Fenian
leader and prominent member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood
. His life as an Irish Fenian is well documented but he is perhaps known best in death for the graveside oration
given at his funeral by Pádraig Pearse.
He was born at Rosscarbery
, County Cork
, to Denis O'Donovan and Nellie O'Driscoll, a family of tenant farmers, but in correspondence with the eminent scholar John O'Donovan
the two arrived at the conclusion that Rossa's ancestors belonged to the admittedly long obscure but ancient sliocht of the MacEnesles or Clan Aneslis O'Donovans.
This rooting out of the Irish people; this transplanting of them from their native home into a foreign land, may be all very well, so far as the young people are concerned; but for the fathers and mothers who have reared families in Ireland, it is immediate decay and death.
The one enemy in the world that America has is England. But then, England is the great land of Christian civilization, and it may not be a thing to be much wondered at that our Americans whom we send to represent us in London become in a short time somewhat civilized, and learn to love those who hate them, bless those that curse them, and do good to those that persecute and calumniate them.
It is in that English Parliament the chains for Ireland are forged, and any Irish patriot who goes into that forge to free Ireland will soon find himself welded into the agency of his country’s subjection to England.