Life
1807-1849; b. Tinakill [var. Tenakill, Queen’s Co.], Co. Laois, son of Patrick Lalor [‘gentleman’], radical MP
and anti-tithe activist of the 1830s; d.
privately and at Carlow Lay College, contracted spinal disease resulting
in hunch-back appearance and reclusive habits; supported radical land-reform
rather than Repeal of the Union; wrote to Pitt indicating that a settlement
of the Repeal agitation could be reached if land agreement were reached
first (i.e., took anti-Repeal stand); experienced rift with his father;
wrote to Peel in 1843 offering to supply information towards suppression of Repeal movement; lived precariously in Dublin but returned home in ill-health, 1846; contributed
series of letters to The Nation, 1847, advocating ‘the land
of Ireland for the people of Ireland’; became known as the most extreme
member of Young Ireland and the chief influence on Mitchel (probably oblivious
to his stand on Repeal); not supported by Charles Gavan Duffy or William
Smith O’Brien; involved in unsuccessful attempts to organise tenant
rights associations in Kilkenny and Tipperary with Michael Doheny; failed
also to organise rent strike; co-ed., with John Martin, The Irish Felon,
June 1848; arrested at Templederry, Co. Tipperary, July 1848; Tenants’
Protection Societies, established under his influence by Frs. O’Shea
and O’Keeffe, Callan, Co. Tipperary 1849, triggering evictions of
four hundred tenants in Earl of Derwent’s Callan estate, and 100,000
country-wide; Lalor released with bad health, Nov. 1849; stayed with Fr.
John Kenyon in Templederry; joined O’Leary, Kickham, and others in
Waterford-Tipperary secret organisation; prepared another rising at Cashel,
19 Sept., but sent the small rally home; d. 27 Dec.; bur. Glasnevin; a
younger br., Peter, was active in the labour movement and held office
in the Victoria administration; Eamon de Valera quoted Lalor at Bodenstown,
25 June 1925. JMC IF DNB DIW DIB DIH RAF FDA OCIL
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Works
The Writings of James Fintan Lalor, With an Introduction embodying Personal
Recollections by John O’Leary, and a Brief Memoir by O’D[...]
(Dublin: T. G. O’Donoghue 1895); Nathaniel Marlowe, ed., James
Fintan Lalor, Collected Writings (Dublin: Maunsel 1918) [var. 1916];
James Fintan Lalor, Patriot and Political Essayist, 1807-1849,
pref. note by Arthur Griffith ([Dublin: Talbot] 1918) [var. 1921], reiss.
as James Fintan Lalor, Patriot and Political Essayist, 1807-1849: Collected
Writings; with a biographical note by L. Fogarty (Dublin: Talbot 1947),
147pp., front. port.; James Connolly, ed., The Rights of Ireland and
the Faith of a Felon ... and an introduction by James Connolly
(Dublin: Socialist Party of Ireland n.d.).
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Criticism
L. M. Fogarty, James Fintan Lalor, Patriot and Political Essayist,
1807-1849. With a preface by Arthur Griffith (Dublin: Maunsel 1918).
T. P. O’Neill, ‘Fintan Lalor and the 1849 Movement’ An Cosantóir, The Irish Defence Journal, X, No. 4 (April 1950), pp.173-79.
Tomás Ó Néill, Fiontán Ó Leathlobhair (Cló Morainn 1962).
Thomas P. O’Neill, ‘James Fintan Lalor’, in Thomas Davis Lectures, ed., J. W. Boyle (Cork: Mercier Press 1966) [q.pp.].
Asa Briggs, ‘Fergus O’Connor and J Bronterre O’Brien’, in J. W. Boyle, ed., Thomas Davis Lectures (Cork 1966).
David N. Buckley, James Fintan Lalor, Radical (Cork UP 1990), 124pp.
Thomas P. O’Neill, James Fintan Lalor,trans. by John T. Goulding (Wexford: Golden Publications 2003), 223pp., ill., facs., maps, ports.
Maurice Lenihan, ‘Reminiscences of a Journalst’, Limerick Reporter and Tipperary Vindicator, 1866, 1867, and 1870; &c. Bibl. as supra.
Tomás Ó Néill, ‘The Papers of James Fintan lalor in the National Library’, in Irish Book Lover, XXX (Jan. 1948).
Tomás Ó Néill, ‘Fintan Lalor andthe 1849 Movement’, in An Cosantóir: The Irish Defence Journal, X, No. 4 (April 1950).
Tomás Ó Néill, ‘The economic and political ideas of James Fintan Lalor’, in Irish Eccles. Record, Vol. LXXIV Nov. 1950).
Tomás Ó Néil, ‘James Fintan Lalor’, in J. W. Boyle, ed., Leaders and Workers (Cork 1966).
Seamus Deane, ‘Landlords and soil: Davitt, Lalor’ [sect. of], ‘National Character’, in Strange Country: Modernity and the Nation in Irish Writing Sicne 1790 (OUP 1997), pp.75-78.
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Notes
Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (1904), b. Tinakil,
nr. Dublin [sic]; ed privately; hunchback, shy, purblind, obstinate and
proud, shy and suspicious; hater of tyranny; contributor to press [Nation
&c.] at arrest of Mitchel; went to Dublin at suppression of The
United Irishman to edit The Irish Felon; imprisoned for bold
opinions; d. 27 Dec., health shattered by imprisonment; buried Glasnevin.
gives extract from article (‘The Soil of Ireland for the people of
Ireland’; as infra); ‘The Faith of a Felon’ (Irish Felon,
8 July 1848), ‘the English conquest consisted of two parts ... conquest
of our liberties, the conquest of our lands/I saw clearly the re-conquest
of our liberties would be incomplete and worthless without the re-conquest
of our lands ... The lands were owned by the conquering race, or by traitors
to the conquered race. They were occupied by the native people, or by
settlers who had mingled and merged./I selected, as the mode of re-conquest,
to refuse payment of rent, to resist process of ejectment./In that mode
I determined to effect the re-conquest, and staked on it all my hopes,
here and hereafter - my hopes of an effective life and an eternal epitaph.
[After a history of his relations with the Repeal and Young Ireland parties,
he goes on to state four ‘opinions’ [I-IV] in the manner of
Gavan Duffy’s creed of the Nation - the last of them, at greater
length, containing the remarks on the eight million and eight thousand;
also ‘Ulster is not merely conquered but colonised ... &c.]’
Dictionary of National Biography lists Finton Lalor [sic Shorter]; prominent in revolutionary circles, 1847-48; ed. Irish Felon, 1848.
R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland (London: Allen Lane 1988), bio-note records: b. Queen’s Co., son of radical MP of 1832-5; crippled; ed. Carlow Coll., letter to Peel urging land nationalization to supress Repeal agitation, 1845, and later swung to physical-force independence movement; wrote for The Nation, 1846-7; fnd. Tenant League in Tipperary, 1845; ed. the Irish Felon, June 1848; arrested, and released in poor health, continuing to urge a rising, which amounted to an attack on a Waterford police barracks in Sept. 1849. ALSO, Foster (Modern Ireland, p.381), To take the most radical and least representative formulation ... the cogent broadises of JF Lalor in the late 1840s set the tone for later land agitators; begining with unrealistic and grandeloquent appeals to landlords to join the neo-Yougn Irelanders in 1828, he rapidly moved on (in his irish felon letters) to demonstrating that the Irish land question was an issue between ‘a class and a people’. [Foster mentions a ‘mysterious visit he may have made to France in 1827, and compares this sould wtih the ‘debased German romanticism of average Young Ireland.’] Independence for the farming class must be the basis of national independence, and must precede it; in a memorably metaphor, it would be the engine that would drag national independence in its train.//Whether or not Lalor was correct, his tactics were prescient [of the] no-rent strike and boycott advocated by ideologues for a tenantry ... Lalor’s own rising of 1849 was a hiccup .[…] (Foster, op. cit., p.315.)
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 2 selects ‘A New Nation, Proposal for an Agricultural Association between the Landowners and Occupiers’, a letter addressed to Gavan Duffy, [in] The Nation, 24 April 1847, creating a left-wing in Ireland by linking the ideas of nationalism and social revolution [165-72]; extracts from The Irish Felon [172-75]; had not known Davis [Deane, ed.], 117; they [Davis, Meagher, Lalor, and Mitchel] conducts his arguments on the level dictated by the forces which [they] feel oppressed ... they want to be on a par with them; they want ‘Celt’ to be equivalent to, if also different from, ‘Anglo-Saxon’. They do not oppose the racism by which they are humiliated [ibid.], 119; Lalor’s warning unheeded by landlord’s but heeded by government [ibid.], 120; with Mitchel’s genocide theory, his land-tenure revolution plea on of the key Young Ireland contributions with 20th century consequences, 121; [Davitt, 201-02]; Fenians influence in physical force policy by [Deane, ed.], 209; Davitt’s Fall of Feudalism completes what Lalor and Mitchel had begun - a campaign against the garrison ascendancy of landed proprietors [ibid], 212; principals more radical than Gavan Duffy’s [ibid.], 276[n]; preached doctrine that ownership ‘is vested in the people of Ireland’ [ibid.], 280[n]; , Pearse puts him in the tradition of Tone, 294; cited as political essayist by Thomas McDonagh (1916), 991; cited by Frederick Ryan as unhindered by being English-speaking, 999; 206, BIOG, b. Tenakill, Queen’s Co. (Laois); father prominent in 1830s anti-tithe movement and MP in 1832-35; congenital spinal disease, deaf, near-sighted and deformed; broke with his father, who supported O’Connell and the Repeal Association, and reconciled in 1846; began publishing series of letters in The Nation, Jan 1847, advocating land confiscation; failed rent strike, 1847-48; John Martin started The Felon as successor to Mitchel’s United Irishman, and Lalor ran it almost single-handedly at Martin’s arrest (5 numbers); arrested 1848; released in ill-health after some months; attempted to organise another rebellion in 1849, and died shortly after its failure. BIOG & COMM [as supra]. FDA3, Bulmer Hobson describes finding Lalor’s theory of ‘moral insurrection’, and effectively describing the defensive tactics of guerrilla war, 503; hoped to change the perennial defeats of the ‘Celts’ with Lalor’s policy, 506-507; [O’Faolain, 572]; [Pearse, ‘This gospel of the Sovereign People that Fintan Lalor delivered is the shortest of the gospels’ (in The Sovereign People, p.346; quoted Fr. F. Shaw, 1972), 593.
Henry Boylan, A Dictionary of Irish Biography [rev. edn.] (Gill & Macmillan 1988), incls. notice on his brother Peter Lalor (1823-89), ed. TCD, who became a prospector in Australia at Eureka find and led miners in the encounter at Eureka Stockade, 3 Dec. 1854, losing an arm; later MP for Ballarat; govt. posts, and Speaker of Australian Parliament, 1880-88; grant of £4,000. d. Melbourne, 10 Feb. See also F. L. S. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (1971).
Durance vile: Lalor was arrested under Suspension of Habeas Corpus
Act, in 1848; his letters to The Nation, signed ‘James F.
Lalor, residing in a village in Queen’s County’ [Laoise]. (See Field Day Anthology, 1991, Vol. 2.)
Andrew Merry [Andrew Melrose], The Hunger—Being Realities of the Famine years in Ireland, 1845 to 1848 (1910), contains portrait of Lalor as “The People’s Larry”. (See ‘Reviews’, in The Irish Book Lover, Vol. I, No. 11, June 1910, p.151.)
Ulster Libraries: Belfast Central Public Library holds Writings (1895); Collected Writings (1947).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)