Young Ireland & the 1848 Rising

1848: In the depths of the Famine, a new nationalist movement rose: romantic, literary, and doomed to a brief, failed rebellion.

In the 1840s a group of young writers and thinkers around the newspaper The Nation gave Irish nationalism a new, romantic voice. The Young Irelanders (figures like Thomas Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy and John Mitchel) celebrated Irish culture, history and language, and their songs and ballads (among them "A Nation Once Again") stirred a generation.

As the Great Famine ravaged the country and constitutional politics seemed to fail, some turned to force. Their rising in July 1848, amid a wider year of revolutions across Europe, was small and quickly crushed. It is remembered, a little unfairly, as "the Battle of Widow McCormack's Cabbage Patch" in County Tipperary. Yet Young Ireland's ideas outlived its failure: its cultural nationalism fed the Gaelic Revival, and its militants helped seed the Fenian movement that came next.