Ireland and the First International

Abstract

Ireland in the eighteen-fifties was quiescent through exhaustion. The great famine of the eighteen-forties had resulted in heavy population losses through death and emigration and demoralized tenant farmers had offered but a feeble resistance to wholesale evictions. The failure of the Irish Confederate risings of 1848-49, the collapse of tenant-right agitation and the disintegration of the Independent Irish Party at Westminster, had left the country sunk in political apathy. The trade union movement did not escape the general paralysis and the Regular Trades Association, a central organization that had developed in Dublin during the eighteen-forties, disappeared. Not until 1859 was there renewed trade union activity in the form of a campaign to abolish night-baking; though it had only limited success, it helped to bring about the appearance in 1863 of a new grouping of Dublin trade unions, the United Trades Association. It was, however, not a trade union organization but the Irish Republican Brotherhood that aroused the country from political torpor.The I.R.B., known in North America as the Fenian Brotherhood, was a secret oath-bound society pledged to establish an independent Irish republic. Its first leader was James Stephens, who had founded it in 1858 after his return from an exile following the 1848 rising. Its membership was drawn from the rural and urban working class – the sons of small farmers, mechanics, artisans, laborers and petty shopkeepers. In 1861 Stephens skillfully stage-managed the funeral of Terence Bellew McManus, a Confederate exile whose body was brought back for burial in Ireland, and thus aroused an unprecedented interest in “The Organization,” as its members called it.