Like so many fathers in Famine Ireland, to relieve his family’s distress, Denis O’Donovan turned to the Board of Works for support and was employed as labourer supervisor. He had worked on a road through Rory Glen, West Cork and had employed the young Rossa as one of his workers. Struggling for preservation, the O’Donovans were working extraordinarily hard. While working on the local roads surrounded by farms and fields, O’Donovan Rossa could not help but notice that despite the increasing hunger and deprivation in Ireland, there was still an abundance of food in the country, and recalling his personal experience of the Famine, he explained:
During those three years in Ireland, ’45, ’46, and ’47 the potato crops failed, but the other crops grew well, and as in the case of my people in ’45, the landlords came in on the people everywhere and seized the grain crops for the rent – not caring much what became of those whose labour and sweat produced those crops. The people died of starvation, by the thousands.11
One of those who died was O’Donovan Rossa’s father on 25 March 1847. Denis O’Donovan had contracted fever and O’Donovan Rossa replaced his father as labourer–supervisor at 16–years-of-age. He realised that his father’s death had left a family of five fatherless and effectively penniless. Denis was waked the day after his death and a great crowd descended on the family home to pay their respects to him. The following day he was buried in the family plot at Ross Abbey. This was not the only Famine tragedy to befall the 16–year-old Rossa. The following year, a woman whom he had been friendly with, Jillen Andy, died of Famine fever, leaving four sons orphaned. He had been particularly friendly with Jillen’s fourth son, Tade. O’Donovan Rossa was kind to Tade, who was mentally disabled, and he recollected how he would regularly take Tade on his back to school and tell him stories to make him laugh. One evening in 1848, while playing on the street, Tade came to him with the news that his mother had died, and he asked the young Rossa to help him bury her. With no money for a coffin and no mourners, they buried the woman in a shallow grave and tied a pillow to her head. Laying an apron over her head, so the dirt could not touch her face, Tade and Rossa filled the shallow grave. Within one month his friend was buried with his mother, his life another casualty of the Famine.
Like his father, O’Donovan Rossa, shortly after the burial of Tade, was struck by fever. Lying in bed for a little over a week, his family thought he was dying. While he was in great pain and his life was challenged, he survived the bout of fever but recovering from his illness he complained about his eyes, which became infected. The pain in his eyes was attributed to fairies and his mother wondered what the fairy world had against them and why they were being punished so much. By now the family were heavily in debt and debt collectors increasingly ploughed pressure on Nellie O’Donovan, keenly aware that she was at her lowest ebb. The family had no money and could not oblige the collectors; as a result everything inside the house was seized and sold, much to the family’s indignity. Rossa recalled how the family were left hungry and dependent on relatives and neighbours for assistance. On one particular occasion, he remembered how, coming home from playing with his friends, he found his mother in tears – there was no food in the house and she was unable to provide for her children. Searching through his pockets he found a single penny piece. He was so hungry. Leaving the house the young O’Donovan Rossa made his way to a nearby shop and bought a penny bun, recalling how ‘I stole to the back of the house and thievishly ate that penny bun without sharing it with my mother, my sister and my brothers.’12
Soon after this an eviction notice was given to Nellie O’Donovan. The family moved into a house formally owned by a neighbour Darby Holland, who had died. They secured the house through a family relative who lived there rent free during her life. As part of the agreement Nellie O’Donovan would be paid £12 for a wheat crop growing in Darby Holland’s former hill field. This money was not used to provide for the family; the £12 was needed to pay back debts incurred since Denis O’Donovan died.
The year of 1848 was a tough one for the O’Donovan family, but it was also a year of great social change throughout Europe. In January 1848 there was a rebellion in Sicily; by February the winds of change had reached France where there was a republican revolution and the French monarchy was overthrown.
In March, Germany was the scene of a failed wave of protest seeking German national unity and freedom of assembly, while in nearby Denmark later that month there was popular opposition levelled against a system of monarchical absolutism. The revolutions sweeping throughout Europe certainly influenced nationalist Ireland. While the Repeal movement looked on many within its offshoot, Young Ireland became convinced that the time had come for Ireland to proclaim its right to independence. William Smith O’Brien, perhaps one of the most famous of the Young Irelanders, inspired by the success of the French Revolution, aimed to establish an Irish National Guard and a council of 300 members to function as the embryo of an independent Irish parliament. In deference to the French Republic, Smith O’Brien, with Thomas Francis Meagher travelled to Paris to seek recognition of their aims. The French were, however, unwilling to support the Young Irelanders, as the recognition of their aims would antagonise the British. O’Brien and his followers in the Young Irelanders regarded the republic as a necessary evil, not in the context that they supported its establishment, but as a means to threaten the government to terms. In this regard the Young Irelanders’ strategy had initially held out for an Irish parliament by peace, or a republic by force. By May 1848 the Young Irelanders led an abortive and disastrous uprising, the largest skirmish of which was at a widow’s cottage in Ballingarry, County Tipperary, where a number of police officers had barricaded themselves into a house and were surrounded by rebels. Poorly equipped and lacking popular support, the rebellion easily shot its bolt and in the aftermath the leaders of the Young Irelanders were either rounded up and deported to Australia and Van Diemen’s Land or escaped to Europe and America.
The Young Irelanders heavily influenced the young Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. The Irishman recalled that in the period of 1848-58, with the transference from Young Irelanderism to Fenianism, he was effectively carried from ‘boyhood to manhood’.13 The fireside stories of his youth and his eager absorption of the ideas disseminated in The Nation, coupled with his experiences of the Famine, certainly played a crucial role in the radicalisation and politicisation of the young O’Donovan Rossa. The rigours of the Famine had forced the family to scatter throughout the globe. Following the 1848 Rebellion, the O’Donovans emigrated to America, yet for one reason or another, including a perception that O’Donovan Rossa could look after himself, Nellie O’Donovan had chosen to leave Jeremiah in Ireland. O’Donovan Rossa now lived with his father’s niece, Ellen Dowling, who had previously secured him work in her husband Mortimer Dowling’s hardware shop in Skibbereen. Remembering the passage of his family to America, O’Donovan Rossa lamented the event:
The day they were leaving Ireland, I went from Skibbereen to Renascrenna to see them off. At Renascrenna Cross we parted… Five or six other families were going away, and there were five or six cars to carry them and all they could carry with them, to the Cove of Cork. The cry of the weeping and wailing of that day rings in my ears still. That time it was a cry heard every day at every cross roads in Ireland. I stood at that Renascrenna Cross till this cry of the emigrant party went beyond my hearing. Then, I kept walking backward toward Skibbereen, looking at them till they sank from my view.14
Life without his family was tough for O’Donovan Rossa, and