Shane Kenna - The Invincibles: The Phoenix Park Assassinations and the Conspiracy that Shook an Empire

E ven by the standards of violent secret societies, the story of the Irish National Invincibles has been clouded in mystery and warped by misinformation. It has also been notably neglected, for a body that created international news in May 1882, when it assassinated two of the most senior government officials in Ireland in the Phoenix Park. Fundamental details, such as the precise name of the organisation that coalesced in Dublin in 1881, have been debated, as well as the question of its role and relationship within the broader Irish Republican Brotherhood. While the identities of the main Invincibles have been ascertained, their names have never loomed large in the popular imagination. This is surprising, given that they had members executed in 1883. These men never attained the veneration accorded to the Manchester Martyrs. In all probability, the exclusion of the Invincibles from the top tier of the republican pantheon derived in part from the magnitude of the killings they committed, coupled with the studied reticence of their associates in Ireland, Britain and the United States of America.

The revival and extremity of the physical force tradition in Ireland owed much to An Ghorta Mor (The Great Hunger) of 184550. The IRBs founders were among those who held the British Government culpable for the catastrophic death toll. The malign agency of Westminster, the sole parliamentary authority in Ireland since the Act of Union took effect in 1801, was detected in the dangerous mismanagement of the pre-Famine economy, and paltry efforts to stave off mass excess mortality, eviction and forced emigration. Veterans of the desperate Young Ireland revolt of 1848 consequently built a trans-Atlantic Fenian organisation from 1858, in order to establish a sovereign Irish Republic outside the British Empire. There seemed to be no viable constitutional path to this progressive objective, as efforts by moderates working within the proto-democratic electoral system proved time and again.

In March 1867, the Fenians in Ireland promised adult suffrage and an equitable land system, in a country slowly recovering from the privations of An Ghorta Mor and without adequate security of tenure. Attempts to achieve such ambitious objectives by force of arms were contained that year by a programme of pre-emptive police actions and effective counter-insurgency. The triumph of Dublin Castle, seat of the British interest in Ireland, aggrieved militant republicans, who endured damaging schisms on both sides of the Atlantic. Adversity spurred restructuring and new strategic thinking.

The most dramatic expressions of such multi-faceted processes were the resumed, albeit increasingly token, armed attacks on British North America from the USA. Irish-American Fenians, reorganised as Clan na Gael, humiliated London by conveying six escaped political prisoners from Western Australia to New York in 1876. In 188185, others mounted a sophisticated bombing campaign in England that badly shook the British establishment. Yet in 1884, the IRB was central to the creation of the Gaelic Athletic Association, a sporting and cultural national body, unconnected to political violence.

Quasi-legal Fenian initiatives included much deeper engagement in the day-to-day issues of the rural poor, and the discrete extension of logistic support to those attempting to convince the House of Commons to legislate in a manner favourable to Ireland. The revolutionary underground, however, was very much alive and, due to its temporary derailment in 1867, more keenly attuned to the threats posed by infiltration and agents provocateurs. The necessity of maintaining a credible, versatile paramilitary challenge to Dublin Castle, while guarding against its well-resourced counter-measures, ultimately spawned the Invincibles.

As is comprehensively detailed in this volume, the Invincibles surfaced when the newly formed Irish National Land League was deemed by the IRB to require robust underpinning. Liaison between leading Fenians and the Irish Parliamentary Party, not least Charles Stewart Parnell, preceded the October 1879 foundation of the Land League. A de facto alliance was by no means a foregone conclusion. Agitation for far-reaching land reform, rather than preparations to achieve an independent republic, did not appeal to all IRB and CnG figures, but significant grassroots aid was nonetheless provided. To a much greater extent than previously experienced, Fenians in Ireland generated support for the Land League and engaged in agrarian activism under its banner.