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Born at Dowth Castle, near Drogheda, Co. Meath, Ireland, John Boyle O’Reilly (1844-1890) was a journalist, writer and civil rights activist. He worked as a recruiter for the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, also known as the IRB or Fenian Brotherhood, whilst serving in the British Army. Fearful of another Irish uprising, the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood was persecuted by the British government who saw the movement as an intrinsic threat to their interests in Ireland. As Irish historian T. W. Moody comments, the Fenians had revolutionary politics at their core: the brotherhood was ‘essentially a physical-force movement which absolutely and from the beginning, repudiated constitutional action […] [m]ore than any other school of nationalism the Fenian movement concentrated on a single aim, independence, and insisted that all other aims were beside the point’.
In 1866, O'Reilly's secret revolutionary activities were discovered by the British authorities and he was charged and convicted of Treason. This carried a death sentence; however, due to his young age (22 yrs) the sentence was later commuted to 20 years penal servitude and transportation to Australia. O’Reilly left Portsmouth, England, on October 12, 1867, bound for the Penal Colony of Western Australia, on the convict ship Hougoumont. Ever the writer and propagandist, O’Reilly hand-wrote 7 editions of a newspaper, The Wild Goose, on board the ship to keep-up the morale of his fellow convicts. He found lasting fame, however, for staging an audacious escape from the Penal Colony of Western Australia.
O’Reilly eventually settled in America and worked as a journalist and advocate for Irish independence. His status was such that he was commissioned to write a poem in dedication of the national monument to the Pilgrim Fathers in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1889. You can read more about the poem and remarkable life of John Boyle O’Reilly on our feature here.