Charles Gavan Duffy

Sir Charles Gavan Duffy KCMG, PC (born Cathal Gabhánach Ó Dubhthaigh; 12 April 1816 – 9 February 1903) was an Irish poet, politician and journalist (editor of The Nation), Young Irelander and tenant-rights activist. After emigrating to Australia in 1856 he entered the politics of Victoria on a platform of land reform, and in 1871–1872 served as the colony's 8th Premier.

Early life and career

Duffy was born at No.10 Dublin Street in Monaghan Town, County Monaghan, Ireland, the son of a Catholic shopkeeper. His father died when he was ten, and at the insistence of his sister and with the permission of his guardian, a parish priest, he was taken out of the local "poor school" and sent, as its only Catholic pupil, to a classical academy in Monaghan run by a presbyterian minister, John Bleckley. While not allowed "altogether to forget" that he "belonged to the race beaten at the Boyne", he recalls that there was a "boys newspaper" and a "boys' parliament" (indications, perhaps, that Bleckley was influenced by the democratically-inclined pedagogy of Belfast schoolmaster David Manson) in which his Protestant schoolmates debated, and resolved in favour of, Catholic emancipation.

One day, when he was 18, Charles Hamilton Teeling, a United Irish veteran of the 1798 rising, walked into his mother's house. Teeling was establishing a journal in Belfast and asked Duffy to accompany him on a round of calls to promote it in Monaghan. Inspired by Teeling's recollections of '98, Duffy began contributing to the journal, The Northern Herald. In Belfast, where in the 1841-1842 session he studied logic, rhetoric and belles-lettres at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Duffy went on to edit The Vindicator, an O'Connellite journal launched by Thomas O'Hagan (later the first Catholic to become Lord Chancellor of Ireland since 1687). In April 1841, in the face of Orange threats and a mob assault on the Vindicator's offices, he and O'Hagan helped organise Daniel O'Connell's visit to Belfast, "capital of the loyal north".