‘Why, it’s like a ’98 trial’: The Irish Judiciary and the Fenian Trials, 1865–1866

This chapter focuses on the ‘Fenian trials’ of 1865–66. It challenges us to think beyond established ‘speeches from the dock’ narratives to consider the part played by the judiciary in the theatre of the court. While names such as Kickham, Luby, Rossa, and o’Leary will roll of the tongues of many today, fewer will recall a William Keogh, or a John David Fitzgerald, the two Catholic judges who presided over the special commission that tried the Fenian accused. There was much criticism at the time that the state had ‘packed the bench’, an accusation levelled with regularity throughout the nineteenth century. The essay gives due consideration to these claims. The appointments of Keogh and Fitzgerald were clearly political it suggests, and cites John Devoy’s assessment that all judges in Ireland were rewarded for political service rather than legal acumen. However, it concludes that the judges’ precise handling of the proceedings undermined attempts by the accused to challenge the legitimacy of the court and, ultimately, the Fenian trials show how perceptions of judicial partiality evolved over time.

‘Night Marauders’ and ‘Deluded Wretches’: Public Discourses on Ribbonism in Pre-Famine Ireland

This chapter focuses on Ribbonism, challenging notions of the Ribbon ‘bogeyman’ through the persons of real Ribbonmen such as Richard Jones, the Dublin leader who was tried in 1840 and later transported. Examining the evolution of Ribbonism but focusing on the sensational show-trials that surrounded Jones’s time in the dock, the chapter reveals how the language of ‘banditti’ was readily applied, attempting to shear them of political association from an organisation that the authorities saw as fundamentally criminal. Journalists, court cases, novelists, and other writers seemed to enforce the image of the night-time agitator whose aim was to threaten loyal subjects through all manner of criminal wickedness, thus losing the true image of Ribbonism, as a proto-union of Catholic confrères.

Arson in Modern Ireland: Fire and Protest before the Famine

This analysis of arson details the use of incendiarism as a protest tool in the decades before the Famine. The pre-Famine period witnessed several outbreaks of agrarian unrest. Deliberately setting fire to property and crops was one obvious manifestation of agrarianism, and a particularly effective one given its destructiveness. Yet there is more to arson than its immediate destructive outcomes, this essay points out. It was a means by which to intimidate those who failed to comply with communal demands and bring them back into line. Arson in an Irish context rarely resulted in death and this essay says much about the very nature of crime and violence in nineteenth-century Ireland where violent crimes against property, rather than against the person, accounted for the majority of prosecutions.

‘Skin the Goat’s Curse’ on James Carey: Narrating the Story of the Phoenix Park Murders through Contemporary Broadside Ballads

The death of the arch-informer James Carey is the focus of this exposition of the popular balladry that followed the Phoenix Park Murders of 1883. The broadside ballad is recognised as a key source for social commentary, and this essay shows that the murders and the subsequent assassination of Carey prompted an unprecedented flurry of street ballads. They covered all spectrums of opinion, from those critical of the brutal murders to others that celebrated the perpetrators as heroes and martyrs. Given Irish nationalism’s disdain for informers, it is little surprise that special attention was afforded to James Carey, the Fenian-turned-approver who gave evidence against his co-conspirators. This essay shows that the level of hatred and revulsion for Carey expressed in the ballads and the contrasting admiration afforded to his assassin, Patrick O’Donnell, captured the public mood during the period.

‘Loyal to the Crown but not the Crown’s Government’: The Challenge to Policing Posed by the Orange Order in 1830s Ulster

The strength of the Orange Order in early nineteenth-century Ulster, if at first a boon, was later a cause of concern for successive British governments. From local magistrates at petty sessions through to William Saurin, the Attorney General, Orangeism permeated the administration of law and order in the northern province. A radical shake up of the justice system, including the establishment of a new constabulary force, was undertaken during the 1820s and 1830s. This chapter explores the reactions of the Orange Order to the new police and in the process augments the extant literature on the ‘conditional loyalty’ of Ulster loyalism. Purges of Orangemen from the magistracy during the 1830s, the disbandment of the yeomanry in 1833, and the enforcement by the constabulary (in some instances at least) of the prohibition on assemblies and arches, fuelled Orange rage and prompted violent resistance to the forces of law and order. This essay posits that Ulster Orangemen could not countenance the possibility that the laws upheld and administered by Dublin Castle could apply to loyal citizens such as themselves. As a result, their disobedience towards the police in the years immediately following Emancipation ran contrary to the rules of the Orange Institution to uphold the law.

From Bandon to … Bandon: Sectarian Violence in Cork during the Nineteenth Century

This chapter attempts to place a taxonomy and a structure on sectarian violence in county Cork. Bandon—notorious for its ‘ostentatious protestantism’—provides the focus. Celebrations of orangeism, heightened tensions at closely fought elections, and religious zealotry in various guises all ensured that Bandon could, at times, resemble more a northern town than its southern equivalents. Yet this stimulating analysis highlights the folly inherent in simply categorising localised outbreaks of confessional violence as ‘sectarian’ without fully exploring the factors that provoked them. Hence, sectarianism was not necessarily the trigger but often the consequence of violence.

Attitudes and Responses to Vagrancy in Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century

This essay focuses on a special category of Irish crime: vagrancy. While vagrancy was a criminal offence in its own right, it was often its association with other forms of criminality and immorality that ensured ‘tramps’ could be viewed with fear and contempt in the Irish countryside. The relationship between crime and poverty has been a subject of considerable debate in numerous scholarly fields. This essay makes the important point that tramps were viewed with suspicion, not on account of their poverty intrinsically, but rather because they consciously rejected social norms in favour of an itinerant lifestyle. The ‘tramp problem’ occupied the attentions of the public and the administrators alike at the turn of the century: the former sometimes startled by the arrival at their door of a ‘big lazy fellow’ demanding relief, and the latter busily issuing circulars to magistrates and police imploring them to clamp down on the offenders. In the end, however, an unsatisfactory justice system predicated on punishment merely reinforced existing prejudices and did little to alleviate the social inequality that gave rise to vagrancy in the first place.

Organised Labour in Limerick City, 1819–1821: Violence and the Struggle for Legitimacy

This chapter is concerned with labour struggles in Limerick and a blend of guild language, trade union activity and modes of violence in the shape of the united trades. It describes how the eighteenth-century protestant labour guilds had given way in the nineteenth century to organisations that called themselves guilds till the 1890s, but were now overwhelmingly Catholic. The chapter challenges lazy assumptions about the linear transfer from guild to union modes of activity.

Cork’s Courthouses, the Landed Elite, and the Rockite Rebellion: Architectural Responses to Agrarian Violence, 1820–1827

This chapter complements a burgeoning literature on Irish architecture within the wider concept of ‘improvement’ during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A detailed examination of the building of county Cork’s new courthouses and bridewells during the 1820s offers a fascinating insight into the thought processes of grand juries as they sought to marry their visions of improvement with the practicalities of penal architecture and urban planning. The Rockite disturbances provided the immediate backdrop, but this thought-provoking essay shows that the flurry of new building in Cork must be considered within ‘the delicate balance of alliance and enmity which characterises central state and Irish grand jury relations in this period’.

The Law of Captain Rock

This chapter examines the threatening letter as a form of potential brutal social control and a manifestation of alternative law, or ‘legal parallelism', during the Rockite disturbances of the 1820s. The author focuses on 135 instances of these threatening letters and notices gathered in Dublin Castle during investigations to paint a picture of charivari Irelandaise, rough music, or community justice of sorts. The chapter reads these protest and threats through the prisms of Mikhail Bakhtin and Antoni Gramsci, with authority challenged, but not threatened; with the dissolving of legal protection of customary rights being questioned, but not the law itself.