help Ireland against England, and
assurances had been given that if an Irish insurrection gained
considerable initial successes the French Government would exert
influence on England. A successful blow at Carrick and a subsequent
seizure of Kilkenny and proclamation of Irish independence from that
city was possible, and if realised would have probably led to the
counties of Waterford and Tipperary rising en masse. How far the
insurrection would have spread outside those counties is problematical,
but in the year 1848 they were counties which presented difficulties to
regular troops and advantages to insurgent forces. According to M'Gee,
Sligo was willing to rise if the South made a good beginning and the
Bishop of Derry, Dr. Maginn, sent a message to Gavan Duty that he was
willing to join in the insurrection at the head of his priests once the
harvest was reaped. Doheny's criticism of the action of some of the
Tipperary priests is justified. But of others it is to be remembered
that they were not in sympathy with Young Ireland, that they were not
bound to support an insurrection undertaken irrespective of them, and
that they could not be expected to take the initiative. There were at
least two priests in Tipperary prepared to lead their parishioners to
the insurgent standard if O'Brien struck at any point a successful blow.
O'Brien's indecision was the real cause why the insurrection died in its
birth.

If courage and devotion could have saved Ireland in 1848, O'Brien and
his comrades would have saved the land. No braver gentlemen could any
nation produce. They asked their countrymen to take no risks they did
not take themselves in the forefront. But courage and devotion alone can
never make an insurrection into a revolution. 1848 was a failure--in one
sense--because there was no second Mitchel in Ireland when the first
Mitchel was hurried off on a British gunboat.

But 1848 was not a failure in the true sense of failure. For years the
Irish people had submitted to any and every imposition of foreign
tyranny, taught to believe that forcible resistance to outrage on their
national liberties was in itself immoral. The sneer of the satirist
that the Irish were:--

"A nation of abortive men
Who shoot the tongue and wield the pen,"

seemed to have grown a reality. Young Ireland evoked the fighting
tradition of the nation once again. Without 1848 the spirit that freed
the Irish Catholic from being tributary to an