prisoners. O’Donovan Rossa and his co-conspirators had been detained without trial and were yet to receive one. For two weeks of their imprisonment there had been no charges against any of the men and protesting to the prison authorities, their pronouncements were ignored – they were bluntly told that unless they could pay for their own maintenance within the prison, they would have to work. O’Donovan Rossa resolved to work and endure the rigours of life in Cork jail. Increasingly, however, as the mundane and lethargic hours of jail life crept by, he was growing evermore despondent and his resolution to ‘suffer and be strong’39 was weakening:
Some of the detained arranged to get their own food, but the rest of us thought that we would inure ourselves to hardship. But we could not eat the fare we got; and this, with the solitary confinement imposed, starved us out of our resolution ‘to suffer and be strong.’ The bread was made with rye/wheat flour; it had the appearance of brown turf and you could squeeze the water out of it. The porridge, about the same colour, was flavoured with leeks, which made it disgusting, for when you drew your spoon out of the bowl you would draw up one of those foot-long leeks, and unless you had gone through a course of starvation your stomach would refuse to receive the product as food.40
With the Phoenix men imprisoned at Cork Jail, George Fitzmaurice instructed police to co-operate with local post offices to intercept the mail of the imprisoned men. This order was compounded by a further dictate that the correspondence of their solicitor, Timothy McCarthy Dowling, was also to be secretly opened and copied by police. Fitzmaurice had evidently sought to establish a clandestine means of cumulative evidence to prove that the Phoenix prisoners were guilty of revolutionary conspiracy. All of this was inadmissible in court, however. To strengthen the case against the Phoenix prisoners, Fitzmaurice now extracted Dan O’Sullivan Goula from the conspiracy, and the informant emerged within a fortnight of the arrests in Cork Jail, accompanied by Sir
Matthew Barrington, Crown Solicitor. O’Sullivan Goula identified all of the prisoners as members of a secret society and claimed that they had been intent on leading a rebellion in Ireland against Britain. Recalling a visit to Skibbereen on the 5 December 1858, O’Sullivan Goula placed O’Donovan Rossa, Morty Dowling, Tim Duggan, Denis Downing, Morty Moynahan, Pat Dowling, Daniel McCarthy and William O’Shea at a Phoenix Society meeting in a back room in Morty Dowling’s pub. Furthering this accusation, O’Sullivan Goula told Barrington that he had personally witnessed the prisoners drilling in military formation with swords and canes, led by McCarthy and O’Donovan Rossa.41 Morty Moynahan was a regular driller of men, and with almost forensic precision, O’Sullivan Goula recalled how Moynahan would order the men to ‘fall in line’,42 and march like regular soldiers. O’Donovan Rossa was more of a strict drill master, and in O’Sullivan Goula’s narrative O’Donovan Rossa had, in his presence, drilled some 300 men in Skibbereen. Once again O’Sullivan Goula identified the Phoenix men as actively drilling in West Cork, and claimed to have taken and administered two oaths to several individuals, swearing them into the revolutionary movement. While not producing any written oath as evidence, he verbally cited the oath as:
I_____ do solemnly swear that I will, to the utmost of my power, endeavour to subvert and overthrow the British government; that I will join and assist any foreign army who may arrive in this country with that object, and that I will obey and carry out the orders of my superiors to the best of my ability.43
Each of the Phoenix prisoners denied this oath and continued to argue that O’Sullivan Goula was lying on behalf of the state to secure convictions. O’Sullivan Goula next swore of a meeting which took place on the rural border between Cork and Kerry, where he had heard talk of American and French intervention designed to make Ireland ‘an Independent Republic’.44 The prisoners, particularly O’Donovan Rossa, strenuously denied his claims to Barrington, insisting that the informer was lying. Recalling Sullivan Goula’s performance in his later years, O’Donovan Rossa angrily remembered:
O’Sullivan Goula was brought among us, and there he stood shivering, side by side with the man who had been honoured with England’s knighthood [Sir Matthew Barrington]. Tim Duggan was moving up close to the informer, the informer complained to Sir Matthew that the prisoner was looking threateningly at him and asked to be taken into another room till his evidence was required. Sir Matthew sent for extra police; they came and stood between Goula and the prisoners. No matter how bad and wicked a character I may be considered now, the adoration I received in youth was a moral and religious one. I had not till then realized the possibility that any man would go on a witness table, kiss the Book, invent a pack of lies and deliberately swear they were the truth, and do all this to put into jail and keep them there, men who never did him, or anyone belonging to him, hurt or harm. But there was that Goula before me, deliberately swearing that he saw me drilling three hundred men one night, and swearing to other things against me which he never saw and which I never did. All pure invention of his own; all false swearing. But no; it was not invention of his; the invention was Fitzmaurice’s and Sir Matthew Barrington’s. They had made up their minds to fasten their irons well on me, and they had made up the informer for the work.45
Under British law, however, despite what O’Donovan Rossa suggested, the word of an informer was not, strictly speaking, admissible in any future trials. Considering the informer was paid by the state and had offered to give information leading to the conviction of the Phoenix prisoners, witnesses were required to corroborate his narrative. Fitzmaurice now eagerly sought to elucidate a confession from the Phoenix prisoners; none could be found, however, to give evidence. O’Donovan Rossa remembered, for the benefit of an American newspaper, how:
The usual English tactics were resorted to for the purpose of weakening some of us and getting us to become informers on others to save ourselves. A warder would see me, pretend to be a secret sympathiser with me, tell me something very confidential, caution me for my life not to breathe a word of it to anyone unless I wanted to effect his ruin; thou he’d come next day and repeat confidence again, and by and by he’d whisper something very suspicious of the prisoner in the next corridor: ‘Did I know him well?’ ‘Was I sure of him?’ ‘Could there be anything wrong about him?’ or ‘Was he in a position to do much harm if it could turn out that he was bad?’ Then it would very confidentially transpire that that prisoner in the next corridor was day after day being taken to the Governor’s private room and having interviews with detective[s] and other agents of the English Government.46
A search was also made for impeccable witnesses, including policemen, to testify that the Phoenix men were engaged in active conspiracy and military drilling. The state had great difficulty in securing witnesses amongst the ordinary people of Skibbereen as the community remained remarkably tight-lipped as to the activities of the Phoenix men. This meant that the prosecution of the Phoenix men was more reliant on the evidence of informers supported by police statements. One of these policemen testified in the Magistrates Court that he had seen one of the men, Denis Dowling, out marching in military formation in Skibbereen. Pressed by McCarthy Dowling as to who was seen marching with Denis Dowling, the policeman was forced to admit that Dowling was in fact on his own, and therefore could not have been marching in military formation. The Phoenix men arrested and examined in Cork Jail were released on bail following their inquisition. Only O’Donovan Rossa, William O’Shea and Morty Moynahan were to remain in prison on remand. While the trials were taking place, George Fitzmaurice was actively working behind the scenes to secure a conviction of the Phoenix prisoners. He had grounded this in a perception that the government needed to act firmly with the society, considering they had the potential to work up further conspiracy in Skibbereen.47 Explaining to Dublin Castle the reality of the situation on the ground, he anxiously wrote:
There is, however, the greatest possible feeling of sympathy evidenced here for the parties in custody which daily impresses upon my mind more fully the great necessity there was for the measures resorted to by the government for the suppression of the society… If such had not been so timely done this county as well as many others in Ireland would be by this time in a bad state.48
The first of the Phoenix men to be tried was Daniel O’Sullivan, one of the arrested Kerry men. Tried at the Kerry Assizes on Thursday 10 March 1859 for conspiracy, he was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment and moved to Mountjoy Jail, Dublin. Florence O’Sullivan, who had been arrested with him, had earlier confessed to the