1. John Francis O'Mahony was an Irish scholar and the founding member of the Fenian Brotherhood in the United States, sister organisation to the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
11 Facts About John O'Mahony
1. 2.
John O'Mahony was born in 1815 in Kilbeheny, on the border between County Limerick and County Cork, into a family of minor Roman Catholic landed gentry who had managed to retain land following the Munster Plantation.
3.
John O'Mahony became an accomplished Gaelic scholar, and later taught Greek and Latin, and contributed articles to Irish and French journals.
4.
In 1854, he learned that John O'Mahony Mitchel had escaped from the penal colony on Van Dieman's Land and made his way to New York City.
5.
John O'Mahony managed to follow him there and thereafter took part in the Emigrant Aid Association, the Emmet Monument Association, and other Irish organisations.
6.
The mental strain to which John O'Mahony was subjected in the preparation of this work, which brought him no pecuniary gain, affected his reason, and he was removed by his friends for a short time to a lunatic asylum.
7.
At the time of the Cincinnati convention, John O'Mahony held the rank of colonel of the 69th Regiment of New York State Militia, recruited mainly from the ranks of the Brotherhood, which had furnished a large proportion of Meagher's Irish Brigade, the Corcoran Legion, and Irish regiments engaged in the American Civil War.
8.
The rapid growth in membership of the Fenian Brotherhood rendered it impossible for John O'Mahony to retain the colonelcy of the 69th regiment, which he had held for some time, and resigning he gave all his attention to the spread of Fenianism.
9.
John O'Mahony did not take any part personally in the attempted Fenian Rising of 1867 or in the raids on Canada, although his advice counted for much in these enterprises.
10.
John O'Mahony devoted the last years of his life to literary pursuits, but suffered from ill health struggled to secure the bare means for subsistence.
11.
John O'Mahony died in New York City in 1877 and his remains were taken to Ireland and interred with the honors of a public funeral in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.