Qualla: William Smith O'Brien

William Smith O'Brien: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leon Gluckman (?), Public domain. He brought the flag home from Paris. In March 1848, on the streets of a city remaking itself in the Second French Republic, William Smith O'Brien and Thomas Francis Meagher were handed a tricolour by French sympathizers - green for Catholics, white for peace between them, orange for Protestants. Smith O'Brien was a Protestant landowner who had served fourteen years as a Westminster MP supporting the union with Britain. He was a descendant of Brian Boru, the 11th-century High King. Four months after returning from Paris, he raised that flag in Kilkenny as the standard of an armed rising against the British government, the year of the worst famine in modern Irish memory. The rising lasted barely a day, ended with a skirmish at the Widow McCormack's cabbage patch in Tipperary, and earned him a sentence of hanging, drawing, and quartering - the last person in Ireland to receive that medieval punishment.

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Image: Leon Gluckman (?) | Public domain

William Smith O'Brien: Born Into the Establishment

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Bogman assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5. He was born at Dromoland in Newmarket-on-Fergus, County Clare, on 17 October 1803, the second son of Sir Edward O'Brien, 4th Baronet of Dromoland Castle. His mother was Charlotte Smith, whose family owned Cahermoyle in County Limerick. When William inherited that property, he add...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Bogman assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 2.5

William Smith O'Brien: Young Ireland

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Leech, Public domain. The break came slowly. In 1843 he joined Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association in protest at O'Connell's imprisonment, but O'Connell's commitment to constitutional methods and his rejection of any resort to force frustrated the younger members. When O'Connell and his son John for...

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Image: John Leech | Public domain

William Smith O'Brien: The Widow McCormack's Cabbage Patch

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Bogman assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5. The British government chose coercion. John Mitchel was convicted under new martial law measures, transported. On 9 July 1848 Gavan Duffy was arrested. The issue of the Nation that would have carried his call to arms was seized; the paper was suppressed. Planning fell to Smith O'...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Bogman assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 2.5

William Smith O'Brien: Tasmania, and Home

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jaqian, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 5 June 1849 the sentence was commuted to transportation for life to Van Diemen's Land - Tasmania, on the far side of the world. Smith O'Brien was held first on Maria Island, where he tried to escape by hiring a schooner whose captain, Ellis, betrayed him; he was then transferr...

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Image: Jaqian | CC BY-SA 3.0