He recovered, but was very shabbily treated by the Government, who only awarded him a miserably small pension, a niggardly act which aroused much dissatisfaction.
The Roman Catholic Bishop of Killarney, Doctor Moriarty, protested strongly against the cowardice of the Fenians, who were afraid to face one armed man, and waited until his back was turned before they shot him.
However, as I have indicated, the Fenian movement was very insignificant, and was known in all its aspects to the Government, which dealt pretty roughly with it.
It is a singular fact that in the Fenian councils Killarney should have been selected for the outbreak.
This is a town where nearly all the landed proprietors were Roman Catholics, where there was a Catholic Bishop, a monastery and two convents, while one half-ruined Protestant church sufficed to accommodate the few worshippers who sat under a dreary, inoffensive vicar on a very small salary. All reasonable folk, moreover, know that Killarney is the town to which, more than any other in Ireland, it is important to attract British tourists.
It was well known that some of the promoters and instigators of the movement betrayed it before its very inception to the Government; and Bishop Moriarty, from his pulpit, in his sermon alluded in no measured language to those criminals who instigated the innocent peasants to play a part in this mock insurrection, and then betrayed them.
He concluded:—
'It may be a hard saying, but surely hell is not too hot nor eternity too long for the punishment of such villainy.'
Yet the whole of Irish history is disfigured by the poisonous trail of the insidious informer.
I was in Kerry at the time of the Cahirciveen fizzle, in the neighbourhood of Dingle, and it was rumoured that the insurrection was to be general.