Celtic Corner - April 2015

CELTIC CORNER

1916-2016

March is always for St. Patrick. April is for the Rising. On Easter Sunday in Newark, a group of men & women commemorate the 1916 Easter Rebellion with a march from Military Park to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  Frank & Kathie Darcy are honored to carry the banner in the march. A mass is celebrated in Irish Traditions and the Proclamation is read.

This year we celebrate 99 years. Next year we will have the 100 year celebration of a free 26 county Ireland. We know the heroes, we know the story. We would have no Ireland, let’s not forget that. Woodbridge Irish Remember.

TIME LINE LIST

1916- The rebel leader Patrick Pearse stands under the portico of Dublin’s General Post Office to announce the birth of the Irish Republic.

1916-Eamon deValera comes to prominence as one of the republican leaders in the Easter Rising.

1916-Patrick Pearse and his fellow Irish rebel James Connolly are executed by firing squad.

1919-The Sinn Fein members elected to Westminster establish their own parliament in Dublin, The Dail Eireann (Assembly of Ireland),soon declared illegal by Britain.

1919-The armed supporters of Sinn Fein become the IRA, or Irish Republican Army, in Ireland’s war of independence.

1919-Michael Collins springs deValera from Lincoln gaol, with the help of a duplicate key.

1920-The Government of Ireland Act provides for separate devolved parliaments in southern Ireland and the six counties of Ulster.

1920-The brutal behavior of the British police reinforcements, the Black and Tans, aggravates the violence in Ireland.

1920-The Ira and the British security forces clash during a violent ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Dublin.

1921-The republican party Sinn Fein is unopposed in southern Ireland’s first general election and so wins every available seat in the Dail.

1921-The Sinn Fein members of southern Ireland’s new parliament assemble on their own, under the name Dail Eireann(Assembly of Ireland).

1921-James Craig (later Lord Craigavon) begins a 19 year term as prime minister of the new province of Northern Ireland.

1921-Envoys sent to London by deValera agree independence for southern Ireland as the Irish Free State, with Dominion status.

1921-The Anglo-Irish Treaty, agreed in London, ends the war between the British army and the IRA.

1921-The British parliament ratifies the Anglo-Irish treaty, but deValera repudiates it and resigns as president of the Dail.

1922-In elections to the Dail the pro-treaty faction of Collins and Griffith defeats the opposition, led by deValera.

1922-Bitter war breaks out between faction of the IRA supporting and opposing the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

1922-The Irish Free State takes stringent measures against rebel terrorism, making possession even of a pistol a capital offense.

1922-With the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the 26 counties of southern Ireland formally become the Irish Free State.

1922-William Thomas Cosgrove becomes the first prime minister of the Irish Free State.

1923-De Valera and the IRA lay down their arms, bringing to an end the Irish Civil War.

1923-De Valera and his followers do well in elections to the Dail but decline to take their seats.

1926-Eamon De Valera’s faction, Fianna Fail (Warriors of Ireland), enters mainstream Irish life as a political party.

1927-De Valera and his party, the Fianna Fail, finally take their seats in the Dail.

1931-The Irish government classifies the Irish Republican Army as an illegal organization.

1932-Fianna Fail wins enough seats in the Irish Free State’s election for Eamon deValera to form a government.

1932-De Valera withholds farmers’ annuities from Britain, provoking British tariffs and a trade war.

1933-Fine Gael is the name given to a new political party in Ireland, formed by the merger of several smaller groups.

1937-De Valera introduces a new constitution, changing the name of the Irish Free State to Eire (Gaelic for Ireland).

1937-De Valera’s new constitution for Eire lays claim to the six counties of northern Ireland.

1940-Lord Craigavon (previously James Craig) dies in office after nineteen years as Northern Ireland’s prime minister.

1943-Basil Brooke begins an unbroken 20 year period in office as Unionist prime minister of Northern Ireland.

1949-Eire is renamed the republic of Ireland and withdraws from the Commonwealth, severing the last link with the British crown.

1949-The British government declares that Northern Ireland will remain British unless the parliament in Stormont decides otherwise.

1957-DeValera takes stringent measures against the IRA and Sinn Fein, detaining activists in an internment camp.

1959-On the retirement of deValera, Sean Lemass succeeds him as leader of Fianna Fail and prime minister of Ireland.

1963-Terence O’Neill succeeds Basil Brooke (Lord Brookeborough) as Northern Ireland’s prime minister.

1965-Terence O’Neil and Sean Lemass, prime ministers of Northern Ireland and Ireland, have two unprecedented meetings.

1968-The first civil rights march in Northern Ireland, in Derry, is halted by the police with batons and water cannon.

1969-The Provisional IRA reintroduces the fight for justice in Northern Ireland after Protestants attack a civil rights march.

1970-The Social Democratic and Labour Party(SDLP) is formed in northern Ireland as a coalition of Catholic nationalist and civil rights campaigners.

1971-Ian Paisley and others in Northern Ireland form the Democratic Unionist Party, as the intransigent wing of Ulster Unionism.

1971-Gerry Adams is imprisoned for suspected IRA links but is released for lack of evidence.

1972-British paratroops open fire on a civil rights march in Derry killing thirteen in what becomes known as Bloody Sunday.

1981-The first of 10 hunger strikers Bobby Sands dies.

1984-Republican activist Gerry Adams is elected president of Sinn Fein.

1990-Mary Robinson is elected president of the republic of Ireland, the first woman to hold the post.

1993-UK and Irish premiers John Major and Albert Reynolds sign the Downing Street Declaration, a strategy for peace in Northern Ireland.

1994-The IRA declares a cease fire in Northern Ireland, a gesture followed a month later by Protestant paramilitaries.

1998-A proposed referendum on Northern Irish issues is accepted by all the relevant political parties in what becomes known as the Good Friday Agreement.

1998-In the referendum to endorse the Good Friday Agreement, the terms are accepted by majorities in both the republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

1998-The Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble becomes First Minister of the newly convened Northern Ireland Assembly.

2003-Ian Paisley’s hard line Democratic Unionist Party wins in elections to the suspended Northern Ireland Assembly.

2005-The Provisional IRA announces a formal end to armed conflict and orders units to dump all their weapons.

2007-Elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly bring the same result as in 2003, with extremist rivals DUP and Sinn Fein the dominant parties.

2007-Long term enemies Ian Paisley (DUP) and Gerry Adams (Sinn Fein) agree to share power in reconvened Northern Ireland Assembly.

2007-Devolved government returns to Northern Ireland with Ian Paisley as first minister and Martin McGuinness as his deputy.

2008-Peter Robinson, elected unopposed as leader of the DUP succeeds Ian Paisley as First Minister of Northern Ireland.

2015-The British government would not allow the Irish to have a St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Scotland.

          Sadly enough, there is still no justice, no freedom, just hatred, prejudice, false imprisonment and a lot of violence. Just imagine your Celtic language is not legal to speak, your Gaelic games are frowned upon, your religious freedom is always in question. Ireland without question is one country, no partition.

“Ireland unfree shall never be at peace”

Padric Pearse

Caisc shona duit

Happy Easter

          
Frank Darcy

Celtic Corner - March 2015

CELTIC CORNER:

Saint Patrick's Day Traditions

THE WEARING OF THE GREEN
     The tradition of wearing Shamrock to celebrate Saint Patrick seems to date from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. This was a very turbulent time in Irish history. The suppression of the Gaelic way of life by the ruling British invaders resulted in many aspects of the Catholic religion in Ireland being forced underground. Strict laws were enforced which prevented the Catholic population from attending schools so 'hedge-schools' were operated in secret.
     These were schools run outdoors in secluded places (sometimes literally 'under a hedge!). The teaching of religion was also forbidden so it is only to be expected that teachers would use naturally available resources to inform their pupils. Thus the Shamrock plant was used to illustrate the message of the Christian Holy Trinity.
     Saint Patrick was credited with using the Shamrock in such a manner so the wearing of the Shamrock by the oppressed Catholic population became a means of demonstrating their defiance to the ruling British class. It also imbued a sense of kinship among the native Gaelic people, differentiating them from their oppressors.
     Wearing a clump of Shamrock is now a firmly established tradition throughout the world to celebrate not just Saint Patrick but Ireland itself. The Shamrock symbol is widely used by businesses seeking to associate with Ireland and, along with the Harp, is perhaps the single most recognizable symbol of Ireland. It is a shame though that the Shamrock is not a blue plant as the color originally associated with Saint Patrick was blue!
SAINT PATRICK'S DAY PARADE
     Saint Patrick's Day is unique in that it is celebrated worldwide. It is most unusual that a country has such an international celebration and is really evidence of the generational effects of emigration that has afflicted Ireland for centuries. After the 1845 to 1849 Irish Famine emigration soared with as many as a million native Irish leaving their homes in the decades after the famine to settle in places like Boston, New York, Newfoundland, Perth, Sydney and beyond. The US Census Bureau now reports that 34 Million US Citizens claim Irish descent. Most emigrants like to commemorate their heritage and thus the Saint Patrick's Day Parade came into being.
     The earliest record of a Saint Patrick's Day Parade was in the year 1762 when Irish soldiers serving in the British Army held a Parade in New York City. Earlier records suggest that the day was celebrated by the Irish in Ireland as early as the ninth and tenth centuries.
     Again, this was a very difficult time in Irish history with Viking raiders terrorizing the native Gaelic population. It is thus no surprise then that in times of strife the local population would turn to religion and to a commemoration of their own heritage and individuality - a practice that has been repeated by populations of troubled places since the dawn of time. The New York Parade is now the longest running civilian Parade in the world with as many as three Million spectators watching the Parade of over 150,000 participants.
     The first official Parade in Ireland was in 1931. The 1901 law that copper-fastened March 17th as an Irish national holiday was later amended to insist that public houses close down on the day. This restriction was later lifted in the 1970's. In the mid 1990's the Irish Government really started to promote the event when it changed from a single day's Parade into a 5-day festival attracting as many as a million visitors into the country. Parades are now held in just about every major city in the world with the biggest in several US cities reaching epic proportions.
GREENING OF BUILDINGS AND RIVERS
     The use of the color green reached new heights (or plunged new depths!) when in 1962 the city of Chicago decided to dye part of the Chicago River green. Since then the campaign to have just about every possible landmark turned green for the day has taken off in earnest and in recent years has included the Irish Parliament building, the Sydney Opera House, the Empire State Building, Niagara Falls and even the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt!
A PINT OF PLAIN
     The Irish association with drinking is well known and not always positive. Fortunately there are plenty of examples of the appropriate use of alcohol and Saint Patrick's Day is one of them. It is a widely held tradition in Ireland that beer or whiskey can be taken on Saint Patrick's Day although native Irish pub-goers can only look on aghast as visitors top the heads of their creamy pint of Guinness with a green Shamrock. Sacrilege! It is estimated that as many as 13 Million pints of Guinness are consumed on Saint Patrick's Day, up from the usual 5.5 Million per day!
DRESSING UP
     The tradition of dressing up in Irish outfits is not just confined to participants in Parades. Jovial creatures of Irish origin the world over use the opportunity of Saint Patrick's Day to dress up as Leprechaun or even as Saint Patrick himself. Kids love to wear the big green, white and orange hats and receive sweets thrown to them by similarly clad operators of the various Parade floats.
THE SAINT PATRICK'S DAY DINNER
     Corned beef and cabbage is as traditional an Irish meal as you will ever find and it is often hauled out for Saint Patrick's Day. Traditional Irish music in the background and a family gathering are other Irish Saint Patrick's Day traditions that have been going on for centuries.

May the Love and Protection

Saint Patrick can give

Be yours in abundance

As long as you live

Frank Darcy

Celtic Corner - February 2015

CELTIC CORNER

Some more stories about the Irish Immigrants

          Woodrow Wilson was a bespectacled, ascetic looking man who resembled a schoolteacher. Indeed, for a good part of his life, he was one. He knew how to exploit opportunity. At one point during his presidency, he had sheep graze on the South Lawn of the White House, selling their wool to raise money for charity.

          Both of Wilson’s paternal grandparents came from the Strabane area of County Antrim. He was raised by stern father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a Presbyterian minister and theologian, and a mother who was the daughter of minister in England. Both were of Scotch Irish lineage.

          He was born on December 28, 1856 in Staunton, Virginia but a year later his family moved to Augusta, Georgia.

          He graduated from the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton, in 1879 and received a Ph.D. in government and history in 1886 from Johns Hopkins University.

          He held a variety of academic positions in the years following graduation, including a fifteen year stint at Princeton, which was capped by his being appointed university president in 1902, apparently fatigued by academic life, he entered politics, accepting the Democratic nomination for governor of New Jersey in 1910.

          His political beliefs were described by the word “progressivism,” and he had a number of goals: to eliminate political corruption, to institute antitrust legislation and to restructure the election system by using direct primaries. At the time, the last proposal would not have been advantageous for his party and was a courageous move on his part.

          He won the election handily and America began to take notice of him. Two years later in 1912 Wilson started a run for the presidential nomination. His chief opponent for the Democratic nomination was Champ Clark, speaker of the House of Representatives.

          It was a grueling nomination fight, requiring forty six ballots, but Wilson eventually prevailed.

          As it turned out the election campaign was a cakewalk by comparison. The Republican Party was split between William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt (who was running as an Independent) and Wilson overwhelmed them both.

          Once in office, Wilson helped establish the Clayton Act, an amendment to the Sherman Antitrust Act, which strengthened labor’s ability to strike, established the Federal Reserve Board to help control the currency and instituted the income tax.

          As dominant as he was in domestic matters, Wilson was even more influential in foreign one. (He was the first president to leave the United States while president) During his presidency, the United States became involved in the affairs of a number of countries. Wilson always had a justification for these acts, which is where some historians question his sincerity. Perhaps he was so imbued with righteous indignation that he never realized he could be morally wrong.

          The event in which Wilson’s lack of moral insight had the biggest impact was World War I

When war broke out between France and Great Britain and Germany, Wilson was at first neutral. In fact, in 1916 he conducted a successful reelection campaign based on the slogan “He kept us out of the war.”

          In fact, he was hardly neutral. He put the not insignificant industrial might of the United States at the disposal of France and Britain. And he became outraged at the torpedoing of ships with Americans on board. He became more warlike in this pronouncements but swathed them in high toned rhetoric such as “establishing a peace that will win the approval of mankind” and “an equality of right.”

          On April 2, 1917 Wilson delivered a speech to Congress with the oft quoted line “the world must be made safe for democracy.” Finally America was in it and surely a crucial partner for the Allies.

          Following the war, Wilson was one of the important architects of the League of Nations, which essentially detailed the rules by which nations would deal with one another. When the League of Nations’ charter was examined by Congress, the Senate thought it compromised the United States’ sovereign rights and wanted to make changes Wilson found abhorrent. In a cruel twist of fate, Wilson found himself making a whistle stop tour across the country urging Americans to pressure their representatives not to support it.

          It was while he was on this jaunt in Pueblo, Colorado that Wilson suffered a stroke that left him temporarily unable to speak. From that time on, his wife, Edith, virtually took over in what was described by cynics as the “petticoat presidency.”

          His last words to Edith were “Edith, I’m a broken machine, but I’m ready.” The day he spoke them was February 3, 1924. He proved to be more popular in death than life.

 

Happy Valentines Day

Lá Fhéile Vailintín sona duit

           

                  

Frank Darcy

 

Celtic Corner - January 2015

CELTIC CORNER

Some more stories about the Irish Immigrants

          Legend has it that auto baron Henry Ford had a unique way of firing people. An employee would leave on a Friday and return on Monday to find his office cleaned out and a notice that he was no longer employed by the company.

          Three things are known for certain about Henry Ford: He revolutionized the automobile worldwide; he brought into being something called the production line, which revolutionized industry; and he changed the way America lived. Before Ford, there was the horse and buggy. After Ford, there was the motorcar.

          Members of the Ford family started to come from County Cork to Dearborn, Michigan in 1832. William, Henry’s father and a host of uncles and aunts arrived in the area in the 1840’s, driven from Ireland by the potato famine.

          Michigan was a good place to emigrate to. At the time, anyone could buy an acre of land for the munificent sum of ten shillings, about $1.20 in American money. The immigrants bought every square inch of soil they could afford and then set about farming it. At harvest time, the produce was sold in Detroit, which was not so far away that it couldn’t be reached by horse drawn carts.

Henry, born two years before the Civil War ended, worked on his family’s land. But when he was sixteen, he took a part time job at a machine shop, where he could exercise his interest in inventing and how mechanical things work.

          He then went to work for the Detroit Edison Company and by the time he was thirty had worked his way up to being chief and was responsible for that city’s electricity.

          The job allowed him a lot of free time. While he had to be on call twenty four hours a day, circumstances rarely required his presence. He was able to bury himself in his shop where in 1893 he constructed a gasoline engine that was an improvement over those that then existed. Three years later he invented an ungainly, spidery looking thing with four wheels that was part bicycle, part car. He called it the “quadricycle” or “horseless carriage”.

          Over the next few years, he improved the horseless carriage and in 1903 he felt he had developed a marketable car. With just $28,000 Ford incorporated the Henry Ford Company.

          His company was a success (he publicized it by racing his cars; he himself drove a “999” to a world record, covering a mile in 39.4 seconds) and was almost immediately pounced on by the Licensed Auto Manufacturers, who said he couldn’t use the gasoline engine, which they claimed had been patented in 1895. Ford disagreed, saying his engine was different from the original. They went to court and in 1909 Ford lost. But in 1911 he won an appeal.

          In 1908 Ford told the world that he would build a car for the masses and he did. The Model T sold more than fifteen million vehicles and Ford captured half the world market.

          At the core of his success was not just the car, which was well made, but the value consumers’ received for their money. In 1908 the Model T cost $950, but because of Ford’s innovations on the production line and because of his willingness to pay his workers double what other auto manufacturers did and thus encourage them to greater productivity, in 1927 he was able to produce a Model T that sold for less than $300.

          To get supplies for his cars, Ford bought the producers-the mines, forest, glassworks, rubber plantations of the raw materials needed, as well as ships and trains to transport the materials. His cash flow was so great that he could finance these purchases himself.

          While Ford had a passion for building cars and other mechanical items, he had a deep interest in other activities as well. One was country dancing, which he remembered fondly form his youth. In fact he had met his wife, Clara (whom he married in 1888), at a square dance. In 1900 he set about to bring country dancing back into public consciousness.

          He also brought it back into the consciousness of his employees whether they liked it or not. Here, his dictatorial side showed. He made learning square dancing mandatory for his executives actually curtaining off a large area in one of

the laboratories to serve as a dance studio.

          He also had members of his company research county dancing thoroughly to make sure the steps were correct and he ultimately wrote a book on the subject entitle Good Morning-After a Sleep of Twenty Years, Old Fashioned Dancing Is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford. Ultimately, Ford would push and support country dancing to the point where it became part of the curricula of many colleges.

          Though Ford’s car and production line achievement helped eliminate the old ways things were done and the way people lived, he never lost a liking of things from yesteryear. To help preserve those traditions, he built Greenfield Village near Detroit, which sought to reproduce things the way they had been when he was a boy.

          And his admiration for Thomas Alva Edison (he once wrote in one of his notebooks, “God needed Edison”) was reflected in his Greenfield Village duplication of the Menlo Park, New Jersey laboratories where Edison had invented so much. Ford had worked for Edison and regarded him as his mentor. Early on, when he had been working on the gasoline engine, Edison had encouraged him to continue rather than get involved with steam or some other fuel system.

          In the 1930s the fortunes of the Ford Motor company declined. The successor to the Model T, the Model A, did not sell as well and across the 1930s the graph line showing the company’s sales continued downward. But when World War II came along and with it the demand for thousands of new vehicles, Ford rebounded.

          Ford was a tough man, but the great sadness in his life, the one thing he could never put behind him, was the death of his son Edsel of cancer in 1943. It is said the heart went out of him not only for business but for life itself. Two years after this, he handed the reins (or steering wheel) of the company to his grandson Henry II.

          He died four years after Edsel and gave his shares of the company to the Ford Foundation, instantly making it a leading philanthropic organization.

         

Athbhliain faoi mhaise dhuit! = Happy New Year!

Pronounce it something like: /ah-vleen fwee vosh-ah ghwitch

 

Frank Darcy

Celtic Corner - December 2014

CELTIC CORNER

Some more stories about the Irish Immigrants

        By the time he was fourteen, Andrew Jackson, the man whose face adorns the U.S. twenty dollar bill, was an orphan.

        During the Revolutionary War, Jackson’s two brothers, who lived with Jackson and his mother at the Waxshaw settlement in South Carolina, were killed by British soldiers (Jackson himself was seriously wounded for defying a soldier and was taken prisoner). A short while later his mother an immigrant from County Antrim in Ireland, contracted cholera and died. His father had died a year after he had arrived in America in 1765.

Jackson could be described in one word: tough. As an adult, he engaged in a number of wars, and he was so tough that his troops dubbed him “Old Hickory” after the hardwood.

        In 1784 he went to Salisbury, South Carolina, and, with a legal career in mind, apprenticed himself to a law firm. In 1787 he passed the bar; then he headed west to Nashville. He was able to buy a planation and raise horses, but marauding Indians were very much a problem in the area. Jackson fought them effectively, garnering a well-deserved reputation. In 1802 he married Rachel Donelson Robards.

        Jackson was six feet one inch tall, a thin man, with reddish brown hair and a quick temper, which led him to a number of duels. His most famous, a duel over horses, occurred with a man named Charles Dickinson. Dickinson fired first, thinking with horror that he had missed because Jackson just stood there and fired back and Dickinson was mortally wounded. However, Dickinson had hit Jackson. But Jackson had worn a large, heavy coat that had caused Dickinson to misaim: The coat was so oversized that the bullet hit Jackson below the heart. He recovered from the wound after a few weeks.

        During the War of 1812 Jackson became famous for his military prowess. In 1818 President James Monroe appointed him to deal with Indians in Florida, which he did by torching Pensacola and summarily hanging two Englishmen he thought were conspiring with the Indians, and that caused an international incident.

        Gradually, he emerged as a presidential candidate. He ran in 1824 against John Quincy Adams and lost because of what he characterized as a “corrupt bargain” among various people. But in 1828 he won.

        During his two terms, Jackson increased the power of the presidency. He used the “spoils system” appointing his own political cronies to office and organizing counties into branches of the Democratic Party so they could deliver the vote more effectively. He also made good use of the presidential veto. He used it a dozen times, more than all other previous presidents combined.

        He also put the “pocket veto” to good use: If a bill came to his desk fewer than ten days before Congress adjourned, the law permitted him to put the bill “into his pocket” and turn it down without giving Congress a reason why. For example, Jackson was opposed to restructuring of the Bank of the United Sates and used the pocket veto to defeat relevant legislation. Jacksonian scholar Robert Remini wrote that Jackson created a gain in Presidential power that did not abate until the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.

        In foreign affairs, Jackson also achieved much. He revived trade with England, exempting English goods from the harsh tariff of 1828 (the so called Tariff of Abominations. He also used his influence to help reopen trade with the British held West Indies. He also succeeded in getting payments for France for the “spoliation” attacks on American ships during the Napoleonic Wars earlier in the century.

        One great domestic triumph was the annexation of Texas. Though Jackson wanted to annex it, he did nothing while in office because he feared that the unresolved slavery question could cause problems for the election chances of his handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren. After Van Buren was elected, Jackson supported annexation, which took place in 1845, the year he died.

        Jackson liked to give parties, and he was a man of the people- everyone was welcome. At his last party as president, he had a fourteen hundred pound cheese brought in the White House and it was eaten in two hours. The White House smelled of the cheese for weeks.

  

Nollaig shona duit

Merry Christmas

Frank Darcy

Celtic Corner - November 2014

CELTIC CORNER

Some stories about the Irish Immigrants

        An Irishman named John P. Holland, a schoolteacher in Paterson, NJ uses his spare time to invent a submarine or, at the very least, to put it on track to becoming a practical-indeed, deadly- weapon of war.

        Holland was born in Liscannor Bay in County Clare in 1842. He was educated at the Limerick Christian Brothers School, and he originally intended to be a Christian Brother, to which end he took vows in 1858 and over the years taught in a number of different places. He also wanted to go to sea, but his poor eyesight prevented him from doing so.

        In 1872 the family emigrated to the states, but before leaving Holland was released from his vows.

        Holland, the son of a coastguardsman in Ireland, had no formal engineering education, but he started educating himself in engineering and drafting when he was very young and showed a brilliant aptitude for it. He had always been interested in submarines. After all, at the time the British navy was formidable, and Holland looked on the sub as a way of sneaking up unseen and sinking its ships.

        In 1874 and 1875, when Holland was trying to first interest the U.S. Navy in his submarine, the idea was not new. Indeed, using a submarine to sink a warship had been demonstrated in the Civil War by the Confederate sub Hulney, which had succeeded in its attack on a warship but sunk in the process. And one hundred years before that a submarine invented by a man named David Bushnell had tried to sink a British ship during the Revolutionary War.

        The navy thought the idea a bit preposterous, in part because Holland was not a sailor; this idea, of course, was also preposterous, as if only a sailor could invent a seagoing craft.

        But the Fenians were interested. Though they had been dealt a serious blow in the war against England because of their defeat in Canada in 1866, a number of them had reassembled, and Holland presented his idea to them. He impressed them enough to invest some sixty thousand pounds from their “skirmishing fund” for him to build the real thing. He did, and one day the Fenians and Holland assembled on the banks of the Passaic River and the fourteen foot craft was launched.

        It didn’t even float, quickly filling up with water and sinking to the bottom. But it was raised, and after an examination it was discovered that one of the workman had failed to install a pair of screws, which had left an opening for the water to pour in through.

        The submarine was drained, the screws were installed, and Holland himself too it out. It floated, it dived and surely much to the relief and joy of Holland, it resurfaced.

        Holland set about fine tuning the craft. The plan for mounting an attack against British ships was already settled. Holland was well aware of the power of their ships, which made a direct confrontation foolhardy. Sneakiness would be the key. His plan involved launching the sub from a trapdoor in the side of an innocent looking ship that would anchor near the British craft. It was a plan, indeed, that modern navies would use over and over again.

        Then, in 1883, the Fenian organization abruptly started to deteriorate. One night a group of Fenians took the sub, which was anchored in New Jersey, hauled it up to New Haven, Connecticut, and tried to launch it. They didn’t succeed, and they abandoned the craft at a nearby brass factory. Holland was incensed, and the great scheme was abandoned. Holland and the Fenians never communicated again.

        Holland was truly ahead of his time. His theory about the submarine was that the best possible shape would be that of a cigar. But the soundness of this idea did not emerge until the 1950s, long after Holland was gone.

        He never made any money from the submarine, and as time went by he started to be deeply concerned about the havoc a sub could wreak. The validity of his concerns were borne out particularly in World War II, when German “wolf packs” roamed he Atlantic, sending thousands of tons of materials and thousands of people, many of them civilians, to the bottom of the ocean.

 

John P. Holland was only one of many influential Irishmen that came to America

Erin Go Bragh

 

Frank Darcy

Celtic Corner - October 2014

CELTIC CORNER

The Fenian Movement

My dad. Frank Darcy Sr, will be honored by the Fenian Grave Society on October 26. Dad was recognized as a champion amongst Fenians fighting for the Freedom of Ireland.  I am very proud of dad and when I refer to him as a Fenian Man, people would ask what is a Fenian, so here is the Fenian story.

The Fenians were members of the so-called Fenian movement in Ireland and elsewhere, though primarily America and England. The Fenians wanted one simple desire for Ireland - independence from British rule. The Great Famine had a massive impact on Ireland. Some in Ireland believed that the government in London - to solve the 'Irish Problem' - had deliberately done as little as possible to aid the people of Ireland – a form of genocide – and these people concluded that the only hope Ireland had for its future was a complete separation from Great Britain. If London was unwilling to grant this, then the Fenians would fight for it.

Anger against the British government spilled over in 1848. In this year a group of revolutionaries known as Young Ireland launched an ill-prepared uprising against the government. It was a failure.

Two of the members of Young Ireland were James Stephens and John O'Mahony. In the eyes of the authorities both had committed a very serious crime. To escape punishment both fled to Paris. Though near to Britain, both men were relatively safe in Paris. In 1853, O'Mahony went to America. Here he tried to gain support for another uprising from those who had left Ireland during the Great Famine.

Stephens returned to Ireland in 1856. In Dublin in March 1858, he formed a secret society that became known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Its aim was Independence for Ireland.

In America O'Mahony became the leader of a new organization called the Fenian Brotherhood. It took its name from the Fianna who were a band of Irish warriors of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The name ‘Fenians’ became an umbrella term to cover all the groups associated with wanting independence for Ireland. By the very nature of what they wanted, those elements within the Fenian movement who were prepared to use violence to advance their cause, had to remain secret.

The Fenian movement quickly attracted thousands of young supporters both in Ireland itself and America. When one of the 1848 Young Ireland rebels, Terence Bellew McManus, died in America in 1861, his funeral in Ireland was attended by thousands of people.

However, as the Fenian movement grew, so did the difficulties of keeping it organized. This had proved difficult because of the Irish-American geographic split and the problems of communications. But the two founders – O’Mahony and Stephens – disagreed on how the movement should develop. In 1863, Stephens founded a newspaper called the ‘Irish People’. He wanted to make as many people as was possible aware of what the Fenians stood for. O’Mahony did not approve of this move as he felt such a paper would attract even more attention to the movement from the British government based in Dublin. He preferred the movement to develop in secrecy.

Another problem faced by the Fenians was that the Roman Catholic Church was generally not supportive of them. The power of the local priests was great and their influence within a local community, and especially among the older members of such communities, meant that they could undermine whatever influence the Fenians tried to establish.

The Fenians always faced the possibility of being infiltrated by British spies. An uprising in Ireland had been planned for 1866 but it never took place because the government knew about it. In September 1866, the ‘Irish People’ was shut down by the government and Stephens was arrested and sent to prison. He escaped from jail and went to America. Anyone suspected of being involved with the Fenians was arrested. Money sent from America for the Fenians was seized. The government also believed that some units of the British Army based in Ireland were sympathetic to the Fenians. These units were moved out of Ireland.

There was an attempted uprising in 1867, though it was a failure. The ‘uprising’ was led by Thomas Kelly who had fought in the American Civil War. Kelly did not base himself in Ireland but in London. Here he gained support from the large Irish community that had come to the city during the Great Famine. 

Kelly and other Fenians attempted to attack Chester Castle to gain weapons and ammunition. This was not a success and Kelly and another Fenian were arrested. In September 1867, Kelly was being taken to Manchester to be tried when he was rescued by other Fenians. During the rescue, a policeman was killed. Three of the Fenians were caught and after a trial were hanged for murder. To the Fenians, they became known as the "Manchester Martyrs". To many in Ireland, the sentence was considered far too harsh for what they saw as an accidental killing. Of course the Fenians continued their philosophy of a Free & United Ireland into the present day politics and of course supports the peace process. And dad always quoted Padric Pearse:

“Ireland unfree shall never be at peace”

 

 

Thank you for showing your interest in the Fenian movement.

Frank Darcy