Welcome to the London Review of Books podcast.

You can unlock the entire LRB archive for free for 24 hours by visiting LRB.com.uk, forward slash, open.

Tony Blair, at the time of the Belfast Agreement, spoke of the hand of history being on him.

I don't feel that.

But nonetheless, there is something odd about that my grandfather was arrested. He took part

in the rebellion, in the 1916 rebellion, and was arrested and was held in Frangok, in Wales. They were

surprised. The Irish, the people from home were surprised that the guards were all speaking Welsh,

and the Irish were all speaking English.

And there was one of the beginnings of all the ironies that surround the relationship between the two islands.

And anyway, it's interesting to be here in the belly of the whale

a hundred years later.

In 1867, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, a member of the Fienian movement, also known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood,

that would be also the IRB. He was serving a life sentence for treason. He was moved to Milbank prison in London,

where he was overseen with great care, with the gaslighting left on in his cell at night.

According to his biographer, he was regarded as the most troublesome prisoner in the institution,

and news of the little punishments and received for petty infringements of the rules

became an important

part of Fenian propaganda over the next few years. And two different inquiries actually

took place into conditions in which he and his fellow Fenian prisoners were being held.

And after the second of these, it was decided that the prisoners would be released on condition that they did not return to Ireland.

Thus, in January 1871, O'Donovan Rossa arrived in New York, where he was greeted as a hero.

Among the friends he made in New York with Patrick Ford, the editor of the Irish World newspaper, which had a circulation of 125,000.

...