A Fenian revolutionary turned Parnellite MP and a war correspondent who also wrote theatre reviews, James Joseph O’Kelly (1842 – 1916) was a man of many parts. He was also, for a brief period, a man of two wives.
And yet his extraordinarily colourful life may today be better remembered in Cuba than in Ireland, something the ambassador of the former to the latter will attempt to rectify when laying a wreath at his grave later this week.
O’Kelly was born the son of a blacksmith off Dublin’s Townsend Street, not far from where the Irish Times offices now stand. All three of his brothers were artists, the best known being Aloysius, whose Mass in a Connemara Cabin hangs in the National Gallery.
James might have become a sculptor himself, but a more radical future was foreshadowed when as a teenager he made pikes in his father’s forge and, while attending Irish classes, was sworn in as a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).
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After the family moved to London, O’Kelly left to join the French Foreign Legion, for which he fought in Mexico. Then he learned from his childhood friend John Devoy that plans were afoot for a Fenian uprising. So he deserted the Legion and went home, via a fraught trek through the US.
Quickly realising that a rebellion was foredoomed from lack of preparation, however, he turned against the idea. Instead, while continuing to work for the IRB, he recrossed the Atlantic and became art and drama critic with the New York Herald.
It was the Herald that dispatched him to Cuba, then in the midst of the “Ten Years War” against Spanish rule. But O’Kelly didn’t just report on the rebels. He joined their cause, advising on military tactics, and so doing earned a death sentence from the colonial army, although not before refusing a lucrative reward to turn informer.
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In his book The Mambi-Land, or Adventures of a Herald Correspondent in Cuba, he later vividly described the self-sufficiency and high morale of a rebel encampment in the hills close to a Spanish-occupied town.
But while there, he also witnessed the insurgents’ execution by firing squad of an imprisoned army officer in reprisal for the killing of one of their own leaders:
“The aim of the men had been true, and every bullet had struck the major ... It was a sad sight, and I turned away with a shudder from the dead man, lying cold and pallid in the bright sunshine ... The incident was unpleasantly suggestive of what my own fate might be, and showed me very clearly that little humanity or forgiveness was to be expected from men hardened by such scenes ...”
His death sentence commuted, he was eventually released from a colonial prison thanks to political lobbying at home and in the United States, and resultant sensitivities in Spain.
Back in New York in the mid-1870s, he published his book, reported from the US army’s Indian Wars, and married twice. The first was an enforced wedding, to a woman pregnant with his child. They didn’t live together, and he promptly remarried, this time with more romantic intent, until the second wife found out about the first and divorced him.
After a return home, a series of interviews with Charles Stewart Parnell in 1878 transformed O’Kelly’s political ideas. He now saw the necessity for a strong Irish party at Westminster and became an ardent Parnellite, being elected MP in 1885 and remaining loyal to Parnell after the split, although he lost his own seat then in part because of anti-clericalism.
O’Kelly had argued, among other things, that atheists should be allowed sit in parliament without taking the oath. Despite this, he won the seat back in 1895 and retained it for the rest of his life.
In later years, as ill health overtook him, he avoided attendance at Westminster in favour of working as London correspondent for the Irish Independent. He advocated Irish involvement with the allies in the first World War, which the Dictionary of National Biography notes was a rare point of disagreement with his lifelong friend Devoy. But having lived to see the Easter Rising, he kept a public silence on it until his death, just before Christmas 1916.
A failure in its own terms, the 1868-1878 war nevertheless set Cuba on a path to independence. O’Kelly’s vivid account on it is still read there today (parts of it were also republished in a book for the trade union SIPTU in 2009, edited by Manus O’Riordan), and the man himself is considered a hero.
His role will be commemorated this Friday when the Cuban ambassador to Ireland Berardo Guanche Hernandéz lays a wreath at O’Kelly’s grave in Glasnevin Cemetery.
Aptly for a Parnellite, the ceremony will happen in the same week as Ivy Day. But the significance of October 10th in Cuba is that it was the date in 1868 when patriot leader Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed the slaves on his own sugar plantation and issued a call to arms against colonial rule.
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