1848 was the year of revolutions across Europe. King Louis Philippe fell to the February Revolution in Paris and the Second Republic was proclaimed. From Berlin to Vienna to Rome to Prague to Budapest, absolutist governments were temporarily replaced by liberal administrations. Suffrage expanded. Constituent assemblies were elected to draft new national constitutions. Contemporaries called it the springtime of the peoples. Ireland in 1848 was still reeling from the Great Famine, the British government's response to which had been too little and too late. The Young Ireland movement -- which had broken away from Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association -- took an uncompromising stand for a national Parliament with full powers. Leaders William Smith O'Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher, and Richard O'Gorman travelled to Paris to congratulate the new French Republic. Meagher came home with a tricolour flag, the symbol of the reconciliation of the green of Catholic Gaelic Ireland with the orange of Protestant Anglo Ireland -- now the national flag.

On 16 July 1848, William Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and Michael Doheny gathered 50,000 people on the slopes of Slievenamon in County Tipperary. From 23 to 29 July, O'Brien, Meagher, and John Blake Dillon travelled from County Wexford through Kilkenny into Tipperary, raising the standard of revolt. On 28 July the last great gathering took place at the village of the Commons. On 29 July, with barricades erected near the Commons colliery to prevent his arrest, O'Brien waited with his local supporters -- miners, tradesmen, and small tenant farmers -- for the police and military. When the Callan police saw the barricades from a distance they veered right toward County Kilkenny, and the rebels followed across the fields. Sub-Inspector Trant and his 46 policemen took refuge in Margaret McCormack's two-storey farmhouse, taking her five young children inside as hostages. They pointed their guns from the windows and waited.

Margaret McCormack, the owner of the house and the mother of the children, demanded to be let in. The police refused. She found O'Brien outside and asked him what was to become of her children and her house. O'Brien went with her up to the parlour window and spoke through it to the constabulary inside. 'We are all Irishmen,' he said. 'Give up your guns and you are free to go.' He shook hands with some of the police through the window. The initial report to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland stated that a constable then fired the first shot at O'Brien while he was trying to negotiate. General firing followed. James Stephens and Terence Bellew MacManus, both wounded, dragged O'Brien out of the line of fire. The shooting went on for hours. Thomas Walsh was shot dead by police while crossing between the gate piers. Patrick McBride, who had been safe at the gable-end of the house, jumped up on the wall to rejoin his retreating companions and was fatally wounded. Father Philip Fitzgerald, the local Catholic priest, tried to mediate. When Cashel police reinforcements appeared over Boulea Hill, the rebels faded away.

John Mitchel, the most committed revolutionary among the Young Irelanders, had already been arrested earlier in 1848 and convicted on the purpose-built charge of treason-felony. He was transported first to Bermuda to work on the Royal Naval Dockyard, then to Van Diemen's Land (present-day Tasmania). After the Ballingarry collapse, William Smith O'Brien and Thomas Francis Meagher were arrested and joined him. John Blake Dillon, James Stephens, John O'Mahony, and Michael Doheny escaped to France. Meagher and Mitchel both eventually escaped to the United States, where they served on opposite sides in the American Civil War -- Meagher commanding the Union's Irish Brigade, Mitchel sending three sons to fight with the Confederacy. From Paris, James Stephens and John O'Mahony planned the next stage. In 1858 O'Mahony founded the Fenian Brotherhood in America. Stephens returned to Dublin and on St. Patrick's Day 1858 founded the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The McCormack farmhouse, owned by various families after 1848, was officially renamed Famine Warhouse 1848 by the State in 2004 and designated a national heritage monument.