Wicklow rebel - Brian Maye on the famed fighter Michael Dwyer

Michael Dwyer, who took part in the 1798 rising and who evaded capture and sustained a guerrilla campaign for some years afterwards in his native Wicklow, was born 250 years ago this year.

He was born in Camara in west Wicklow, the eldest of seven children of John Dwyer and Mary Byrne, who had a sheep farm in the remote Glen of Imaal. He worked as an ostler for some years and joined the United Irishmen, probably influenced by John Dwyer of Seskin, a close relative who was a leading Wicklow republican and who was executed with 35 other prisoners on Dunlavin Green at the beginning of the rising.

Dwyer distinguished himself militarily during the rising, taking part in the major battle of Arklow on June 9th, the second battle of Hacketstown on June 25th and the ambush at Ballyellis on June 30th. Fortunately for himself, he didn’t participate in the disastrous “midlands campaign” of July, instead protecting the wounded with Miles Byrne at Glenmalure.

They joined the successful United Irish leader Joseph Holt (of a Protestant, loyalist background) in rejecting conditional pardons offered in July-August and sustained an effective guerrilla campaign in Wicklow.

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When Holt sought terms and surrendered after the French expeditionary force that had landed at Killala was defeated at Ballinamuck, Dwyer became leader and carried on the campaign. He married Mary Doyle on October 16th; they would go on to have six children. His military actions were mainly defensive in character and confined to Imaal and Glenmalure but because of the constant danger of betrayal, ruthlessness was required.

The authorities undertook a massive campaign to capture him, constructing a “military road” from Glencree to Imaal, with five barracks to protect it. He was almost captured in the famous night skirmish at Derrynamuck cottages on February 15th, 1799. Antrim man Sam McAllister, who was badly wounded, drew the soldiers’ fire on to himself and enabled Dwyer to escape – the Dwyer McAllister cottage, where the event took place, is preserved as a heritage site.

He plotted with Robert Emmet to stage another rising but a communications breakdown meant he didn’t take part in Emmet’s abortive endeavour on July 23rd, 1803, after which his extended family were imprisoned and threatened with transportation. Because of this, he decided to seek terms and received comparatively generous ones: following internment in Kilmainham, he was deported to New South Wales, but as a free settler rather than a convict.

Dwyer was given 100 acres at Cabramatta and lived there peacefully with his wife and their two eldest children (he was never to see his four younger children again) but was arrested on suspicion of planning rebellion in February 1807.

Although acquitted, he was sent to Norfolk Island by the treacherous governor William Bligh, who hated the Irish as well as many other nationalities. When Bligh was overthrown in an officers’ coup, Dwyer was reinstated in Cabramatta as a free man. He was appointed a constable and to other minor administrative posts by the progressive new governor and spent 10 years as chief constable of Liverpool, near Sydney. In addition, he farmed 610 acres during this time and owned the Harrow Inn, the name recalling a successful battle by the Wexford United Irishmen in 1798. He also campaigned for greater rights for Catholics in the Australian colony.

Unfortunately, in October 1820, he was sacked from the constabulary for disciplinary reasons (there is some dispute about the real reasons). A couple of court cases in the early 1820s, one relating to debt, led to further setbacks and imprisonment as a debtor in May 1825. In Sydney jail, he got dysentery and died on August 23rd, 1825.

He was buried in Liverpool but his grandson Dean John Dwyer of St Mary’s Cathedral had him reinterred in Devonshire Street Cemetery, Sydney, in 1878. Its closing coincided with the centenary of the 1798 rising and led to the second reburial of Dwyer and his wife (who died in 1861) in Waverley Cemetery, Sydney.

The substantial Patriot’s Monument, built over his tomb in 1900, made of white Carrara marble, has been described as the largest monument to the 1798 rising in the world.

Ruan O’Donnell, in his entry on Michael Dwyer in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, said that the monument “remains the focal point of Irish-Australian republicanism”.