John Devoy, "the greatest of the Fenians", according to Patrick Pearse, was born 156 years ago near Johnstown, Naas, Co Kildare. Terry Golway, an American journalist, has written an excellent and very readable biography of Devoy, published recently by St Martin's Press in New York.
It is hard to believe that this is the first biography of John Devoy in English. But the jacket notes are quite wrong to call it "the first biography ever written" about Devoy, whose death in 1928 was marked by an obituary in The Times which called him "the most bitter and persistent, as well as the most dangerous enemy of this country which Ireland has produced since Wolfe Tone." Sean O Luing wrote an excellent biography of Devoy in Irish which was published in 1961.
John Devoy's life was the stuff of legend. He joined the Fenians at the age of 18 and then the French Foreign Legion to gain military experience. After his return to Ireland he was appointed by James Stephens as "chief organiser" in the British Army to recruit serving soldiers into the Fenian movement.
Triumphant arrival
He helped to rescue Stephens from prison, and then served five years himself. On his release he was exiled to America where he was at the cutting edge of Irish America's fight to free Ireland from British rule for the next 50 years. He arrived triumphantly in New York in 1871 with four other Fenian ex-prisoners, one of whom was O'Donovan Rossa, with whom Devoy was to have a turbulent relationship ("O'Dynamite Rossa") over the next four decades. He joined Clan na Gael and worked as a clerk in the offices of the New York Herald, where he often had to keep his views to himself. At Devoy's urging the Clan fitted out a whaling ship, the Catalpa, to rescue six Fenian prisoners from Freemantle in Western Australia. They had been specifically excluded from the 1871 amnesty for Fenians because they had been serving British soldiers at the time of their membership.
The rescue and voyage around the world and back took over 15 months and is the subject of a thrilling book by Sean O Luing, Freemantle Mission.
Devoy was instrumental in the "New Departure" of 1878, which has such resonances for the peace process today. Devoy, rather like Gerry Adams in modern times, tried to convince physical force republicans that there was another way, a political way, besides the gun.
Just as the "New Departure" of today is having such tragic difficulties in bringing along those in Ireland who are wedded to the gun, so too did Devoy have difficulty in convincing former Fenians, including Kickham, O'Leary and O'Donovan Rossa, to accept the new direction. The "New Departure" was not simply a cynical exercise to, in the author's words, "grasp any weapon with which to crack British skulls". Devoy was a member of the International Workingmen's Association - Karl Marx's First International - and was politically highly astute, using his job at the Herald to keep up with international developments.
Submarine
Devoy commissioned and financed the first modern submarine, The Fenian Ram, designed by John Holland from Co Clare, for possible use against British forces. He helped to finance the 1916 Rising. He also disrupted Synge's Playboy of the Western World in New York in 1911, shouting during the first act, "That's not Irish, you son of a bitch."
Mr Golway's book comes into its own in its treatment of the Devoy-de Valera quarrel when de Valera was in America in 1919-20. De Valera, perhaps naturally, believed that, as Ireland's representative in America, he should be acknowledged as the leader of the Irish in America and should set policy as he saw fit.
Devoy, then over half-a-century in America and having been stung by ill-advised forays into partisan American politics (and used to getting his own way), thought differently. He believed that the mechanics of securing support for the Irish struggle in America should be in the hands of those living there. In the interests of unity, Devoy publicly swallowed his pride and accepted de Valera's leadership. However, in February 1920 de Valera gave an interview to the Westminster Gazette in which he said that Ireland would settle for a relationship such as that between Cuba and the United States. All hell broke loose in Irish America because Americans knew that Cuba was a virtual colony of the US. Devoy broke his public truce regarding de Valera and hit back the following week in the Gaelic- American. The split was complete by the time de Valera left America for Ireland in December 1920, leaving Irish America behind him in tatters. It is probably because he clashed so strongly with de Valera that Devoy has never been accorded his rightful place in Irish history.
Banquet in Dublin
He came back to Ireland for a visit in 1924. A banquet was held in his honour at the Dolphin Hotel in Dublin on September 3rd, 1924, on his 82nd birthday. My grand-aunt, Alice Carragher Comiskey, with whom Devoy lodged for the last years of his life in New York and to whom he left all his papers (later brought back to Ireland by Frank Robbins), gave me the sterling silver cigar box inscribed in Irish with which he was presented on that night.
He sailed for New York on September 6th, never to return to Ireland. He last words on partition still carry a resonance today: "The only true solution to the boundary question is the abolition of the boundary. There are two ways of effecting that solution. One way, and by far the best, is by an agreement based on the will of the people of both sections and entirely satisfactory to both. The other is by waiting for England's next war and . . . securing it by force.
"Force . . . is wholly undesirable. Therefore the only sane policy to meet the present situation is . . . to bring about unity by consent."