John Devoy

But fiction does.

And like a lot of people like historical fiction, it wouldn't necessarily, you know, read a biography of, for example, John Devoy, which is, Terry has written the main biography of John Devoy.

And we will have that in the show notes, the link to that book.

But, I think it's a really important kind of medium because it is what gets a lot of people into looking at wider history.

Yeah, exactly.

I think it gives you, it does give you that scope to explore stuff.

And what Terry does, and I'll maybe give a small bit of background to the book, Terry introduces into his whole story, it's set in 1880s New York, the Dynamite Campaign, we've mentioned it before, we'll be mentioning it again, people like John Devoy, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, how important New York was as a absolutely epicenter, really, of what was going on in terms of Irish nationalism.

particularly physical force nationalism during the 19th century.

So they were sentenced to death, which was commuted to life and then transported to Western Australia.

So the whole affair was, The rescue of these men orchestrated by John Devoy of Clan de Gael, the Fenian organisation in the United States.

And the book reads like a thriller or there's cinematic elements to it because the...

The levels that they went to and the adventures and the scrapes and the way it came so close to disaster on so many different occasions.

You're then moving into, um, the, the fight for home rule, and what is the key development there is the new departure, um, which some of us might remember from school, where you had the agrarian Michael Davitt, you, or Michael Davitt.

You had John Devoy in the States of Clan na Gael, and then you had, uh, Parnell himself.

We'll come back to that later, Bernadette.

Yeah.

...

the, um, what you're talking about with the IRB in Clonakilty.

Um, John Devoy's very dodgy book, um, Recollections of an Irish Rebel, um, he does indicate that, uh, he regarded Clare as one of the best Fenian counties, and the t- the men that he in- identifies as, you know, key men who had American experience and been over and back the whole time, and that's about bringing ideas from America back into Ireland about US rep- dem- democracy and US republicanism, would be John Clune, and then also many of you will have known about Stephen Meaney.

And Meaney is a really important and a really interesting figure as well, from nearby here, from New Hall, uh, out, uh, just p- outside Ennis.