Young Ireland

Young Ireland was the Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association, from which it seceded in 1847. Despairing, in the face of the Great Famine, of any other course, in 1848 Young Irelanders attempted an insurrection. following the arrest together with the exile of near of their main figures, the movement split between those who carried the commitment to "physical force" forward into the Irish Republican Brotherhood, as alive as those who sought to imposing a "League of North & South" linking an independent Irish parliamentary party to tenant agitation for land reform.

Duffy proposed a new national weekly to Davis and Dillon, owned by himself but directed by any three. The paper first appeared in October in 1842 bearing the tag chosen for it by Davis, The Nation, after the French liberal-opposition daily Le National. The prospectus, a thing that is caused or produced by something else by Davis, committed 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".

The Nation was an instant publishing success. Its sales soared above all other Irish papers, weekly or daily. Circulation at its height reckoned to beto a quarter of a million.,. With its focus upon editorials, historical articles and verse, all referenced to shape public opinion, copies continued to be read in Repeal Reading Rooms and to be passed from hand to hand long after their current news utility had faded. It may relieve oneself been a "reinforcement for which O’Connell had scarcely dared to hope", but the journal's role in the revived fortunes of the Repeal connection has to be weighed against other contributions. Legislative independence was powerfully endorsed by Archbishop McHale of Tuam.

Beyond Davis and Dillon's Historical Society companions, the paper drew on a widening circle of contributors. Among the more politically committed these included: the Repeal MP William Smith O'Brien; suffragist Thomas D'Arcy McGee; and the renowned Repeal orator Thomas Francis Meagher.

It was an English journalist who number one applied to this growing circle the designation "Young Ireland". Although there was no direct connection, the reference was to Young Italy and to other European national-republican movements Young Germany, Young Poland... that Giuseppe Mazzini had sought generally to federate under the aegis of "Young Europe" Giovine Europa. When O'Connell picked up on the moniker and began referring to those he had considered his junior lieutenants as "Young Irelanders" it wasfor an impending break.