IF they made a movie of Thomas Francis Meagher's life, you'd probably say it was too far fetched. Irish patriot, American Civil War general, New York newspaper editor and acting governor of the American frontier, he lived an adventure packed existence criss-crossing the world, living hard and finally dying under suspicious circumstances.

It was Meagher's fortune - or misfortune - that his life took place against two of the most wrenching backdrops in Irish

and American history. Nowadays you don't meet such men, and such journeys are no longer possible.

Like many accomplished Irishmen of his era, there's a distinct lack of consensus regarding Meagher's character and achievements. Some claim he was a hero, others say he was merely a showboat, or a bloated drunk.

But anyone who studies his life as closely as Montana born author Paul R. Wylie has in his superb new biography The Irish General (University of Oklahoma Press) can't help falling under his spell. Handsome, aristocratic, Jesuit trained and a powerful orator, Meagher had a meteoric career and a colorful enigmatic life that still fascinates.

"I really didn't

know anything about Meagher's history until I took a trip to Belfast in 1994 and got interested in the Irish Troubles. The more I studied Irish history the more I encountered Thomas Francis Meagher's name. Before I knew it I was writing this book," Wylie said during an interview with the Irish Voice.

Meagher was educated at Clongowes in Ireland and then at Stonyhurst College in England, and upon graduation he returned to Dublin where he quickly fell in with the editors of The Nation, an influential Nationalist publication.

Shortly thereafter he was giving fiery speeches advocating the use of violence to achieve political ends in Ireland. Giving the era he lived in, his militant streak was hardly surprising - the country was passing through the darkest years of the Famine - and the manifest political failure of British colonialism seemed to offer no alternative but revolt.

"Meagher's speech was one of the first in modern Irish history that called for the use of arms against the British. He became an ardent revolutionary - one of many at the time - but he had no military training," says Wylie.

"He took part in the revolution of 1848 that failed spectacularly to rally the Irish people, and for that impertinence he was sentenced to death for high treason - but popular opinion in Ireland rejected his sentence and so he was eventually transported to Tasmania in Australia."

From 1849 until 1852 Meagher lived, in the odd parlance of the time, as a semi-free man, even taking an Irish wife, until he made secret plans to escape to the U.S. For reasons known only to himself now he neglected to inform his "peasant" spouse that he was leaving - she was expecting his child, who died a month after his departure.

Divested of his hapless wife, and free to walk the streets again, with his remarkable ability to keep landing on his feet, Meagher started his own newspaper in New York in 1856 - The Irish News - and he watched as it surpassed his wildest dreams.

Initially planned as a journal for a general readership, Meagher's volatile politics and the force of his personality soon asserted themselves and the paper began to tackle hot topics like the need for Irish unity, the poor treatment of Irish immigrants by the nativist mobs in New York, and even the possible creation of a more welcoming Irish homeland in Central America (the search for an Irish promised land was one of the recurring themes of his life, an outward expression of his paternalistic nature).

By this stage of his career Meagher's maverick spirit and picaresque life had already left him with enough ghosts to haunt several graveyards - and it's no wonder that he succumbed to alcohol. His alcoholism became a tool for his enemies to dismiss him, but Meagher had a genius for inspiring the allegiance of others, and his reputation assailed all attempts on it.

Meagher's preeminence in Irish affairs led to his appointment as a general when the U.S. Civil War broke out, and he led the famed Irish regiment dubbed the Fighting 69th into many of the war's most decisive campaigns.

As always, controversy followed him here too. A Catholic in a predominantly Protestant officer caste, he was marked and jeered at by his Yankee peers and subordinates - but his own regiment idolized him.

In the last years of his Dickensian life Meagher conceived of Montana (then still a frontier state) as an ideal enclave for the Irish. There's a magnificent statue of him outside the state capital building that was erected by money raised solely by the Irish community of Butte, Montana in 1904. No state funds were used.

Appropriately enough, there is still some controversy as to whether it should be there at all. The controversies that followed him in life have not dispersed, and neither has his legend.