 As with other prominent Young Irelanders, this was later commuted to transportation for life to the penal colony at Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania).In 1849 O'Donoghue, together with William Smith O'Brien, Terence MacManus, Thomas Francis Meagher and many others were on board the prisoner transport ship the "Swift" for a six-month, 14,000-mile journey under difficult conditions which some fellow prisoners did not survive.On 26 January 1850, "Using materials he had begged and borrowed" as one account gives it, Patrick O'Donoghue started publishing in Hobart Town a weekly newspaper named "The Irish Exile", aimed mainly at fellow Irish prisoners and deportees and considered to be the first Irish Nationalist paper to be published in Australia.