“God Save Ireland”: Manchester-Martyr Demonstrations in Dublin, 1867–1916

Abstract

On 23 November 1867 three Irishmen--William Philip Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O'Brien--were executed in Manchester, England. They had been found guilty of murdering a policeman during a successful attempt to rescue two Fenian prisoners from a police van in Manchester. Although the policeman had been killed with just one shot, allegedly by accident, five men were sentenced to death for the killing. Shortly afterward, one of them, Thomas Maguire, was pardoned, and another, Edward O'Meagher Condon, an Irish-American, was reprieved owing to insufficient evidence. As all five men had been tried together on the one indictment and convicted on the same verdict, many observers expected that the case against the other three men would also be dropped. When they were executed, many Irish nationalists believed that the government had refused to exercise mercy not because the men were unquestionably guilty, but in order to satisfy English public opinion, which expected that somebody would be punished for the crime. Much sympathy was also aroused among the Catholic community in Ireland because the three men, who were believed to be devout Catholics, did not receive a proper Christian burial, their bodies having been covered with quicklime in Salford jail. (1) The executions had an immediate impact on public opinion in Ireland. The Irish nationalist press expressed feelings of outrage. Many mock funeral processions were held across Ireland within days of the executions to commemorate the three men. (2) These men became popularly known as the martyrs. For over fifty years demonstrations were held to mark the anniversary of their execution. Thus far, however, little attention has been paid by historians to the Manchester-martyr commemorative demonstrations that were held after 1867. (3) These demonstrations were popular not only in Ireland but also throughout the Irish community in Britain and the US and could vary greatly in size and character, depending on the locality in which they took place. For example, in Britain the usual practice was simply to offer a mass for the souls of the martyrs on their anniversary. In the US commemorative concerts and lectures were often held to mark their anniversary. These events were most popular in those cities that had a large Irish population, such as New York and Chicago. In Irish country towns people often gathered by torchlight in a town square to hear a commemorative speech by a local politician. During the 1870s the Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B.) usually organized the demonstrations in both rural and urban Ireland. After the formation of the Land League, however, many of the demonstrations in rural Ireland were organized by supporters of the constitutional nationalist movement. By contrast, the demonstrations in Dublin were remarkable for the extent to which control of the demonstrations lay more firmly in republican hands. For this reason they were of continued interest to the Dublin Metropolitan Police, which suspected that their success or failure was a rough guideline to the degree of influence that the I.R.B. exercised in the city. On 11 September 1867, six months after the abortive Fenian Rising in Ireland, the police in Manchester apprehended the acting Fenian leader Colonel Thomas J. Kelly and his associate Captain Timothy Deasy. Exactly one week later, as Kelly and Deasy were being transported in a prison van from court back to jail, they were rescued by a body of armed Fenians. During the rescue, depicted in this sketch, an English police sergeant named Charles Brett was killed when one of the rescuers fired a shot through the ventilator of the locked back door of the van. The shot fatally wounded Brett, though the intention was probably not to kill him but to frighten him into opening the door or to break open the lock. A woman prisoner inside the van then took the keys from the dying Brett and passed them out to the rescuers through the ventilator. …