James Fintan Lalor

Extracted from "Wolfe Tone Annual" 1939

He was born at Tenakill, in Laois on March 10, 1807, the eldest of eleven sons, all of whom were strong, active, robust, while he was deformed having suffered from a disease of the spine which retarded his growth, but mentally he was head and shoulders above all his brothers. His father, Pat Lalor, was what has been known as a "gentleman farmer", an honest, sincere man in politics and at one time a staunch supporter of O'Connell. He retired in disgust from public life when he saw the great movement on which his hopes were set sink down into a refuge for the-servers, knaves, and placemen. James Fintan Lalor, was not one of the Young Ireland Party, and he criticised them openly and strongly in their own paper, the Nation. He had a genuine admiration for Mitchel, and became a friend of Duffy, but Tone and Davis were his guiding stars. When Mitchel was arrested and sentenced to twenty years transportation beyond the seas and called a felon by his and Ireland's enemies, Lalor joined John Martin in carrying on Mitchel's paper, the United Irishman under the significant title of the Irish Felon. Gavan Duffy later sought to show in a manner that did him no credit, that Lalor had no use for Mitchel. This is absolutely untrue. He wrote of the "felon": -"John Mitchel, between whom and myself there was from the first an almost perfect agreement. May his spirit live amongst us!" And when the Irish Felon was suppressed and those connected with it prosecuted, one of the items in it which offended Dublin Castle and was cited in court was A Song for the Future, written by young John Mitchel, son of the "felon", a boy not ten years old!

Lalor was arrested in the summer of 1848, imprisoned in Nenagh Jail, and then transferred to Newgate Prison in Dublin. His health, never good, was permanently shattered in the close confinement, but as soon as his release came, he gathered a few comrades around him where he lived in Capel St. in Dublin, and began to plan for insurrection. He became intimate with John O'Leary and Thomas Clarke Luby, who were destined to become leaders of the Fenian Movement, and with them and John Savage and Joseph Brenan he led an attempted Rising in Waterford and Tipperary in September 1849. There was a partial rally, but it proved a failure, as failures are counted in this world. But Lalor was satisfied that it perpetuated, even flickeringly, the flame of revolt against British rule in Ireland. A little over three months later he was in his grave. The imprisonment, the restless planning and working and writing had told on the weak frame, and on December 27, 1849, James Fintan Lalor, one of the greatest of the great lovers of Ireland, was carried to his last resting place in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

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