his use of the Repeal Association as his personal fiefdom. The Young Irelanders sought to re-define Ireland on a principle of nationality and unity of people, irrespective of religious and cultural difference. The Nation newspaper would become one of the most important and influential nationalist newspapers of the 1840s, and O’Donovan Rossa, already being reared within a political family, was increasingly exposed to its ideas, soon becoming a regular reader, often visiting the workshop of Mick Hurley in Pound Square to listen to a reading of The Nation. O’Donovan Rossa had developed a marked respect for Thomas Davis. He enjoyed his poetry and poetic style and found a great resonance in his political thought, for Davis had reaffirmed the inclusive republicanism of the United Ireland and their concept of an all-inclusive nation. Exposed to the ideas of The Nation, O’Donovan Rossa recalled how the newspaper had given him an understanding of Irish politics and the nature of Ireland’s relationship to Great Britain. He recalled in Recollections a growing awareness of the reality that Ireland was subservient to Britain, and its people were intrinsically different to the British, not only in religion and culture, but language and heritage too. He recalled some years later that, through The Nation, he had had a baptism in Irish nationalism and began to question why Ireland was governed by her nearest neighbour. Within a short time of his introduction to The Nation, however, Ireland was faced by a profound political crisis that would harden O’Donovan Rossa’s opinions; the country would experience famine.

The Great Famine of 1845-52 had resulted from phytophthora infestans, or potato blight, combined with a poor government response and a strict laissez faire interpretation of economics. Of the tenant farmers identified by the 1841 census, the great majority of these were entirely reliant on the potato crop, the cheapest and most easily produced food source. Many of these tenant farmers were dependent on Lumpers, a form of potato that was highly susceptible to disease. By 1845, the first reports of potato blight had been recorded, and the following year the harvest failed again. This triggered a tragedy of unprecedented proportions and while the people starved, other Irish produce was often shipped out to Britain and the imperial markets under armed guard.

While towns and villages throughout Ireland were damaged by the Famine, West Cork, where the O’Donovan’s lived, was particularly affected. James Mahony, a young artist who was touring West Cork for the Illustrated London News, was horrified by what he had seen. Mahony provided a vivid description for the readers of the newspaper, which drew on poverty, hunger and death, reporting that:

I started from Cork, by the mail, for Skibbereen and saw little until we came to Clonakilty, where the coach stopped for breakfast; and here, for the first time, the horrors of the poverty became visible, in the vast number of famished poor, who flocked around the coach to beg alms: amongst them was a woman carrying in her arms the corpse of a fine child, and making the most distressing appeal to the passengers for aid to enable her to purchase a coffin and bury her dear little baby. This horrible spectacle induced me to make some inquiry about her, when I learned from the people of the hotel that each day brings dozens of such applicants into the town.6

Similar to Mahony, a sailor from the HMS Tartarus, delivering food to Ballydehob, West Cork, claimed that: ‘The deaths here average forty to fifty daily; twenty were buried this morning and they were fortunate in getting buried at all.’7 Similar to many families in West Cork, the O’Donovans were horribly affected by the Famine. O’Donovan Rossa had experienced the horrific realities of famine life first hand and was inevitably affected by what the Illustrated London News reported as ‘the horrors of poverty’8 in West Cork. In 1845, at the onset of the Famine, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa was 14-years-of-age. In his recollections, he recalled the almost apocalyptic scene of when his father had opened the family’s potato pit. With tension palpable and a growing sense of unease spreading throughout the country, he remembered the fear and horror his parents experienced:

The leaves had been blighted, and from being green, parts of them were turned black and brown, and when these parts were felt between the fingers they’d crumble into ashes. The air was laden with a sickly odour of decay, as if the hand of death had stricken the potato field, and that everything growing in it was rotting… The stalks withered away day by day. Yet the potatoes had grown to a fairly large size. But the seed of decay and death had been planted into them… By and by an alarming rumour ran through the country that the potatoes were rotting in the pits. Our pit was opened, and there, sure enough, were some of the biggest of the potatoes, half rotten.9

Representing the unfolding crisis as experienced throughout Ireland, each day Denis O’Donovan attended the family potato plot in the hope of seeing the crop flourish rather than diminish. On each occasion he was left disappointed as the potato stalks turned black and crumbled to dust as the crop rotted within the ground. Separating his rotten potatoes from good Lumpers, Denis O’Donovan carted them to a specially built chamber house on his land which he had padded with straw to keep the potatoes dry and maintain a proper temperature. To his great horror, the good potatoes were rotting here too. Specially constructing room for them above the family kitchen, in their loft, the family once again toiled to separate the good potatoes from the bad and stored them in the cool, dry loft. Again, every potato that was stored in the loft rotted.

To meet the crisis in Ireland, Sir Robert Peel, the British Prime Minister, initially acted promptly by clandestinely securing maize from America known as Indian corn to avert the hunger in Ireland and allowed the coast guard to open up seventy-six food depots along the west coast of Ireland, the worst area affected by the Famine. Peel was replaced by Sir John Russell of the Whigs, whose government adopted a more laissez faire attitude to famine relief in Ireland. Leaving much of the governmental response to the Famine in the hands of Charles Trevelyan, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the government moved to transfer the burden of famine relief from the central exchequer to the local tax rates. Peel had previously established a Board of Works to provide work for the starving poor and give them money to purchase food. In this view the government was of the opinion that the people did not require handouts; they required work to survive. This scheme was continued under the Russell administration. However, under Trevelyan, it was decided that while money for the Board of Works would be provided by the Central Government Fund, the money advanced by the British government was to be repaid from local rates over a ten-year period.

By 1847 some 700,000 people were employed by the board. These people were, however, grossly underpaid, receiving between 8d to one shilling per day. This money was not in keeping with the rising cost of living during Famine-stricken Ireland and was insufficient for survival considering the cost of food and the increasing problem of shopkeepers and food providers taking advantage of the peoples’ hunger. By 1847, the British government introduced a temporary Soup Kitchen Scheme, with three million people using the service by the summer. Relying on the Irish Poor Law System, the government also turned to workhouses as a means of Famine relief. The cost of the Poor Law System, however, fell upon landlords who, rather than aid the starving, set about a process of evicting tenants from their land so as to reduce their liability to Poor Law funding. Amending Irish Poor Law, an infamous clause was introduced into the British Parliament known both as the Gregory or Quarter Acre Clause, which ruled that tenant farmers would be denied Famine relief either inside or outside a workhouse if they were farming more than a quarter an acre of land. As thousands were evicted from their homes, they had little choices of life within workhouses, as a result, many wandered aimlessly throughout Ireland, turning to criminality or emigrating in search of a better life. The exact human cost of the Famine in Ireland can never be adequately examined, but most estimates suggest that the population went into free fall, with more than one million people choosing to leave Ireland in search of a better life, and some two million people dying. The 1841 census noted there were over eight million people living in Ireland that year. Every census since 1841 has been substantially lower.

The Famine placed an immense strain on the O’Donovans, and all resources were dried up to provide for the family. O’Donovan Rossa recalled that early on in the Famine all their money was lost to pay the rent for their tenant farm. He noted that the wheat from his parents’ farm came to £18.5s, but had been seized by the landlord who, fearing it would be used by the family rather than as a means of generating money for rent, employed men to watch over it so that it was threshed, bagged and taken to the mill by the family rather than be used for any other purpose. The problem for the O’Donovans was that their rent was also £18 and this money was promptly handed over to the landlord’s agent, Garrett Barry. Lamenting the horror of the Famine in his later years, he recalled how, as a boy, he did not know ‘how my father felt. I don’t know how my mother felt. I don’t know how I felt. There were four children of us there. The potato crop was gone; the wheat crop was gone.’10 By 1846, the second year of the Famine, there was further distress throughout the country as the blight struck again, but on this occasion the potato did not grow at all, and as fields became increasingly untended, the rural landscape was dotted with yellow ragwort – a worthless weed. Standing on a hill overlooking Roscarbery, O’Donovan Rossa saw over a mile of land covered in the weed; he recalled that despite the horror unfolding, it was a beautiful sight to see as it glistened in the sun. He realised that the beautiful scene, which he watched from upon high, was the baleful beauty of decay and death.

Financially, the family could no longer survive after their rent had been paid to the landlord, and Denis O’Donovan, increasingly desperate, had plunged the family into debt. Their resources, already stretched, were further exasperated when a family friend, Donal O’Donovan Buidhe, arrived at their home looking for shelter. Unable to pay his rent, he had been evicted and arrived with his family of six children and distressed wife. Unable to turn their friends away, Denis O’Donovan helped to clear an outhouse on his land for them to live in. The O’Donovan Buidhe’s had a donkey, which the young O’Donovan Rossa was taken by, but looking for it one day he could not locate it; the family, in their desperation, had eaten it. Seeking to relieve their distress, Denis and Nellie agreed that they needed to seek assistance. Denis O’Donovan’s sister was quite wealthy and he sent Nellie to her to ask for help. While his sister was favourable to helping her brother, her son-in-law, whom she asked for advice, prevented her from giving them money as the family were so sunk in debt that they would never be able to pay it back and the money would be lost.

Like so many fathers in Famine Ireland, to relieve his family’s distress, Denis O’Donovan turned to the Board of Works for support and was employed as labourer supervisor. He had worked on a road through Rory Glen, West Cork and had employed the young Rossa as one of his workers. Struggling for preservation, the O’Donovans were working extraordinarily hard. While working on the local roads surrounded by farms and fields, O’Donovan Rossa could not help but notice that despite the increasing hunger and deprivation in Ireland, there was still an abundance of food in the country, and recalling his personal experience of the Famine, he explained:

During those three years in Ireland, ’45, ’46, and ’47 the potato crops failed, but the other crops grew well, and as in the case of my people in ’45, the landlords came in on the people everywhere and seized the grain crops for the rent – not caring much what became of those whose labour and sweat produced those crops. The people died of starvation, by the thousands.11

One of those who died was O’Donovan Rossa’s father on 25 March 1847. Denis O’Donovan had contracted fever and O’Donovan Rossa replaced his father as labourer–supervisor at 16–years-of-age. He realised that his father’s death had left a family of five fatherless and effectively penniless. Denis was waked the day after his death and a great crowd descended on the family home to pay their respects to him. The following day he was buried in the family plot at Ross Abbey. This was not the only Famine tragedy to befall the 16–year-old Rossa. The following year, a woman whom he had been friendly with, Jillen Andy, died of Famine fever, leaving four sons orphaned. He had been particularly friendly with Jillen’s fourth son, Tade. O’Donovan Rossa was kind to Tade, who was mentally disabled, and he recollected how he would regularly take Tade on his back to school and tell him stories to make him laugh. One evening in 1848, while playing on the street, Tade came to him with the news that his mother had died, and he asked the young Rossa to help him bury her. With no money for a coffin and no mourners, they buried the woman in a shallow grave and tied a pillow to her head. Laying an apron over her head, so the dirt could not touch her face, Tade and Rossa filled the shallow grave. Within one month his friend was buried with his mother, his life another casualty of the Famine.

Like his father, O’Donovan Rossa, shortly after the burial of Tade, was struck by fever. Lying in bed for a little over a week, his family thought he was dying. While he was in great pain and his life was challenged, he survived the bout of fever but recovering from his illness he complained about his eyes, which became infected. The pain in his eyes was attributed to fairies and his mother wondered what the fairy world had against them and why they were being punished so much. By now the family were heavily in debt and debt collectors increasingly ploughed pressure on Nellie O’Donovan, keenly aware that she was at her lowest ebb. The family had no money and could not oblige the collectors; as a result everything inside the house was seized and sold, much to the family’s indignity. Rossa recalled how the family were left hungry and dependent on relatives and neighbours for assistance. On one particular occasion, he remembered how, coming home from playing with his friends, he found his mother in tears – there was no food in the house and she was unable to provide for her children. Searching through his pockets he found a single penny piece. He was so hungry. Leaving the house the young O’Donovan Rossa made his way to a nearby shop and bought a penny bun, recalling how ‘I stole to the back of the house and thievishly ate that penny bun without sharing it with my mother, my sister and my brothers.’12

Soon after this an eviction notice was given to Nellie O’Donovan. The family moved into a house formally owned by a neighbour Darby Holland, who had died. They secured the house through a family relative who lived there rent free during her life. As part of the agreement Nellie O’Donovan would be paid £12 for a wheat crop growing in Darby Holland’s former hill field. This money was not used to provide for the family; the £12 was needed to pay back debts incurred since Denis O’Donovan died.

The year of 1848 was a tough one for the O’Donovan family, but it was also a year of great social change throughout Europe. In January 1848 there was a rebellion in Sicily; by February the winds of change had reached France where there was a republican revolution and the French monarchy was overthrown.

In March, Germany was the scene of a failed wave of protest seeking German national unity and freedom of assembly, while in nearby Denmark later that month there was popular opposition levelled against a system of monarchical absolutism. The revolutions sweeping throughout Europe certainly influenced nationalist Ireland. While the Repeal movement looked on many within its offshoot, Young Ireland became convinced that the time had come for Ireland to proclaim its right to independence. William Smith O’Brien, perhaps one of the most famous of the Young Irelanders, inspired by the success of the French Revolution, aimed to establish an Irish National Guard and a council of 300 members to function as the embryo of an independent Irish parliament. In deference to the French Republic, Smith O’Brien, with Thomas Francis Meagher travelled to Paris to seek recognition of their aims. The French were, however, unwilling to support the Young Irelanders, as the recognition of their aims would antagonise the British. O’Brien and his followers in the Young Irelanders regarded the republic as a necessary evil, not in the context that they supported its establishment, but as a means to threaten the government to terms. In this regard the Young Irelanders’ strategy had initially held out for an Irish parliament by peace, or a republic by force. By May 1848 the Young Irelanders led an abortive and disastrous uprising, the largest skirmish of which was at a widow’s cottage in Ballingarry, County Tipperary, where a number of police officers had barricaded themselves into a house and were surrounded by rebels. Poorly equipped and lacking popular support, the rebellion easily shot its bolt and in the aftermath the leaders of the Young Irelanders were either rounded up and deported to Australia and Van Diemen’s Land or escaped to Europe and America.

The Young Irelanders heavily influenced the young Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. The Irishman recalled that in the period of 1848-58, with the transference from Young Irelanderism to Fenianism, he was effectively carried from ‘boyhood to manhood’.13 The fireside stories of his youth and his eager absorption of the ideas disseminated in The Nation, coupled with his experiences of the Famine, certainly played a crucial role in the radicalisation and politicisation of the young O’Donovan Rossa. The rigours of the Famine had forced the family to scatter throughout the globe. Following the 1848 Rebellion, the O’Donovans emigrated to America, yet for one reason or another, including a perception that O’Donovan Rossa could look after himself, Nellie O’Donovan had chosen to leave Jeremiah in Ireland. O’Donovan Rossa now lived with his father’s niece, Ellen Dowling, who had previously secured him work in her husband Mortimer Dowling’s hardware shop in Skibbereen. Remembering the passage of his family to America, O’Donovan Rossa lamented the event:

The day they were leaving Ireland, I went from Skibbereen to Renascrenna to see them off. At Renascrenna Cross we parted… Five or six other families were going away, and there were five or six cars to carry them and all they could carry with them, to the Cove of Cork. The cry of the weeping and wailing of that day rings in my ears still. That time it was a cry heard every day at every cross roads in Ireland. I stood at that Renascrenna Cross till this cry of the emigrant party went beyond my hearing. Then, I kept walking backward toward Skibbereen, looking at them till they sank from my view.14

Life without his family was tough for O’Donovan Rossa, and despite working for his cousin’s husband, he had no paid salary from Mortimer Dowling. His job was secured on the understanding that the Dowlings would feed, shelter and clothe him in return for his labour. In 1849, however, business began to improve for Mortimer Dowling, and he changed premises, enlarging his business from general hardware and including cutlery, agricultural seeds and farm and ironmongery tools. Later on, Dowling expanded into the wool, cotton and flax industry, and as a Poor Law Guardian, won contracts to supply them to the Poor Law Unions in Skibbereen, Bantry and Kenmare. With the expansion of his business, O’Donovan Rossa now could draw a salary and earned the tidy sum of £2 per year. He was also offered to work for Dowling for five years, but he was reluctant to sign such a long and binding contract. Mortimer Dowling had been a Young Irelander and had volumes of The Nation and Repeal pamphlets stored in his home, which the young Rossa eagerly read. Of particular interest to O’Donovan Rossa was the Young Irelander John Mitchel. Mitchel had been the most vocal advocate of violent revolution amongst the ranks of the Young Irelanders and had broken from the organisation in his desire to see a violent uprising. Explaining the Famine of 1852, Mitchel, who would eventually be deported to Van Diemen’s Land, found that the disaster was not manmade but was the result of a British policy to starve Ireland into submission. O’Donovan Rossa agreed with this analysis of the Famine as a man-made catastrophe, stating in retrospect:

Coroners’ Juries would hold inquests on Irish people who were found dead in the ditches, and would return verdicts of ‘murder’ against the English government, but England cared nothing for that; her work was going on splendidly; she wanted the Irish race cleared out of Ireland – cleared out entirely, and now something was doing for her what her guns and bayonets had failed to do. She gave thanks to God that it was so; that the Irish were gone – ‘gone with a vengeance.’15