What was the Fenian Brotherhood? And was Ellen Cochrane real?

• Read more | Is House of Guinness a true story?

What were the Fenian Brotherhood and Irish Republican Brotherhood?

The Fenian Brotherhood was a revolutionary nationalist movement founded in the late-1850s among Irish emigrants in the United States, and its Irish counterpart was the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood (IRB, later known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood), founded in Dublin in 1858.

We are introduced to Fenians and their cause in the opening scenes of House of Guinness as they protest at Benjamin Lee Guinness’s funeral. Their campaign for an independent Ireland, in the wake of the famine and other unequal treatment of the largely Catholic working classes, is central to much of the series’ action.

• Read more | Who was to blame for the Irish famine?

Both wings of the Brotherhood drew inspiration from earlier failed uprisings, like the Irish Rebellion of 1798 led by the United Irishmen (a republican society co-founded by Wolfe Tone, regarded by many as the father of Irish Republicanism), and the 1848 Young Ireland rising. They were committed to establishing an independent Irish republic through armed insurrection.

In Ireland, the organisations recruited heavily among the urban working class and rural small farmers, many of whom were disillusioned by poverty, famine and the limited results of constitutional politics, leading to more militant republicanism.

The Fenian Rising of 1867 mentioned in the show – which took place the year before the House of Guinness begins – included an attempt to capture Dublin. It was a poorly coordinated revolt that was quickly suppressed by British forces. Though militarily a failure, it marked the first large-scale attempt at rebellion since 1848.

• Read more | The history of Ireland: 11 milestone moments

Later in the century, when constitutional efforts to achieve independence failed, organisations turned to further violence once again.

Isolated acts of sabotage and bombing in Britain in the 1860s and 1880s (the latter sometimes called the ‘dynamite campaign’) kept the Fenian name alive in the public consciousness – a historical reality brought to stark life in House of Guinness’s series finale, when a Fenian plot reaches its climax. Unlike in the series, there’s no evidence that any of the Guinnesses were directly targeted by Fenian violence in the 19th century.

Where House of Guinness does draw from real history is in featuring the hanging of Michael Barrett.

In May 1868, the 27-year-old Barrett became the last man to be publicly hanged in Britain when he was executed outside Newgate Prison. He had been involved in a botched attempt in 1867 to free imprisoned Fenian supporters. A barrel of gunpowder had been placed near to Clerkenwell jail; when detonated, it left as many as 15 people dead and 50 injured. Despite not being the one who lit the fuse, Barrett was the only person able to be convicted based on evidence, and his death became a rallying moment for the Fenian cause.

In America, the movement attracted Irish immigrants who had military experience from the Civil War and who could raise funds and arms for the cause. This transatlantic network became one of the Fenians’ great strengths, and this cross-national alliance comes into play when the show explores the Guinness’s foray into the American market.

The real Ellen Cochrane?

The pivotal Fenian activists in House of Guinness, Ellen Cochrane (Niamh McCormack) and her brother Patrick (Seamus O’Hara), are invented, though they may have been inspired in part by real figures: Ellen O'Leary (1831–1889), a poet and activist, and her brother John O’Leary (1830–1907), a leading Fenian.

The drama’s Ellen and Patrick Cochrane are deeply committed to the Fenian cause, and cross paths with various Guinness family members in plot developments that rely on barrels of invention bigger than those in the St James’ Gate brewery.

However, as with much of House of Guinness, there is real historical detail woven through the action. In the show, Ellen Cochrane writes pamphlets and verses, spreads Fenian political messaging, and is involved with an organisation called the Ladies’ Committee, a real movement that allowed some women a route into politics – and this points to one of the possible inspirations for her role.

The real Ellen O’Leary was a poet and writer, who contributed nationalist verse to The Irish People, the IRB newspaper in the 1860s that became a mouthpiece for Fenian ideals.

When the paper was suppressed, and leaders including her brother, John, were imprisoned or exiled (as happens to Patrick in House of Guinness), Ellen remained in Ireland and helped keep the network alive. She was central to organising Fenian gatherings in Dublin, offering her home as a meeting place for sympathisers and writers, and later became a mentor to younger nationalist poets, including WB Yeats.

She did not take part in military planning – and similarly Ellen Cochrane is shown to refuse any form of violence in the show, frequently dismissing her more militant brother as a “bonehead”. But O’Leary’s cultural work and practical support gave the Brotherhood an important intellectual and emotional foundation, linking revolutionary politics with a broader cultural nationalism.

John O’Leary (1830–1907), a possible partial inspiration for Patrick Cochrane, was one of the most prominent leaders of the Fenian movement in mid-19th century Ireland.

Having studied both law and medicine (though not fully qualified in either), he became politically radicalised as a young man and was and early recruit to the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in 1858, serving as one of its most determined organisers.

As editor of the Fenian newspaper The Irish People, he championed republicanism and the idea that only armed resistance could achieve Irish independence – a historical detail mirrored in Patrick’s descent into violence in House of Guinness. John O’Leary was arrested for treason in 1865 – it was alleged that he was the “financial manager” of the Fenian movement, who brought money raised by American sympathisers into the country.

He was given a 20-year sentence of penal servitude, later commuted to exile.

In the show, after a stint in Dublin’s infamous Kilmainham Gaol, the character of Patrick is exiled to New York and spared gaol, on the condition that he turns an agent of the Guinnesses on the east coast of America.

In contrast, John lived his exile in Paris, where he remained a respected figure among exiled revolutionaries, while also befriending writers and intellectuals, which deepened his belief in linking political nationalism with cultural renewal.

Returning to Ireland in 1885, O’Leary stayed committed to separatism, remaining a symbol of unbending republican principle.