THE 150th anniversary of the birth of Fenianism is passing by largely unnoticed. Yet the Irish Republican Brotherhood was one of the most significant organisations in Irish revolutionary history. The IRB was formed in 1858 and did not fade away until Michael Collins had used it to help get the Anglo-Irish Treaty through Dáil Éireann in 1922, writes Brendan O'Cathaoir.
After the Young Ireland outbreak of 1848, James Stephens and John O'Mahony spent several penurious years together in Paris. O'Mahony moved to New York where he emerged gradually as the most dedicated, if not the most efficient, of the refugee leaders. Stephens returned home and founded a new secret society "to make Ireland an independent democratic republic". Influenced by the contemporary continental model, membership of this society was divided into circles in the vain hope of preserving security.
The designation, Fenian, came from O'Mahony's "intense nostalgia" for the Gaelic past. The name of his parallel American organisation, the Fenian Brotherhood, spread to include the Irish wing of the movement also. Underlining the impact of the Famine exodus, the Fenians drew strength from "the Irish men and women of America who pray, hope and labour for the . . . redemption of their native land".
Stephens was "chief organiser of the Irish republic" (or "a provisional dictator", according to his new biographer, Marta Ramón) until his overthrow in 1866. Egotistical and deluded, none the less, he was a formidable organiser. His charisma attracted the adherence of talented individuals including Thomas Clarke Luby, John O'Leary and Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa.
According to John Devoy, Charles Kickham "was the finest intellect in the Fenian movement, either in Ireland or America, although his defective sight and hearing prevented the demonstration of that fact in public".
While in his later career Kickham personified intransigent republicanism, he is remembered chiefly as the author of a novel, Knocknagow, and ballad Slievenamon.
Stephens's strategy depended on Irish-Americans providing aid - money primarily and later, it was hoped, men - and involved persuading the Fenian Brotherhood of Irish readiness for revolution.
It did not work because both Irish and Irish-American Fenians demanded evidence of their opposite number's revolutionary commitment before they would reciprocate. Stephens promised a rising by the end of 1865.
The Fenian Brotherhood was encouraged during the American Civil War because the generals wanted fighting men and politicians needed Irish votes. Anglo-US tensions at the end of the war raised Fenian expectations.
But the brotherhood split, deposed O'Mahony, and dissipated its military resources on Canadian raids.
In June 1866 Fenian raiders crossed the frontier and remained in the Canadian provinces long enough to issue a dispatch on behalf of the "IRA" - the first recorded use of those famous initials.
The folly of striking a blow for Irish independence by invading British North America was denounced by Stephens, who declared that, if Ireland enjoyed the same measure of self-government as Canada, he would not have become a revolutionary.
He prevaricated about action in Ireland until displaced by militant Irish-Americans, who went ahead with a forlorn insurrection in March 1867.
After a long exile Stephens returned to Ireland in 1891 and lived quietly for another decade in a cottage funded mainly by constitutional nationalists. At Parnell's funeral he occupied the fourth carriage in the cortège, along with O'Leary and an IRB organiser, PN Fitzgerald. The political theatre continued a few days later when Stephens visited Parnell's grave and was reported to have "sobbed aloud" (like Joyce's Mr Casey).
In the 1890s the IRB functioned primarily as an adjunct to Parnellism. "Parnell's Old Brigade", led by John Redmond, campaigned for the release of imprisoned Dynamitards - so-called because they used newly patented dynamite. The RIC referred to the Parnellites and the Amnesty Association as "almost one and the same body". The Redmondite-Fenian nexus did not survive the reunification of the Irish Parliamentary Party, however, and advanced nationalism was a marginal force in 1900.
Nevertheless, recent additions to Irish historiography assert that clear boundaries should not be imposed between the political cultures of separatism and constitutional nationalism. Notably, Matthew Kelly argues in The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882-1916 (The Boydell Press, €55) that the relationship between the IRB and the Redmondite wing of the Irish Party was closer than is often assumed; that Fenian support was crucial to Redmond's political survival in the years after the Parnell split; and that Redmond's subsequent embrace of a more imperial form of Home Rule left the Irish Party ideologically vulnerable to separatist attack.
Dr Kelly concludes: "[T]he history of separatism should not be reduced to the history of the IRB's dilapidated revolutionary organisation.
Instead, Fenianism emerges as the central influence in an Irish nationalist culture that was deeply imbedded in the texture of Irish identity." John Dillon observed that the Land League had been animated by the "Fenian spirit".
Non-sectarian in the tradition of Tone and Davis, Fenianism restated certain fundamentals of the separatist ideal. By involving our Diaspora, it demonstrated that the Irish question had become irrevocably international.
By their integrity and bravery in hopeless circumstances, its champions bequeathed a legacy of self-sacrifice untainted by fanaticism.
Fenianism is the theme of this year's Kickham school in Mullinahone, Co Tipperary, on August 8th-10th.