BY SHANE Mac THOMÁIS

On 10 November 1861, 137 years ago, 100,000 people defied the Irish bishops and followed the remains of Terence Bellew MacManus to Glasnevin Cemetery.

Terence Bellew MacManus was born in 1811 to a traditional Fermanagh family who emigrated to Liverpool. He returned to Ireland in 1843 to join the Repeal Association and the Young Irelanders. During the Young Irelanders short uprising in 1848, MacManus joined William Smith O'Brien and John Blake Dillon at Ballingarry, County Tipperary, where the only sustained combat took place. He was sentenced to death for his part in the Rising, but this was commuted to transportation for life. He was sent to the British penal colony at Van Diemens Land, Tasmania. Within two years of his arrival, he had escaped and made his way to San Francisco.

In America, MacManus tried his hand at many jobs but he was to end his days a pauper in the poor house.

When MacManus died on 15 January 1861, the Fenian Brotherhood of San Francisco, which had grown to respect and love this man, funded his trip back to the land he had spent his life fighting for. His extended funeral procession was the most effective fundraising means imaginable at that time. Any town with a sizable Irish population demanded the funeral pass through on its way to Boston.

These stops along the train tracks and dusty roads of rural America fed the Fenian Brotherhood and Clan na Gael with both funds and fresh recruits. The demand to hold memorials for MacManus in every town along the way was so great that it took nearly ten months for his coffin to reach Boston harbour.

Arrangements for further processions once the body reached Ireland were made. The Catholic Church attempted to stop these memorials from happening, but the Fenian show of strength and support in Cork City was breathtaking and quashed any hope of shutting them down. Nearly the entire population of the city and surrounding areas showed up to be a part of the funeral procession.

The coffin then travelled north to Dublin, where the major procession had been planned. On 10 November 1861, an estimated 100,000 people showed up for the final trip of the Young Irelander. Almost 50,000 men marched in military formation, while a greater number lined the streets. Included along the way were numerous stops to tell the tales of hallowed spots of great fallen revolutionaries. These included the church in front of which Robert Emmet was hanged, the house where Tone's body was prepared before its burial, and the house where Lord Edward Fitzgerald was shot.

The church again tried to quell this flouting of its authority and refused to allow the body to rest in any church or to give the dead man any funeral rites. But Father Patrick Lavelle, a previously secretive Fenian, defied Archbishop Cullen and the body was lain in state in Abbey Street at the Mechanics Institute. An oration written by James Stephens was delivered by a Captain Smith in Glasnevin Cemetery.

The funeral was a revival of the nationalist spirit, which had been thought dead after the Famine and the failure of the 1848 Rebellion. The IRB's ranks grew in size. It showed that the people were ready to honour their Fenian dead and it was this funeral that was to inspire a future IRB man to orate: "Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace."