The simple facts respecting McGee's childhood scarcely need narrating. They are facts that might be recounted with respect to thousands of Irish boys of the same period. His father brought his family to Wexford when Thomas D'Arcy was eight years old, and McGee later in life always associated Wexford with his youth. In this city he obtained the slender advantages of a day school education, and came under the influence of a stimulating personality, the famous Father Mathew. This marvellously effective apostle of temperance, who swayed the conduct of Irishmen as with a magic wand, was at the time carrying on his triumphant campaign in southern Ireland. His appeal touched McGee. Under Father Mathew's influence a juvenile temperance society was established in Wexford. One evening a slight boy with flat face, dark skin and hair, and wonderfully expressive eyes, delivered before the society a spell-binding oration, on which he received the hearty congratulations of the great priest. The boy was young McGee, and this was his first public speech. During the next two years, 1840-1842, "little Tommy McGee's" speeches drew large numbers to the society's meetings. But Wexford was not long to claim the boy orator. His mother had died, his father had remarried, and the family were not in affluent circumstances. Ireland in the forties held out few prospects to the children of the indigent. The economic structure of Irish society was diseased. Approximately seven million were vainly endeavouring to wring a lean subsistence from the land, and hundreds of thousands were on the verge of famine. Gloom and misery were written broad over the southern counties, lit up but not relieved by the sputterings of political agitation. The one hope of the impoverished was the continent in the west, and a mighty stream of emigration to that land of promise set in. McGee joined the emigrant throng.