Remarks on receiving the John Boyle O’Reilly Literary Award
The Merrion Hotel, 10th July 2012
A Dhaoine Uaisle, is mór an onóir agus pléisiúr dom an Gradam Liteartha John Boyle O’Reilly a ghlacadh agus ba mhaith liom buíochas a ghabháil leis an gcoiste as an ócáid seo a chur ar siúl.
[Good evening ladies and gentlemen, it is a great personal pleasure that I accept this John Boyle O’Reilly Literary Award and I would like to sincerely thank the committee here this evening for hosting this occasion.]
I would like to compliment the committee on their efforts to encourage awareness and appreciation of the significant contribution of this great Irish intellectual, poet, author, orator and humanitarian from Dowth, Co Meath.
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of visiting the city of Boston, the adopted home of John Boyle O’Reilly; and I was pleased to note that there is an immense appreciation for this great man’s work and his outstanding legacy and contribution to the civil rights movement in the United States.
John Boyle O’Reilly’s literary work provides a remarkable insight into the past‚ the events of his personal life; he was born on 28 June 1844 in County Meath, the son of a schoolteacher William David O’Reilly and Eliza Boyle O’Reilly. The Methodist Reverend Louis Banks summarised O’Reilly’s life as follows:
“At thirteen a student in school in Drogheda, Ireland; at seventeen a stenographer in England; at nineteen a private soldier in the Irish Hussars; at twenty-two lying in a dungeon in Dublin, condemned to death for treason against Great Britain; at twenty-four a nameless convict in a criminal colony in Western Australia; at twenty-five in Philadelphia without friends and without money; at thirty a successful journalist and promising poet in Boston; and at thirty five the acknowledged leader of the Irish cause in America. ”
After a bold and daring escape from Australia he arrived in Boston in 1870 to experience a country in the midst of rapid transformation. Following its civil war, westward expansion and industrialisation were underway, the American Indians were struggling to survive, the exploitation of immigrants, Chinese, Irish and Jewish immigrants in particular, and the ongoing oppression of black Americans gripped the country that O’Reilly called his new home.
Writing from a perspective that supported the rights of these groups he rose through the ranks of journalism to secure a position as a respected newspaper editor.
He was a popular master of ceremonies when at events organized to welcome such Irish leaders as Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell when they visited America. Oscar Wilde came to America to ask O’Reilly to publish his mother’s poetry under the pseudonym “Speranza”. When WB Yeats travelled to America, he had one mission and that was to talk to O’Reilly about setting up a national theatre in Ireland.
On arrival in America, O’Reilly joined the Boston Pilot as an ambitious reporter – the paper well known as a voice for Irish Americans. During this time he is credited, through his articulate writing and passionate leadership, for influencing Boston’s transition to a multiracial, multiethnic city.
Later as co-owner of the Pilot he became one of the most influential Irish in America. He used the pages of the Boston paper to rally against racial and ethnic discrimination.
According to Susanna Ashton O’Reilly’s specialty was “uplifting verse, which, in simple couplets, would call out for freedom and against tyranny.” The renowned Hungarian-American the newspaper publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, commissioned him to write a poem for the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, which stands proudly at the mouth of New York’s Harbour.
As Ormond Waters tells us
“As Editor and part owner of the Boston Pilot O’Reilly established himself as a well known humanitarian, writer, poet and orator. He was elected President of the Papyrus Club and also of the Boston Press Club. Together with John Devoy and Henry Hathaway O’ Reilly arranged for the purchase and fitting out of the ‘Catalpa’, on behalf of Glan Na Gael. On 28 March 1876 the ‘Catalpa’ under Captain George Anthony dropped anchor at Bunbury. The daring rescue of six of the ten remaining Military Fenians from Fremantle Prison, via Rockingham beach took place on Easter Monday 17 April, 1876. ”
The ‘Catalpa’ expedition is a testament to the value John Boyle O’Reilly placed on solidarity and friendship. Over time he became known as “a champion of the people” and he befriended noted Americans such as Mark Twain and the anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass. Importantly, he offered the columns of his newspaper to Douglass and invited him to march proudly in Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Agus mé ag déanamh óráid in Halla Faneuil níos luaithe sa bhliain cuireadh Gorta Mór na hÉireann i gcuimhne dom. Ar ndóigh cuireadh in iúl dom gurbh iomaí óráid stairiúil a thug John Boyle O’Reilly sa Halla céanna sna 1880idí.
[As I waited to deliver a speech in Faneuil Hall earlier this year, reflecting on the Gorta Mór, the Great Famine of Ireland, I was reminded by my hosts that Faneuil Hall was the historical setting that John Boyle O’Reilly gave many historic speeches in the late 1880s.]
Appalled at the discrimination he found in Nashville in which washroom facilities were segregated by colour, O’Reilly thundered in one of his famous Faneuil Hall speeches in 1885:
“So long as American citizens and their children are excluded from schools, theatres, hotels or common conveyances, there ought not to be and there is not among those who love justice and liberty, any questions of race, or creed, or colour: every heart that beats for humanity beats with the oppressed. The sympathy of the world is with you, and the time is not distance when you will tear down that infamous inscription from the Nashville depot. ”
Some observers believe O’Reilly’s role during that time was both Irish and American, both Catholic and Protestant. O’Reilly’s close friend, the Unitarian Minister, Thomas Wentworth Higginson said that O’Reilly’s success laid in his ability to be both “so good an American, but steadily and underneath it all an Irishman too” and that “through his life and in his spirit he kept the green-flag waving beside the stars and stripes.”
O’Reilly was a poet and a prophet who yearned for and worked for a new kind of Boston where equality and dignity would prevail. His life and vision have deep contemporary resonance for us as we struggle today to create an inclusive society based on participation, equality, respect for all and the flowering of creativity in all its forms.
We, no more than O’Reilly and his contemporaries, are called to combat the social exclusion of the poor and vulnerable populations such as women, migrants, travellers and to turn around the corrosive economic inequality that has taken hold and continues to grow. The challenges faced by O’Reilly to define and create a form of economy that is ethical, a kind of society in which economics, politics and society are not mutually exclusive but integrated in a way that all people can flourish, realise their potential, live as free and equal human beings remain and are, as I speak, acute.
John Boyle O’Reilly was both Irish and American but more than this: his world was his country and mankind was his kin, and he sought to make the world a fairer and more humane place and to many people he became a great beacon of hope. He had a profound confidence in the power of the written word; in clear and honest journalism and in public debate as the fuel of social progress.According to Ashton, O’Reilly “had a fervent belief in the arts themselves as bridging the gap between the powerful and the powerless.” Underpinning O’Reilly’s literary work on behalf of the Irish Land League and the Irish National League and his relentless commitment to civil rights were deeply held beliefs in the intrinsic value of each individual and their human dignity; and it is these ideals that were and will always be worth striving for.
The appreciation O’Reilly’s contribution goes of course, beyond these shores, and beyond the Irish community in the US. Writing in the Journal of Negro History in 1966 John R Betts said of O’Reilly
“in 1870 a young, fiery idealistic Irishman, a refugee from an Australian prison camp, arrived on the Boston scene, assumed a reportorial and then an editorial role on the diocesan paper, and soon reawakened the Boston community to the Negro’s plight. An ardent Irish nationalist and Roman Catholic, John Boyle O’Reilly came to champion the underprivileged and the weak -the working man, the orphan, the female house servant, the new immigrant, the Indian, the Jew, and the Negro.”
O’Reilly’s poem on the death of his friend and the great abolitionist Wendell Phillips, sets out his vision:
“There are no classes or races,
But one human brotherhood.
There are no creeds to outlaw,
No colors of skin debarred.
Mankind is one in its rights and wrongs.
One right, one hope, one guard.
The right to be free, the hope to be just,
and the guard against selfish greed.”John Boyle O’Reilly spent his life observing and reporting on his surroundings. In today’s world of social media, Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In we can record that this young Irish American was ahead of his time, when he became editor of the Boston Pilot he saw the need to use the publication to engage, motivate and challenge the reader.
He pioneered a method of advertising where-in when the new Irish landed in America, they could make contact with a former neighbour, friend or family member by placing an ad in his paper looking to make contact and in return leave their contact details. In the late 1800s this approach was not only groundbreaking in the publication world it was central to reuniting Irish families, ensuring the safety, and indeed saving lives of those who without the support of their family and friends, may well have perished in their new surroundings. In the period 1831 – 1850, some 5,655 ‘missing persons’ from Ireland were sought in the Boston Pilot columns.O’Reilly’s sudden death in 1890 at 46 years of age, “a profound emotion swept over America” and the New York Metropolitan Opera House was filled to capacity with those mourning his death. In 1896 the John Boyle O’Reilly Memorial was erected at the intersection of Boylston Street and Westmoreland Street in Fenway. Today the Memorial is part of Boston’s Irish Heritage Trail providing a lasting tribute to the O’Reilly’s unique and bold leadership.
As Susanna Ashton has reflected, O’Reilly situated his novel Moondyne (1878) beyond the context of the Australian penal system, and beyond the Irish land question. He positioned the novel in the context of how America itself might be a model for how cultures could work together. She notes:
“Moondyne takes on the question of prison justice, yes. And it certainly poses questions about the United States. But it also asks its readers how we might imagine models for cooperation among seemingly irreconcilable enemies. ”
In his writings he provided images of the romantic‚ the real‚ the opportunities and challenges confronting his rapidly changing world. In remembering his life and reflecting on his works‚ we find an original thinker, a courageous, bold, spirited man, one with the kind of audacity we need to cultivate today in Ireland if we are to truly transform our society into the kind of equal, humane, ethical Ireland of which we can be proud.
Once again ladies and gentlemen it was a great pleasure to have been invited here this evening, and I am delighted and proud to accept the John Boyle O’Reilly Literary Award.