The century that followed the rebellion of 1798 and Robert Emmet’s rising of 1803 belonged, on its surface, to constitutional nationalism. Daniel O’Connell’s mass movements for Catholic Emancipation and Repeal, and later the disciplined parliamentary campaign for Home Rule under Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell, set the terms of Irish political life and commanded the loyalty of the great majority. The separatist tradition, the conviction that a sovereign Irish Republic could not be granted at Westminster but must be taken, was for most of this period the creed of a determined minority, defeated in the field and marginalised in public life.
1804-1899
Yet it endured. The Young Irelanders, who broke from O’Connell over the question of force, carried the ideal through the failed rising of 1848 and into the pages of journals like The Nation, where a generation learned to think of Ireland as a nation entitled to independence rather than concession. From the ashes of that failure came the Irish Republican Brotherhood, founded in 1858, and with it a movement that was secret, oath-bound, and organised on both sides of the Atlantic. The Fenian rising of 1867 was suppressed as comprehensively as those before it, but the executions and imprisonments that followed, and the martyrology they produced, did more to sustain the tradition than any victory could have. Defeat, transmitted through memory and commemoration, became the means by which separatism passed from one generation to the next.
The Shan Van Vocht
1900-1909
By the closing decades of the century the tradition was being renewed from new directions. The Gaelic Athletic Association, founded in 1884, and the Gaelic League, founded in 1893, set out to reclaim an Irish identity in sport and language, and in doing so created the cultural ground from which a more confident separatism would grow. A new separatist press emerged to give it voice, of which Arthur Griffith’s United Irishman, launched in 1899, was among the most influential, while the IRB worked quietly within these movements to keep the older revolutionary purpose alive. By 1909, with a younger generation coming of age, the inheritance was ready to be carried into the revolutionary years that followed. The documents in this section trace that long line of continuity: the persistence, across more than a century, of an idea that constitutional politics never satisfied and repeated defeat never extinguished.
 The United Irishman (Feb 1900) |  Maingín Scéal – Padraic Pearse |  The Workers Republic (1898) |
 An Macaom (Christmas 1909) |
A note on this section: the surviving material gathered here is more modest than that of the periods on either side of it. Much of the separatist movement of the nineteenth century operated in secret, in exile, or under the constant threat of suppression, and far less of its printed record has come down to us than survives from the revolutionary decades that followed. The items collected here should therefore be read as fragments of a much larger story, representative of the tradition’s endurance rather than a complete account of it. The archive welcomes contributions from anyone holding material from or about this period.
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