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The founding meeting took place at Hayes’s Commercial Hotel, Thurles, County Tipperary, on Saturday 1 November. The surviving record is not wholly uniform about how many men were in the room: later institutional accounts commonly name seven, while contemporary newspaper reporting suggests a somewhat wider attendance. The essentials, however, are firm. Maurice Davin, the celebrated athlete and farmer from Carrick-on-Suir, was elected president. Michael Cusack, the Clare-born schoolmaster and journalist, became one of three honorary secretaries, alongside John Wyse Power and John McKay. Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Davitt and Archbishop Thomas William Croke were invited to act as patrons.
The first political drama centred on John Mitchel, the Young Ireland journalist and former transportation prisoner. Mitchel had lived for years in the United States, but a Tipperary by-election gave his supporters an opportunity to return him to parliament on a programme embracing home rule, tenant rights, free education and the release of Fenian prisoners. On 16 February he was declared elected unopposed, before he had reached Ireland; he arrived at Queenstown the following day. The symbolism was deliberate. Mitchel had been convicted after the failed rebellion of 1848 and had escaped from Van Diemen’s Land in 1853. His supporters knew that his legal position would be contested, but treated the election as a protest against the constitutional order rather than as a practical route to a Westminster seat.
