Ancient Order of Hibernians

Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), the largest Irish‐American benevolent society, established in New York in 1836. Much of its inspiration, though few of its activities, probably came from the Irish secret society tradition. By 1900 it had 100,000 members. In Ireland and Great Britain it was small until after 1900, when the power and influence of a reunited American order stimulated the appearance of rival constitutional and revolutionary strands. Catholic and broadly nationalist, it shared with the Christian Brothers the slogan ‘Faith and Fatherland’. The Belfast Nationalist leader Joseph Devlin, national president of the order (1905–34), turned its mainstream, known as the ‘Board of Erin’, into a political machine for the Nationalist Party, and during the years 1903–6 and 1910–14 the American parent body followed this lead. Under Devlin the AOH in Ireland and Britain supported the United Irish League and in some areas virtually supplanted it: membership grew from 10,000 in 1905 to 60,000 in 1909, preponderantly in Ulster and neighbouring counties, and in Dublin. It was attractive to businessmen for its freemason‐style activities, to workers for its benevolent activities, and to young Ulster Catholics as a rival to the Orange Order. It benefited greatly from its role as an ‘approved society’ under the National Insurance Act of 1911. Known disparagingly by independent nationalist, Labour, and Sinn Féin opponents as ‘the Molly Maguires’ (after the secret society which operated covertly within the AOH in the Pennsylvania coalfield in the 1870s), it was regarded as synonymous with jobbery, machine politics, and sectarianism. In Ireland it acquired a ‘green Tory’ image after 1921, whereas its divisions in British cities delivered the former ‘Irish vote’ to the Labour Party. In Northern Ireland it was closely associated with the old Nationalist Party, but since the early 1970s it has contracted drastically.

For Devlin the AOH had three attractions: it provided a direct link to Irish‐American influence and money; it harnessed the Catholic content of Irish nationalism to lay leadership; and it provided new dynamism to replace the fading issue of land tenure. For a while this worked, but the AOH ethos was really one of simple emigrant nostalgia, little suited to the nationalist heartlands of Ireland. There it was soon supplanted by a Gaelic movement which, though scarcely less Catholic in membership, offered a more dynamic sense of Irish identity.

A. C. Hepburn