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become, after he was joined by Dillon and Davis, the powerful weekly organ of the Young Irelanders- while Davis and Dufy were destined to become the chief poets of the move- ment. Very quickly a number of brilliant and equally ardent poets, speakers, thinkers, es- sayists, journalists, and orators, such as Denis Florence MacCarthy, Samuel Ferguson, Lady Wilde (“Speranza”), James Clarence Mangan, and the poet, Mary Eva Kelly, from Head- ford, in county Galway, who became widely known as “Eva of the Nation” joined them. But it is often said that their most valuable supporter and acquisition was John Mitchell, from Camnish, near Dungiven, county Derry. The son of a Unitarian minister and a solicitor by profession, Mitchell was one of the inest thinkers and most powerful writers of his era and his Jail Journal is often hailed as being one of Irish Nationalism’s most famous and inluential texts. An open advocate of insurrection, Mitchell especially espoused resistance to the land system, which lay at the root of all the evils from which the country was sufering.Their greatest orator was undoubtedly the Waterford native and designer of the Irish tri-colour, Thomas Francis Meagher, while another noted member was William Smith O’ Brien, a country gentleman from Dromoland, Newmarket-on-Fergus, county Clare.
It was said of the new movement: ‘The brilliancy of the Young Irelanders, the beauty, the power and the sincerity of their writings, illuminated the ‘Forties, and made that period a shining one in Anglo-Irish literature.’ Unfortunately, in 1845, the movement lost to scarlet fever, Davis, their most beloved member, and the one who displayed the inest promise of becoming a great Irishman, a great leader, and a gifted writer.