Na Fianna Éireann, known as the Fianna, is an Irish nationalist youth organisation founded by Constance Markievicz in 1909, with later help from Bulmer Hobson. Fianna members were involved in setting up the Irish Volunteers, and had their own circle of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). They took part in the 1914 Howth gun-running and in the 1916 Easter Rising. They were active in the War of Independence and many took the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War.
Fianna Scouts engaged in field medical training, c.1914
Fianna memorial at St Stephen's Green, Dublin, Ireland
Fianna Éireann Council, between 1912 and 1915. Front row (left to right) Patrick Holohan, Michael Lonergan and Con Colbert. Back row (left to right) Garry Holohan and Padraig Ó Riain
Fian Seán Healy, the youngest casualty in the Easter Rising on the Republican side at 15 years old
Fianna were small warrior-hunter bands in Gaelic Ireland during the Iron Age and early Middle Ages. A fian was made up of freeborn young males, often from the Gaelic nobility of Ireland, "who had left fosterage but had not yet inherited the property needed to settle down as full landowning members of the túath". For most of the year they lived in the wild, hunting, cattle raiding other Irish clans, training, and fighting as mercenaries. Scholars believe the fian was a rite of passage into manhood, and have linked fianna with similar young warrior bands in other early European cultures.
Fionn and Goll seated in a banquet hall as their rival bands of Fianna fight. Illustration by Arthur Rackham in Irish Fairy Tales (1920).
"The Fianna raised a pillar stone with her name in Ogham letters" - illustration by Stephen Reid in Myths & Legends of the Celtic Race (1911)