The 1848 rising, while no Young Ireland 'Alamo', was a defining moment in Irish history. Its focal point, known traditionally as the "Warhouse", was opened as a museum yesterday by the Minister of State at the Department of Finance with responsibility for the Office of Public Works, Mr Tom Parlon.
The permanent exhibition, in the house where constabulary held the Widow McCormack's children hostage, is set to become a visitor attraction and focus for rural regeneration in south Tipperary.
The exhibition, with narrative written by historian Dr Thomas McGrath, places the attempted insurrection in its European context.
The Young Irelanders were influenced profoundly by relatively bloodless revolutions on the Continent - in France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Hungary - in the spring of 1848.
Against the background of the Great Famine and ensuing diaspora, it tells the story of the insurrection: the capture, trial and conviction of some leaders and the escape of others.
One of the best documented attempts at resistance, eyewitness accounts by participants - police, rebels and the McCormack children - together with original letters, feature in the exhibition.
The Young Irelanders were, for the most part, middle-class intellectuals who lacked every military quality, except bravery.
They embarked on an ill-timed insurrection in July 1848, when the British government's suspension of habeas corpus in Ireland made a humiliating submission or premature revolt unavoidable.
William Smith O'Brien's decision to take the field owed more to ideas of duty and honour than to any military assessment of the situation. Descended from the ancient line of the O'Briens of Thomond, he was born in Dromoland Castle, Co Clare, and in 1848 was MP for Co Limerick.
Terence Bellew MacManus, who led the attack on the Warhouse, was ordered to desist by O'Brien, who thought the 47 paramilitary police were prepared to surrender their arms. During a parley, stone-throwing began and the police replied with their carbines, killing two insurgents and wounding others.
As revolution, the rising was a pathetic farce; as revolutionary theatre, however, it was a protest against death and despair, evictions and emigration.
Its political effects were profound and far-reaching. It re-established republican links to the United Irishmen and brought the land question into the political arena. Four of the captured leaders, including O'Brien and Thomas Francis Meagher, were transported; many escaped to the United States. The dispersal of the Young Irelanders gave them authority to interpret emigration as exile. Their rhetoric politicised the Famine experience. Meagher's contribution - like much of the Young Ireland legacy - is of symbolic importance. He wore a tricolour sash during the week of the attempted rising, having returned from Paris in April with the first green, white and orange flag. (That banner was seized by police in D'Olier Street, Dublin, from a building that today forms part of The Irish Times complex.)
O'Brien declared that henceforth the national flag "will be the Irish tricolour, as a sign that the Protestants of the north and the Catholics of the south will unite in demanding the rights of their country".