After publishing five issues of the Irish Felon Martin was arrested,
tried and sentenced to fourteen years penal servitude in Tasmania (then Van Dieman's Land)
for conspiring 'to depose her most gracious Majesty and to levy war against her.'
Martin was pardoned in 1854 after which he travelled to Paris where he lived for two years
before returning to Ireland to become a national organiser of the Tenant League.
In 1866 Martin was tried and acquitted of sedition after addressing a League
gathering. In 1869 he emigrated to America but returned to Ireland in 1871 and was elected
to Parliament for Meath. In 1873 Martin became Secretary of
Issac Butt's Home Rule League. Martin was elected to Parliament for Tipperary
shortly before his death in 1875.
This extract is from Martin's article in the first issue of the Irish Felon, June 24th, 1848.©
At the time when John Mitchel lay in Newgate Prison, expecting what fate Lord Clarendon's
'loaded dice' might bring, I stated it as my opinion that if the Irish people permitted the
English ministry to consummate his legal murder, the national cause would be ruined for
this generation. The transportation of a man, as a felon, for uttering sentiments held and
professed by at least five-sixths of his countrymen, seemed to me so violent and so
insulting a national wrong, that submission to it must be taken to signify incurable
slavishness. The English Government, the proclaimed enemy of our nationality, had
deliberately selected John Mitchel to wreck their vengeance upon him, as representative of
the Irish nation. By indicting him for a 'felony' they virtually indicted five-sixths of
the Irish people for 'felony'. By sentencing him to fourteen years transportation to a
penal settlement, they pronounced five-sixths of the Irish people guilty of a crime worthy
of such punishment; and they declared that every individual of the six million of Irish
Repealers who escapes a similar doom, escapes it not through right and law, but through
the mercy or at the discretion of the English minister.
The audacity of our tyrants must be acknowledged. They occupy our country with military
force, in our despite, making barracks of our very marts and colleges, as if to defy and
challenge any manly pride that might linger among our youth.
They pervert our police force into an organisation of street bullies, as if to drive all
peace-loving industrious citizens into the ranks of disaffection.
They insult the poor dupes of 'legal and Constitutional' agitation, and rudely open their
eyes to the real nature of foreign rule by such an outrage upon public decency and justice
as this 'trial' aggravated as it must be by the official meanness, brutality, hypocrisy and
perjury, requisite for effecting their object. They took measures to provoke the active
hostility of all Irishmen who loved justice, or respected religion. They defied and
challenged all parties of the Irish people; and I did not think that such a challenge
could not honourably or prudently be refused, and that the abject submission of the Irish
people in that matter might destroy the national cause for this generation...
I do not love political agitation for its own sake - at the best I regard it as a necessary
evil; and if I were not convinced that my countrymen are determined on vindicating their
rights, and that they really intend to free themselves, I would at once withdraw from the
struggle and leave my native land forever. Not that I have any sympathy with the canard
(sometimes uttered even by Repealers) that the Irish people are 'unfit', or 'not yet fit'
for freedom - because, forsooth, we exhibit faults of national character proper to an
enslaved people. No, if we are often times boastful, suspicious, selfish, cowardly,
'leader-ridden', there is more urgent need for national independence to cure us of those
slave vices.
To talk of a people fitting themselves for national freedom while in a state of slavery,
is not less silly than to talk of people fitting themselves for slavery while in a state
of freedom.
The way for an enslaved people to fit themselves for freedom is to assume freedom. The
proof is given that they are fit when they liberate themselves. Not from such silly
'disgust' at the slave's vices of my countrymen, would I desert my native land.
But I could not live in Ireland and derive my means of life as a member of the Irish
community, without feeling a citizen's responsibility in Irish public affairs. And those
responsibilities involve the guilt of national robbery and murder - of a system which
arrays the classes of our people against each others' prosperity and very lives, like
beasts of prey, or rather like famishing sailors on a wreck - of the debasement and moral
ruin of a people endowed by God with surpassing resources for the attainment of human
happiness and human dignity.
I cannot be loyal to a system of meanness, terror and corruption although it usurps the
title and assume the form of a 'Government'. So long as such a 'Government' presumes to
insult and injure me and those in whose prosperity I am involved, I must offer it all the
resistance in my power. But if I despaired of successful resistance I would certainly
remove myself from under such a Government's actual authority. That I do not exile myself,
is a proof that I hope to witness the overthrow and assist in the overthrow of that
abominable tyranny the world now groans under - the British imperial system.
To gain permission from the Irish people to care for their own lives, their own happiness
and dignity - to abolish the political conditions which compel the classes of our people
to hate and murder each other and which compel the Irish people to hate the very name of
the English - to end the reign of fraud, perjury, corruption and 'Government' butchery and
to make law, order and peace possible in Ireland the Irish Felon takes it place among the
combatants in the holy war now waging in this island against foreign tyranny.
In conducting it my weapons shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,
so help me God.
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