Irish Rebel: John Devoy and America’s Fight for Irish Freedom, by Terry Golway

Irish Rebel - John Devoy and America’s Fight for Irish Freedom

Author: Terry Golway

ISBN-13: 9781785370250

Publisher: Merrion Press

Guideline Price: €19.99

This is a very welcome and timely revised edition of the biography of John Devoy by the author, Terry Golway, first published in 1998 in New York. As a result, it was not widely available in Ireland. This edition has been streamlined by removing long explanations of Irish history unnecessary for an Irish audience. Golway received his doctorate in history from Rutgers University and is a journalist in New Jersey.

It is hard to believe that, other than Desmond Ryan in 1937 and Seán O Luing in 1961, no one had written a biography of John Devoy until Golway. Since then Prof Terence Dooley of Maynooth University has published a short biography.

Born near Naas, Co Kildare, Devoy was, along with O’Donovan Rossa, by 1900 the living embodiment of Irish resistance to British rule. What set him apart, according to the author, was that Devoy wedded his actions to realistic and attainable goals. Patrick Pearse called him “the greatest of the Fenians”.

In 1861 Devoy joined the Fenian movement and soon after joined the French Foreign Legion to gain military experience. From his return to Ireland in 1862 (it is unclear if he deserted) until the Truce was declared in 1921, Devoy worked unceasingly to free Ireland from British rule.

The Fenians had a daring plan to secure arms. Instead of importing them, they would swear serving Irish members of the British garrison in Ireland into the Fenian movement, thus securing both men and their weapons. James Stephens put Devoy in charge of this operation (“Chief Organiser in the British Army”) in October 1865. This showed the faith that Stephens had in Devoy, then only 23. Devoy later wrote that fully 8,000 out of the 26,000 British troops garrisoned in Ireland were sworn Fenians, along with 7,000 others stationed in Britain and elsewhere. At the same time Irish and Irish-Americans, many of whom had fought in the American civil war, began to pour into Ireland to fight. But the combination of Stephens not giving the order to rise and British infiltration of the movement led to wholesale arrests and the defeat of the Fenians, practically without a skirmish.

The British had learned their lesson. Never again would the majority of British troops stationed in Ireland be Irish.

The author takes the reader through Devoy’s life from the beatings in school by Irish schoolmasters (which he never forgave, even in his eighties); defying his father by joining the IRB and the Fenians; enlisting in the French Foreign Legion; his arrest in Pilson’s pub in James Street in Dublin while meeting serving British soldiers sworn into the Fenians; prison in England; exile to America; journalism there; joining and eventually leading Clan na Gael; organising the rescue from Massachusetts in 1875 by the Catalpa whaling ship of six Fenians held in Western Australia; forming an alliance with Parnell by convincing the Fenians (or enough of them) to address the land question in the New Departure; opposing “O’Dynamite” Rossa’s campaign; commissioning John Holland to build in 1883 the first submarine, the Fenian Ram (and worrying the British no end who were watching Holland test it, torpedoes and all, in the Passaic River in New Jersey); becoming by 1900 the clear leader of the Irish in America; negotiating with Germany on behalf of the 1916 rebels; encouraging and financing the Easter Rising in 1916 and the War of Independence from 1919 to 1921; and finally, clashing with Eamon de Valera during the latter’s 18-month stay in the US in 1919 and 1920.

The final straw for Devoy (or perhaps the straw that Devoy was waiting for) was an interview that de Valera gave to the Westminster Gazette in February 1920 where he suggested that Ireland could have the same role vis-à-vis Britain that Cuba had vis-à-vis the the US. In a well-written and reasoned article, Devoy demolished de Valera in the pages of the Gaelic-American. Americans knew that that Cuba’s independence since 1898 was a sham and that America reserved the right to intervene unilaterally in Cuba. Six months later, when de Valera’s naïve and clumsy actions at the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions in the summer of 1920 only succeeded in angering US politicians and resulted in neither the Devoy/Cohalan resolution nor, of course, de Valera’s own resolution, being adopted, Devoy crucified him further in his newspaper.

According to the author, there had been a tacit understanding between the Irish in America and the Irish at home. The Irish at home would decide when and where to strike against the enemy and the Irish in America would finance them. Crucially, the Irish in America would decide policy in America as far as it related to domestic US politics, since, living there, they were attuned to the nuances. When de Valera arrived in New York in June 1919 the Irish in America were united as never before. When he left in December 1920 the Irish were divided as never before.

It is far too easy to put forward the argument that Devoy supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty simply because de Valera opposed it. Devoy was far too cerebral for such a petty reaction. What is certain is that de Valera’s opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty made it easier for Devoy to support it, or perhaps reinforced his support for it. A central tenet of this biography is that, despite his rhetoric and his invective, “Devoy demonstrated a flexibility and a moderation not in keeping with his public image as an implacable supporter of the Irish Republic. He settled for what he could get.” He showed this in his support for Home Rule and Parnell, as well as for the New Departure, which Charles Kickham and John O’Leary strongly opposed. And many years later, when it became evident that explicit recognition of the Irish Republic by US politicians was not going to happen, Devoy switched to resolutions in favour of self-determination for the Irish people, a more nebulous concept. He was a pragmatist who took what he could get, licked his wounds and moved on for the next battle.

This book is very well written and a pleasure to read and is very, very good on Devoy’s early life as a Fenian and his mature years in America. The internecine battles and splits in Irish America are very well explained, especially the Devoy-de Valera quarrel. Devoy spent nearly 60 years in America. The author has mined the original sources as well as Devoy’s vitriolic pen in the pages of the Gaelic-American to great effect. There are many vignettes worth re-telling, including his objecting to being asked in confession by the prison chaplain if he had taken the Fenian oath after the priest had promised not to ask about it – Devoy had not gone to confession in five years – and would not go again for another 60. He told the chaplain that he didn’t discuss politics on his knees.

Paying $5,000 out of his own meagre resources to pay Roger Casement’s legal fees, even though he thought that Casement had become a liability since leaving for Germany in 1914, though never doubting his sincerity. The Clan na Gael treasury was empty after funding Easter Week. Casement broke down in tears when he was handed the cheque. Devoy paid Casement a moving tribute in his Recollections of an Irish Rebel. Likewise Devoy’s kindness in secretly paying for an operation for Tom Clarke’s son even though his mother Kathleen was siding with de Valera at the time and did not want de Valera to know about her contacting Devoy. In 1919 Devoy had also paid the $5,000 bail money for Jim Larkin out of his own pocket. There is also the touching, if bittersweet, story of the renewal of the friendship (or romance) with his old sweetheart, Eliza Kenny, on his triumphal visit to Ireland in 1924.

The author is perhaps on somewhat less solid ground on events in Ireland in the 1918-1921 period since, to a certain extent, he relies on, in the author’s words, “historian Tim Pat Coogan”. Coogan is, of course, a journalist.

Also, the author was apparently unaware of Frank Robbins’ book, Under the Starry Plough – Recollections of the Irish Citizen Army. Robbins was in New York from late 1916 to early 1918 and knew Devoy quite well because he was an “Easter Week exile” and because he married into the Devoy circle. He relates that Devoy felt very hurt that Liam Mellows failed to publicly deny rumors going around New York at that time that Devoy was neglecting Mellows. Mellows is barely mentioned in Golway’s book. With regard to Casement, the author appears to have joined the ranks of the forgery deniers since the first edition was published as he refers in this edition to “Casement’s homosexuality” without qualification, nor does he cite any source for this. Perhaps the author was unaware of Angus Mitchell’s latest work on Casement, 16 Lives: Roger Casement. The jury is still very much out on this question.

The author also could have treated Devoy’s strong anti-sectarianism. Devoy was very unhappy if he heard that a Protestant Fenian had become a Catholic. He fought all his life the attempt by individuals to equate Irish republicanism with Catholic nationalism. Allied to that, Devoy’s relationship with the Catholic Church could have been given more consideration. Devoy was finally reconciled to the church when he was in his eighties by, not surprisingly, an Irish Capuchin priest. At the next meeting of the Clan na Gael, Daniel Cohalan, remarked to him that he had heard that he was “back in the state of grace”, to which Devoy retorted, “Bad news travels fast!”

By way of correction US senator Simon Conover of Florida, who was sworn into the Clan na Gael and helped Devoy in the Catalpa rescue, has somehow become Senator BP Conover in the book. This is incorrect. Conover is interesting as he gives the lie to those whose claim that non-sectarian republicanism died after 1798. Conover’s grandfathers were Dissenters who were out in 1798 and then fled to America. Another Presbyterian, Dr William Carroll from Donegal, was head of Clan na Gael from 1875 until 1880. Rev David Bell of Ballybay, Co Monaghan, driven from his manse in 1853 for advocating tenant rights, became an active Fenian and went into exile in America.

Last October, a life-size statue of Devoy was unveiled in Naas, close to the church in which he was condemned from the pulpit. It is perhaps fitting (or perhaps typical of his treatment in Ireland) that Irish America provided the funds.

His view on partition is as prescient today as it was in 1925: “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.”

The publication of this edition in Ireland fills a huge void and will go some way to right the wrong done to Devoy by de Valera and his civil servants who deliberately wrote him out of Irish history, reducing him to little more that a footnote in school textbooks. It shocks, or should shock, the conscience of this nation that practically no one in Ireland can identify the man who had a public life dedicated to Ireland spanning over 60 years and whom the Times of London, in its obituary in 1928, called “the most dangerous enemy of [the British Empire] since Wolfe Tone”.

Frank MacGabhann is a lawyer and commentator