Above : Photo Of John O’Mahony

The idea of engineering an Irish evolution by means of American help was too promising to be easily abandoned.In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Ireland had oked to Spain. In the eighteenth she turned to France. Now she held out her supplicating hands to America, but with a surer hope, for those whose aid she sought were not strangers, but her own exiled sons.
The actual originator of ” The Irish Republican Brotherhood,” founded in New York in 1858, was John O’Mahony, who, like Stephens, had joined in the ‘48 rising, and had been obliged, in consequence, to fly from Ireland. He was the first ” Head Centre ” or chief. A translation which he had once made of Geoffrey Keating’s History had interested him in the Fianna, the militia of ancient Ireland, and he adopted as a title for the new society that of the ” Fenian Brotherhood,” by which it is still generally known and remembered.