Charles Guilfoyle Doran – A Dunlavin Fenian.

Charles Guilfoyle Doran was born in Dunlavin on 2 February 1835. His name does not appear in the local baptismal registers for that year, but the Dunlavin connection is well documented. At some point during his youth, Doran moved from Dunlavin to County Cork, and thus he became known as ‘Charles Doran of Queenstown’. He was to become a leading figure in the Fenian Brotherhood (also known as the I.R.B.) and, like many of his contemporaries, was well-read and an excellent orator. From an early age, Doran was influenced by the ideals of Wolfe Tone and was particularly influenced by the writings of the Young Ireland leader, James Fintan Lalor. Doran was a founder member of the United Brethren of St. Patrick, which was responsible for organising the showpiece funeral of Terence Bellew McManus, the deceased leader of the 1848 Rebellion.

In 1866, Doran, who had trained as a civil engineer, was employed by the architects Pugin and Ashlin, and became clerk of works on the building of the new cathedral in Queenstown (Cobh), Co Cork. This position meant that he had to travel widely, both within Ireland and beyond, and served as a useful front for his subversive activities. Having joined the organisation in his mid-twenties, Doran rapidly rose through the Fenian ranks and by 1867 he was at the hub of a wide network of clandestine contacts. These included Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Michael Murphy, James Stephens, Charles Kickham and John Mitchell. At the time of the abortive Fenian Rising of 1867, Doran was second-in-command to General William Halpin, and he took part in the futile skirmish known as the Battle of Tallaght.

Following the failed rising, Doran fled to France, possibly via England. A Charles Doran had married Catherine Mahon in Prescott Catholic Parish, St. Helens, Lancashire on 20 November 1865, and it is possible that this was Charles Doran of Dunlavin and Queenstown. If so, it is also possible that he made use of his English contacts on his way to France after the rising. Once in France, Doran was sheltered by another Fenian contact, J.P. Leonard. During his time with Leonard, the Catholic Bishop of Cloyne, Dr. William Keane, visited Doran. Keane was a nationalist sympathiser and had met Doran through the Queenstown Cathedral project. Keane prevailed on Doran and convinced him that it was safe to return to Ireland. Thus, three months after his escape, Doran returned to Queenstown.

Doran settled in Dunworth House and he went back to his old job as clerk of works on St. Colman’s Cathedral. This project would take up the rest of Doran’s working life, and was not actually completed until ten years after his death. On his return from France, Doran found the Fenian movement in disarray. However, in 1868, the I.R.B. was reconstituted and Doran (along with Thomas Neilson Underwood) was an integral figure in the drawing up of the new constitution and in the resurrection of the Fenian movement itself.

Such was Doran’s importance within the remodelled Fenian organisation that he became a member of the Supreme Council itself. This body consisted of nine members and was in overall charge of the whole Fenian Brotherhood. Doran was now a leading Fenian figure and during the 1874 general election, Isaac Butt’s Home Rule Association nominated him as a candidate for Cork. However, Doran refused the nomination, because he objected vehemently to the obligatory oath of allegiance to the British monarch, which all M.P.s were required to take. However, even though he would not stand for parliament himself, Doran worked tirelessly in support of other candidates who had the backing of the Fenians. In fact, as a leading Fenian, he even played an indirect part in introducing Charles Stewart Parnell to the political arena.

In February 1875 a parliamentary seat became vacant in Tipperary. John Mitchel, the former young Ireland leader, who had been deported to Tasmania but escaped to America, decided to contest the seat. Mitchel was returned, but the House of Commons ruled that he could not take his seat because he was ‘an undischarged felon’. Another election was called and, moreover, Mitchel resolved to run again second time around. However, when he eventually arrived in Ireland, it was obvious that he was too ill to do more than make a token appearance, so the election campaign was managed by Queenstown’s Doran and another leading Fenian, John Daly of Limerick. Mitchel was re-elected but died very shortly afterwards and another Nationalist politician, John Martin, also died, leaving the Meath seat vacant as well as Tipperary.

At this point Parnell (through the offices of his friend Fr. Galvin) indicated that he would contest Tipperary against any Conservative (Tory) candidate. Armed with a letter of introduction from John Dillon, Parnell travelled to Tipperary to meet a Fenian delegation headed by Doran. By doing this, Parnell was identifying with the cause of ‘advanced’ nationalists of the ‘physical force’ tradition. This was a calculated gamble, but does not mean that Parnell had already moved to the left of party leader Isaac Butt before he had even entered parliament. Rather, this was one of Parnell’s first serious attempts to juggle all strands of nationalist opinion while balancing on the political tightrope. Two years later, Parnell would again seek out Doran and eventually Parnell and the Fenians (along with other nationalists, parliamentarians and land reformers) concluded the deal known as the ‘New Departure’ in 1879. However, back to 1875 – and although Doran was impressed with Parnell, he was not prepared to see the Fenians used for Parnell’s own ends and so no doors opened in Tipperary. Thus, Parnell turned his attention to Meath, where a door did open… Parnell was elected and the rest, as they say, is history.

Incidentally, just as Parnell impressed Doran, it is also true that Doran impressed Parnell. In 1877, Parnell sought to enlist Doran as a political candidate. Parnell wrote to William Dillon regarding Doran: ‘I think that with twenty such men we can have things at our mercy’. However, the issue of the oath of allegiance again stopped Doran from accepting Parnell’s offer and so the IRB man was not to be had. Hence, Parnell turned to John Dillon instead of Doran… and, once again, the rest is history.

In an ironic twist, the phenomenal success of the Home Rule party under Parnell over the next decade, the 1880s, sidelined the Fenians and isolated them as hardliners among Irish nationalists. The short-lived ‘New Departure’ ended with Parnell’s acceptance of the Kilmainham Treaty in 1881. From that time onwards, relations between Parnellism and Fenianism was, at best, strained… and, at worst, openly hostile. Despite their political differences however, Parnell and Doran remained relatively close and Parnell often called into Doran’s house when he was in Queenstown. There was a mutual respect between the two men, even when their opinions differed. In 1880, for example, Doran upbraided Parnell about his forthcoming fundraising trip to the U.S.A., which Doran classed as begging! On a more famous occasion, when Parnell was admiring the Doran’s new baby, Sophie, he called the sleeping infant ‘a lovely little lady’. Mrs. Doran replied ‘Yes, and she only speaks to gentlemen’! Perhaps the rift between Doran and Parnell was never too far below the surface.

During his later years, Doran continued to work on his magnum opus, Cobh Cathedral. He also built up a huge collection of books and when his private library was sold in 1910, there were more than one thousand, three hundred items on the auctioneer’s catalogue, and many of these entries contained sixty to seventy individual books! Doran was a traditional antiquarian, who had in his possession one of only three known manuscript copies of the ‘Tripartite Life of St. Patrick’. Doran also became an authority on the history of Cork city and county, contributing many articles of local interest to academic journals published in the Munster capital. Doran’s influence in the Fenian organisation also waned in his later years; the Fenians had a new set of younger leaders by the time of Doran’s death at his last residence, 5 Union Quay, Cork, on 19 March 1909. Many of these younger leaders were instrumental in leading the rejuvenated I.R.B. into the 1916 rising and beyond.

In many ways, Doran is the ‘Forgotten Fenian’. He lived in the shadow of other, more colourful, Fenian leaders, but his power and influence within the movement during his own lifetime were immense. He played a pivotal role in reorganising the movement in the aftermath of the debacle that was the Fenian Rising of 1867 – at a time when the Phoenix really did rise from its own ashes – and he helped to lay the foundations for the new-look Irish Republican Brotherhood of the early twentieth century, although he did not live long enough to witness the culmination of its objectives and the establishment of the fledgling Irish Free State.