It is a singular fact that in the Fenian councils Killarney should have
been selected for the outbreak.

This is a town where nearly all the landed proprietors were Roman
Catholics, where there was a Catholic Bishop, a monastery and two
convents, while one half-ruined Protestant church sufficed to
accommodate the few worshippers who sat under a dreary, inoffensive
vicar on a very small salary. All reasonable folk, moreover, know that
Killarney is the town to which, more than any other in Ireland, it is
important to attract British tourists.

It was well known that some of the promoters and instigators of the
movement betrayed it before its very inception to the Government; and
Bishop Moriarty, from his pulpit, in his sermon alluded in no measured
language to those criminals who instigated the innocent peasants to play
a part in this mock insurrection, and then betrayed them.

He concluded:--

'It may be a hard saying, but surely hell is not too hot nor eternity
too long for the punishment of such villainy.'

Yet the whole of Irish history is disfigured by the poisonous trail of
the insidious informer.

I was in Kerry at the time of the Cahirciveen fizzle, in the
neighbourhood of Dingle, and it was rumoured that the insurrection was
to be general.