Thomas Francis Meagher (/mɑːr/ MAR; 3 August 1823 – 1 July 1867) was an Irish nationalist and leader of the Young Irelanders in the Rebellion of 1848. After being convicted of sedition, he was first sentenced to death but received transportation for life to Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in Australia.
In 1852, Meagher escaped and made his way to the United States, where he settled in New York City. He studied law, worked as a journalist, and traveled to present lectures on the Irish cause.
The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC, Irish: Constáblacht Ríoga na hÉireann; simply called the Irish Constabulary 1836–67) was the police force in Ireland between 1822 and 1922, when all of the island was part of the United Kingdom. A separate civic police force, the unarmed Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), patrolled the capital, while the cities of Derry and Belfast, originally with their own police forces, later had special divisions within the RIC. For most of its history, the ethnic and religious makeup of the RIC broadly matched that of the Irish population, although Anglo-Irish Protestants were overrepresented among its senior officers.
The RIC was under the authority of the British administration in Ireland. It was a quasi-military police force. Unlike police elsewhere in the United Kingdom, RIC constables were routinely armed (including with carbines) and billeted in barracks, and the force had a militaristic structure. It policed Ireland during a period of agrarian unrest and Irish nationalist activity. It was used to quell civil unrest during the Tithe War, the Young Irelander Rebellion, the Fenian Rising, the Land War, and the Irish revolutionary period.
John Francis O'Mahony (1815 – 7 February 1877) was an Irish scholar and the founding member of the Fenian Brotherhood in the United States, a sister organisation to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Despite coming from a reasonably wealthy family and being well educated, the primary pursuit of O'Mahoney's life was that of Irish Independence from the United Kingdom, a calling that ultimately left him in poverty. O'Mahony fought in the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 as well as the American Civil War, and was involved organisationally in the Fenian Rising of 1867 in Ireland and the Fenian Raids on Canada.