Young Ireland (Irish: Éire Óg, IPA: [ˈeːɾʲə ˈoːɡ]) was a political and cultural movement in the 1840s committed to an all-Ireland struggle for independence and democratic reform.

The club at Trinity College had a history, stretching back through the student participation of the United Irishmen Theobald Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet to Edmund Burke, of debating patriotic motions.

[4] In the south and west, the great numbers of tenant farmers, small-town traders and journeymen O'Connell had rallied to the cause of Emancipation in the 1820s did not similarly respond to his lead on the more abstract proposition of Repeal.

[5][6] Patriotic and republican sentiment among the Presbyterians of the north-east had surrendered, since the Rebellion of 1798, to the conviction that the union with Great Britain was both the occasion for their relative prosperity and a guarantee of their liberty.

The prospectus, written by Davis, dedicated the paper "to direct the popular mind and the sympathies of educated men of all parties to the great end of [a] nationality" that will "not only raise our people from their poverty, by securing to them the blessings of a domestic legislature, but inflame and purify them with a lofty and heroic love of country".

[14] Although in Duffy's view, the decision deprived the Repeal movement of "half its dignity and all of its terror", the Young Irelanders acknowledged that the risk of a massacre on many times the scale of "Peterloo" was unacceptable.

When after three months (the charges quashed on appeal to the House of Lords) they were released, it was Davis and O'Brien who staged O'Connell's triumphal reception in Dublin.

[8] Davis (conscious of his family's Cromwellian origin) was persuaded by Johann Gottfried von Herder: nationality was not a matter of ancestry or blood but of acclimatising influences.

Once a parliament restored to Dublin had retired their distinctive privileges, he was content to suggest that Protestants would, "with little delay, melt into the overwhelming majority of the Irish nation".

In return for allowing a "corrupt gang of politicians who fawned on O'Connell" an extensive system of political patronage, the Irish people being "purchased back into factious vassalage".

[32] Barricaded behind laissez-faire doctrines of "political economy", the government left O'Connell to plead for his country from the floor of the House of Commons: "She is in your hands—in your power.

[37] When the conservative Standard 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.

Meagher argued that while the Young Irelanders were not advocating physical force, if Repeal could not be carried by moral persuasion and peaceful means they believed a resort to arms would be a no less honourable course.

An offer by United Irish veteran, Valentine Lawless (Lord Cloncurry) to chair a committee to adjust the dispute between Old and Young Ireland had been rejected by John O'Connell in reportedly "very saucy and unbecoming language".

In October 1846, the Association chairman in Dublin was presented with a remonstrance protesting Young Irelanders exclusion signed by fifteen hundred of the city's leading citizens.

[42] As first directed by Duffy, in towns Confederate clubs were to encourage the use of Irish resources and manufactures, work for the extension of popular franchise, and instruct youth in the history of their country which was being kept from them in the government's National Schools.

The village clubs were to promote the rights of tenants and labourers, diffuse knowledge of agriculture and—in token of the continuing commitment to non-violence—discourage secret societies.

[50][51] His views were similar to many other Young Ireland émigrés such as Thomas D'Arcy McGee, who defended American slavery while espousing Irish nationalism.

In May, as its publisher, Mitchel was convicted of a new crime of treason felony and sentenced to transportation for 14 years to the Royal Naval Dockyard on Ireland Island in the "Imperial fortress" of Bermuda (imprisoned in the Prison hulk HMS Dromedary),[54] and Van Diemen's Land.

[57] Instead of singing the 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".

[58] But Duffy's objection to "Lalor's theory" was that "his angry peasants, chafing like chained tigers, were creatures of the imagination--not the living people through whom we had to act".

[60] By a vote of fifteen to six, the Council adopted Duffy's alternative proposition: a Parliamentary Party that, accepting no favours, would press Ireland's claims by threatening to put a stop to the entire business of the Commons.

[68] This was a tricolour he had brought back from France, its colours (green for Catholics, orange for Protestants) intended to symbolise the United Irish republican ideal.

Following a public outpouring, the government commuted their death sentences to penal transportation to Van Diemen's Land, where they joined John Mitchel.

[73] Convinced that "the Famine had 'dissolved society' and exposed landlordism both morally and economically",[74] in September 1849 Lalor attempted with John Savage, Joseph Brenan and other Young Irelanders to revive the insurrection in Tipperary and Waterford.

[78] In the 1852 election, organised around what Michael Davitt described as "the programme of the Whiteboys and Ribbonmen reduced to moral and constitutional standards",[79] the League helped return Duffy (for New Ross) and 47 other MPs pledged to tenant-rights.

Many of the MPs had been sitting Repealers who had broken with the Whig government over the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, and only one pledged MP, William Kirk for Newry, was returned from Ulster.

Catholic Primate of Ireland, Archbishop Paul Cullen approved the MPs breaking their pledge of independent opposition and accepting positions in a new Whig administration.

[85] Broken in health and spirit, Duffy 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.

[86] From 1870 a Land League and Irish Parliamentary Party realised the combination he had sought: coordinated agrarian agitation and obstructionist representation at Westminster.