Kildare County Council is delighted to announce the donation of John Devoy\u2019s chair to its County Archives. \u00a0The chair was donated by Frank MacGabhann, a grand nephew of Alice Cumiskey (n\u00e9e Carragher) and Lily Carragher, who cared for John Devoy in his final years in the United States. It was transported to Ireland earlier this year, with assistance from the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Irish Consulate in New York and the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport.<\/p>\n
The chair will be available for public viewing at the annual John Devoy Commemoration in Naas Library and Cultural Centre on 25 September at 7pm. All welcome to this free event. Refreshments from 6.30pm.<\/p>\n
This annual event, organised by the Friends of John Devoy, is held to commemorate the renowned Fenian in the county of his birth. The event will be opened by the Cathaoirleach of the County of Kildare, Cllr. Carmel Kelly, with guest speaker, Frank MacGabhann whose aunt, Alice, donated Devoy\u2019s papers to the National Library of Ireland in 1938. She revealed to Frank that she was among the few individuals Devoy had confided in about the 1916 Rising beforehand. \u00a0A short film by Donal Higgins, John Devoy: the Greatest of the Fenians, will also be shown.<\/p>\n
This year marks ten years since the unveiling of a statue of John Devoy at Poplar Square, Naas, on 25 October 2015, by the then Cathaoirleach of the County of Kildare and the U.S. Ambassador. This was the first of Kildare County Council\u2019s Decade of Commemorations flagship projects, in partnership with the Kildare Association of New York.<\/p>\n
\u2018John Devoy was born in 1842 at Kill, Co. Kildare, in a small cottage on the main road from Naas to Dublin.\u00a0 He died in America in 1928, having given almost seventy years of his life to secure the freedom of Ireland.\u00a0 The task which he shouldered was that which had been undertaken by numbers of previous generations, the breaking of English power in Ireland.<\/em> \u00a0Devoy\u2019s time as an active Fenian in Ireland was short; his time as an exile in America was, on the other hand, extremely long.\u00a0 The peculiar quality of tenacity he possessed served him as Fenian soldier, Fenian prisoner and Fenian exile. <\/em><\/p>\n At Easter, 1916, John Devoy announced the declaration of the Irish Republic to a large gathering of Irish people in New York.\u00a0 Tears of joy streamed down his face. He was the Fenian \u2013 almost the only one, certainly the greatest one \u2013 who lived long enough to see the fruits of freedom. He died in 1928 and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.\u2019<\/em> (Michael Smyth, 1964)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kildare County Council is delighted to announce the donation of John Devoy\u2019s chair to its County Archives. \u00a0The chair was donated by Frank MacGabhann, a grand nephew of Alice Cumiskey (n\u00e9e Carragher) and Lily Carragher, who cared for John Devoy in his final years in the United States. It was transported to Ireland earlier this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":7697,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,121,118],"tags":[71,193,90],"class_list":["post-7696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-decade-of-centenaries","category-news-events-2","category-people","tag-decade-of-commemorations","tag-john-devoy","tag-naas"],"blocksy_meta":[],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Devoy-2025-600x400.png","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Devoy-2025-600x600.png","author_info":{"display_name":"Karel Kiely","author_link":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/author\/kkiely\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7696"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7720,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7696\/revisions\/7720"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}