Thomas Clarke Luby - Irish Republican Brotherhood

Irish Republican Brotherhood

In the autumn of 1857 Owen Considine arrived with a message signed by four Irish exiles in the United States, two of whom were John O'Mahony and Michael Doheny. The message conveyed the confidence they had in Stephen’s and asking him to establish an organization in Ireland to win national independence. Considine also carried a private letter from O’Mahony to Stephen’s which was a warning, and which was overlook by Luby and Stephens at the time. Both believed that there was a strong organisation behind the letter, only later to find it was rather a number of loosely linked groups. On the 23 December Stephens dispatched Joseph Denieffe to America with his reply which was disguised as a business letter, and dated and addressed from Paris. In his reply Stephen’s outline his conditions and his requirements from the organisation in America.

On 17 March 1858, Denieffe arrived in Dublin with the acceptance of Stephens’s terms by the New York Committee and the eighty pounds. Denieffe’s report that there was no actual organized body of sympathizers in New York but merely a loose knot of associates disturbed Stephens went ahead regardless, and that very evening the Irish Republican Brotherhood was established, in Peter Langan’s timber-yard in Lombard Street. Luby’s description of the event in a letter to John O’Leary in 1890 was that immediately after the return of Denieffe, "at once Stephens began organizing. I had already made some provisional trips into Meath county; but ‘twas on Patrick’s Day 1858, that the I.R.B. movement was formally commenced. I drew up the form of oath, under Stephens’s correction, in his room at Dennelly’s, in the street behind and parallel to Lombard Street. The first text had clauses of secrecy and of obedience to all commands of superior officers not immoral. I swore Stephens in and he swore me." The original I.R.B. oath, as quoted by Luby and O’Leary, and which is among several versions in Stephens’s own papers, ran:

This oath was significantly revised by Stephens in Paris in the summer of 1859. He asked Luby to draw up a new text, omitting the secrecy clause. The omitting of the secrecy clause was outlined in a letter from Stephens to O'Mahony on the 6 April 1859 and the reasons for it. Henceforth,’ wrote Luby to O’Leary "we denied that we were technically a secret body. We called ourselves a military organization; with, so to speak, a legionary oath like all soldiers."

The revised oath ran: