The New International Encyclopædia/O'Mahony, John Francis

O'MAHONY, ō̇-mä′ō̇-nē̇, John Francis (1816-77). An Irish politician, born at Kilbeheny, County Limerick. He received a good education at a classical school in Cork and at Trinity College, Dublin, though he never took a degree. Early in his career he became deeply impressed with a sense of the wrongs of Ireland, and practically his whole life was devoted to efforts to free her. He was a ‘repealer,’ but was more radical than O'Connell, and in 1845 seceded with the ‘Young Irelanders.’ He joined in the insurrection of Smith O'Brien in 1848, and after its failure fled to France, where he lived for some years in great poverty. In 1852 he went to New York, and there in 1858 was a member of the committee that sent a delegate to James Stephens in Dublin with proposals for the founding of the secret society later known as the Fenian Brotherhood. O'Mahony was one of the most active and influential promoters of the organization, and was for a time its president. In his later years he had a hard struggle to secure the bare means for subsistence. He died in New York in 1877, and his body was taken back to Ireland and buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, near Dublin, with great honors. In 1857 he published The History of Ireland by Geoffrey Keating, D.D., Translated from the Gaelic and Copiously Annotated. Consult Webb, Irish Biography (Dublin, 1888), and articles in the Celtic Magazine (New York).