150 years ago today, the Fenian Rising commenced.

Less than ten years after the founding of the Fenian Brotherhood in New York and the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Dublin, armed men assembled across Dublin and in other parts of the country. The insurrection is synonymous with Tallaght, where thousands of Fenians mobilised for action, but there were outbreaks of violence in other places too. At Stepaside and Glencullen, men led by the American Civil War veteran Patrick Lennon carried a green flag into battle emblazoned with the words ‘REMEMBER EMMET’.

The insurrection quickly collapsed; William Domville Handcock, a Tallaght landowner and Magistrate for County Dublin, wrote dismissively of “the Fenian Battle of Tallaght as it was called, though it was unworthy of the name.” Even some later separatists dismissed what occurred in 1867; Bulmer Hobson, the maverick IRB organiser who would do so much to revitalise the Fenian movement in the early 20th century, referred to the 1867 rebellion in his Bureau of Military History Witness Statement as “a pitiful demonstration.”

Despite its military failure, one interesting dimension of the rebellion was the Proclamation issued by the Fenian leadership, and delivered to the offices of The Times newspaper in London and other media outlets. To mark the anniversary of this historic event, we are reproducing it in full below.

It called for “absolute liberty of conscience, and complete separation of Church and State”, and appealed directly to English workers, encouraging them to take up arms and to “remember the starvation and degradation brought to your firesides by the oppression of labour.” In many ways, it is a document more radical than the much more celebrated Proclamation of Easter 1916.

Lastly, we wish to express our sadness at the passing this week of historian Shane Kenna, who had done so much in recent years to highlight the role and importance of the Fenian movement in Irish history. Shane was a talented writer, a wonderful tour guide and one of the nicest people in the small community of historians in Dublin. He was laid to rest yesterday in Tallaght, only one day short of the anniversary of the Fenian Rising there. We express our condolences to his family and friends, and we are grateful to have known him.