The Oireachtas Library has launched a new digital exhibition entitled "Uniting the scattered millions: O'Donovan Rossa's United Irishman newspaper".
O’Donovan Rossa published The United Irishman while living in exile in New York in the late 19th century. An Irish Fenian, O’Donovan Rossa had been jailed several times by the British authorities for his political activities before being released as part of an amnesty in 1870.
The newspaper was available on both sides of the Atlantic. The Chief Secretary’s Office in Dublin Castle, then the centre of the British Administration in Ireland, collected and stored many issues of The United Irishman. This collection, comprising 450 issues of the newspaper, was part of the reference collection transferred from Dublin Castle to the Oireachtas Library in 1924.
The Oireachtas Library has been running an extensive programme since 2009 to digitise its historical collections, making over 12,000 documents available to the public.
