Official Opening of Famine Warhouse
Wednesday 21st July 2004
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The opening of this Famine Warhouse is an act of historical justice to the people of The Commons, to their ancestors, and the Young Ireland Movement, and commemorates a very important moment in Irish history. 1848 was the year of revolutions, when the tricolour was brought for the first time from France. It symbolised liberty, equality, democracy, and, on that basis, peace between traditions. The 1848 rebellion which came to a head here round this house did not alone fail in Ireland. It failed sooner or later throughout Europe. But its spirit left an enduring legacy for later generations. As John O’Leary put it, ‘if Young Ireland had failed and failed definitively in her revolutionary policy, she had certainly not failed in her educating and propagandist policy. The soul she had brought into Éire still stirred in many of us’. The condition of Ireland at the end of the 1840s was desperate. It deserved a revolution, but the people were debilitated. William Smith O’Brien, who had been Daniel O’Connell’s lieutenant and second-in-command in the Westminster parliament, was no military leader, but a man of integrity, who was morally outraged by the situation and by British indifference to it. The Church wanted no repetition of the slaughter of 1798, where there were not the conditions of success. As the Emmet rebellion also showed, people, if they were to risk sacrificing their lives, had to have faith in their leaders, that they knew what they were doing. Smith O’Brien was captured at the newly opened Thurles railway station. The State trials, re-enacted a few years ago by the Galloglass Group in the Courthouse in Clonmel, and sketched at the time by Tinsley, took place in 1848, and though O’Brien was found guilty, there were universal pleas for mercy, beginning with the foreman of the Grand Jury, my great-great-grandfather Richard Martin Southcote Mansergh. As we know, the accused had their sentences commuted and were transported to Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania. Several of the Young Irelanders subsequently held governmental positions in the colonies, which were not open to them at home, Charles Gavan Duffy inVictoria, Australia, and Thomas d’Arcy McGee in Canada. Thomas Francis Meagher, ‘of the Sword’, became a Brigadier General leading the Irish Brigade, including the New York 69th regiment, in the American Civil War and later he became Governor of Montana. The Fenians took over, where the Young Irelanders left off. People like Thomas Davis, who died in 1845, and John Mitchel, author of the famous Jail Journal, had a huge influence on the generation that founded the State. I want to pay tribute to those who have brought this project to fruition, Minister Parlon and the OPW, the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, and the Minister for Defence Michael Smith, who brought this house to his attention. I would also like to thank the County Manager and the engineers for improving road access. But, as we can see today, there is room for further work. Finally, I would like above all to congratulate Dr Tom McGrath, a noted historian, whose vision this is, and who has driven it to completion. My father, who was also a historian, whose most popular book, Ireland in the Age of Reform and Revolution, later The Irish Question, began in the 1840s with Young Ireland, visited the house more than twenty years ago, and expressed to me the hope that the State would look after it and not let it fall down. We have come a very long way since 1848. The Good Friday Agreement is an important step along the road towards realising the ideals embodied in the national flag, and in September we are moving on to a stage of negotiation that will be decisive for its implementation. I will conclude by a verse of Charles Kickham, which I have put on the back of my visiting card. ‘The nations have fallen, but thou still art young.
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