"Deoraidhthe Síora gan Sgíth gan Sos": John O'Mahony and the Development of a Diasporic Gaelic Print Culture

John Francis O'Mahony, 1816–77, Matthew Brady Studio, ca. 1860–70. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Frederick Hill Meserve Collection.

In the summer of 1857 John O'Mahony put the finishing touches on his translation of Geoffrey Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn in his office in Brooklyn, New York. He had arrived in the empire city from France four years earlier aboard the Humboldt.¹ As a well-known political exile who had played a central role in the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, his arrival was much anticipated within the postfamine Irish community in the United States. In the years that followed, O'Mahony became one of the most important figures in reorganizing and harnessing the fervor of militant nationalism that resonated with many postfamine immigrants. This was a community that was both large and linguistically diverse in the city of New York. Historian Kenneth E. Nilsen has noted that at the time of O'Mahony's arrival, one in every four persons in the city had been born in Ireland and as many as 100,000 were native Irish speakers. Despite this, most were illiterate in their own language and thus left very little historical record behind.²

But while O'Mahony's revolutionary activities have received substantial attention in studies of Fenianism—the movement he helped to found in 1858—his scholarly and cultural pursuits have received comparatively little consideration. A number of scholars have even asserted that the Fenians had little interest in the promotion of the Irish language.³ Patrick Steward and Bryan McGovern claim that the "rapidly dying Gaelic language was of little relevance to the IRB and its stateside auxiliary," and that "restoration of the Celtic tongue was not a Fenian priority."⁴ Such positions are likely the result of what Vincent Morley points to as "the inability of so many historians of Ireland to read primary sources in the indigenous language of the country."⁵ The exception within the historiographical landscape is Fionnuala Uí Fhlannagáin's Fíníní Mheiriceá agus an Ghaeilge (2008), which highlights the individual linguistic backgrounds of a number of Fenians, including O'Mahony, and their efforts to promote the Irish language.⁶ A perusal of archival sources reveals further Fenian engagement with Irish in both functional and symbolic capacities. Reflecting the surreptitious tone of an internal circular to Fenian leaders in 1870 that covertly announced renewed Fenian effort to invade Canada, General John O'Neill reinforced the veiled language of a particularly incendiary paragraph by asking its recipients, "Thigin thú?"⁷ Two years later a group of O'Mahony's followers in Boston sent a lengthy correspondence in Irish to the Garde Républicaine outlining the historical relationship between the Irish and French republican causes. Explaining their choice of language, the writers later noted: "We did not wish to send a copy in English, which is to us the language of tyrants."⁸

Many more examples like this surely exist. However, it is O'Mahony's marrying of the Irish language and the Fenian cause that is the most glaring historiographical gap. This is represented by his most ambitious feat, the translation of Geoffrey Keating's seventeenth-century foundational Irish history Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, and by his editorial work focused on language and culture in the Irish American press. After the release of the second edition of his translation in 1866, one reviewer in the Fenian organ the Irish People contended in inflated terms that O'Mahony's scholarly pursuits had been the most crucial element in bringing about a resurgence of Irish nationalism during the late 1850s, christening his effort "the textbook of modern Irish revolution."⁹

This article will consider O'Mahony's work as a translator and as a newspaper editor with the Irish People (New York) and highlight how he set out to bridge the gap between higher and lower forms of Irish in popular...