(1819–1877), revolutionary and translator. Born in Kilbeheny, Co. Limerick, and educated at TCD, he took part in the Young Ireland rising of 1848, fled to France, and went to join John Mitchel in New York in 1853. He issued a translation of Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn as The History of Ireland (1857), but the wholesale inclusion of notes from John O'Donovan's edition of the Annals of the Four Masters (1848–51) prevented its sale in Ireland. The work includes a commentary of his own comparing the modern struggle against English rule in Ireland with the ethos of the Fionn cycle, giving currency to the term most widely used for the Fenians. In 1859 he founded the Fenian Brotherhood, the American wing of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).
From The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature in Oxford Reference.