The "McManus Plot", in Glasnevin

As the start of the new academic year is looming, I am getting worried about how regularly I can manage to keep posting, with the Ph.D. continuing, and full-time teaching starting soon. So I have decided to try and write shorter posts, and that every other post will be about a grave or a graveyard which has to do with my research. This makes it easier for me, because I already know my stuff. For the first such post, I have chosen to focus on the grave where Terence Bellew McManus is buried, in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. It is an important place for me personally, because McManus's was the first "Fenian" funeral I heard of, back when I was an MA student working on the IRB and their political uses of cultural nationalism. And it's out of my interest for this event that I ended up working on republican funerals more generally. It was a fundamental historical and political moment in that it was the first of what would become a long series of republican funerals, and it remained a reference point throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century. Finally, it was a spectacular political coup through which a small, underground organisation managed to appropriate the cultural and political heritage of Young Ireland (who had popularised cultural nationalism) and the 1848 rising, to such an extent that in the course of my research I have come accross at least two fellow-historians who classified McManus as a Fenian, even though he never was.

So who was he, and how did he end up associated with fenianism? He was born in 1810 in County Fermanagh and grew up in Monaghan, where he became a close friend of Charles Gavan Duffy's (later to be one of the co-founders of the Nation and of the Young Ireland movement). He moved to Dublin in 1836, and to England in the early 1840s. He was active in local clubs supporting the Repeal of the Act of Union and he sided with Young Ireland in their disputes with Daniel O'Connell (they supported non-denominational universities and refused to condemn violent action on principle, arguing that in some cases it was the only resort). In 1848, aggravated by the disastrous Famine situation and inspired by the republican revolution in France earlier that year, some Young Ireland members organised a rising for Irish independence. McManus came back to Ireland to take part in the rising, which did not succeed. Like all of the movement's leaders, he was judged for high treason and condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered, which was commuted to transportation for life in Van Diemen's Land (known today as Tasmania). He escaped in 1851 and lived in San Francisco until his death in January 1861. He was not involved in any republican or nationalist group while he was there.

And yet his death became an opportunity for the transnational Fenian movement to assert itself. The impulse came from the Fenian organisation in the US. Mc Manus had been buried in January, and a subscription was launched to pay for a monument to his memory, which the US Fenians pressured to turn into an exhumation and transatlantic journey for a reburial in Dublin.

The body was finally unearthed in August, and shipped from San Francisco to New-York via Panama, then from New-York to Queenstown (now Cobh). A funeral procession was organised in Cork, then the coffin was put on a train to Dublin, where it lay in state at the Mechanics' Institute (future Abbey Theatre) for a week. The final procession to Glasnevin cemetery was followed by tens of thousands of people (up to 200,000 according to some estimates which *coughs* would be a quarter of the Dublin County population at the time *coughs*). Whatever the exact figures, it was aknowledged by all sources as a popular success, and it took 5 hours for the procession to reach Glasnevin via a very circuitous route (see map).

Now this is where I start writing less and you get to see actual pictures of the grave:

The monument was not erected by the Fenians themselves, but by the National Graves Association in 1933, after the country had gained autonomy, and long after McManus's death. The female figure at the top is an allegory of Ireland (the word "Erin" is engraved on her belt), and her children are the Irish people fighting for their freedom (the child to the left has a sword and a shield, the one to the right is accompanied by an Irish wolfhound, a Fenian symbol). To the right, you can get a glimpse of another Fenian tomb, that of John Keegan Casey, recognisable because of its sculpted ruins of a monastery and round tower.

But most importantly, you have probably noticed that the plot is much wider than all those around it, and that a plaque at the bottom mentions John O'Mahony. This is why this area of the cemetery is called the "McManus plot", but also the "republican plot" or the "Fenian plot". As I mentioned above, his funeral was the first of a long series in which the Fenians sought to assert the continuity of their struggle throughout Irish history. By the way, it is interesting to note that there is no mention of McManus being a republican. He is simply defined as a Young Irelander. It is the fact that John O'Mahony (who died in 1877 in New-York and had a transatlantic funeral as well) had also participated in the 1848 rebellion which indirectly relates McManus to the rest of the people buried there - all members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Charles McCarthy died a few days after being released from prison in 1878, while Patrick Nally died a few days before his planned release in 1891. Daniel Reddin and James Stritch had both participated in raiding a police van in Manchester to rescue Fenian leaders in September 1867 and they went to prison for that. Stritch would later be part of the O'Donovan Rossa funeral committee in 1915 (another transatlantic affair) and of the rising in 1916. He lived until 1933, after which the plot was sealed and the monument erected.