Page 329 - Demo

Chapter NiNe 329
After Meagher had delivered his declaration of Ireland’s militant principles to a stunned assembly, O’Connell’s son John (who represented his father at the meeting) rose to his feet and ‘red with wrath’ informed the gathering that either he or Mr.Meagher would have to leave the hall and the Association. Straight away, Meagher and his Young Ireland supporters marched out of the assembly, quitted the Repeal Association, and quickly formed the Irish Confederation with the intention of propagating their principles. Ironically, some years pre- viously, Meagher’s father, Thomas Senior, the wealthiest merchant in the city of Waterford at the time, an MP and the irst Catholic Mayor of Waterford, had bankrolled Daniel O’ Connell in the county. Almost immediately they began organizing their followers through- out the country in a military fashion in preparation for an all out rising which they believed was the only hope of Ireland, and to this end they earmarked the latter part of 1848, when the harvest would be gathered, as the ideal time for the rising. Armed with the knowledge that all was not well in Ireland, the Government passed a Bill “for the better security of the Crown and Government,” making all written incitement to insurrection, or resistance to the law, felony punishable with transportation.
Even though the country was in the throes of famine and thoroughly unprepared for an uprising of any size at this juncture, nonetheless, an uncompromising John Mitchell was relentless in urging immediate action, his argument being that it was better for the people to die ighting their country’s enemy than to die as they were dying, of hunger, in the ditches. Mitchel’s ardent militancy brought him into conlict with some members of the Young Irelanders, as a result of which he parted company with them and founded his own paper the United Irishman. But the breaking out of the Révolution de Février-‘The Februray Revo- lution’ the 1848 Revolution in France which ended the Orléans monarchy and led to the creation of the French Second Republic, ired and inspired all the Young Irelanders with a new-found spirit and brought them together again.
In the early part of summer, 1848, the Government, naturally not wishing to allow the activists further latitude swooped. Mitchell, Meagher, and Smith O’ Brien were all arrested and charged with sedition following the publication of an article in the United Irishman. While the authorities initially failed to convict either Meagher or Smith O’Brien, Mitchell, the pioneer of the revolutionary wing, was convicted by a packed jury of ‘treason-felony’ and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation. Other arrests quickly followed and the Ha-