The People’s Flag: Thomas Meagher’s childhood Irish home

Thomas F. Meagher

Directly across the road from the Bishop’s Palace Museum on the Mall in Waterford you’ll find Derrynane House– the home where Thomas Francis Meagher grew up and from where he was arrested in 1848.

Just 14 doors along is number 33, from where he flew the Irish flag for the very first time and so it’s fitting that the exhibit to Thomas Francis Meagher should be set here in heart of his home place.

Amongst the brilliantly preserved artefacts on display include the very coat he wore when he first displayed the flag on that April afternoon.

A skinny green club uniform made from linen and with tails, it has shamrock designs sown into the collar and cuffs. It also has 16 gold-coloured buttons each one emblazoned with the year ‘1782’ – the year in which Ireland was granted its own parliament.

An accomplished musician the collection also includes Thomas F Meagher’s clarinet which he played while in school in Stonyhurst.

The museum has also acquired the last letter Meagher wrote while being held in Richmond prison in Dublin before being deported to Tasmania.

It was sent to his dear friend John Leonard (from Cork) who lived in Paris. In it Meagher writes of Ireland: “never, never, was their country so utterly downcast, so debased, so pitiful, so spiritless. Yet I do not, could not, despair of her regeneration. Nations do not die in a day. Their lives are reckoned by generations and they encompass centuries.”

Two swords, one Meagher would have used in battle and another a dress sword, from his time in the American civil war glimmer in their glass cases caressed by day-light.

A walking stick which was presented to Thomas Meagher Snr by the Irish American community of Cincinnati, and which was made from wood grown from a tree at George Washington’s gravesite, has also been acquired.

In another case we find a faded sprig of boxwood (to represent a spring of green) which Meagher asked his Irish brigade to wear on their uniforms as they rode into the battle of Fredericksburg in 1862.

And intriguingly, under the gaze of a huge painting of Meagher, we find the rosary beads of his much more low-key brother Colonel Henry Meagher who served with the Papal Guard in Rome for seven years. Also here sits a chain of office which was presented to Col Meagher by Pope Pius IX himself.