The publication of a new book next week, Wolfe Tone: Irish Jacobin, by Galway city native Dr Kieran Allen, makes it opportune to remember the famous republican's connections with Galway.
By Allen’s frame of reference, Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798 ) underwent a transformation during his short life from a “playboy with colonial fantasies, into a radical Jacobin who advocated the unity of Catholics, Protestants, and Dissenters.” His Galway sojourn was during his playboy phase.
Actor, playboy and romantic
Twenty years old, and recently suspended from Trinity College, Tone encountered up-and-coming politician Richard Martin - eventually County Galway's Member of Parliament for two decades - and his accomplished wife Eliza, in Dublin.
Heir to the Ballinahinch estate in Connemara, and prominent in the Volunteer movement, Martin offered Tone employment as tutor to his half-brothers in the family home in Dangan.
Tone’s arrival coincided with the establishment by the Martins of Galway’s first purpose-built theatre, located on Kirwan’s Lane. Tone was roped in, playing opposite Eliza Martin in its earliest production, ‘Douglas’. Proximity kindled affection, as Tone acknowledged in his journal:
“About the beginning of the year 1783 I fell in love with a woman who made me miserable for near two years… Mrs Martin was one of the first actresses I ever saw… I very soon became in love to a degree almost inconceivable… I actually suffered on her account for two years that our acquaintance continued, in which time I made three visits to her house of four or five months each.”
The feelings were mutual, but, by Tone’s account, the relationship was conducted without “in a single instance overstepping the bounds of virtue, such was the purity of the extravagant affection I bore her.” Richard Martin suspected otherwise, and Tone left Galway in acrimonious circumstances.
There was further acrimony a few years later, when Eliza embarked on a scandalous sexual affair in revolutionary Paris. The widely-reported legal proceedings and divorce fuelled suspicions about Eliza’s conduct in Dangan in 1783/4.
Political activist
Tone went on to qualify as a lawyer. Like many of his generation he was influenced by the French revolution, ultimately becoming the ‘radical Jacobin’ discussed in Kieran Allen’s book.
In 1791, Tone published An argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, a plea for an end to religious discrimination, notable for being written by a Protestant.
Next, he found employment with the Catholic Association, and it was as its representative that he visited County Galway during the Ballinasloe fair of 1792. There were frustrations: uncomfortable accommodation, inedible food and confused political arrangements – but some compensation in seeing what Tone described as “the greatest cattle fair in Europe except for one in Hungary”.
Revolutionary: 1798
Already, Tone was a leading member of the United Irishmen. The movement was strongly influenced by French revolutionary ideas, causing a breach with the anti-revolutionary leadership of the Catholic Association.
When Britain went to war with France in 1793, French connections were suspect, so to avoid arrest, Tone emigrated with his family to the United States. Late in 1795, he sailed to France to seek support for revolution in Ireland.
It was as a French officer that he next set foot in Ireland, having been captured off the Donegal coast in October 1798. Three weeks later, he died in captivity.
Galway played a minor part in the events of 1798. Most of the county’s clergy and merchants, with their connections in pre-revolutionary ancien régime France, opposed the United Irishmen, and they rallied in support of the authorities. There were of course United Irishmen in the county, and in the post-rebellion crackdown, at least thirteen were executed, mostly in Galway itself, but there were public executions also in Gort, Loughrea and Tuam.
Remembering Tone
Tone’s reputation as a 'founding father of Irish republicanism’ was secured with publication of his writings in the 1820s and consolidated by the interest of Young Irelanders, Fenians, and later republicans.
The centenary of the rebellion drew particular attention to his legacy. GAA clubs were named for him, including the Galway-city based Wolfe Tones which beat Corofin to win the county football title in 1936.
By 1911, there were eleven Wolfe Tone Streets in Ireland. Others followed, including Tone Avenue in Mervue in the 1950s.
Sometimes the naming was controversial, as with Galway’s Wolfe Tone bridge in 1934.
Breandán Ó hEithir recorded in his Begrudger’s Guide to Irish Politics a condemnation of ‘cut-throat Tone’ by Galway’s Bishop O’Doherty in a sermon denouncing secret societies. The insult offended Fianna Fáil and other republican members of Galway County Council, so they rebuked the bishop by naming the bridge for the martyr of ’98. The fact that no clergy attended the official opening lends credibility to Ó hEithir’s account.
Almost 140 years after his death, the radical Jacobin was still capable of provoking political passions in a city where he lived and loved so fleetingly.
Dr John Cunningham is an historian and writer.
Kieran Allen’s Wolfe Tone: Irish Jacobin (Pluto Press ) will be launched in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop on Thursday, November 19, at 6pm.
