Charles Kickham - Irish Republican Brotherhood

Irish Republican Brotherhood

After the failure at Ballingarry he had to conceal himself for some time, as a result of the part he had played in rousing the people of his native village to action. When the excitement had subsided, he returned to his father’s house, and resumed his interests in the sports of fishing and fowling, and spent much of his time in literary pursuits, for which he had great natural capacity and all the more inclined as a result of the accident. Some of the authors in which he was well versed were Tennyson and Dickens and he greatly admired George Eliot, and after Shakespeare, was Burns. In the autumn of 1857, a messenger, Owen Considine arrived from New York with a message for James Stephens from members of the Emmet Monument Association, calling on him to get up an organization in Ireland. On 23 December, Stephens dispatched Joseph Denieffe to America with his reply, and outlined his conditions and his requirements from the organisation in America. Denieffe returned on 17 March (St. Patrick's Day) 1858 with the acceptance of Stephens' terms and £80. That evening the Irish Republican Brotherhood commenced. Those present in Langan's, lathe-maker and timber merchant, 16 Lombard Street, for that first meeting were Stephens, Kickham, Thomas Clarke Luby, Peter Langan, Denieffe and Garrett O'Shaughnessy. Later it would include members of the Phoenix National and Literary Society, which was formed in 1856 by Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa in Skibbereen.