page_title: Patrick O'Donoghue (Young Irelander)
section_title: Transportation to Van Diemen's Land
hierarchical_section_title: Patrick O'Donoghue (Young Irelander) / Transportation to Van Diemen's Land
caption_attribution_description: Trial of the Irish patriots at Clonmel, Oct. 22nd. 1848 Thos. F. Meagher, Terence B. Mc.Manus, Patrick O'Donohue, receiving their sentence / lith. &amp; pub. by N. Currier. Print shows Lord Chief Justice Doherty, standing (left), delivering a death sentence to members of the rebel group, Young Ireland, standing (right).
context_page_description: Patrick O'Donoghue, also known as Patrick O'Donohoe or O'Donoghoe, from Clonegal, County Carlow, was an Irish Nationalist revolutionary and journalist, a member of the Young Ireland movement.
context_section_description: In 1849 O'Donoghue, together with William Smith O'Brien, Terence MacManus, Thomas Francis Meagher and many others were on board the prisoner transport ship the Swift for a six-month, 14,000-mile journey under difficult conditions which some fellow prisoners did not survive.
  On 26 January 1850, "Using materials he had begged and borrowed" as one account gives it, Patrick O'Donoghue started publishing in Hobart Town a weekly newspaper named The Irish Exile, aimed mainly at fellow Irish prisoners and deportees and considered to be the first Irish Nationalist paper to be published in Australia.
  The paper featured Irish ballads and poetry, articles about Irish history, and a regular column by John Martin reporting on the situation of the Repeal Movement (campaigning to repeal the Act of Union under which the Irish Parliament had been abolished). There were also local news of the Irish deportee community, then numbering in the thousands, and of Hobart Town daily life in general.
  O'Donoghue used The Irish Exile to publish excerpts of his journal aboard The Swift, which were reprinted in Australian, British and Irish newspapers. Brisbane's The Moreton Bay Courier (reprinted from Dublin's The Nation) found that the journal "will show how severely the tyrannical government of England visited the offences of the Ballingarry cabbage-tree heroes. The studies of Messrs. O'Brien, Meagher (afterwards O'), and O'Donoghoe, will amuse the reader". While in Van Diemen's Land, the Launceston Examiner reprinted London's The Examiner's view that "a singularly large amount of mercy has been shown to those grown-up children who made the escapade from Dublin to raise the standard of Irish rebellion at Ballingarry. One of the worthies, Mr. Patrick O'Donoghue, has published an account of his deportation; and certainly a more pleasureable  [sic] voyage could not have been under taken at the expanse of government. A roomy cabin, a capital library, a fair dinner, with a couple of glasses of wine, and cigars upon deck, from the dietary and the entertainment of the political exiles".
  Publication of the paper was not in itself illegal, but was highly displeasing to the Governor, Sir William Denison, who found that the paper could be suppressed by arresting O'Donoghue and charging him with having "left his allocated district". He was sentenced to one year's work in a chain-gang – a time spent at hard labour, living in a convict station and wearing a convict uniform, mainly in the company of non-political prisoners such as "rapists, muggers and thieves".
  In March 1851 he was released and taken back to Hobart Town. Undeterred, he immediately restarted his paper, prominently featuring an extensive personal account of his year with the chain gang. The governor reacted by sending him again to a chain gang, at a more distant location this time – the Cascades Penal Station. Three months later the governor ordered him released from there and sent to Launceston.
  On the way there, he succeeded in escaping from his guards with the help of fellow-prisoners, who managed to smuggle him on board the ship Yarra Yara, on its way to Melbourne.
caption: Trial of the Irish patriots at Clonmel. Thomas Francis Meagher, Terence MacManus, and Patrick O'Donoghue receiving their sentence of death.
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