Today in 1848, in the shadow of starvation, a group of poets and idealists staged a doomed rebellion in Ballingarry, County Tipperary. It was the only armed rising during the Great Famine. And though it collapsed in a matter of hours, the event has come to be known as “the Battle of the Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch.” The rebellion was led by the Young Irelanders, a breakaway nationalist group inspired by the revolutionary fervour sweeping across Europe. That same year, Louis Philippe I had been overthrown in France, replaced by the poet-statesman Alphonse de Lamartine. Two leading figures of the movement, Thomas Francis Meagher and William Smith O’Brien, returned to Ireland from Paris glowing with republican passion. They hoped to ignite the same spirit on Irish soil. Ireland in 1848 was a wasteland. The Great Famine had emptied the land of hope, and healthy people. Still, the Young Irelanders pressed on. For a week before the rising, O’Brien, Meagher, and John Blake Dillon toured Wexford and Kilkenny, trying to stir the embers of revolt. They gave speeches, distributed pamphlets, and tried to rally the rural poor. But turnout was sparse. On the day of the rising, O’Brien was in the village of The Commons, a bleak spot in the Slieveardagh Hills of east Tipperary. Barricades had been thrown up to prevent his arrest by the police. A detachment of 47 constables from Callan, led by Captain Trant, arrived but took one look at the armed resistance and fled pursued through fields and lanes by jeering rebels. The police took shelter in the farmhouse of a local widow, Margaret McCormack, who had five children inside. Unwittingly, she and her family became hostages in Ireland’s last gasp of 1848 revolution. McCormack caught between worlds, attempted to mediate between O’Brien and Trant. But then, perhaps out of fear or desperation, a constable fired a shot from a window. A gunfight erupted. It lasted a few hours, with both sides exchanging sporadic fire in the summer heat. By evening, police reinforcements arrived. The rebels, low on ammunition, scattered into the countryside. No uprising followed. The nation, ravaged by hunger and weary of grand gestures, did not rise. The Times of London promptly ridiculed the incident as “the Battle of the Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch.” It was over almost before it began. But the authorities made sure the leaders paid dearly. Smith O’Brien, Meagher, and MacManus were arrested and sentenced to death for treason, sentences later commuted to transportation to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). Meagher would famously escape and sail for the United States, where he rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the Union Army during the American Civil War. John Mitchel, another firebrand from earlier in the year, had already been exiled under a newly passed Treason-Felony Act and was shipped to Bermuda, and then Australia. Though the 1848 Rebellion achieved nothing tangible, it became a kind of national fable. A noble failure, romantic and absurd. It offered future generations of Irish nationalists a template of sacrifice and defiance. The tricolour flag first flown by Meagher that year would eventually become Ireland’s national flag. As for Margaret McCormack’s house, that accidental flashpoint of rebellion, it stood quietly for more than 150 years before being declared a National Heritage Site in 2004. Now called the Famine Warhouse, it serves as a curious monument to a rising too small to win, yet too sincere to forget. – at Dublin City, Ireland