Talk:Boer war
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John MacBride displayed a strong nationalistic outlook when he left his home in his middle teens to serve his time in Fitzgibbon's Drapery Store, Castlerea. He went to Dublin in the early 1890's and played an active part in the Young Ireland League and Celtic Literary Society. His ideas of future rebellion and revolution were nurtured. In 1895, to escape police attention, John MacBride immigrated to South Africa were he worked to establish friendships between the Boers and the Irish there. He was elected leader of the Irish Brigade whose men fought bravely in many engagements until 1901. John was nominated as candidate to fill the Mayo seat in the British House of Commons vacated, as a protest against the suppression of the Boers. However in the election the Major was defeated by John O'Donnell, the United Irish League candidate in a landslide victory. After the General Amnesty he returned to Dublin in 1903, secures a position under Dublin Corporation and married Maude Gonne, daughter of an English Army Officer and English mother. The beautiful Maude Gonne was active in all phases of the national struggle for independence. Major John MacBride, who was responsible for the Irish Brigade in 1899 which fought for the Boers against the British in the unsuccessful Transvaal (Boer) War of 1899 - 1902. Major MacBride fought the British at Jacob's factory during the Easter Week Rebellion. He took part in the Boer war, where he was commissioned with the rank of major in the Boer army and given Boer citizenship. John MacBride continued his work in opposing conscription and in preparing for a rebellion. In his address of the Manchester Martyrs in 1914, he gave the Fenian Credo of Separation as follows: "No man can claim authority to whittle down to or barter away the immutable rights of nationhood; for Irish men have fought, suffered, and died, through too many centuries, in defense of those rights. And, thank God Irishmen will always be found, in the darkest a and the dreariest night that fall upon our country, to snatch up the torch from the slumbering fire to hold it up aloft as a guiding light, and to hand it on, blazing afresh, to a succeeding generation." On Easter Monday, 1916, John MacBride joined the 2nd Battalion of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers under the command of Thomas McDonagh. He was immediately promoted Vice Commandant. During Easter Week the men under McDonagh fought bravely. After the surrender of his court martial, Major John MacBride was shot by firing squad on May 5, 1916. Declining to be blindfolded the Major asked that the firing squad would fire on the nod of his head. The proud head nodded, the rifles barked and Major John MacBride was dead. John MacBride joined the illustrious names of Easter Week. The news of his execution did not bring despair to the hearts of the men of Mayo and elsewhere but resolution to be ready for the fight which the knew must come.
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