How should we commemorate O’Donovan Rossa?

4 Dec 2014

Ideas on how best to commemorate the centenary of the death of the famous Cork Fenian, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa will be discussed at a public meeting in Rosscarbary, Friday 5 December, 7.30pm.

The public meeting will be held in the Celtic Ross Hotel, Rosscarbary, Co Cork  and all are welcome.

Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa was a famous Irish republican of the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who, in life and death, played a significant role in the campaign for Irish independence. He was a prominent activist and organiser of the Fenian movement in Ireland (and who, as a consequence, experienced extended, and controversial, periods of imprisonment in several British gaols) and his continuing political engagement with the Irish republican cause following his emigration to America marked him as an especially dangerous opponent of British government in Ireland. His death, and funeral, in the Summer of 1915 was, moreover, a key event in the build-up to the 1916 Easter Rising, with Pádraig Pearse’s oration at his graveside in Glasnevin cemetery widely considered to be one of the most significant speeches in modern Irish history.

The meeting – which is open to all who wish to attend – is designed to bring together all interested parties who wish to commemorate this major figure in Irish history, whose death and funeral marks one of the first of the major landmarks of the ‘decade of centenaries’ with a clear Cork connection.

For further information contact Gabriel Doherty, School of History, University College Cork, 021 4902783 (W), g.doherty@ucc.ie