A recent book on the subject is:

"The Voyage of the Catalpa: a perilous journey and six Irish rebels' escape to freedom", by Peter Stevens, Weidenfeld & N. 2003. ISBN 1 842 12651 2.

I haven't read Kickham's novel "Knocknagow" (1873 but the description in the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature sounds interesting "perhaps the most influential novel in the Irish nationalist tradition...filmed sucessfully in 1917". (Knocknagow was Kickham's home townland near Mullinahone in Co. Tipp.)