3. Ibid., p. 254.
4. Ibid.
5. Correspondence on meeting of inhabitants of County Tyrone, in Dungannon, p. 1, HC 1835 (120), XLV, p. 511.
6. Ibid., p. 1.
7. [First] Report of the select committee appointed to inquire into the nature, character, extent, and tendency of Orange Lodges, associations or societies in Ireland; with the minutes of evidence and appendix [hereafter First report on Orange lodges], p. 371, HC 1835 (377), xvi.
8. The Londonderry Journal and Tyrone Advertiser [hereafter LJ], 4 July 1837.
9. The Star of Brunswick, 7 March 1829.
10. Royal Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, Appendix F, pp. 419, 427, 643, 657 [Command Papers 35–42], HC 1835, vol. xxx, 35, 221, vol. xxxi, 1, vol. xxxiii, 1, vol. xxxiv, 1.
11. A. Day and P. McWilliams, Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland, vol. xx (Belfast, 1993), p. 42.
12. Electors registered Ireland. Return of electors registered as qualified to vote at the last general election in Ireland, p. 8, HC 1836 (227), XLIII, p. 469.
13. Bardon, History of Ulster, p. 254.
14. Correspondence on Meeting of Inhabitants of County Tyrone, in Dungannon [hereafter Corresp. on Meeting in Dungannon], p. 2, HC 1835 (120), XLV, 511.
15. The Enniskillen Chronicle and Erne Packet [hereafter ECEP], 25 December 1834. Given its area of 6,700 sq. yd, if each person had a space 2ft by 1½ft to stand in, the square would hold 20,000 people. That seems a credible maximum, since there were horses and wagons there too.
16. Day and McWilliams, Ordnance Survey Memoirs, p. 40.
17. G. Owens, ‘Nationalism without words: symbolism and ritual behaviour in the repeal “monster meetings” of 1843–45’, in J. S. Donnelly Jr and K. A. Miller (eds), Irish Popular Culture, 1650–1850 (Dublin, 1999), pp. 242–69.
18. First report on Orange lodges, p. 345, HC 1835 (377), XVI.
19. Ibid., p. 323.
20. Ibid., p. 324.
21. Owens, ‘Nationalism without words’, pp. 242–69.
22. The Star of Brunswick, 7 March 1829.
23. First report on Orange lodges, HC 1835 (377), XVI, p. 324.
24. LJ, 23 December 1834; Strabane Morning Post [hereafter SMP], 23 December 1834.
25. LJ, 23 December 1834.
26. Ibid.
27. SMP, 23 December 1834.
28. Cronin, ‘Of one mind?’, pp. 139–72.
29. ECEP, 25 December 1834.
30. First report on Orange lodges, HC 1835 (377), XVI, p. 371.
31. ECEP, 25 December 1834.
32. Corresp. on Meeting in Dungannon, HC 1835 (120), XLV, 511, p. 2.
33. First report on Orange lodges, HC 1835 (377), xvi, p. 371.
34. Corresp. on Meeting in Dungannon, HC 1835 (120), XLV, 511, pp. 2–3.
35. First report on Orange lodges, HC 1835 (377), xvi, pp. 371–2.
36. Belfast Newsletter, 26 December 1834.
37. Cronin, ‘Of one mind?’ , pp. 139–72.
38. PRONI, Inspection books, patrol books and returns from Dungannon police station, 1833–62, D804/3.
39. Corresp. on Meeting in Dungannon, HC 1835 (120), XLV, 511, p. 2.
40. First report on Orange lodges, HC 1835 (377), XVI, p. 325.
41. Day and McWilliams, Ordnance Survey Memoirs, p. 40.
42. LJ, 6 July 1841.
Chapter 6
1. S. Clark, ‘The political mobilisation of Irish farmers’, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 12 (1975), pp. 483–99.
2. There has also been an absence of studies of the broader political mobilisation of Irish workers, though see F. Lane, ‘Rural labourers, social change and politics in late nineteenth-century Ireland’, in D. Ó Drisceoil and F. Lane (eds), Politics and the Irish Working Class, 1830–1945 (Basingstoke, 2005).
3. D. McAdam and D. A. Snow (eds), Social Movements: readings on their emergence, mobilisation, and dynamic (Los Angeles, 1997), p. xxiv.
4. B. Nedelmann, ‘Individuals and parties: changes in processes of political mobilisation’, European Sociological Review, 3 (1987), pp. 181–202.
5. See V. Crossman, The Poor Law in Ireland, 1838–1948 (Dundalk, 2006).
6. Outdoor relief was introduced in response to the Great Famine; when that ended in the early 1850s, outdoor relief was reduced to very small numbers, but then rose gradually from 1,500 in 1859 to 33,500 by 1877.
7. M. R. Beames, ‘Rural conflict in pre-Famine Ireland: peasant assassinations in Tipperary, 1837–1847’, Past and Present, 81 (1978), pp. 75–91.
8. In the 1860s only about 200,000 Irish men had a parliamentary vote and the second Reform Act had no direct equivalent in Ireland: K. T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 1832–1885 (Oxford, 1984). In the 1870s about half a million Irish ratepayers (including some women) had a vote in Poor Law elections.
9. Given the somewhat chaotic state of the Irish franchise up to the late 1860s, it is likely that some poor persons did have a vote in parliamentary elections. Reports of the Galway demonstrations in 1865 suggest that some of those demonstrating did have a parliamentary vote.
10. W. L. Feingold, The Revolt of the Tenantry (Boston, 1984); M. Cousins, ‘Poor Law politics and elections in post-Famine Ireland’, History Studies, 6 (2005), pp. 34–47. There is little indication that agricultural labourers tried to win seats on the boards; when they did, they were largely unsuccessful. See F. Lane, ‘P. F. Johnson, nationalism and Irish rural labourers, 1869–82’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. xxxiii, no. 130 (November 2002), pp. 191–208. Few labourers would have had a vote in Poor Law elections and even fewer would have satisfied the property qualification to serve as a guardian.
11. Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland.
12. As another instance of such action, delegations of poor labourers frequently met with the boards of guardians to request, for example, the provision of work or outdoor relief.
13. See S. Tarrow, Power in Movement: social movements, collective action and politics (Cambridge, 1994).
14. See, for example, G. Rudé, The Crowd in History, 1730–1858 (New York, 1964); C. A. Bouton, The Flour War: gender, class, and community in late Ancien Régime French society (Pa, 1993); D. Béliveau, ‘Les grains de la colure: geographie de “l'émotion populaire” en France au sujet de la cherté des céréales (1816–1847)’, Criminologie, XXVII, 1 (1994), pp. 99–115; L. Taylor, ‘Food riots revisited’, Journal of Social History, vol. 30, no. 2 (Winter 1996), pp. 483–96; N. Bourguinat, ‘L'État et les violences frumentaires en France sous la Restauration et le Monarchie de Julliet’, Ruralia [online] 1997–01.
15. R. Wells, ‘The Irish famine of 1799–1801: market culture, moral economies and social protest’, in A. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Liverpool, 1996).
16. E. Magennis, ‘In search of the “moral economy”: food scarcity in 1756–7 and the crowd’, in P. Jupp and E. Magennis (eds), Crowds in Ireland (Basingstoke, 2000).
17. C. Kinealy, The Great Irish Famine: impact, ideology and rebellion (Basingstoke, 2002), chapter 5.
18. This event is described in more detail in J. Cunningham, ‘A Town Tormented by the Sea': Galway, 1790–1914 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 197–8.
19. For details of these events, see Appendix 1. A food riot was expected in Mitchelstown, County Cork in 1863 but I have been unable to establish whether one occurred. I have excluded two actions: a crowd in Loughrea burning a workhouse cart intended to convey a smallpox patient to the workhouse, apparently a public health not poor relief issue (CSORP/1875/18580); a riot in Mount Bellew in 1870, seemingly the result of ratepayer opposition to paying a dispensary doctor's pension (Mount Bellew minute book, Galway county archives).
20. In Galway the leaders were described as ‘local petty agitators amongst the mechanics’.
21. Limerick Reporter, 12 January 1861.
22. See, for example,
J. A. Goldstone and B. Useem, ‘Prison riots as microrevolutions: an extension of state-centered theories of revolution’, American Journal of Sociology, 104 (1999), pp. 985–1029; E. Carrabine, ‘Prison riots, social order and the problem of legitimacy’, British Journal of Criminology, vol. 45, no. 6 (2005), pp. 896–913.
23. E. Goffman, Asylums (Harmondsworth, 1968).
24. See, for example, A. Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: madness and society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven CT, 1993) on asylums; J. R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge, 1980) on lock hospitals.
25. D. R. Green, ‘Pauper protests: power and resistance in early nineteenth-century London workhouses’, Social History, vol. 31, no. 2 (2006), pp. 137–59. Green looks at pauper protests in early nineteenth-century London workhouses, including individual actions, so his study is not fully comparable with that undertaken here.
26. H. Burke, The People and the Poor Law in Nineteenth-century Ireland (Littlehampton, 1987), pp. 210–18; A. Clark, ‘Wild workhouse girls and the Liberal imperial state in mid-nineteenth century Ireland’, Journal of Social History, vol. 39, no. 2 (2005), pp. 389–409.
27. This episode deserves more detailed study than it has received to date.
28. It seems in South Dublin these were largely separate from (though perhaps encouraged by) the longer-term resistance of young women inmates, which began as early as 1857 and continued into the 1860s, though by 1862 those young women were largely contained in a separate refractory ward and do not appear to have been involved in the serious rioting and significant violence between inmates and officials of that year.
29. Although the 1863 report of the Poor Law commission refers to violence in the Clonmel workhouse, I have not to date managed to locate further details of this in the local newspapers which, unfortunately, contain quite summary accounts of the meetings of the boards of guardians. Further research in the minute books of the union would be required.
30. NLI, Balrothery minute book, 10 March 1873.
31. Ryan's evidence to a later investigation by a Poor Law inspector; report in Waterford Mail, 11 October 1861.
32. Ibid. Also Waterford Mail, 29 March 1861, 13 September 1861; and Waterford News, 20 December 1861, when the matron complained to the board that despite efforts to stop it the inmates could not be prevented from doing muslin work without the active co-operation of all female officers.
33. Waterford Mail, 10 January 1862.
34. The more serious violence appears to have been committed by the officials rather than the inmates.
35. Cork Examiner, 5 March 1863.
36. Ibid., 24 March 1863.
37. It appears, for example, that there were workhouse riots in Belfast before the Famine (see the Belfast Timeline at www.belfasthistoryproject.com/belfast-timeline.html) and in the pre-Poor Law Dublin house of industry.
38. It is notable that the master's account of the resistance at Waterford is to be found in the report of a Poor Law inspector several months later; there is little indication of such problems in the detailed reports of the meetings of the boards of guardians in the local papers of the time.
39. J. Holmes, ‘The role of open-air preaching in the Belfast riots of 1857’, PRIA section 2, 2002, p. 102 (3); C. Hirst, Religion, Politics and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Belfast (Dublin, 2002).
40. Fr Alessandro Gavazzi (1809–89), a former Barnabite monk, became religious leader of the national crusade in Italy. Driven from Rome, he took refuge in England; in 1853 he visited America, leading to riots in Canada (D. Horner, ‘A barbarism of the worst kind: negotiating gender and public space in the aftermath of Montreal's Gavazzi riots’, Canadian Historical Association conference, London, Ont., 31 May 2005); his visit to Ireland in 1859 led to riots in Galway and Tralee. I wish to thank Daniel Horner who kindly sent me a copy of his paper.
41. See Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland.
42. Cork Examiner, 11, 17 and 24 March 1863.
43. See NLI, Larcom MSS 7756–8.
44. It would be interesting to compare this resistance to that which occurred during the tithe war just over a decade earlier; see P. O'Donoghue, ‘Causes of the opposition to tithes, 1830–38’, Studia Hibernica 5 (1965), pp. 7–28; idem, ‘Opposition to tithe payments in 1830–31’, Studia Hibernica 6 (1966), pp. 69–98; idem, ‘Opposition to tithe payments in 1832–3,’ Studia Hibernica 12 (1972), pp. 77–108.
45. S. Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton NJ, 1979).
46. W. L. Feingold, The Revolt of the Tenantry (Boston, 1984).
47. NAI, CSORP/1880/7865. In Strokestown in February 1880, for example, an estimated 500 able-bodied men with a black flag of distress marched into the workhouse yard while the board was sitting. It was estimated that only one in six were labourers; the rest included ‘well-to-do’ farmers, shopkeepers and their assistants.
48. United Ireland, 16 January 1886.
49. S. Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War.
50. Ibid., pp. 309–11.
51. Burke, The People and the Poor Law, pp. 210–18; Clark, ‘Wild workhouse girls and the Liberal imperial state’.
52. J. Robins, The Lost Children: a study of charity children in Ireland, 1700-1900 (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1980).
Chapter 7
1. Much of the information about the episode was found in one file, NAI, CSORP 1874/8773, evidence gathered for a Board of Trade inquiry held in Galway in August 1873, including material relating to a coroner's inquest and a manslaughter trial. References to items in this file are prefixed 1F.
2. 1F, ‘Notes of evidence taken before a Court of Inquiry … in pursuance of the instructions of the Board of Trade’, deposition of George Bond.
3. See, for example, 1F, Captain Bedingfield to Admiralty Secretary, 30 April 1873, and ‘Notes of evidence’, deposition of Joseph Semple.
4. C. R. Browne, MD, ‘The ethnography of Garumna and Lettermullen, in the County of Galway’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. 5 (1898–1900), pp. 243–5.
5. C. Payne, ‘Smugglers, poachers and wreckers in nineteenth-century English painting’, Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, vol. iii, no. 61, April 2005; G. P. Landow, Images of Crises: literary iconology, 1750 to the present (London, 1982), pp. 35–130; M. Lincoln, ‘Shipwreck narratives of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, XX, 1997, pp. 155–72.
6. B. Bathurst, The Wreckers: a story of killing seas, false lights and plundered ships (London, 2005), p. 20.
7. T. J. Schoenbaum, Admiralty and Marine Law, 4th edn (St Paul, 2004), pp. 831–44.
8. E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the origins of the Black Act (London, 1975), pp. 258–69; H. Laird, Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879–1920: from ‘unwritten law’ to the Dáil courts (Dublin, 2005), pp. 23–5, 59.
9. Laird, Subversive Law, pp. 24–5; R. Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: history and power in colonial India (Cambridge MA, 1997), pp. 63–72, passim; R. Grave and M. Kale, ‘The empire and Mr Thompson: making of Indian princes and English working class’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XXXII, no. 36 (6–12 September 1997), pp. 2273–88; D. Lloyd, Ireland after History (Cork, 1999), pp. 54, 77–88; J. Cunningham, ‘Popular protest and a “moral economy” in provincial Ireland in the early nineteenth century’, in F. Devine, F. Lane and N. Puirséil, Essays in Irish Labour History (Dublin, 2008), pp. 26–48.
10. J. G. Rule, ‘Wrecking and coastal plunder’, in Hay et al., Albion's Fatal Tree: crime and society in eighteenth-century England (London, 1975), pp. 167–88.
11. ‘The wreck register of 1859’, Illustrated London News, 20 October 1860; K. Brady, Shipwreck Inventory: Louth, Meath, Dublin, and Wicklow (Dublin, 2008), pp. 45–6.
12. For example, T. Ó Criomhtháin, An tOileánach (Dublin, 1929), p. 12; A. Powell, Oileáin Árainn: stair na n-oileáin anuas go dtí 1922 (Dublin, 1984); B. Dornan, Mayo's Lost Islands: the Inishke
as (Dublin, 2000), pp. 144–7; É. Langford, Cape Clear Island: its people and landscape (Cork, 1999); C. Kruger, Cape Clear: island magic (Cork, 1994), pp. 28–34.
13. For evidence of the abandonment of the Julia, see 1F, Report to the Board of Trade of an inquiry chaired by James O'Dowd.
14. 1F, ‘Notes of evidence’, deposition of Joseph Semple; D. Fitzpatrick, ‘The disappearance of the Irish agricultural labourer’, Journal of the Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, vol. vii, 1980, pp. 90–2.
15. 1F, ‘Notes of evidence’, deposition of Frederick St Clair Ruthven.
16. Ibid., depositions of Henry Warren and St Clair Ruthven.
17. Congested District Board, Baseline Reports: South Connemara, p. 483.
18. Browne, ‘Ethnography of Garumna and Lettermullen’, p. 223.
19. Coimisiún na Gaeltachta, 1925, p. 2.
20. British parliamentary papers, Census of Ireland for the year 1891: vol. IV, province of Connacht, 1892, vol. XCIII, county of Galway, table vii.
21. M. Ó Conghaile, Conamara agus Árainn: gnéithe den stair shóisialta (Béal an Daingin 1988), pp. 102–4, 171. Causeways were later built to join Garumna to Lettermullen (1886) and Lettermore to the mainland (1891). Only in 1897 was a bridge built between Lettermore and Garumna (Browne, ‘Ethnography of Garumna and Lettermullen’, p. 267).
22. J. M. Synge, In Connemara, 1979 edn, Cork, p. 32; Browne, ‘Ethnography of Garumna and Lettermullen’, p. 248.
23. P. O'Dowd, In from the West: the McDonogh dynasty (Galway, 2002), pp. 2–11; interview with Beartla King, local historian, 20 September 2005.
24. E. Keogh, ‘In Garumna island’, New Ireland Review, June 1898, p. 194.
25. Rundale is a system where the land is divided into discontinuous plots, cultivated and occupied by a number of tenants.
26. Browne, ‘Ethnography of Garumna and Lettermullen’, pp. 249, 254.
27. Ibid., pp. 259–60; Congested Districts Board, Baseline report for South Connemara, Appendix J, ‘Boats’.
28. British Parliamentary Papers, Thirty-seventh report of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, with appendices, 1871, vol. xxiii, p. 607; Duvally deposition.
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