Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, KCMG, PC (12 April 1816 – 9 February 1903), was an Irish poet and journalist (editor of The Nation), Young Irelander and tenant-rights activist.

One day, when Duffy was aged 18, Charles Hamilton Teeling, a United Irish veteran of the 1798 rising, walked into his mother's house (his father had died when he was 10).

[3] In Belfast, Duffy went on to edit The Vindicator, an O'Connellite journal launched by Thomas O'Hagan (later the first Catholic to become Lord Chancellor of Ireland since 1687).

All were members or supporters of Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association, dedicated to a restoration of an Irish parliament through a reversal of the 1800 Acts of Union.

[12][13] For Duffy there was a further, less liberal basis, for his disaffection: O'Connell's repeated denunciations of a "vile union" in the United States "of republicanism and slavery", and his appeal to Irish Americans to join in the abolitionist struggle.

When the Standard in London observed that the new Irish railways could be used to transport troops to quickly curb agrarian unrest, Mitchel responded that the tracks could be turned into pikes and trains ambushed.

In the desperate circumstances of the Great Famine and in the face of martial-law measures that, following O'Connell's death, a number of Repeal Association MPs had approved in Westminster, Duffy conceded the case for taking "the no less honourable course".

This was a republican tricolour with which Meagher had returned from revolutionary Paris, its colours intended to symbolise reconciliation (white) between Catholic (green) and Protestant (orange).

But with the rural priesthood against them and the body of their support confined to the garrisoned towns, their efforts issued in a small demonstration that broke up after its first armed encounter, the Battle of Ballingarry.

Duffy had invited Carlyle, a Unionist and anti-Catholic, in the vain hope that he might help sway establishment opinion in favour of humane and practical relief.

[19] Instead of singing La Marseillaise, he said that what the men of '98 should have borrowed from the French was "their sagacious idea of bundling the landlords out of doors and putting tenants in their shoes".

[20] In 1842, he had already allied himself with James Godkin[21] who had abandoned a bible mission to campaign for the rights of the Catholic tenants he had been tasked with bringing into the Protestant fold.

[22] He now looked to James MacKnight (M'Knight) who, closely aided by a group of radical Presbyterian ministers, in 1847 had formed the Ulster Tenant Right Association in Derry.

[24] Uniting activists across the sectarian and constitutional divide, in 1852, the League helped return Duffy (for New Ross) and 49 other tenant-rights MPs to Westminster.

The Curia had, as a result, returned to "her design of treating Ireland as an entrenched camp of Catholicity in the heart of the British Empire, capable of leavening the whole."

Broken in health and spirit, he published in 1855 a farewell address to his constituency, declaring that he had resolved to retire from parliament, as it was no longer possible to accomplish the task for which he had solicited their votes.

Duffy initially practised law in Melbourne, but a public appeal was soon held to enable him to buy the freehold property necessary to stand for the colonial Parliament.

Irish Catholics serving as Cabinet Ministers was hitherto unknown in the British Empire and the Melbourne's Protestant establishment was ill-prepared "to countenance so startling a novelty".

Historian Don Garden commented that "Unfortunately Duffy's dreams were on a higher plane than his practical skills as a legislator and the morals of those opposed to him.

One famous Punch image, "Citizens John and Charles", depicted the pair as French revolutionaries holding the skull and cross bone flag of the so-called Victorian Republic.

In 1871, Duffy led the opposition to Premier Sir James McCulloch's plan to introduce a land tax, on the grounds that it unfairly penalised small farmers.

Victoria's finances were in a poor state and he was forced to introduce a tariff bill to provide government revenue, despite his adherence to British free trade principles.

Of his eight surviving children: A grandson, Sir Charles Leonard Gavan Duffy, was a judge on the Supreme Court of Victoria, Australia.