RIOTOUS
ASSEMBLIES
REBELS, RIOTS & REVOLTS IN IRELAND
EDITED BY
WILLIAM SHEEHAN & MAURA CRONIN
MERCIER PRESS
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© Individual authors, 2011
© Introduction: William Sheehan & Maura Cronin, 2011
ISBN: 978 1 85635 653 4
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TO OUR FAMILIES,
FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Firstly, we would like to thank the Mercier Press team who have supported this project over the last year. A sincere thanks, too, to Liam Irwin, the Head of History at Mary Immaculate College, and to our colleagues, Michelle Mangan, Sarah McNamara and Ursula O’Callaghan, and the Mary Immaculate College staff for their help and support at the ‘Riotous Assemblies’ conference held at the college in September 2009, from which this book grew.
Finally, we wish to express our gratitude to all the contributors to the conference and the book, giving special mention to Professor Peter King of the Open University who, as the conference’s plenary speaker, shared some remarkable insights into the ‘riotous’ Irish in eighteenth-century London.
Maura Cronin
William Sheehan
THE CONTRIBUTORS
EDITORS
DR MAURA CRONIN is Senior Lecturer in History at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. Her research interests centre on nineteenth-century Ireland and include popular politicisation, popular song, labour organisation, agrarian movements and the evolution of towns. She is co-ordinator of the Oral History Centre at Mary Immaculate College, which collects memories of Irish working lives and social change from the 1930s onwards. Her publications include Country, Class or Craft: the politicisation of the skilled artisan in nineteenth-century Cork (1994), The Death of Fr John Walsh at Kilgraney Bridge: community tensions in pre-Famine Carlow (2010) and Agrarian Protest, 1750–1950 (2010).
DR WILLIAM SHEEHAN is a military historian and has lectured on the MA in Military History and Strategic Studies programme at the National University of Ireland (NUI), Maynooth. He is an associate lecturer of the Open University and a member of its Empire and Postcolonial Studies Group. Dr Sheehan is a graduate of University College Cork (UCC), the University of Limerick, the Open University and Mary Immaculate College. He has published four books: British Voices from the Irish War of Independence (2005), Fighting for Dublin (2007), Images of Sarsfield Barracks (2008) with Denis Carroll, Michael Deegan and Stephen Kelly, and Hearts and Mines: the British 5th Division in Ireland, 1919–1921 (2009). His doctoral thesis will be published in 2011 under the title A Hard Local War: the British army and the guerrilla war in Cork, 1919–21. Dr Sheehan wrote the article on General Sir Peter Strickland, the British commander in Cork, for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He is one of the leading historians on the Irish War of Independence and an expert on the British army’s campaign in Cork from 1919 to 1921.
WRITERS
STEPHEN CARROLL is pursuing a PhD in Trinity College, Dublin and is currently in his second year of research. He is working under the supervision of Dr Robert Armstrong and the title of his thesis is ‘Violence and popular protest in Ireland, 1603–1633’.
DR MEL COUSINS has written extensively on aspects of social history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland, including The Birth of Social Welfare (2003). He is currently based at Glasgow Caledonian University where he is completing research on the Poor Law in nineteenth-century Ireland.
DR LAURENCE COX is a lecturer in sociology at NUI Maynooth. He has particular research interests in social movement theory and methodology, the contemporary ‘movement of movements’ against neo-liberalism and working-class community organising. He is co-editor of the online social movement studies journal Interface (www.interface.net).
DR JOHN CUNNINGHAM is a lecturer in history at NUI Galway. He has published widely on Irish labour and social history. In 2010 he published Unlikely Radicals: Irish post primary teachers and the ASTI.
DARAGH CURRAN is a PhD student at NUI Maynooth and is currently researching County Tyrone Protestant society in the pre-Famine period. Central to this research is the study of Orangeism, electoral politics and the role of the lower classes in both of these areas.
DR MARK EMPEY is an Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences postdoctoral fellow at the University College Dublin (UCD) Humanities Institute of Ireland. His fellowship is held in conjunction with a three-year research project entitled ‘Protestants, print and Gaelic culture, 1567–1722’. His current interest focuses on the seventeenth-century historian and antiquary, Sir James Ware, in addition to the broader study of the Protestant contribution to Gaelic culture in early modern Ireland. He also specialises in the political and religious history of Britain and Ireland.
DR BRYCE EVANS is an Ad Astra Doctoral Research Scholar based at the Humanities Institute of Ireland and the School of History and Archives, UCD. His most notable research is on Ireland during the Emergency (1939–45) and the life and career of Seán Lemass. His doctoral thesis was entitled ‘Farewell to Plato’s Cave: “Moral Economy” in Emergency Ireland, 1939–1945’. He is working on a new biography of Lemass, to be published in 2011.
NOREEN HIGGINS-MCHUGH is currently a PhD student at the Department of History, UCC. Her thesis topic is ‘The tithe war in Ireland, 1830–38’, which enlarges on her single-county study for an MA in History and Local Studies from the University of Limerick in 2000 and the publication Tipperary’s Tithe War, 1830–38 (2002). She has also published various historical articles in the Tipperary Historical Journal.
LIAM KELLY is a third-year PhD candidate at the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, Belfast. His doctoral research aims to produce a ‘thick descriptive’ historical case study of Belfast between 1968 and 1970, with particular interests in issues relating to space, identity, territory, violence and parading.
DR STEPHEN KELLY is currently Post Doctoral Research Fellow (IRCHSS funded) at the UCD International Centre for Newman Studies. His research interests are contemporary Irish history and politics, Anglo-Irish relations and European nationalism.
JOHN MCGRATH has BA and MA degrees from Mary Immaculate College. He is currently completing a PhD investigating the development of organised labour in Limerick city in the nineteenth century. His previous publications include ‘Music and politics: marching bands in late nineteenth-century Limerick’, North Munster Antiquarian Journal, no. 46 (2006) and ‘An urban community: St Mary’s Parish, Limerick and the social role of sporting and music clubs 1885–1905’, in J. Kelly and R. V. Comerford (eds) Associational Culture in Ireland and Abroad (Dublin, forthcoming).
EALÁIR NÍ DHORCHAIGH is a postgraduate research student in sociology. Her research focuses on issues of accountability and governance, and is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
DR JOHN O’CALLAGHAN lectures in modern Irish and European history in the Department of History,
University of Limerick. His primary research interests lie in the area of twentieth-century Ireland. His previous publications include Revolutionary Limerick: the republican campaign for independence in Limerick, 1913–21 (2010) and Teaching Irish Independence: history in Irish schools, 1922–72 (2009). Among his current projects is a contribution to Mercier’s Military History of the Irish Civil War Series, The Battle for Kilmallock. He is also co-editing a volume entitled ‘Subversive Voices’: oral history and the occluded Irish diaspora for Peter Lang’s Reimagining Ireland series.
DR CLODAGH TAIT is a senior lecturer in the Department of History, University of Essex. She is author of Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–1650 (2002) and co-editor of Age of Atrocity: violence and political conflict in early modern Ireland (2010). She has also published articles on religious culture, funerary monuments, martyrdom, riot, childbirth, baptism and naming, and is completing a book on the social and cultural history of the early modern British and Irish Isles.
ABBREVIATIONS
BMH Bureau of Military History
Cal. Carew MSS Calendar of Carew MSS preserved in the archiepiscopal library at Lambeth, 1515–1624, ed. J. S. Brewer and W. Bullen, 6 vols (London: Longman, 1867–73)
Cal S. P. Ire. Calendar of the State Papers relating to Ireland, of the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, ed. H. C. Hamilton (vols 1–5), E. G. Atkinson (vols 6–10) and R. P. Mahaffy (vol. 11) (London: Longman/HMSO, 1860–1912)
Carte MS Carte manuscript, Bodleian Library, Oxford
CSO Chief Secretary’s Office
DAA Dublin Archdiocesan Archive
DFA Department of Foreign Affairs
DT Department of the Taoiseach
HC House of Commons
HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission
HMSO Her Majesty’s Stationery Office
ICOS Irish Co-operative Organisation Society
IRA Irish Republican Army
NAI National Archives of Ireland
NAUK National Archives, United Kingdom
NLI National Library of Ireland
ODC Order of Discalced Carmelites
OFM Order of Friars Minor (Franciscans)
OSA Order of St Augustine
PRONI Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
RP Registered Papers
RUC Royal Ulster Constabulary
S.P. State Papers Domestic, National Archives, London
TD Teachta Dála [Member of Dáil Éireann]
UCDA University College Dublin Archives
INTRODUCTION
This book grew from a conference held at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, in September 2009. The question underlying the conference theme was simple: why have people in Ireland become involved in rioting? A simple question, it led us in the course of discussion to many other questions. Why did riots occur? Who rioted? What was the government response to public disorder? When did a riot or public violence have legitimacy and who defined legitimacy? How can we as historians restore the voices of ‘ordinary’ people, as expressed in these events, to the grand narrative of history?
History is perhaps no longer written by and for the great. Many generations of historians have recalled the voices of the forgotten to enhance our understanding of the past. This volume, as the different chapters show, offers a contribution to that ongoing work. As relatively few ‘ordinary’ people have left behind full and complete accounts of their lives, records of rioting or public action by crowds are often the only evidence we have for the grievances or fears of these ordinary people. One of the key problems of this type of historical recovery is that as historians we have to rely on official or semi-official sources as the basis of our analysis of these past events, since the poor and unimportant leave little behind for historians to explore. But as many of the chapters in this book so skilfully show, even these sources can be read against the grain, allowing those submerged voices to speak once more.
This book ranges across a wide spectrum of Irish history. Clodagh Tait explores urban rioting and disorder in early modern Ireland, as does Stephen Carroll in his examination of the 1613 Dublin parliamentary election. Noreen Higgins-McHugh focuses on the rural scene with an analysis of collective violence during the tithe war in Munster. Daragh Curran revisits the O’Connellite age of monster meetings, but details the phenomenon from an Orange and loyalist perspective through the analysis of a meeting in the Tyrone town of Dungannon. Mel Cousins brings us back to urban Ireland, and shows that violent protest was not simply a matter for the street but something that could occur within the walls of the workhouse, while John McGrath explores the pattern of urban disorder in Limerick City over a wide sweep of the nineteenth century. John Cunningham takes us west, with a unique micro-history which explores a conflict in Conamara surrounding the shipwreck and salvage of the Julia.
Subsequent chapters extend into twentieth-century Ireland. John O’Callaghan provides an intriguing study of political street fighting in Limerick just prior to the outbreak of the War of Independence. Bryce Evans and Stephen Kelly explore various Fianna Fáil governments’ fears of, and attempts to control, public violence within the Irish state. Liam Kelly’s chapter sheds new light on the history of the Northern conflict and reminds us of the importance of locality in the emergence of protest in 1969. Finally, Eálair Ní Dhorchaigh and Laurence Cox bring this volume right up to date by exploring the responses of the modern Irish state to ‘riotous assemblies’.
Many common themes link the chapters. One such theme is the role of local rivalry in fomenting disturbances, particularly in the urban context, as in nineteenth-century feuding in Limerick (McGrath) and the role of space and place in the outbreak of violence in late 1960s Belfast (Liam Kelly). A further theme explored by many contributors is the theatricality of public violence, whether the election-related attempt in 1629 to undermine the mayor’s authority by snatching the king’s sword (Empey) or the carnivalesque ‘reclaim the streets’ protests of 2002 (Ní Dhorchaigh and Cox). Many of the actors, too, reappear again and again over the course of the period. Women were active rioters in Dublin in 1629 (Empey), in workhouse protests in Dublin in the 1850s (Cousins) and in Limerick street violence in the 1840s and 1890s (McGrath). As Tait and O’Callaghan show in very different periods, relations between soldiers and citizenry have almost always been fraught, while the potential for youth to engage in activities ranging from rhetorical rejection of authority to the fomenting of riot is as visible in local Fianna Fáil party cumainn reaction to the border campaign of the 1950s (Stephen Kelly) as it was in Lord Claud Hamilton’s fomenting Orange protest in 1830s Tyrone (Curran) and the Limerick City youths’ rowdy game that became a riot in 1599 (Tait).
The incidents sparking disturbances, too, seem to recur over time, many riots occurring when small communities come into conflict with outside forces – billeted troops and enforcers of cess in Waterford in the 1570s (Tait), tithe-collection enforcers in Kilkenny in the 1830s (Higgins-McHugh), custom officials interfering with wreck salvage in Conamara in the 1870s (Cunningham), compulsory tillage inspectors in Leitrim in the 1940s (Evans), and police and pipeline workers in Mayo in the early 2000s (Ní Dhorchaigh and Cox). Nor did violent or potentially violent protest necessarily involve large numbers: the individual yet explosive animosity shown towards tillage inspectors in Leitrim in the 1940s (Evans) was the tip of an iceberg of popular hostility towards government policy.
Rioting is often seen as the act of the underclass, yet as Carroll, Curran, Higgins-McHugh and Empey suggest, more elite elements could frequently be involved, either as active rioters or – more usually – in orchestrating protest that they were sometimes unable (as in the Dungannon case) to fully control. Elites could also provoke rioting through their very efforts to control it – a question explored in considerable depth by Ní Dhorchaigh and Cox in relation to the early twenty-first century, but equally relevant in O’Callaghan’s discussion of the Limerick Catholic clergy’s condoning of anti-milit
ary rioting in 1918, and in Carroll’s treatment of the dubious handling of the Dublin election of 1613. Considerable skill was needed on the part of those in authority to prevent the mutterings of discontent from becoming something more violent. Perceptive officials in the 1940s went some way to countering high-handed government orders on the matter of compulsory tillage (Evans), whereas the sidelining of an equally perceptive customs official in favour of less sympathetic individuals in 1873 hastened the explosion of violence surrounding the wreck of the Julia (Cunningham).
So, one is left with the question: what caused people to riot during the 500 years that form the time span of the present book? And, more fundamentally, what was a riot? When a crowd (large or small) exploded into violence in reaction to some unpopular event or individual, its suppression or placation on the one hand, or on the other its escalation into a riot, depended on the accompanying circumstances. Ní Dhorchaigh and Cox conclude that ‘an assembly is riotous when the authorities say that it is’ and while this may not be the whole story, its emphasis on the indefinable nature of the riot does echo many of the other contributions to this book.
Riots were usually spontaneous explosions of resentment, but sometimes they were long gestating. They were not entirely plebeian in their social composition, representing something of a cross-section of society, from lay and clerical elites at the top to the (usually) anonymous ‘nobodies’ at the bottom. They were usually but not always violent; they involved some, or several, grievances – reflecting local fear of outside forces, animosity between rival groups and localities, and resentment against change. Even if the causes, course and consequences of rioting vary considerably from one period to the next, many aspects of Irish rioting over the past 500 years, though expressed in the archaic terminology of past times, are familiar to today’s readers. When put under the microscope, as they have been by the contributors to this book, they not only make for fascinating reading but will hopefully encourage more research in this area.
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