By Barry Sheppard

The town of Lurgan, County Armagh, has in recent decades developed a harsh reputation for political and sectarian violence. Perhaps understandable against the backdrop of the thirty odd year timespan of ‘the Troubles’. It is a town that has, unfortunately, witnessed its fair share of bloodshed.

Political and sectarian violence has also obscured a once great labour history, when the town was a burgeoning centre of industry, with much of the employment attached to the Irish linen industry. The mid-Ulster town produced not only a strong industrial workforce over the generations, but a number of standout labour activists, thinkers and trade unionists, including George William Russell (AE), Richard McGhee, and Bob Levin, whose impact stretched far beyond the boundaries of the Armagh town.

This strike paralysed the industry in the town for weeks, pushing families to their limits and shaped local labour politics for years to come.  To say that conditions were ripe for a strike would be an understatement. Prior to the strike action, wages had not actually increased for Lurgan linen workers since 1886, a stagnation that not only caused considerable hardships, it fomented strong resentment towards the small number of bosses who propped up the town’s primary industry.

Linen: Harsh and Exploitative

Lurgan’s involvement in the linen industry is often heralded as a golden age in the town’s history. The industry was introduced to the town and surrounding rural areas in the late seventeenth century, when the local landlords, the Brownlow family encouraged local people to take up linen weaving.

By 1708, Lurgan was already described as one of the North’s leading linen manufacturing markets. The industry expanded significantly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Initially a cottage industry, the industry was transformed when James Malcolm introduced power-loom weaving in 1855. This technological breakthrough directly led to the development of factories, dramatically increasing employment.

At its height in the late nineteenth century, the industry was reported to support approximately 18,000 handloom weavers across Lurgan and the surrounding counties, alongside thousands of factory workers and women engaged in embroidery and handkerchief finishing.[1]

Marked today through by ‘the Linen Bleachers’ statue in the town, the industry was nonetheless a harsh existence for the vast majority involved, especially those occupying the bottom rungs of the workforce. Meagre pay combined with hazardous working conditions, early deaths and debilitating respiratory illnesses were common.

Noted Lurgan historian, Frank McCorry has described the local linen industry as operating within ‘an inherent lowly-based wage structure’ which despite bringing in high levels of employment, left its employees without necessities such as milk and clothing.[2]

Among McCorry’s keen observations on the industry, he draws attention to the acquisition of property in the town by the business elites who ran the factories. This is an important observation, especially when considering the factors that brought workers out onto the picket line in 1913.

Arguing that ‘home owning was virtually an impossibility’ for the average family employed in the linen industry, McCorry shows that factory-owners were among a small group of elites who ‘catered for most housing needs’. McCorry crucially adds that rents were paid by working families right back to the factory owners, guaranteeing the success of the owner class in property mobility.^[3]

Property ownership and linen interests afforded local captains of industry the opportunity to position themselves a world apart from the majority of Lurgan’s working population, even if it their mansions were only physically a street or two away from the two up and two down dwellings of their factory workers.^[4]

The disparity between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ in the town has led some, like McCorry, to argue that the class divide in the town often ‘outflanked’ the religious divide. This is a position that contrasts with scholars such as O’Grada, whose work on the town disproportionately emphasises divisions along religious lines.[5]

It certainly is true that sectarian violence had long been an occasional feature of life in the town,[6] and the sectarian geography of the town had been well established in the mid-nineteenth century[7], the nature of the linen industry meant that Catholics and Protestants shared the same work spaces for much of the time.

The timing of the January 1913 strike is therefore significant. The strike, while lasting only a matter of weeks, maintained strong cross-community cooperation. A significant position, given that it occurred a short matter of months after the signing of the Ulster Covenant, and at the same time in which the Ulster Volunteer Force was founded to combat the potential granting of Home Rule.

National and International Context

While the local political context is important in understanding the wider picture around the Lurgan strike, so too are the national and international contexts. It would be remis of the author to only position the strike actions of Lurgan workers in local isolation, especially given the international nature of the linen industry.

The period of 1911-1914 in the United Kingdom has been retrospectively dubbed by historians as ‘the Great Labour Unrest’. A fraught period which saw an estimated total of 3000 strikes take place across these islands (with over 1200 in 1913 alone, including the Dublin Lockout).

Yet strikes in the UK mirrored episodes of labour unrest across the Atlantic. Notable disputes connected to the textile industries included the ‘Bread and Roses’ textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the textile strike in Little Falls, New York, in which emigrant workers walked out in October 1912 over low pay and poor living conditions. A much larger strike in Paterson New Jersey saw tens of thousands of working days lost and factories barricaded when silk workers walked out in huge numbers strike.^[8]

Many on the front line of the American strikes had local Irish connections. Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Limerick-born Pat Quinlan represented the Industrial Workers of the World. All three had strong associations with James Connolly who, also in 1913, penned his famous pamphlet, ‘To the Linen Slaves of Belfast’.^[9] Clearly by this year, many across the globe felt that their positions within a modern global industry had become intolerable. Lurgan was no different.

 Lurgan’s Strike

While the Great Labour Unrest period was certainly the driving factor in the 1913 strike, local tensions had been simmering for much longer. As previously stated, wages for Lurgan textile workers had not increased since 1886. In May of 1912, eight months before the strike, union representatives, including the Lurgan Weavers and Winders’ Trade Union unsuccessfully lobbied the Power Loom Manufacturers’ Association in Belfast for an increase in wages from the average of 12 shillings per week which had been in place for almost three decades.

Undeterred, textile unions maintained momentum, undertaking what they considered to be groundbreaking research into the stagnation of workers’ wages. In October 1912 the report was published. Secretary of the Lurgan Weavers’ union, William O’Neill warned that the evidence he held in his hand showed that workers’ wages ‘just merely saved them from starvation’. The Union, seeking as much impact from the report as possible, presented a copy of the report to Ulster Unionist leader, Edward Carson. Carson, however, may have had other pressing matters on his mind.^[10]

Frustrations peaked going into December 1912 when staff at Lurgan’s main linen companies, Johnston & Allen, The Ulster Weaving Company, Messrs Malcom Ltd and W. J. Allen Company held a coordinated ballot for strike action. Demanding wage increases and better materials to work with, they were airing the grievances of at least two generations of textile workers in the town.

An overwhelming majority of 1,042 to 21 voted in favour of strike action. The new year was barely 24 hours old when William O’Neill served notice on the bosses that on the morning of Monday 13 January 1913, workers would cease to attend work until their claims for an increase in the scale of wages was conceded.

Giving that period of notice in the hope that bosses would come to the table also gave O’Neill and others the opportunity to gauge the mood of workers in the week after the ballot. On Monday 6 January, the Executive Committee of the Weavers and Winders’ Union made their final pre-strike pitch to a hall packed with fed up workers. By that time, it was clear that the bosses refused to be swayed.

So, on Monday 13 January industrial action began. Local and national newspapers keenly reported on the initial day of the strike. The Dublin Daily Herald told readers that ‘not a single weaver turned up to commence work in three of the four Lurgan power loom factories—those of Messrs. Malcom Limited; the Lurgan Weaving Company Limited; and Messrs. Johnston and Allen’.

Various press outlets estimated that the strike had brought 1,500 workers out in the streets, a not insignificant number, given the town’s entire population at that time was approximately 12,500. After conferring privately with one another, factory owners decided to cut their losses and close their factories until at least Monday 27 January, when it would be decided if further closures were required if an agreement had not been made.

In the meantime, authorities drafted in scores of extra police from adjoining districts for fear of strike-related violence. Strikers staked their place in Lurgan’s public spaces where the simmering animosity between bosses and workers was given expression. It was reported that some of the striking workers cornered one of the local factory owners, ‘haranguing and booing’ him after he unwisely drove near the picket line in his car.

It was speculated that the hostile reaction was in response to the bosses’ decision to publish a joint letter in that morning’s paper which claimed that it was they who were under immense financial pressure. The letter lamented the common occurrence of strikes in the modern day. However, there was bemusement of the need for such action ‘against the places paying the highest wages in the trade to which they appertain’. The letter certainly wasn’t designed to mend fences when it stated; ‘we much regret that in this case the workers are so ill-advised and foolish as not to realise their position’.

The workers, for their part, were defiant, asserting that they had sufficient funds in reserve to allow strike action to continue for at least two months without privation.  There was also considerable public sympathy for their plight.

On 15 January, strikers met in the town’s Carnegie Street picture house, where local Councillor, Edward Lunn announced that since action had been called funds had begun to flow into the coffers from the purses of the public. It was also claimed that a couple of unnamed gentlemen contributed the princely sum of £25 each to the workers’ fund.

By the weekend of 19 January, six days into the strike, it was claimed that 800 unionised members of the workforce had been paid up from union funds. Significantly, it upwards of 600 non-union members had also been paid by public subscription, an indication that the public at large backed the workers.

The public’s role in maintaining the momentum on behalf of the strike was noted by one of the two main local newspapers, the Lurgan Times. The Times went as far to suggest that were it not for the generosity of the local public, the strike surely would have quickly faltered.^[11]

With little sign of resolution and approximately 1,500 still out on strike, a call was made to attend the Carnegie Street Picture House again on Thursday 23 January to meet with Belfast and Lisburn trade union activists who made the journey to lend moral support. The basket was whipped round again for a further collection for non-unionised strikers.^[12] By this time financial support also began to filter in from trade unions in Belfast and various parts of industrial England.

Maintaining a presence on the ground, was, of course, an integral part of keeping agitation in the public consciousness. Regular marches and trade union processions were organised through the town, with some public demonstrations seeing a tenth of the local population bringing the old market space in the town centre to a standstill on Wednesday 5 February. Afterwards the march made its way to the town hall, where hundreds huddled around the building, unable to gain access to hear the assembled speakers.

Despite strong numbers turning out regularly in depth of winter, an air of pessimism prevailed. The Lurgan Times on 5 February summed up the mood of frustration and uncertainty, counting the cost to the area’s main industry. While noting the efforts made by various sections of society including the clergy, traders, and union officials, in trying to broker an end to this ‘deplorable struggle’, the paper nonetheless praised the ongoing ‘benevolence’ of the factory owners; a sympathetic position that the majority of local papers held.

The strikers were undeterred by failing to find a truly sympathetic ear in the local press. They were, at that time, able to call on the support form far outside the local area. On 6 February a meeting of the Belfast Trades and Labour Council placed the Lurgan dispute on the top of its agenda. The Secretary of the Council, John Murphy, proclaimed that he had contacted all the trade unions in the city to appeal on behalf of the Lurgan strikers.

The strike was raised in the Westminster parliament on the same day by prominent trade unionist and Labour MP for Barrow-in-Furness, Charles Duncan, who pressed the President of the Board of Trade in Parliament on the matter. Duncan enquired if any of the Lurgan factory owners had Government contracts, in an effort to put pressure on them from above to make a deal.

Further north, the Manchester-based organ of the British Labour movement, The Daily Citizen, championed the strikers for putting labour first while the likes of Sir Edward Carson and his lieutenants were ‘promising comic-opera revolution in Ulster’. The paper claimed that the Lurgan strike was itself ‘a very real and strenuous war is being waged on behalf of some of the most downtrodden serfs of modern industry’.

The Lancashire-based Cotton Factory Times also took up the Lurgan cause, claiming that ‘in spite of the suffering they are enduring, the linen workers, trade unionists and non-unionists alike—absolutely refuse to go back to work at the employers’ terms of unconditional surrender’.

Closer to home, the strike also impacted on the outcome of local municipal elections. Local businessman and former poor law guardian, Joseph Herbert (formerly Herzberg), a Jewish emigrant from Latvia ran for the Urban District Council local elections, which were held on 15 January, in the midst of the strike. Herbert’s home and business was located in the heart of the working-class North Street area, where many of the strikers resided.

On the eve of the poll, Herbert took out an advert in the Lurgan Times, highlighting his support for those striking and his desire to see them live in decent affordable housing.[13] This timely intervention by Herbert resulted in him topping the poll.[14]

Resolution?

By 8 of February, almost one month into the action, rumblings of a resolution filtered through to those on the front line. Power Loom Association representatives travelled to the town to speak directly with striking weavers.  A meeting was convened for 11 February in the town’s Shankill buildings to thrash out what a resolution might look like.

Intense discussions lasting 22 hours tested the resolve of each side, with unions pushing for a 1/4d increase per yard on the output of cloth woven. Conversely, the bosses proposed a more modest increase of 1/16d. While negotiations continued, the strikers, tired and weary, attempted to exert some last-minute influence over their unions reps by holding two parades in the town, walking beneath a banner bearing the words: ‘1/4D per yard. Nothing less’.

When the meeting broke, it was apparent the bosses had ultimately prevailed. Small concessions were given on pay and better working materials, but evidently this proposed settlement was not going to relegate bosses to the poor house.

The following day, despite the dry and clear conditions, low clouds appeared over the factory workers as they filed into the Carnegie Street picture house to consider the offer made by the factory owners.

Councillor Lunn, noting the mood, attempted to claw back some pride by highlighting the importance of the stand they had taken, claiming that they showed they were now living in times where the worker must be recognised and satisfied. Indeed, while the victory was small in monetary terms, it represented the first pay rise in over two decades.

Of the 1,687 ballots issued, 1,060 agreed to the deal. A total of 385 rejected the terms, while a significant number did not even bother to vote. Perhaps an indication of the dejection some felt. William O’Neill attempted to put a positive spin on the outcome, emphasising that it had been recognised that underpayment was an accepted reality and had been broken. This ‘victory’ came with a timely warning that unless all workers were unionised, any future strike action was bound to be defeated.

Glorious Failure?

In purely monetary terms, the Lurgan weavers strike, like many others of the time, can be viewed as a failure, given initial expectations when industrial action began. Nevertheless, in terms of community solidarity, the strike was an important episode in the town’s social and political history where workers challenged the status quo.

This was certainly the view in the immediate decades afterwards. A thirty-year reflection of the strike at the 1944 Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress heralded the importance of the 1913 Strike as an example of the town’s staunch union militancy. Lurgan’s weavers had, unlike other parts of the country, maintained ‘a powerful union organisation’.

With deindustrialisation and the onset of the Troubles, that militant union tradition has virtually disappeared .

Despite its success throughout the nineteenth century, Lurgan’s linen industry faced growing challenges internally and from outside, with cheaper cotton and imported textiles, changing fashion trends and a decline in demand for traditional linen products.

These combined factors contributed to a steady reduction in employment and the closure of many local firms during the twentieth century. Samuel McCrudden & Co. closed in 1959, followed by Lurgan Weaving Company in 1967. By 1974, when the Troubles was at its height, only two linen-weaving firms remained in the town, marking the near disappearance of an industry that had once been a cornerstone of the local economy.[15]

However, as Dublin, Limerick and elsewhere have recently shown in their remembrance of famous labour stances of the period, the Lurgan strike of 1913 still has something to offer those who seek to reclaim some lost labour pride and history of the area.

References

[1] K Clendinning, ‘The Linen Industry in the Lurgan Area’ in Lurgan Ancestry

[2] F.X. McCorry, Lurgan: An Irish Provincial Town 1610-1970 (Newry, 2010), p. 93.

[3] Ibid, p. 93.

[4] Kathleen Rankin, The Linen Houses of the Bann Valley: The story of their families (Belfast, 2007) pp 180-184.

[5] Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Economic status, religion, and demography in an Ulster town in the early twentieth century’ in The History of the Family, vol. 13, no. 4, (2008), pp 350-359; McCorry, Lurgan, an Irish Provincial Town, p. 93

[6] The Nation, 26 October 1872

[7] G. MacAtasney, Clan na Gael GLC An Lorgain: More Than a Club (Lurgan, 2023), p. 10

[8] Robert J. S. Ross, ‘Bread and Roses: Women Workers and the Struggle for Dignity and Respect’ in The Journal of Labor and Society, vol. 16 (2013) pp 59–68; Robert E. Snyder, ‘Women, Wobblies, and Workers’ Rights: The 1912 Textile Strike in Little Falls, New York’ in New York History, vol. 60, no. 1 (1979), pp 29-57.

[9] James Connolly, To The Linen Slaves of Belfast (1913), https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1913/xx/linslavs.htm

[10] Freeman’s Journal, 16 Oct. 1912.

[11] Lurgan Times, 25 Jan. 1913.

[12] Irish Independent, 24 Jan. 1913.

[13] Lurgan Times, 14 January 1913.

[14] J. McCorry, ‘Lurgan’s Jewish Population’ in Review: The Journal of Craigavon Historical Society, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2011.

[15] S.C. Lutton, ‘The Linen Trade in County Armagh since the turn of the [20th] century’ in Review, the Journal of the Craigavon Historical Society, vol. 2, no. 3 (1974).

By Ray Esten

This article endeavours to reveal George’s Quay and Sir John Rogerson’s Quay as the final point of departure for those who were involuntarily taken, and including those transported as punishment for criminal convictions.

Transportation for a period of 14 years, being one of the main punishments handed out by Irish magistrates until the outbreak of the American War of Independence (1775).

In total, following the Transportation Act of 1718 some 13,000 criminals were removed from Ireland. Many of these convicts were brought from the old jail on Thomas Street in carts, and stood chained on George’s Quay, before being taken onboard ship. A large number of them were later landed at the labour-intensive plantation-colonies of Maryland and Virginia and were sold into indenture upon arrival. [1]

The outgoing cohorts on the quays could encompass indentured servants who agreed to work for several years so they could get free passage to America or escape debt and poverty. Also present were the dreaded ‘sturdy beggars’, transportation being regarded as a remedy for their idleness, which was widely perceived as the principal affliction of the poor.

They sometimes shared the quays with military personnel or seafarers, and those impressed (forced or otherwise persuaded) into naval service. They are tied together through history and circumstances.  Also too were the orphaned sons of seafaring men, who were enlisted on ships and the children abducted from their families and forcibly shipped across the Atlantic. They must have shared a common sense of helplessness and a fear of the unknown.

Impressed into Service

One great evil of eighteenth-century life was the ‘impressing’ or capturing of sailors, workmen and boys by the Royal Navy. This legal method of recruiting seamen, relied on an armed force who, once ashore, forcibly seized and carried off all likely men to serve their king and country, under harsh discipline and for small pay.

The Press Gang, as this force became known, acted as a source of great misery and were dreaded in all seaport towns whenever they appeared. ^[2] In 1734, for example, they went into several ships in the harbour of Dublin and removed two hundred sailors, and it was noted that, ‘they are now beating up for volunteer seamen, to whom good encouragement is promised’. ^[3] This suggests that their methods included canvassing in tandem with violence.

Whatever the case, they became a common feature of quayside life. In 1738, for example, the Dublin papers expected that we should have press warrants to impress seaman, and the Port Mahon Man of War is expected by the next packet.^[4] The newspapers continued in the years following to report on this phenomenon by announcing that a ‘press’ was hot on the quays. In 1745 it was reported that ‘we have had a very hot press on the river for the last three or four days.’ ^[5]

By march of 1756 The Dublin Journal noted that the crew of a yacht and the for-Drake Bomb Ketch[1] (a ship belonging to the press gang) came armed against the coal porters of Aston Quay and pressed about forty, and afterwards made a rally on the unsuspecting hackney chairmen of Lazers Hill, of whom they impressed fifteen.^[6]

At the same time, it was reported that twenty sails of colliers had arrived in the bay, most having their hands pressed without regard for their protection. ‘Those who managed to escape or deserted through fear were left to the mercy of the sea.’ This had reached such heights by 1756 that it was feared that, ‘if some method is not discovered to prevent the Hands of being impressed out of the colliers, coals will inevitably rise to an exorbitant price.’ A reflection on the precarious nature of the coal trade in this period, and particularly when combined with the actions of the Press Gang. If this was to continue, it was argued, ‘the people in general be greatly distressed for want of them. ‘^[7] It continued nonetheless and a short time after a smart-press was recorded on George’s Quay, in which the Lieutenant belonging to the tender was dangerously wounded by a cutlas of a sailor, who afterwards made his escape.^[8]

There was even a case of voluntary enlistees in the 1750s that comprised of some 90 members of the Liberty Boys (a Dublin gang that caused havoc in the city) who had voluntarily entered the service on board his majesty’s fleet.^[9] An indication of the way enlistment could be used as a form of social control.

The fields behind St. Mark’s church were, for the Press Gang, a happy hunting ground and whenever a man-of-war was stationed off Ringsend there was usually trouble.[10] Impressment was sure to radicalise the local sailors, whom they tried to enlist by force, and they met any incursion with determined resistance. Though it was in America that anti-impressment riots laid the foundation of a form of political resistance that would become central to the American experience of ‘patriotism’ or rejection of British rule. ^[11]

The Point of Exit: Soldiers, Seamen and Sailors

It was not only sailors or demoralised gang members who departed from Dublin’s quays, however. Soldiers, in their traditional red uniform, would have been a regular sight on George’s or Sir John Rogerson’s Quay where they could be observed marching onboard ships anchored quayside.

In 1755, for example, a woman followed her husband (a soldier) from the quayside, and tried to enter the boat he boarded on George’s Quay, but was refused to take leave of her husband by the officers because of her young child, the child not being permitted on board.

‘Though, the vessel was under sail, she thought it proper to go off, and leave her child with a stranger.’ She did, however, ultimately return to collect her child. This also says something about the practices of parenting in this period.

The Point of Exit: Stolen Children

Yet, parents could not always afford to be lax about their children’s whereabouts. In fact, a stern eye was needed for in the wink of an eye a child could be taken, and sold into servitude on George’s Quay. The most notorious and published case of child abduction was brought about by the supposed heir by the order of his uncle in 1728.

Following the death of his father, James Annesley, aged around twelve, was hustled in a coach to George’s Quay, into a boat down to Ringsend and shipped to America.[12]

The boy was sold in Pennsylvania for seven years, however, an attempt at escape secured him for a further thirteen years (the law of that state according seven years to escapees). ^[13]

The Dublin Journal noted in 1750 that kid-napping children still remains notwithstanding the, many cautions given in that paper.^[14]

A further case reported in The Dublin Journal noted that a man near Aungier street desired that two girls go with him to see his wife, whom they knew. Their mothers, however, on getting word of this pursued them to George’s Quay. ‘Tis imagined the villain intended to put them on board a Kids-Ship and send them to the plantations.’^[15] This practice appears to have been revived or continued in the subsequent decade. In 1768, for instance, it was reported that ‘the old practice’ of kidnapping children from their parents and privately shipping them to America had been revived.

That August two children were taken from their parents for that very purpose. Following an intensive search of Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, however, the children were discovered and a man was subsequently lodged in Newgate. On his way to the jail, the kidnapper was followed by a crowd who pelted him with dirt and stones. ^[16] In the next year, a bill was being prepared to be brought into parliament that would make it a felony without the benefit of the clergy to sell, to steal or force or kidnap any child or person without their consent or those of parents, guardians or next of kin, ‘to indent or go abroad to any different part of the world. [17]

Though this practice appears to have carried on to near the end of the century, a future of which included an old woman, who lured the children with ginger bread, before gagging children and covering them with a cloak. On board ship, children were discovered packed into barrels, and ready to sail for America.[18]

Point of Exit: Marine Society Poor Boys

The company of stationers in 1757 presented a sum of money to the marine society, to fit out poor boys for sea. [19] This was just a year after a marine society had been founded in London, to recruit seafarers, and count boys to act as servants during wartime. In 1759 the Dublin Journal noted that fifty young lads clothed and fitted out by the marine society, marched from Dublin Castle to George’s Quay and were sent on board a tender.[20] By the mid-1760s a Hibernian Marine School or Marine Nursery had been established at Ringsend (Later moved to Sir John Rogerson’s Quay). Its mission was to educate the sons of sailors who were orphans or those whose family could not afford education. They entered the school aged between 7 and 10 years and were to be apprenticed to the masters of ships at the age of 14.[21]

It is perhaps a strange turn of events to think that some of these children could have been the sons of sailors who had been impressed. That this had resulted in them being sent to sea and their mothers and sisters to the workhouse. Though the outcome was not always this tragic.  Caroline Withall who has researched the marine society in Britain noted the varied experiences of the boys, including, ‘Edward Kelly, who was so badly beaten he almost lost the use of his arm, to success stories like George Byworth, who enjoyed a long career at sea with the East India Company after first being placed with them by the Society.’[22]

 The Point of Exit: Transportation:  Crimes and Punishment

Punitive practices in the mid-eighteenth century often assumed forms that diverge markedly from those prevalent in contemporary justice systems.

For capital crimes such as enlisting men into foreign service (Jacobite recruiter) Captain Moses Newland, for instance, was drawn, hanged and quartered at St. Stephen’s Green in 1726, ‘and died like a soldier; his Quarters were delivered to his friends. ^[23]

One Carberry was hanged in July of 1734 at St. Stephen’s Green for robbing some plate and a pair of buck-skin breeches.^[24] A few days after Carberry was turned off ‘the pretended dumb fortune teller’ was whipped through the city by Jack Ketch known as Kelly the hangman. In this period most of the punishments that were carried out in public, included some kind of punishment of the flesh, granting several felons were soon to be deported out of the land. ^[25] Their last journey, before transportation, would have been from the first Newgate jail at Cornmarket to George’s Quays and then onboard a ship.

I sentence you, but to what I know not; perhaps to storm and shipwreck, perhaps to infectious disorder, perhaps to famine, perhaps to be massacred by savages, perhaps to be devoured by wild beasts. Away-take your chance; perish or prosper, suffer or enjoy.

Jeremy Bentham

Transportation as a form of punishment, as noted by Deidre Beddoe in her study of Welsh female convicts, had several advantages for the authorities, ‘it was cheaper than keeping prisoners in gaol and bridewell at home, or building new-style penitentiaries.’ This alternative reminds the reader of the old saying one of ‘out of sight out of mind’ for it removed the ‘dangerous classes’ to another location.^[26]

The practice of deportation or transportation from Ireland to the Virginia tobacco plantations and other locations in America was the result of an act passed in 1719, and after 1726 the government paid subsidies to shipmasters for convicts as well as vagabonds removed. For the majority of individuals transported from the jail to George’s Quay. This constituted their final point of departure. Most of these individuals had previously ventured no farther than the boundaries of their own parish or immediate locality. They, however, could find themselves thrust into alien environments.

One ship that sailed from Dublin in 1736 to Maryland was beset with foul weather and blown off course. All died except for one Mrs Buckler and two sailors. She claimed to have been kidnapped by indigenous M’Knaq who robbed the ship which lay in ruins in Nova Scotia. However, the ship’s valuable cargo was convicts, and she was in fact later discovered to be a thief and prostitute, most likely removed from George’s Quay, who had deceived everyone. She was never seen again.[27]

Quite the opposite occurred, in 1739, just a month before the Cato Conspiracy (slave revolt) in South Carolina, where it was reported that the house of Captain MacPherson was attacked by ‘several Spaniards, Irishmen and Negroes, where they killed several men and wounded many others.’ The people of the province coming to the captain’s assistance this motley crew was beaten off. ^[28]

These are just examples of the diverse experiences of those subjugated. One common trend, that is evident from colonial newspapers, is rewards offered for the capture of Irish escapees. Some of these individuals attempted to return to Ireland, and while the practice was not widespread, one Graham was held in Newgate prison for the crime of returning. He attempted once again to escape. This time in women’s clothing and with a child in arms. He would never set foot on the quays again for he was ‘double ironed and neck yok’d’^[29] and was to be hanged soon after.

Others sent off included, political agitators like Thomas Hamilton, a notorious rioter, who was tried at the Tholsel, a building which doubled as city hall, court and prison, for carrying arms and being ‘a papist’.[30]

Convicts continued to be transported and in the 1770s 40 were put on board the Oxford on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, and destined for his majesty’s plantations.^[31] Soon after, another shipment left for Baltimore.^[32] Escape before removal was possible, both from prison and from the final staging point, prior to transportation. In 1770, for instance, a vessel moored at Sir John Rogerson’s Quay and bound for America became the site of a last-ditch attempt by a number of convicts to evade transportation to the colonies. ‘Three of them got off, two men and women; the men were handcuffed together.’ ^[33] Though their chances of evading justice may seem futile.

There was numerous escape attempts made, and the fear of transportation all too real. Many of them would be mistreated on the passage across. ‘For ship owners had scant motivations for careful handling’ others died of small pox and other diseases. For the British government the advantages of this experiment were removing criminals and at the same time offering a vital workforce to the colonists. infrastructure and extending settlement. The government took full advantage of this export trade and their labour services, clearing forests. [34]

The Point of Exit: Indentured Servants

Indentured service was essentially a labour arrangement, to work without pay -travel expenses, food and shelter for a time usually seven years. It was a harrowing decision for many and for others they faced little choice.  Indeed, some people were forced to go rather than face imprisonment, as through poverty they had been reduced to breaking. They attired to this agreement made at court.

Women like Mary Clark, feeling no other option, and having been burnt in the hand for counterfeiting money, obtained her pardon indented herself, and was sent off to George’s Quay.[35] Her worries were not over, however. Risk to health was very real on-board a ship bound for the colonies. Of course, the journey was long, arduous and hazardous, and there was also the risk of the ship capsizing. A ship, for example, was lost in Virginia; the mate and 50 Irish servants were drowned.

It appears that people were indented at the Tholsel, which had on its ground floor contained the recorders court or session house.[36] In March of 1754, for instance, the Dublin Journal reported that, last week fourteen poor men and women were indented at the Tholsel as servants for America. Gone, it was noted, for the want of employment.[37]

The term ‘indentured’ is typically called so, ‘because the paper on which the terms of the bondage were written was folded and then torn along a crooked (or indented) line, with master and servant each retaining half as contractual agreement.’ [38] This could also be done quayside, and it is possible that it occurred at some properties on Aston, George’s and Sir Rogerson’s Quay. In 1766, for example, a number of people of both sexes having indented themselves on the Liffey for Philadelphia were set ashore by a gang of lawless fellows turned them all ashore.[39]

The Point of Exit: Sturdy Beggars

‘No sooner had the stranger landed at Howth the Pigion House[sic], or George’s Quay, than he was assailed by a clamour of crowds of miserable objects, part of the standing army of 2000 city beggars.’ ^[40]

Others who embarked for the colonies, from the quays, included indentured servants and sturdy beggars. While there was no suggestion that in Europe that the criminal was a distinct social group, however, particular types of individuals and specific social groups were seen as potential criminals. ^[41] Vagrancy was made a transportable offence in 1707, but the legislation was ineffective. Further transportation Acts for beggars came about in 1729 and 1735.[42] Bishop Berkeley probed this feature of Irish society in The Querest (1737) question 384 ‘Whether sturdy beggars should not be seized and made slaves to the public for a certain term of years?’ ^[43]

Since there was no poor law in Ireland, a vagabond, ‘sturdy’ or ‘wandering’ beggar of the city was liable for transportation.^[44] A good example of the general feeling towards beggars in the city parishes is that, in 1742 church wardens had been given the power to take up all strolling beggars and vagabonds and that Vermin.^[45] According to a proclamation published in February of 1749.  Beggars of both sexes and all ages including shoe boys begging without a badge or those without a viable way of getting a livelihood would be put to hard labour at the Workhouse or Bridewell.^[46]

In fact, it could be argued that the hospital for incurables at Townsend Street which in the early days of its founding was little more than an alms-house for ” diseased objects,” which is rather an unfortunate way to describe those who were received into the institution.  Indeed, it is open to question if the Hospital for Incurables was founded on humanitarian grounds.

In fact, noted Robert Gahan, ‘ I believe that it was because of the streets swarming with beggars and vagabonds preying on the charitable public by the exposure of various forms of deformity as to be somewhat of a menace; when we consider that means of travel were so slow as to allow the most afflicted to keep pace alongside such as a sedan chair, the disgust of the occupant can be imagined, with the hasty giving of alms to the human derelict in order to be rid of him; having got rid of one his place would be immediately taken by another, so have been something in the nature of a nightmare to move through the streets; and yet the unfortunate deformed beggar was not to blame, they had to live, and yet no hospital would receive them being victims of incurable complaints.’ ^[47]

The lack of effective legislation contributing significantly to begging. Many of these unfortunate creatures passed through George’s Quay on their march towards the colonies. The transportation of beggars continued until the American Declaration of Independence and the subsequent revolutionary war there and although transportation to Australia continued, those transported included very few beggars as attitudes in Ireland in regards to punishment and vagrancy were evolving. [48]

Conclusion

And so, we walked again on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay and on George’s Quay. They hold the ghosts of our past. The unknown soldier, sailor and charwoman. The indentured servants fixed to work for several years in exchange for free passage to America in the hope of escaping debt and poverty.

Some of the 13,000 criminals who travelled from the old jail on Thomas Street and stood chained on George’s Quay, and were ‘followed to the water’s edge by distracted and heartbroken relatives.’ [49] Or those often-futile last-ditch attempts at freedom.

Those ‘sturdy beggars’, people the authorities saw as idle.  They shared the quays with men of the Press Gang and those they detained. History and circumstance linked them all.

The same was true of the orphaned sons of seamen in their Marine School in their ‘dark blue jackets and white ducks.’ [50] And the children who had been kidnapped from their families, without remorse, and shipped across the Atlantic. All of whom shared a possible sense of helplessness and fear of the unknown.

References

[1] Tim Carey, MountJoy: The Story of a Prison (Collins Press Dublin, 2000), pp. 2-3

[2] The Story of the British People in Pictures (Odem Press Limited, London, n., d), p. 268.

[3] The Dublin Journal June 11, 1734.

[4] The Dublin Journal Apr 18, 1738

[5] Dublin Faulkner Journal Mar 26, 1745

[6] Belfast Newsletter March 16, 1756.

[7] The Dublin Journal March 30, 1756.

[8] The General Evening Post (London) May 06, 1765.

[9] Dublin Faulkner Journal Jan 18, 1757

[10] Joseph W. Hammond George’s Quay and Rogerson’s Quay in the Eighteenth-Century Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Dec., 1942 – Feb., 1943), pp. 41-54

[11] Woden Teachout, Capture the Flag: A Political History of American Patriotism (Basic Books New York, 2009), p. 15

[12] Maurice Craig, Dublin 1660-1860 (Figgis Dublin, 1980), p. 152

[13] M Dorthy George, London Life in the Eighteenth-Century (Capricorn Books America 1965), PP. 364-365.

[14] The Dublin Journal Sep 29, 1750

[15] Dublin Journal August 03 1751.

[16] The Belfast Newsletter Aug 16, 1768

[17] Belfast Newsletter September 26, 1769

[18] Malton’s Views of Dublin, Trevor White ed., Malton’s Views of Dublin: The Story of the Georgian City (Martell Publishing Dublin, 2021), p. 12

[19] The Dublin Journal February 08, 1757.

[20] The Dublin Journal January 27, 1759

[21] J.W. De Courcy, The Liffey in Dublin (Gill and McMillian Dublin, 1996), PP. 191-192

[22] Richmond Local History Society ‘Talk by Dr Caroline Withall on: The forgotten boys of the sea: Marine Society merchant sea apprentices, 1772-1873’ (Nov11, 2029).

[23] The American Weekly Mercury October 06, 1726.

[24] The Dublin Journal July 20, 1734.

[25] The Dublin Journal July 23, 1734.

[26] Deidre Beddoe, Welsh Convict Women: A Study of Women transported from Wales to Australia, 1787-1852 (Stewart Williams, Barry 1979), p. 11.

[27] Graham Seal Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children who built Britain’s Empire (Yale Press. 2021), pp 57-59

[28] Dublin Journal August 07, 1739.

[29] The Dublin Journal May 19, 1741

[30] The Belfast Newsletter Mar 6, 1749

[31] The Freeman’s Journal June 21, 1776

[32] The Freeman’s Journal Sep 08, 1767

[33] Faulkner Dublin Journal Feb 8, 1770

[34] Peter N. Stearns, Punishment in World History Routledge London and New York, 2024), p. 99

[35] The Dublin Journal Mar 12, 1747The

[36] Colm Lennon, John Montague, John Rocque’s Dublin: A Guide to the Georgian City RIA Dublin, 2010), p. 29

[37] Dublin Journal 1733-1825, Tuesday, March 19, 1754

[38] Cary, p. 2

[39] The Freeman’s Journal April 01, 1776.

[40] Samuel A. Ossory, Fitzpatrick, Dublin: a historical and topographical account of the city (London: Methuen

1907), p 202.

[41] Clive Emsley, Crime, Police, and Penal Policy: European Experience (Oxford, 2007), p. 3

[42] Audrey Woods, A History of the Mendicity Institute 1818-1998 (A. A. Farmar Dublin ,1998), p.  5

[43] Joseph Johnson, Bishop Berkeley’s Querist in Historical Perspective (Dundalgan Press Dundalk, 1970), p. 157.

[44] A. G.L Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies: A Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and other parts of the British Empire (Faber and Faber London 1966), p. 36

[45] The Dublin Journal August 14, 1742.

[46] The Dublin Journal February 13, 1749.

[47] Robert Gahan Old Alms-Houses of Dublin. Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Sep. – Nov., 1942), pp. 15-40.

[48] Woods p. 5

[49] Hammond, p 50

[50] Ibid

[1] A ketch-rigged warship of the 17th and 18th centuries, equipped with heavy mortars for firing explosive bombs.

First broadcast on the Irish History Show. John Dorney and Cathal Brennan discuss the Fenian movement, part 3 out of 4.

Part one, 1858-1867 here and part two, 1867 to 1900 here.

This episode takes the Irish Repubican Brotherhood and its American wing, Clan na Gael from the early 1900s up to the Rising of 1916.

We discuss how the oganisation emerged from the doldrums under a new and energetic leadership of figures such as Bulmer Hobson in the early 1900s, infiltrating and utilising wider cultural nationalism, the Sinn Fein party and ultimately the nationalist militia the Volunteers.

We talk about about how the drive for the insurrection of Easter 1916 came partly from the circumstances of the Home Rule crisis and the First World War and partly from the long held plans of veteran Fenian, Tom Clarke.

We finish by discussing the IRB’s prospects under a new leader, Michael Collins, in the post Rising period.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to our Patreon page for The Irish Story if you would like to support our work.

By Dee Moore and Eolan Ryng

They say history repeats itself.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the newly established government of Ireland agreed to the demolition of Kilmainham Gaol. At one stage, the 1916 execution yard was to become home to a heavy goods storage facility. A campaign was established and it was only through voluntary labour that the site was restored in the 1950s and 1960s.

In Cork, history is repeating itself. There is a proposal to demolish a historic detention site and to build over the yard where a 1916 execution took place.

Like Kilmainham, Cork’s Detention Barracks is a 1916 execution site. Unlike Kilmainham, it remained in use as a civil prison until a decade ago. Like Kilmainham, it is the physical connection to some of the most interesting, and heartbreaking, stories of Ireland’s revolutionary past. Unlike Kilmainham, these have remained hidden in plain sight for almost a century.

The stories that this site tells are of martyrdom, love, deceit and bravery. They are not just the stories of heroes – they are the stories of real men and women who played formative roles in the fabric of Cork and Ireland.

Built in the 1840s under the design of Joshua Jebb and based on Pentonville prison in London, Cork’s Detention Barracks would, by 1914, be the third largest site for military detention across Britain and Ireland.

It was a site of controversy with discussions in the House of Commons on the ‘popish’ mass granted to soldiers within its walls. In 1866, a Protestant soldier, Thomas Darragh, was court martialled within its walls for his role in the Fenian conspiracy led by John Devoy.

Darragh was sentenced to death. His sentence was ultimately commuted and from Cork’s Detention Barracks he was sent to Freemantle Prison in Western Australia. Anyone who visits that site today will see a monument to the next journey of Thomas Darragh. Darragh escaped Freemantle aboard the Catalpa and sailed to America for freedom in one of the most famous prison escapes in world history.

The association between the Detention Barracks and international stories would not stop there. The story of Cork’s martyred Ard Mhéara (Lord Mayor) Terence MacSwiney – who died on hunger strike in Brixton prison – would gain headlines around the world. Mahatma Ghandi, Ho Chi Minh and Guo Moruo would cite MacSwiney as a leading influence on their own revolutionary struggles.

The hunger strike that ultimately led to his death in London started within the walls of the Detention Barracks. Arrested in Cork City Hall and brought, with leading IRA figures Liam Lynch and Sean O’Hegarty, to the Detention Barracks, Terence MacSwiney refused to recognise the British authority or to conceal his identity.

He was Ard Mhéara Corcaigh (Lord Mayor of Cork), and around his neck was the chain of his city and he would not deny his democratic mandate to the people of Cork. The others were released but MacSwiney was charged.

He refused food from the moment of his arrest. As he arrived to the Detention Barracks, Sergeant Major Bailey – in charge on the night – took his personal belongings. He asked the Ard Mhéara to hand over the chain of office. Terence MacSwiney told him he ‘would rather die than part with it’.

The matter was not pushed. Terence MacSwiney, the mayor of Cork city, spent the first night of his hunger strike in a cell in Cork’s Detention Barracks with the chain of Cork – a chain still worn by Ard Mhéara today.

That first night of his 74-day Hunger Strike was likely a difficult one. But Ard Mhéara MacSwiney was no stranger to the cells of the Detention Barracks.

He first entered the prison as an ordinary man in 1916. When Cork failed to mobilise during the Easter Rising, the British Army rounded up hundreds of Volunteers and brought them to the Detention Barracks. Amongst them were, alongside Terence MacSwiney, Tomas MacCurtain, who, lie MacSwiney, would also serve as Lord Mayor of Cork and was assassinated by the RIC in March of 1920.

On 9^th May 1916, they were marched outside and down to the train station in Cork. A station that would come to be known as Kent Station.

They remembered how they were rounded up outside, how they were shaken and emotional. They remembered marching in silence until they reached the Lower Glanmire road. They refused to be silenced, however and broke into song in defiance of their captors.

They would board a train to Richmond Barracks and from there many would find themselves spending Christmas 1916 in Frongoch in Wales, but that day in the detention barracks would live in their minds forever.

For at 4am that day, in Cork’s Detention Barracks, their comrade – a man who had been involved in the Land League and taken part in the Irish cultural revival at home and in Boston – Thomas Kent was brought to the yard. He wore no shoes but held his rosary beads. Kent was sentenced to death for the shooting of an RIC constable at his home in Fermoy in north Cork, a shootout in which his brother also died. Defiant to the end, his final request was that no Irish man be forced to shoot him. He was, however, shot by firing squad and  buried in a shallow grave in that same yard, his body covered with quicklime.

At dawn, when the Volunteers were brought on their march to the train station, they had been woken first by the sound of a firing squad executing their friend and comrade Thomas Kent.

Nor would this not be the last time that the sound of a firing squad would echo over the Glen and Cork city.

Thirteen more men would die by firing squad within the exercise yard of Cork’s Detention Barracks between February and May 1921. These included IRA Volunteers captured in Clonmult, Dripsey and Mourneabbey ambushes along with several men court-martialled individually and sentenced to death by military court martial. Six IRA prisoners were shot there on February 28 1921 alone and another four on April 28 of that year.

This is the tip of the iceberg of a prison that saw Munster’s revolutionary tale unfold within its walls. There are many more stories to tell – the first assassination attempt on Cruxy Connors who survived a famous attempt on his life in New York’s Central Park, Tadhg Barry’s search for Thomas Kent’s hidden grave, how Sean and Tom Hales – both imprisoned at this site – took two different sides in the Civil War and many more.

This building is our physical connection to these stories. The plan to demolish it will demolish that connection. Plaques and commemorations and written word will not bring it back.

Kilmainham Gaol stands today as one of the world’s best rated historic museums thanks to the action of ordinary people. It is those same people, it is you and me, who will save Cork’s Detention Barracks. It is a story and a building worth saving.

By Ray Esten

 In the early eighteenth century, Dublin was on the brink of rapid growth, which gathered pace under George II in the late 1720s.

The medieval core (which still dominated city life in the early eighteenth century) was soon to be surpassed by new and fashionable developments on both sides of the Liffey.

The population was rising and the port was being developed and expanded. The working-class communities of this period are often recounted as existing in the Liberties or Ormond Market. One of the less recalled sites, however, when elements of Georgian Dublin’s working life are considered are George’s, Aston and Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, on the southern bank of the Liffey, to the east of medieval city. Yet in many respects these places formed the lifeblood of the city as it developed.

This area was inhabited by weavers, sail-makers, blacksmiths, as well as a large foundry, and other industries that related to ship-building and repair. Breweries and inns dotted the quays. Timber and salt, the latter essential for preserving food, were routinely unloaded quayside. While, porters and carriers of life’s essentials, like corn and coal, plied their labour. On the water, small craft known as gabbards, a flat-bottomed boat with a low hatchway for the reception of cargo, ferried goods up and down the river.

Also active along the Liffey was the wherry, a shallow light boat, sharp at both ends for greater speed. ferried goods along, whilst packet boats and ferries embarked. Ships were built and repaired, sailors took leave at its mouth, and members of parliament boarded (or returned) from London. It was bustling, hazardous, exciting and dangerous.

The South Quays.

Dublin in the eighteenth century was a capital city, housing the Irish Parliament in College Green, and much of the urban development in the city was state-led.

Under an act of parliament, a body known as the Ballast Office Committee was set up to develop the port in 1708. Over the next number of years, the Directors and Masters of the Ballast Office reported works carried out in the port and harbour of Dublin. They included building new walls, building and repairing gabbards (sailing barges) and floats, cleaning the channel, raising ballast and piling and planting on the South Bull, the sea wall that protected Dublin’s harbour. The latter involved the driving of oak piles into the boulder clay of Dublin Bay, which were subsequently secured with gravel-filled baskets and woven wattles.[1]

Dublin, however, was not a city that had a substantially developed or modern port, at least until the end of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, when observing Brooking’s map of 1728, considerable embankment is discernible on the south quays, including Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. This quay, commonly known as John’s Quay, was named after the lord mayor who built the wall which formed that quay, first planned as a dock in 1707.[2]

George’s Quay, originally Mercer Dock and rebuilt as a quay in 1714, it once commenced at White’s Lane (now Corn Exchange Place) and incorporated what ultimately became City Quay. It was constructed in 1713 by John Mercer, and completed in the 1720s at the behest of the city corporation.

During the time of Brookings map neither Burgh Quay nor Carlisle Bridge (later O’Connell Bridge) existed; Aston Quay ran from Anglesea Street to Hawkins Street and met George’s Quay which besides one property that jutted out formed, alongside Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, a continuous corridor, where cargo was unloaded and loaded.

By the time of John Rocque’s map of 1756 buildings and yards are set against a Liffey, which is crowded with vessels, and, ‘each of these admirably realistic-looking crafts is creditably located with respect to nearby keys and ferry points.[3] This points to a growing city and trade in the mid-eighteenth-century, of which George’s Quay, Aston and Sir John Rogerson’s Quay were active contributors.

 Quays Life: Obstacles in Religious Life

It might be asked what life was like in this area at the time. In answering this question, it is imperative that religion be taken into consideration.

The early to mid-eighteenth century was a time of religious and ethnic conflict in Ireland. The Penal Laws (enacted in several bursts since 1691) which consisted of anti-Catholic legislation, left its mark on all parts of Irish society, not least land inheritance. It was also a political distinction; the Penal Laws were justified by the suggestion of Catholic disloyalty to the political and religious establishment in Britain and Ireland and sympathy for the exiled House of Stuart. Violence between sects could also occur and riots and unrest often spilled out onto the quays.

The first house of worship in the neighbourhood of George’s Quay was a Lutheran church (1725) that served Dutch soldiers and their families, after the battle of the Boyne in 1690 [4] These troops had helped secure victory for the largely Protestant armies of King William over the mainly Catholic forces of King James. Commemoration of this victory was blended with a fear of Catholic disloyalty.

This became a key feature of Irish society and contributed to the long duration of the Penal Laws. It has been argued that these laws formed no systematic code. Instead, they amounted to a series of impromptu measures ‘loosely drafted and loosely enforced’ that were neither essential to the functioning of society nor capable of reshaping its fundamental development. Yet oppressive laws, whether enforced or not, set an order in society. In the eighteenth century, this continually reminded Catholics, and several dissenters, of their diminished standing within that society.

If the Land Could Speak

The very plots of land on George’s Quay expose this feature of Irish life, explicitly the purchases contrived and the 1704 and 1709 Popery acts, which, amongst other decrees, stated that Catholics could not buy land in their own name or have others purchase it in trust for them. If a ‘protestant discoverer’ could discover or identify such an individual or individuals, they could receive the property or rents. This law features in the case of William Alcock, a protestant, and most likely the Mr. Alcock expressed as the surveyor of Aston Quay, ‘who disordered of the mind drew his sword and ran it through his breast’. [5]

His last will and testament contained a sizable property at Lazy Hill (Townsend Street) as well as Mercer Dock and George’s Quay. This case makes for complex reading with the executors being mostly Catholic, and the challenger’s Protestant. The latter included Grace Mercer and Alcocks relatives in England.[6] It serves as a useful illustration of the often-complex legal relationships that existed between Catholics and Protestants in this period.

Parish Life

The parish of St. Marks (behind City Quay on present day Pearse Street) served the Protestant community of the south quays. It had been separated from St. Andrews parish in 1707.

The construction of St. Marks church, however, did not begin until later. It was roofed in 1729, and a number of parliament grants given towards its finish, but it was not consecrated until 1757.

It was by no means the wealthiest parish in the city, even if its limits reached to Trinity College. A possible indication of this can be estimated by the architectural merit of the church. A later appraisal of which noted, ‘externally the church has a somewhat dismal appearance, and even the main W front to Marks Street is not striking …internally it is rather gloomy.’ [7] And so, the characteristics of the church, the tardiness of its construction and delayed consecration may reflect the prosperity (or lack of) as well as the size of the population that existed in the locality at this time.

There was some wealth to be found at this locality, nonetheless. Take for instance, an advertisement in the early nineteenth century which offered a house on Townsend Street that would make a pleasing boarding house, and had a garden stocked with fruit trees. This was perhaps an indication of a wealthier period. Or in 1734 when a widow named Brown offered for sale or let a large dwellinghouse at the lower end of Lazars Hill, with coach house, stables and large garden. Together with one acre of good ground and 111 perches of good meadow ground, well enclosed with a good significant wall.[8]

What’s more, nearby once stood the Countess of Brandon’s large mansion, later destroyed by fire.[9] Nevertheless, it was a working-class area by-and-large, and by the early nineteenth century a central feature of this location was, ‘the low dank and unwholesome lanes and alleys, which run to George’s Quay and the Liffey, comprising the Wapping of Dublin [referring to working class dockland area of London].’ [10] It was an area of contrasts; it may be stated.

Catholic Mass House

Though Catholics formed the majority of Ireland’s population, Dublin, its capital, was a majority Protestant city until the late 1700s. This did not mean Catholics were absent from Dublin however.

A property advertised on George’s Quay in 1736 consisted of two large houses in good repair, one having two large warehouses and offices that would suit a merchant.[11] Often obscured in a similar type of building was a religious congregation, and in the same year, behind the quays (near Hawkins Street) stood a similar property, which acted as a Catholic mass house. [12] In this period, the Penal Laws prohibited the public practice of Catholic worship. Therefore, mass was performed away from public view or otherwise hidden from sight and sound.

This mass house had been converted from a stable, at the rear of Lord Ely’s house. It was most likely the primary chapel in the catholic parish of St Andrews, which had been in use, apparently since 1717.[13]

Its presence highlights a growing as well as existing Catholic community. Patrick Fagan in his study of Protestant and Catholic populations of Dublin in the eighteenth century, noted that it served as, ‘a Catholic beach-head in the south-east of the city in the new civil parish of Saint Mark’s, where were one mass-house, two schools, and seven priests who looked after the parishes of Saint Andrew, Saint Anne and Saint Peter.’ [14]

The Parish System: Disparities and Inequality

Most of its working-class inhabitants, owning no substantial property, it would be fair to assume, would not have been affected by questions of land or property rights. It is more likely that the weavers or gabbardmen of St. Marks and St. Andrews had more in common than the theological differences of their respective churches.  Though, the fact that the law explicitly favoured one religion over the other meant that they could not be characterised as wholly equal.

According to David Dickson, ‘the poor Protestants were better catered for than Catholics, as the parish had a system that collected taxes to support them.[15] Besides, the parish wardens of the established church were often active in closing mass houses in their locality. Such as in 1731, when the wardens of St. Marks Parish confirmed that they had discovered the old stable and two ‘Popish’ schools in Hawkins Street.[1] In this case, the government took no action, which indicates tolerance on their part [16].

On a local level, however, community relations must have been fractured. For, one body of the community had conveyed this information, with an eye on the closure of their neighbour’s house of worship. What is of equal significance, however, is the fact that a mass house existed locally after this and for the most part unmolested.

Food Shortage, and Poverty

Besides religious devotion, the daily necessities of life could cause conflict as well as desperation amongst local people. The most significant disturbances, perhaps, transpired in the 1740s, when hungry citizens raided vessels and shops on Aston Quay

Between 1739-40, severe weather, caused a famine in Ireland. In January of 1739 the church wardens of St. Marks parish composed a list of the poor taken house to house. It consisted of two thousand persons in distress and want, and that the list was not closed. It hoped that the charitable and well disposed of the rich part of the city would contribute to the relief of tradesmen, seafaring men, gabbardmen, lace weaving linen and hemp weaving. Cotton spinning silk winders and many other professions.[17] A good indication of the population, poverty, and methods of employment in this locality.

The date is of particular significance, as the winter of 1739-1740 brought a long frost that destroyed a large proportion of rural food stocks. The toil was perhaps greater outside of the city, though the failed harvests caused a great scarcity of grain in the city. This caused the Duke of Devonshire and the Privy Council to ban the exportation of corn, meal or any sort of grain. Therefore, the only cereals and grains that lay on George’s Quay at this time were foreign imports.

This had been facilitated by the easing of the Navigation Acts, laws which had restricted Irish trade with Britain’s empire, the slackening of which made commerce with America easier. The goods that reached Dublin included supplies of fine wheat, and barrels of wheat which arrived from New England and Philadelphia.[18] Many imports would have been small in proportion to earlier cargo, as the harvests had failed elsewhere too. As a result, ‘imports to Ireland, though they rose, did not rise sufficiently’. [19]

At any rate, the scarcity of corn was so bad during this period that the lord mayor directed that the church wardens of the parishes see what corn was stored by their merchants, so it could be brought to market in a time of scarcity.[20] What’s more, ‘to reasonably relieve a great number of the poor of the city’ Lord Viscount Mountjoy and Lord Tullamore sent 800 weight in oatmeal to be sold to the poor.[21]

Though the supply shortage stayed low, and during the summer of 1740, with the bakers making little bread, hungry citizens broke open the shops, and stripped a ship on Aston Quay of a barrel of beef. This only ceased when the lord Mayor, sheriffs and a party of guards intervened, though several other outrages were recorded in the next days.[22]

The insecurity caused by these acts, regardless of the religion of the active persons, perhaps heightened the old fear of a Roman Catholic revolt. The Dublin Journal, for example, reported a meeting at the Tholsel (or town hall) that concerned the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and common council. And, where, ‘it was recommended to the (Protestant dominated) Corporation to be well armed, and have them in readiness.’ Other news items that followed included the raid on a Catholic gunsmiths in Ship Street. And that Catholic houses had been raided for arms, but none found. [23]

After these lively reactions had receded and the horrors of famine passed, it was war fears that delayed economic recovery, until at least 1746. With, ‘repeated trade embargoes ‘mostly at the behest of London’ reduced the volume of maritime trade, and a depleted army presence, increased taxation, and the unsettling effects of invasion rumours weakened the inland economy’. Fear of a French invasion in 1744 had, for example, brought strict enforcement of the Penal Laws counting the closure of Catholic places of worship. It brought about ugly incidents in Dublin involving displaced mass-goers.[24]

But, with food more readily available, addresses of Catholic loyalty, and the defeat of Prince Charles and the last Scottish Jacobite insurrection at Culloden in 1745, and hopes of a Stuart restoration fading, a gradual weakness in implementing Penal legislation ensued.[25]

On George’s quay I first began, I there became a porter

Me and my master soon fell out which cut my Quaintance shorter

Jack of All Trades

Day-to -Day Business Quayside

Dublin was quickly becoming the distribution centre of imports, ‘the winter showground for the gentry, and the largest consumer market in its own right.’

The area around the quays was recognised as a trade centre, and this is reflected through a growth community. The Directory of Dublin for the Year 1738 shows that on George’s Quay lived Nicholas Mellin, Merchant for Ballyhack Millstones (used to grind wheat and corn), next to the Sun (most likely a public house).

On Sir John Rogerson’s Quay those involved in seafaring or the sale of goods related are present. At nearby Lazars Hill lived Dennis Neagle, a gabbard owner, and at Aston Quay lived a gabbardman named Fagan, who operated one of the flat-bottomed barges along the Liffey. [28] Men like Fagan were experts on the tides of the Liffey, who navigated such crafts amongst its rocks, difficult and shallow waters. [29]

Near the Ferryboat slip on Hawkins Quay, where many Dubliners crossed the Liffey or moved along the water, Samual Sandwith was selling clover and seed. Newfoundland cod could be acquired at William Hurst’s warehouse also at Hawkins Street. [30] John Casson, on the west end of Aston Quay, he ceased trading in 1746 stored, good old tent wine, old bottled French claret, mountain and Lisbon wine, Malaga sack, black beer, Hollands Spring water Geneva, rum, shrub, cherry brandy, brandy and rum as well as various other goods. [31]

There was a wide array of products related to colonial trade available quayside. While, regional consignments of salt for the table and for butter, from the Salt Works of Belfast, Newry, Dundalk and Drogheda, were being landed. In the years ahead, the silk and woollen industries controlled the Irish market for fashion fabrics. This kept the lace weaving linen and hemp weaving, cotton spinning and silk winders of the parish of St. Marks busy [32] Though Dublin would face harsher times in the coming decades, as the industry declined in the city, and developed in south Ulster and in Belfast.

Ships continued to bank on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. They accepted foreign goods and exported agricultural and other produces. Alongside this bustling hub operated rope makers, sale makers, ship candlers, brewers. While lightermen, received cargo from ships anchored to be sent to the Coal Quay (Present day Wood Quay) or the Custom House (Present day Wellington Quay). After which, porters and carters engaged in the moving of products throughout the city.

Opposite the Fountain Tavern (pub), on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, wherries (a type of boat that was traditionally used for carrying cargo or passengers) were sold, as well as all sails and rigging. Meanwhile sundry of other items including, pots, deal and oak boards and rack timbers could be viewed at Mr. Charles Sullivan at the Sign of the George (a pub).

Also, obtainable at quayside was 72 casts of scotch herrings well cured. These goods could be bought or viewed at Mr. Canton’s (rope-maker warehouse, on the other side of Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. Grocers like John Pierce of George’s Quay supplied the local community.[33] While, Mrs Elizabeth Williams of Lazers Hill advanced cures and remedies of, for example scurvy.[34] An occupation that could be dubious at best.

In the years ahead goods continued to be auctioned on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, where a docked wherry sold a large number of items to do with fishery as well as scotch herrings. Much of which could be viewed at The Sign of the George or the Black Lion on George’s Quay.[35] Nearby was present John Nairic, a sugar baker in Fleet Street, with a sugar house on Aston Quay [36] Also, on that quay by the late 1750s large quantities of potatoes were arriving from Dungarvan. [37] Potatoes being a common food amongst the city’s poor.

Black Gold

Aston and George’s Quay (later Bachelors Quay became important centres as the city became more built up, and were often associated with coal. Coal was ‘black gold’, for it meant life or death for so many families including the poor of St Marks parish. It was, nonetheless, a lucrative trade for those in that mode of business.

The Irish Parliament was fully aware of these predicaments. They set out various measures to keep prices low and the vulnerable of the city supplied with enough coal to sustain life. As most pressing concern, as James Kelly noted, ‘in the early months of 1740 was warmth rather than food. Most of the deaths that were reported that January were the victims of hypothermia rather than hunger and, because its residents were dependent on imported coal, the problem was acute in Dublin.’ [38]

This was compounded by the swindling practices of the master coal porters and others. In 1739, for instance, the Master of a collier and a master coal porter were locked in Newgate for extortion and prevarication.[39] There were several related grievances related to the selling of coal thereafter. Coal, for example, could be tampered with, for instance, through mixing of slack and water.  Even with the great charity with that had been collected for the poor, and the governments swift response, problems remained. For, Master coal Porters continued to extort the highest price.

The want of heat became so great in the famine years that trees and other combustibles were uprooted. This caused an act of parliament, to make it an offence without ‘benefit of the clergy’ to tear up or cut down trees without the permission of the owner. [40] The greatest efforts to control coal supply were perhaps brought about through the benevolent gentlemen who had established a charitable coal yard -with coal supplied at a reasonable price by the barrel half barrel or Bushell.

The entrance for to one these yards could to be found at the Sign of the Black Lion in Temple Bar and at Porters Row (Aston Quay). [41] Efforts to reform the trade continued, and in the 1750s deception on the part of the master coal porters also continued, with one master coal porter William Waters being ordered to stand at the pillory opposite to Liffey Street and a week later at Porters Row (Aston Quay) as a deterrent to others.

As a means to end dangerous practices, supervisors were employed for planned inspection of every ship, gabbards and lighter. And that their boards shall be put up (by way of a sign) to say if the coal is of Whitehaven or Workington.[42] Difference in coal quality meant that buyers needed good knowledge of the various products, as inferior coal meant less heat during winter. Buying straight from a vessel was attractive to citizens as it cut out the middle-man. However, this encouraged the ‘corner boys’ who lured the buyers on boats that contained inferior coal, and pretended to act as honest brokers, but deceived, and were paid a tribute by some shipmasters.[43]

Many of the deceptive methods of selling coal were not exclusive to Dublin or that English colliers, or used as a particular ply against the Irish consumers’ For, weather in London or Dublin ‘capitalists strove by varies devices, practicality by combination, to destroy competition, monopolise markets and fix the price as they desired.’ [44]

Yet, there was a feeling in Dublin that the country needed to develop Irish supplies. There were different locations that had coal including around Castlecomer in County Kilkenny. This looked promising for a time, as did Tyrone, and, for example, a gentleman, from that county stated in 1755 that several colliers were at the canal and by wagon. And that a great quantity of coal could be sent on reasonable terms to Dublin, some of which had already arrived, and sold out to the people in parcels in Luke Street on George’s Quay, for trial of quality. They hoped that the goodness of this coal would soon remove any prejudice against consuming our own commodities. [45]

Conniving Coal Porters

The coal porters were felt to be a conniving bunch too. Their behaviour was also under scrutiny, and, for example, the lord mayor ordered in 1761 that persons who act as coal porters as well as corn porters in the city apply to him for be in position of a proper badge to prove their good behaviour as permission to act in that capacity.[46]

The coal business became more regulated in coming decades, but there continued to be fraud, and disturbances related to disputes over wages. Hope for a home coal industry glimmered again in 1765, and Tyrone coal could again be the answer. That was, ‘if the Canal from Newry to the colliers was completed upon the same plan with that which has lately been finished from Newry to the sea.’  Soon it was expected ‘we will be able to supply ourselves with coal at a cheaper rate.’ [47] However, this was not the case and the city depended on colliery owners from across the sea thereafter.

Continuity and Change 1750s, 60s and 70s

During the 1750s and 1760s, a number of initiatives were underway in the locality. The quays remained commercially active and maintained some trading connections with Philadelphia and New York.  Though by this time, the grain industry had switched from foreign imports to a homegrown industry. Nevertheless, there was other avenues, and the ship Fanny Snow was ready to sail for Philadelphia. Perspective passengers could directly apply to one Thomas Hutchinson on Aston Quay.[48]. Besides, the movement of people, the flax seed trade was handled by Irish merchants, who purchased most of their seed from factors in Philadelphia and New York. [49]

The hospital for incurables was constructed at the junction of Townsend Street and Luke Street in 1753. [50] Shielded from public attention by Trinity College. By this time, a new market was being formed behind Aston Quay. While, the old Catholic mass-house at Lord Ely’s place, already in a state of bad repair, had been destroyed in a storm. The Royal Dublin Society acquired the Hawkin’s Street property and, in compensation, granted the parish priest a new site at the Fleet Market, situated between Lazar’s Hill and Poolbeg Street.[51]

This society, with a keen eye on better development and improvements to agriculture, also opened experimental farms ground for agricultural implements in Poolbeg Street.[52] What’s more, through its incentives to promote industry it awarded the society’s premium of 310 for the best beer brewed in imitation of foreign beers, to Sweetman’s breweries on Aston Quay in 1757.[53]

By this time, the city had almost entirely shed its medieval skin. Particularly after the establishment of the Wide Street Commissioners in 1759 by an Act of Parliament, as a body to govern standards on the layout of streets, bridges, buildings and other architectural and civic considerations. It not only reshaped the old medieval city of Dublin, but acquired, for example, the Sweetman’s brewery site.

The Wide Streets Commission removed a number a buildings from the south quays that extended to the Liffey, including Sweetman’s Brewery at the Ferryboat slip, interposed. Burgh Quay was built in the next century).[54] which ended the blockade of Aston and George’s Quay.[55] The Sweetman family are a good example of the Catholic middle class in this period. Although families like the Sweetmans were excluded from various aspects of public life because of their religion, they were free to enter what aristocratic society everywhere regarded as ‘base professions’.[56] They concentrated on brewing, and were very successful thereafter.

The ferry boat continued at Hawkins Street, and at Dirty Lane slip, which remained key features of the Liffey.[58] Aston Quay, appears to be in poor condition by the early 1760. Its quay wall, at James Dignam and John Donnelly’s properties, was broken down in a ruinous way, and if not repaired it might be washed away.[59]

In the 1770s, the suitability of the Custom House just below Essex Bridge (Grattan Bridge) was tested. Several citizens argued that it continued to hamper navigation, and with an increased number of ships on the water, especially the waters shallowness and the incapability of tall-ships on reaching the Custom House.

This debate reveals the working life of George’s and related quays. For example, one of the safest parts of the Liffey for ships was from Essex Quay to the end of Moss Street, and ships often sheltered by the houses in George’s Quay. That he knows of ships that were driven from Sir John Rogerson’s Quay and dashed against the North Wall.

The Necessities of life

With regards to the necessities of life, corn was landed at George’s Quay; salt at Aston Quay or Crampton Quay; and rock salt at Georges Quay; Coals at Aston Quay as well as Bachelors Walk and Swifts Row, and afterwards transported to the Coal Quay in lighters (Bachelors Quay being constructed in 1766).

Potatoes were discharged from colliers at George’s Aston Quay and the Bachelors Walk. It was a good place for discharging such goods, except in very high tides and easterly winds. And, beyond its Watch house was a bad lying place for ships, ‘they only do it out of necessity’.

By this time, Aston Quay had become the main area for coal and to a lesser degree Bachelors Walk. Timber was discharged at Sir John Rogerson’s Quay ‘lashed together into rafts’ by it must be stated expert hands. It was estimated that the number of vessels by year as 250.[61] This gives us a fairly complete inventory of the various features of George’s Aston’s and Sir Rogerson’s Quay in the eighteenth century.

Conclusion

The past is a foreign country’ as Hartley wrote and one, we can never visit. [62] This location is now a key part of the modern city, a place of office workers, and it is hard to imagine it as it once was. It has undergone immersible change since large ships, wherries and gabbards sailed the Liffey. It has been perhaps altered more than any other part of the city, besides its sister north quays.

Some readers will remember the gasometer and the various cranes that gave way to office buildings. And change continues. This article endeavours to show life in eighteenth-century Dublin as it transpired. The human experience behind the great “Georgian” development period. To reveal some aspects of working-class life and industry that is often outshone by the refined culture, graceful architecture, bowling greens, and pleasure gardens of that period.

Notes

[1] Lady Gilbert (ed.), Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, Vol. x (Dublin, 1903), p. xxxi.

[2] Adrian MacLoughlin, Guide to Historic Dublin (Gill and Macmillan Dublin, 1979), p.  38.

[3] Two Maps of 18^th Century Dublin and its Surroundings by John Rocque Introduced by J. H. Andrews (Headly Publications, Kent 1977), p. 3.

[4] Dublin Historical Record, Vol. V No. 2 (Dec-Feb 1942-1943) and Colm Lennon The Making of the Early Modern City Map

[5] The Ipswich Journal June 12, 1725.

[6] Charles Ivar McGrath, ‘The Penal Law, Origin, Purpose, Enforcement and Impact ‘in Kevin Costello, Niamh Howlin Law and Religion in Ireland 1700-1970 (Palgrave MacMillan, Switzerland 2021), pp. 13-70.

[7] H. A Wheeler and M. J. Craig, The Dublin City Churches of The Church of Ireland (A.P.C.K Dublin, 1948), p. 24.

[8] Faulkner’s Dublin Journal Jun 14, 1734

[9] Samuel A. Ossory Fitzpatrick, Dublin, a historical and topographical account of the city (Methuen London,1907), p. 253.

[10] History of the city of Dublin: from the earliest accounts to the present time; containing its annals, antiquities, ecclesiastical history, and charters; its present extent, public buildings, schools, institutions, &c., to which are added, biographical notices of eminent men, and copious appendices of its population, revenue, commerce and literature / By the late J. Warburton … the late Rev. J. Whitelaw … and the Rev. Robert Walsh v.2, (London, 1818), p. 727.

[11] The Dublin Journal Jul 13, 1736.

[12] Colm Lennon, Dublin 1610-1756 (Map)

[13] Myles V. Ronan, Townsend Street Chapel Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Jun. – Aug., 1943), pp. 156-157.

[14] Patrick Fagan, The Population of Dublin in the Eighteenth Century with Particular Reference to the Proportions of Protestants and Catholics Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr, Vol. 6 (1991), p. 136.

[15] David Dickson quoted in Claire McCormick, European Migrants in Eighteenth Century Ireland. The Great Palatine Migration of 1709 and its Aftermath (Boydell Press United Kingdom, 2025), p. 119.

[16] Myles V. Ronan, Townsend Street Chapel Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Jun. – Aug., 1943), pp. 156-157.

[17] The Dublin Journal January 22, 1739.

[18] The Dublin Journal July 19, 1740 and Francis G. James Lords of then Ascendancy: The Irish House of Lords and its Members 1600 -1800 (Irish Academic Press Dublin, 1995), p. 97

[19] L m Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland since 1660: Second Edition (B. T Bratford LTD London, 1993), PP 68-69.

[20] The Dublin Journal June 14, 1740.

[21] The Dublin Journal July 19, 1740.

[22] John Swift, History of the Dublin Bakers and Others (Irish Bakers Confectionary and Allied Workers Union, 1948), p. 117

[23] The Dublin Journal May 17, 1740.

[24] David Dickson, New Foundations Ireland 1660-1800 Second Revised and Enlarged Edition (Irish Academic Press Dublin, 2008), pp. 93-94.

1983), David Dickson, New Foundations Ireland 1660-1800, p. 95.

[26] Henry S. Guinness, ‘Dublin Trade Gilds’ The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Sixth Series, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Dec. 31, 1922), p. 146.

[27] Enda MacMahon, A Most Respectable Meeting of Merchants: Dublin Chamber of Commerce a History (Londubh Press, Dublin, 2014), p. 22.

[28] A Directory of Dublin for the Year 1738: Compiled from the Most Authentic Sources (Dublin Corporation Public Libraries, 2000) p. 70, p. 108, p. 166, p. 177.

[29] Desmond F. Moore, The Port of Dublin. Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Aug., 1961), p. 134.

[30] Faulkner’s Dublin Journal Feb 22, 1745

[31] The Dublin Journal Mar 3, 1746

[32] The Dublin Journal January 22, 1739.

[33] Faulkner’s Dublin Journal 2, 1755

[34] Faulkner’s Dublin Journal   Jun 3, 1746

[35] The Dublin Journal November 28, 1749.

[36] The Dublin Journal Oct 12 1751

[37] Belfast Newsletter, February 18, 1757

[38] James Kelly, Coping with Crisis: the response to the Famine of 1740-41, Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr, Vol. 27 (2012), p. 103.

November 2021

[39] The Dublin Journal January 29, 1739.

[40] The Dublin Journal February 05, 1739.

[41] The Dublin Journal November 30, 1751.

[42] The Dublin Journal October 20, 1752.

[43] Tony Farmer, Heitons: A Managed Transition (A. A Farmer, Dublin, 1996), p. 7.

[44] Raymond Turner, ‘English Coal Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ The American Historical Review, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Oct., 1921), p. 23.

[45] The Dublin Journal June 03, 1755.

[46] The Dublin Journal November 07, 1761.

[47] The Freemans Journal Nov 9, 1765

[48] Dublin Journal September 08, 1752.

[49] R. C. Nash, Irish Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Jul., 1985), p. 346

[50] Fredrick O’ Dwyer, Lost Dublin (Gill and MacMillian Dublin, 1981), p. 61.

[51] Myles V. Ronan, Townsend Street Chapel Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Jun. – Aug., 1943), pp. 156-157.

[52] James Livesey, The Dublin Society in Eighteenth-Century Irish Political Thought

The Historical Journal, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sep., 2004), p. 615.

[53] Seán Magee, Sweetman breweries in eighteenth-century Dublin. Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2015), p. 117

[54] H. A. Gilligan, A History of the Port of Dublin (Gill and MacMillian Dublin, 1988), p. 25.

[55] Seán Magee, Sweetman breweries in eighteenth-century Dublin. Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2015), pp. 113-126.

[56] Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History (Cambridge, 2010), p. 166

[57] Enda MacMahon, A Most Respectable Meeting of Merchants: Dublin Chamber of Commerce a History (Londubh Press, Dublin, 2014), p. 22.

[58] Lady Gilbert ed., The Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin Vol. X I. (Dollard Limited Dublin, 1904), p. 451.

[59] Ibid, pp. 157-8

[61] The Journal of the House of Commons of the Kingdom of Ireland Eighteenth Day of May, 1613 in the Eleventh Year of the Reign of King James the Fifth, Inclusive, to the Second Day of June 1774, Inclusive; In the Fifteenth Year of the Reign of His Majesty, King George the Third. The Sixteenth Vol. (Dublin, 1774), pp. 428-446.

[62] Barry Godfrey, Clive Emsley, Graeme Dunstall, Comparative Histories of Crime (Routledge New York London, 2003), p. 7

[1] This mass house is typically dated as 1736. Though this suggests that it was much older.

A discussion of the lessons of the Great Famine. By James Lomastro

In late March of 1849, word went out along the coast road above Killary Fjord that two officials of the Louisburgh Board of Guardians would be at Delphi Lodge to inspect the parish’s claims for relief.

Anyone who wanted to stay on the poor-relief register and anyone who wanted food, or a ticket into the workhouse had to appear before them in person.

So several hundred people, some accounts say four hundred, others put it closer to six hundred, set out walking the ten miles from Louisburgh to Doolough. It was March in Connemara: wind off the Atlantic, hail, no shelter along the fjord road. When they arrived, Colonel Hogreve and Captain Primrose were not there to receive them. The two men had gone to Delphi Lodge to hunt.

The guardians eventually appeared, looked over the starving crowd, and refused most of them either food or the workhouse tickets they had walked all day to ask for. The crowd turned back the way it had come, into the same wind and hail, now on empty stomachs after a full day’s exertion. People began to die on the road. Some were swept into Doolough lake by the squalls. Estimates of how many perished vary. A letter to the Mayo Constitution that April, signed only “A Ratepayer,” first raised the alarm, citing 17 people lost on the road, but the local memory speaks of a third of the walkers not making it home.

There is a monument at Doolough today: a plain stone cross reading “Doolough Tragedy 1849,” and beside it another stone with a harder inscription: “To commemorate the hungry poor who walked here in 1849 and who walk the Third World today.”

Since 1988 there has been an annual walk along that same fjord road in memory of the dead. Desmond Tutu has walked it. So has Vedran Smailović, the cellist who played in besieged Sarajevo while snipers worked the hills above him. So has Kim Phúc, the girl in the photograph, running from napalm in Vietnam. The road keeps collecting witnesses, a century and a half on, because the thing it commemorates keeps having new names.

The paradox at the water’s edge

I kept returning to a version of the same question at several points along the west coast, and it crystallized one evening in Dublin, of all places, at a restaurant called Chez Max near the Castle, eating mussels while rain came down on the cobblestones of Palace Street. The mussels were local.

The coast that produced them is the same coast that produced nothing for the people who starved beside it in the 1840s. Ireland is an island ringed by some of the richest fishing grounds in the North Atlantic. During the worst famine in modern European history, people died of hunger within sight of that water.

The explanation is not mysterious once you look at it, but it is worth sitting with, because it is the clearest version of the argument this whole essay is built around: famine is rarely a story about there not being enough food. It is a story about who has a claim on the food that exists.

The rural poor of pre-famine Ireland were tenant farmers on small, subdivided plots, and they grew potatoes because the potato was the one crop that could feed a family off an acre or two of marginal land, the calories-per-acre math simply didn’t work with anything else, at that scale of holding. They were not, in the main, fishermen.

Fishing required capital: boats, gear, the kind of accumulated knowledge and infrastructure that a subsistence tenant farming family did not have and had no way to acquire. What fishing industry existed in Ireland at the time was organized around export, not local consumption. The coast that looks so abundant to a modern traveler was, to the people who lived beside it in 1847, essentially someone else’s resource.

Nor were those fishermen who did exist, around 113,000 by 1846, spared. The apparent contradiction regarding the Irish fishing industry during the Great Famine that coastal communities possessed a potential food buffer yet still experienced catastrophic destitution can be reconciled by examining the rapid economic collapse of the region. While economic historian Andy Bielenberg in The Cambridge History of Ireland correctly notes that subsistence fishing peaked in 1846 and offered some coastal counties a degree of protection against the absolute highest mortality rates, this natural buffer was tragically fragile.

As the potato crop failed entirely, the immediate need for survival forced fishermen into an impossible economic bind. The Report of the Inspectors of Irish Fisheries highlights that these communities were driven to pawn their boats, nets, and tackle just to pay rent or purchase alternative emergency rations. Consequently, the theoretical abundance of the sea was rendered useless by the structural poverty of the fishermen.

Once their gear was pawned or fell into disrepair, they lacked the capital to retrieve or replace it. This transformed a potentially life-saving subsistence industry into a casualty of the broader economic and agricultural collapse, leaving the fishermen just as vulnerable to the famine as those inland.

And the food that unambiguously did exist such as grain, butter, livestock kept leaving the country throughout the famine. This was not an oversight. It was the predictable output of a system in which food went to whoever could pay for it, and English markets could pay more than starving Irish tenants, whose landlords needed the rent regardless of whether the potato crop had failed.

The British government, having inherited both the crisis and a strong ideological commitment to laissez-faire economics, treated interference with that export trade as a worse evil than the alternative. The blight was a fact of nature. Everything downstream of the blight — who got to eat, who didn’t, what “help” was permitted to look like was a series of human decisions, made by people who were not going to go hungry no matter which way those decisions came out.

The workhouse as reengineered form of relief

Nowhere is that machinery more visible than at Kilkenny, where a shopping and business development called MacDonagh Junction now sits on the site of the old Kilkenny Union Workhouse. The workhouse was built to hold 1,300 people. By July 1847 it held 2,340. By 1851 it held 4,357.

When typhus tore through it in 1847, the dead were buried in mass graves on the site for the next four years. Those who later excavated the grounds found that of nearly a thousand recovered skeletons, roughly half belonged to children, and about half showed signs of scurvy  a disease of Vitamin C deficiency that, in a cruel irony of Irish agriculture, the potato itself had supplied in abundance before the blight. People were not only starving; the one food source that had also been protecting them from a second, entirely preventable disease had been taken away along with everything else.

The workhouse system that produced those numbers was not incidental to the famine, it was Britain’s answer to it, and it was designed, deliberately, to be a punishment as much as a relief. The system, developed since 1839 institutionalized a distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, built its interiors to be austere enough to discourage anyone from seeking help who had any other option, split families on entry, and required labor in exchange for admission. It was, as one historian David Nally has put it, a form of social engineering aimed at disciplining a starving population into self-sufficiency it had no possible way of achieving.

The remains at Kilkenny were finally re-interred in 2010, and a small famine memorial garden was consecrated on the site which is now a retail development. The scarcity there was managed, administered, counted, and audited the entire time it was killing people. That is a different thing from a crop simply failing.

Weaponizing food

Along the Dingle Peninsula, our guide pointed out cottages that had once belonged to families who “took the soup”, the phrase Irish memory still uses for conversion to Protestantism in exchange for food from charitable kitchens. Recent historical research by scholars like Ciarán Reilly of Maynooth University complicates this enduring local narrative.

Evidence indicates that in Dingle, the phrase originated from pre-Famine proselytizing efforts rather than Famine-era relief. Furthermore, during the Famine years, most of the religious food distribution did not make any demands on conversion.

However, this did occur, alongside the implied pressure to convert in return for aid. In the isolated instances where assistance was explicitly conditional on abandoning Catholicism, a starving parent wasn’t choosing between principle and comfort; they were choosing between their faith and their child’s survival. Historical consensus now reveals that such cruel terms set by people who would not starve either way were the exception rather than the rule.

Nevertheless, the same structure recurs with a different vocabulary wherever missionary or humanitarian aid gets tied to compliance: “taking the rice” among famine-era Chinese converts to Christianity, food and clothing withheld from children on American Indian reservations pending assimilation into English-language schooling, and  on a far smaller scale, but the same shape the evangelical missions I’ve encountered doing relief work in Nicaragua, where children could eat only after sitting through the lesson. Scarcity, once it exists, becomes a lever. Whoever controls the food controls a great deal else, and history is full of people who understood that and used it.

The road that went nowhere

The British government’s flagship famine relief measure, the Public Works (Ireland) Act of 1846, put starving people to work building roads including the roads that still run along cliffsides on the Dingle Peninsula, cut by workhouse labor gangs the same way chain gangs cut roads into hillsides in the post-Reconstruction American South.

The original plan, championed by Robert Peel, had included a “reproductive” benefit: the idea that the roads and drainage works being built would actually generate future income for the districts that built them.

Landlords were suspected of siphoning off the funds meant for laborers’ wages, so the reproductive component was scrapped and the whole program handed to an increasingly unwieldy central Board of Works. What was left was labor without investment: people working for wages as low as three-halfpence a day, in the worst winter weather of the century, building infrastructure that in many cases served no real purpose beyond justifying the wage.

The program did not build a future for the districts it touched. It built roads to nowhere, walked by people who were dying while they built them, so that a government committed to the principle that direct handouts would create dependency could say it was doing something other than nothing.

Opulence beside catastrophe

A few years after the worst of it, Mitchell Henry built Kylemore Castle on the shore of Lough Pollacappul in Connemara — later Kylemore Abbey, home to a community of Benedictine nuns since 1920 — complete with a six-acre Victorian walled garden, twenty-one heated glasshouses, and over a mile and a half of underground hot-water piping to keep exotic fruit warm through the winter.

The engineering that could deliver heated greenhouses to a private garden in one of the wettest, poorest corners of Ireland could not, a few years earlier and a few miles away, deliver food to the people starving along that same coastline.

Standing in those gardens and then driving the Doolough road an hour later is a genuinely disorienting experience, not because the two things are causally connected in any simple way, but because they were produced by the same economic and political order, operating in the same country, in the same decade, for two entirely different classes of person.

One of the harder questions the famine leaves you with is not “how could this have happened” but “how did the people who built Kylemore not feel the contradiction”  and the likeliest answer is that constructed scarcity works, in part, by being invisible to the people it does not touch.

What Doolough still teaches

The reason the Doolough road has become a place of pilgrimage for people who have nothing literally to do with Ireland, Tutu, the cellist of Sarajevo, Kim Phúc is that the scene at Delphi Lodge is legible everywhere: officials with the discretion to relieve suffering, who instead went hunting; a bureaucratic process that demanded the starving prove their worthiness in person, at a cost the process itself made lethal; a refusal dressed in the neutral language of administrative procedure.

None of that required a famine to exist. It only required people with power to be somewhere else when the powerless needed them, and to have designed the system so that being somewhere else counted as due process rather than neglect.

Ireland was not left entirely without allies who recognized the shape of what was happening. In 1847, the Choctaw Nation who were eighteen years removed from its own forced displacement along the Trail of Tears, and still desperately poor raised $170 and sent it to Ireland for famine relief. They did it, by their own account, because the story was recognizable to them: a government that could have helped, choosing not to, while people it did not value walked and died on the road.

While acknowledging the profound emotional power of the Choctaw example, it is important to note that enormous sums were also donated in charity to Ireland during this period. Organizations such as the Society of Friends (Quakers) who notably helped coordinate and distribute international contributions, including those from the Choctaw Nation, played a massive role in famine relief. Additionally, private mobilization efforts like the British Relief Association raised funds to deliver critical food and supplies.

The Choctaws’ gift nevertheless became one of the founding threads of a relationship between the Choctaw Nation and Ireland that has lasted nearly two centuries; in 2020, Irish donors gave more than a million dollars, some accounts put the eventual total near three million to Navajo and Hopi communities hit hard by COVID-19, explicitly citing the 1847 debt. The people with the least reason to have anything to spare were the ones who recognized constructed scarcity for what it was and moved to interrupt it. The people with every resource needed to prevent mass death chose, again, to call the outcome natural.

A different frame: the Blasket alternative

It’s worth setting one more picture beside the workhouse and the walled garden. Out past Slea Head, on the Great Blasket Island, a small community of a hundred to a hundred fifty people lived through the same famine years on fishing, a few ridges of potatoes, and oats, holding the mountain in common including turbary rights to cut turf, a shared and carefully negotiated system of grazing rights tied to how many cows a household kept, everyone drawing water and gathering seaweed and mussels from the same shore. It was not a utopia; it was hard, isolated, physically brutal living, and the island’s population still fell after the famine, from roughly 150 in 1840 to about 100 afterward.

But the Blasket Islanders were allocating their own scarcity, by their own negotiated rules, answerable to their neighbors rather than to a Board of Guardians or a Board of Works. It is one of the few glimpses in this history of scarcity being managed by the people actually living inside it, rather than administered to them from outside by people who would not bear the consequences of getting it wrong.

The thing worth carrying forward

The blight was real, and no one chose it. Everything else in this story who ate, who didn’t, whose labor was extracted for a wage that couldn’t sustain them, whose faith was priced against their children’s survival, whose fjord-side hunting trip took precedence over a starving crowd’s wait in the cold, whose garden got heated glasshouses while people a few miles away buried their children without headstones was a decision, made by people insulated enough from the consequences to call the result inevitable.

Yet alongside this systemic cruelty existed an extraordinary counter-current of human solidarity: the generosity of donors like the Choctaw Nation, the dedicated relief work of the Quakers, and the substantial funds raised by the British Relief Association to alleviate the catastrophe.

That is the pattern worth carrying out of Doolough and Kilkenny and Kylemore: scarcity that looks like fate almost always has a design behind it, built well before the crisis that reveals it, and maintained afterward by people whose comfort depends on nobody looking too closely at who decided who would go without—even as others strained to prove that human empathy could cross oceans and ideological divides to offer a different choice.

James A. Lomastro PhD is a retired healthcare administrator and educator. He travels extensively. He currently works pro-bono for Dignity Alliance an advocacy group for older and disabled persons. His travel articles have appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine and Cognoscenti.

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By Emmet Gladney

The most valuable opportunity to examine the bitter legacy of the Irish Civil War may lie in revisiting the Free State’s first election campaigns, before the emotions of the conflict, ‘however real, however much a political device’ were channeled into party politics.[1]

In that context, this article revisits the 1925 by-election in Co. Kilkenny. The election campaign became a palpable battleground in which defamation, the denial of political and revolutionary agency, and attacks on credibility became weapons in a wider struggle for political legitimacy.

Beneath the political rhetoric lay a very real and personal effort by both sides to discredit and delegitimise the other. Furthermore, the failure of the National Group to establish a pro-Treaty form of republicanism shows that attitudes towards the Treaty and the legitimacy of the new state were not as dichotomous as later political divisions might suggest.

During the campaign Cumann na nGaedheal continued with its strategy of criminalisiation. The ‘swashbuckling and revolver-twirling terrorists’ of the anti – Treaty IRA were rarely referred to as republicans, but instead as delinquents, violent criminals and terrorists who were using ‘the camouflage of an irregular armed force either to live without working or to get-rich-quick at the expense of the community.’[2]

Conversely, republicans perceived pro-Treaty supporters and the Free State ‘junta’ as a counter-revolution composed of middle-class moderates of the pre – truce Sinn Féin movement; Home Rulers; ex-RIC men and former British Army servicemen. Their focus on parliamentary politics was seen as un-Irish; their identification with middle class interests as ‘West Britonism’.

The only common ground between the two sides was their desire to claim ownership of the revolutionary tradition of 1916 and the War of Independence. 

Background to the Election

The by – election in Kilkenny was the result of the resignation of a formerly pro – Treaty TD Sean Gibbons over an attempted mutiny in the Free State’s National Army.

Barely two years into power, the first serious challenge to W. T. Cosgrave’s authority would come not from the IRA, but from the Army Mutiny of 1924. A group of National Army officers led by Liam Tobin and Charles Dalton resisted demobilisaton, seized weapons from garrisons around the country and threatened a military coup if their demands were not met.

Although the crisis passed without bloodshed, its political consequences proved far more significant. Arguably, the greatest threat to the government emerged from within its own ranks, not least from the Minister for Industry and Commerce, who was present in Devlin’s pub in Dublin on the night Army commander Richard Mulcahy ordered the arrest of many of its participants.

In October, Joseph McGrath resigned along with eight other TDs in solidarity with Free State officers Liam Tobin and Charles Dalton. Both men demanded that veterans of the War of Independence be considered for senior positions in the Free State army ahead of former British Army officers.

The mutineering officers, otherwise known as the IRAO ^[3] also demanded a more assertive approach towards Michael Collins’ vision of the Treaty. Many on the pro – Treaty side believed the divisive leader when he argued that the Treaty was a stepping stone towards the establishment of an all-Ireland Republic.

Given the record of many IRAO members during the Civil War, some of whom had been implicated in the killing of prisoners, many anti-Treaty republicans, particularly those still imprisoned, rejected Dalton and Tobin’s ‘belated’ aspirations, believing they were motivated more by jealousy and less by patriotism. Some of the resigning TDs, however, appeared genuinely troubled by the government’s growing acceptance of its status as a dominion of the British Empire.

‘A Glorified West British Colony.’

Seán Gibbons was one such example. In 1924, the National Group as the resigning TDs were now known, held a meeting in Ennis where Gibbons’ letter was read out expressing concern at the anti – national spirit manifesting out of government buildings in Merrion Street, while the newly appointed chairman Sean Milroy accused the government of becoming ‘a glorified west British colony’.^[4]

Gibbons, a native of Ballylarkin, County Kilkenny, served as Chairman of the Irish Volunteers in Kilkenny prior to the 1916 Rising, and was interned in Kilkenny Prison and later in Frongoch, Wales. He also served as company captain and later as an intelligence officer in the Kilkenny Brigade of the IRA.^[5]

Nationally, the resignations caused considerable panic for Cumann na nGaedheal who were already grappling with an identity crisis following the collapse of the Boundary Commission. A leaked report had recommended no substantial change in the border between the Free State and Northern Ireland, an outcome many regarded as further entrenching partition in the North East. In Kilkenny City, however, the situation proved more serious where Gibbons’ resignation threatened to split the organisation in the county.

In January 1925, Richard Mulcahy chaired a Cumann na nGaedheal convention in the Town Hall to select a candidate for the constituency. Although he had officially resigned from the party, Gibbons, along with several supporters, attempted to draw attention to their cause by trying to enter the convention. Expecting to be refused entry, the defectors had already planned a publicity stunt by organising a rival convention at the Courthouse a short distance away on Parliament Street.^[6]

Several of Gibbons’ supporters still had valid tickets to the official convention and managed to enter the private chamber of the Town Hall, where they proposed and seconded the former TD as a candidate. When Mulcahy refused to accept the motion, Gibbons’ supporters staged a walkout, hoping their stunt would persuade others to leave. Their attempted coup failed, however, and only twenty supporters walked out in solidarity with the disgruntled faction.^[7]

As a result, Thomas Bolger, a veteran nationalist from Carlow, was nominated to stand as the Cumann na Gaedheal candidate for the Carlow/Kilkenny constituency. After Bolger’s nomination Ernest Blythe reassured the crowd that he ‘did not want a 26-County Republic’ but strongly condemned officers who stole guns and ammunition during the mutiny. Blythe made it clear that those who resigned in sympathy would never be reinstated by the present government.^[8]

Meanwhile, at the rival convention in the Courthouse, Gibbons justified his actions and told his supporters that he accepted the Treaty in the same spirit Michael Collins accepted it, in the hope that it would give Ireland ‘freedom to achieve freedom.’^[9]

Gibbons claimed he left Senator Peter De Loughry in no doubt about his position on the Treaty during the 1923 general election, and insisted he had a mandate from his constituents to work towards achieving full independence for Ireland.^[10]

In spite of the strong nationalist rhetoric at the rival convention, it was clear that some of the defectors sought to settle their differences with the government party which prompted National Group chairman Sean Milroy to block a motion calling for reconciliation. Gibbons’ decision to turn down his nomination to stand as a National Group candidate suggests he too may have favoured some rapprochement with the Cumman na nGaedheal leadership.

Then came a development that would change the entire atmosphere of the election. The Farmers’ Union decided at the last minute not to run a candidate and with Gibbons and Labour already out of the race, Sinn Fein and Cumann na nGaedheal were the only contestants left to fight the election in the constituency.

Adding further drama, Sinn Féin nominated Michael Barry, the brother of 18-year-old medical student Kevin Barry who was hanged in 1920, for his part in an IRA raid in Dublin in which three British soldiers were killed. His execution, the first since 1916, had a profound emotional impact on nationalist opinion. The nomination of Barry transformed the contest from a by – election into a battle over legitimacy and the question of who possessed the rightful claim to his brother’s legacy.

Now that both candidates had been officially selected, the date for the election was set for 11 March, in what could only be described as a showdown between pro and anti – Treaty forces. The Kilkenny People immediately recognised the significance of the contest and advised the electorate to treat the by-election as if it was nothing less than a ‘mini-referendum’ on the Treaty.^[11]

The Cumman na nGaedheal Campaign.

The campaign opened in Kilkenny City on 1^st February, with a rally on the Parade in support of Cumann na nGaedheal candidate Thomas Bolger. Among the principal speakers was Kevin O’Higgins. Republicans never forgave O’Higgins for his role in the execution of 81 republican prisoners during the Civil War. A decision that would cost him his life five years later.

On 10 July 1927, anti- Treaty IRA men shot O’Higgins dead near his home in Booterstown, Co. Dublin. The Civil War was known in the Irish language as Cogadh na gCarad or the ‘war of friends’. Few episodes capture the ‘war of friends’ character better than the execution of Rory O’Connor at government hands in Mountjoy prison in December 1922. He had been best man at O’Higgins’s wedding only a few years earlier.

Cumann na nGaedheal sought to shift attention away from abstract questions surrounding the oath and nationalist legitimacy and tried to focus on fiscal matters and building a strong government. Republicans viewed the lack of idealism as further recognition of their counter – revolutionary and bourgeois values.  O’Higggins defended the government position and argued that concentrating on economic problems was not a declaration of war on racial and cultural movements that were indicative of Irish nationality.[12]

‘Idealism is the salt of life, but you cannot live on it; a certain amount of bread, butter and meat go very well with it. This country cannot live on political propaganda. Hymns of hatred against England or any other country will not feed a single hungry mouth or find work for idle hands.’ – Kevin O’Higgins. ^[13]

However hard Cumman na nGaedheal tried to address bread-and-butter issues, attacks on anti-Treaty republicans seemed inevitable. When challenged by the crowd over the government’s cuts to old-age pensions, Senator Peter De Loughry immediately blamed the anti-Treaty IRA for causing nearly fifty million pounds worth of damage during the Civil War. De Loughry was a prominent member of the Irish Volunteers in Kilkenny before the rising.

He famously forged the key while imprisoned in Lincoln Goal that was used in De Valera’s famous escape. In early February, Minister for Defence Patrick Hughes spoke in Castlecomer, and claimed the IRA robbed money from Post Offices that was intended to pay out pension funds. Hughes claimed republicans now had to earn a living like everyone else after squandering the proceeds of crime and were ‘going around talking about the Republic’ now the ‘good times were over.’^[14]

Cumann na nGaedheal had to find a way to preserve their revolutionary inheritance. One way was to criminalise their opponents in Sinn Fein. On the Parade, De Loughry praised the people of Kilkenny for refusing to loot banks or engage in armed robbery, echoing Ernest Blythe who previously claimed ‘…So much terrorism has arisen in the country that there is no such thing in reality as a Republican Movement…’^[15]

The meeting was also addressed by John M. O’Sullivan, a Cumann na nGaedheal TD and Professor of History in Dublin. O’Sullivan warned about the effects on the Irish market if people voted for anti-Treaty republicans. The pro-Treaty Professor claimed England would not lose a single soldier in a renewed offensive because repudiation of the Treaty would see the country starved into submission within six months. He also praised the construction of 2,000 homes under the government’s housing initiative, while O’Higgins praised the construction of the Shannon Scheme, describing it as a far healthier patriotism than blowing up Mallow Bridge, or burning people out of their homes.^[16]

Another prominent theme in Cumann na nGaedheal’s campaign was the perceived threat of a British invasion should the anti-Treaty side come to power. In March, the Kilkenny People urged voters to support Bolger, warning that the destruction of the Free State could invite the country to ‘go another round with England’ or worse, result in a blockade by the British Navy. O’Higgins heightened tensions when he warned that Éamon de Valera was preparing to ‘wade through the blood of Irish ministers and politicians once again’. An apparent reference to de Valera’s infamous speech in Thurles on St. Patrick’s Day in 1922.^[17]

Callan: Two Irelands, One Town

On 9 February, an incident occurred involving a Sinn Féin candidate who was set to stand in the local election in June. Cumann na nGaedheal held a public meeting in support of Bolger at the steps of the Catholic church in Callan. Among the speakers were Rev. W. Murphy, Eoin MacNeill, and Liam Burke.

MacNeill was still deeply resented by republicans for countermanding the mobilisation order in 1916, serving as a Minister during the Civil War and his role in the Boundary Commision. Rev. Murphy, who was chairing the event, added to the tension by posing a rhetorical that remains one of, if not, the most divisive debate in the historiography of the revolutionary period.

Murphy blamed Éamon de Valera for the outbreak of the Civil War and claimed that the Sinn Féin leader knew in his heart an Irish Republic was not realisable before the Treaty negotiations began.^[18] Eamonn Duggan, one of the plenipotentiaries during the Treaty negotiations, made similar but rather interesting claims at a rally in South Kilkenny in March. According to Duggan, when he came back to Dublin and presented de Valera with the terms of the Treaty at a National University event in the Mansion House, de Valera was more concerned with whether he should attend the celebration in his own clothes, or in his robes as Chancellor of the University. Duggan also claimed Michael Collins kept de Valera informed throughout the talks by special courier and pleaded with him to take part in the negotiations in London.^[19]

Fr. Murphy’s allegations about de Valera infuriated a local man, James Roughan, who immediately rose to defend the Sinn Féin leader. Roughan’s credentials were formidable in his hometown of Callan: he helped establish the Irish Volunteers, served as the first commandant of the IRA’s 7th Battalion, and played a central role in transforming the town into a Sinn Féin stronghold. When he and thirty other prisoners were released from internment in 1921, locals lit bonfires and unfurled tricolours throughout the town’s narrow streets to welcome them home.^[20]

As tensions rose, Murphy alleged another local figure, Dan Stapleton from nearby Tullamaine, had repeated a conversation to him which de Valera supposedly admitted he would have accepted Home Rule—a settlement Murphy argued carried an oath even worse than the Treaty. Murphy even challenged Roughan by offering to bring Stapleton onto the platform to substantiate his claim.

Stapleton had an interesting pedigree of his own. Having qualified as a chemist in 1912, he opened his own medical hall on High Street in Kilkenny City at just 23 years of age. During the War of Independence, he earned the trust of the IRA by supplying two hundred gallons of cod liver oil to active service units and later played a more direct role in mixing explosives; service which apparently earned him the personal praise of Michael Collins.^[21]

According to the Kilkenny People, Murphy accused Roughan of cowardice during an attack on Drangan RIC barracks in Co. Tipperary 1920. The priest alleged that Roughan brought 250 men to attack a dozen RIC officers. Roughan rejected the charge outright and called Fr. Murphy a liar.

The operation had actually been organised by the 3rd Tipperary Brigade and Roughan was requested by Seán Hogan to supply eight of his best riflemen for the attack. In fact, Roughan narrowly escaped death and came under heavy machine – gun fire with little or no cover when verey light flares, which very few IRA men had ever seen before, exposed his position to the RIC.^[22]

Although several witnesses, including IRA Volunteers, admitted their enemy was heavily outnumbered, Murphy’s figure of 250 attackers appears exaggerated.

More interestingly was the priest’s portrayal of the IRA as the aggressor, reflecting a more sympathetic view of the RIC. An institution that not long before had been regarded as a domestic enemy, and whose Auxiliaries nearly beat Roughan to death in Woodstock in 1920.^[23]

Murphy’s final accusation proved the most damaging. He claimed a member of Roughan’s family had told him after the Drangan attack he deliberately waited at home to be arrested by the Black and Tans so he could avoid further danger or death.^[24] The reality was that Roughan’s arrest stemmed from the capture of Ernie O’Malley in December 1920. O’Malley had in his possession a notebook containing details of the Kilkenny Brigade which resulted in the arrest of the Brigade Commander and most of its officers when he was arrested by the Auxiliaries in Inistioge.

The priest continued to degrade Roughan further by threatening to tell the audience all about his ‘record’ during the Tan War, alleging he brought two revolvers to drive an unfortunate defenseless woman out of Callan town when he was released from goal.^[25] Roughan countered by claiming the woman was a spy. If Roughan’s claim was true, his actions were not without precedent. In 1921, IRA headquarters issued a general order which warned that women found guilty of spying were to be forced into exile.^[26]

The exchange between Murphy and Roughan is a striking example of how far each side was willing to debase its opponents. Incredibly, Roughan found himself publicly humiliated in the very town that had celebrated him as a hero half a decade earlier. The psychological effects of such a sudden rupture in a once shared collective identity was likely to have had profound psychological consequences.

The hostile atmosphere was punctuated for a brief moment of humour, however, when two women passing down Green Street shouted, ‘Up De Valera.’ Amid the laughter, Cumann na nGaedheal organiser Liam Burke waved the women on and joked that they were most likely on their way to have a pint at the end of the street.^[27] Although humorous, Burke’s response reflected the class distinction that came to define Cumann na nGaedheal’s discourse during the campaign. Such behavior would be considered morally deviant in the new conservative state which placed women firmly in the domestic sphere. Many female activists in Caumann na mBan would later see this as a betrayal of equal rights and citizenship enshrined in the Proclamation of 1916.

Gavin Foster points to the post – colonial dynamic and similarities between pro-Treaty attitudes and British perceptions of the IRA during the War of Independence. The pro – Treaty preoccupation with respectability often resulted in anti – Treaty republicans portrayed as having ‘…an essentially parasitic relationship to the more productive segments of society….’.^[28].

This was evident at a Cumann na nGaedheal rally in Kilmacow in February. Burke claimed that the ‘new Republicans’ were a ‘wonderful conglomeration’ and ‘extraordinary types of humanity’ who were terrified of ‘their eternal life’ the government might find loot on them, or in the case of a settled government might be forced to pay their debts, or worse might have to do a day’s work. ^[29] This was typical of The Free State projections during the Civil War. Anti – Treaty IRA members were branded ‘utterly unworthy and irresponsible, being generally of pot house derivation … the kind of person who would have been regarded purely as a wastrel.[30]

The Sinn Fein Campaign

“We owe no allegiance to that State … neither do we respect it, and neither shall we ever help it to function.” Eamon De Valera.^[31]

The Sinn Féin campaign began on the Parade the following week and was characterised by traditional republican rhetoric. Brian O’Higgins, a founding member of the Irish Volunteers, urged the people of Kilkenny to drive ‘West Britonism’ out of the country.

He warned that Ireland was becoming more anglicised than at any other time in the last thirty years. While Cumann na nGaedheal portrayed the present generation of republicans as degenerates or ‘criminal folly’, republicans countered by portraying Cumann na nGaedheal as ‘little englanders’ or middle – class conservatives that would have happily assumed power under a system of Home Rule.^[32][33]

Responding to accusations of criminality, O’Higgins claimed the IRA fought without any desire for personal gain and defended the nation when it was threatened with extinction. He reflected on the hundreds of graves filled with the ideals of Pearse, MacSwiney, and Barry. Ideals, he claimed, would have been trampled into the mud had the Irish Republican Army not stood up to defend them.^[34]

Seán Lemass gave only passing attention to economic hardship. He acknowledged the collapse of industry and trade but quickly returned to what he saw was the central issue facing the country: whether the Irish people wanted to be masters in their own land or subjects to a British king. Reflecting on the Truce, he praised the resilience of anti-Treaty republicans but accused pro-Treaty leaders of failing at the final test under threats from the English Prime Minister.^[35]

Revolutionary Inheritance.

As polling day approached, the Kilkenny People, remaining true to its strong pro-Treaty ethos, intensified its attacks on Sinn Féin. An editorial published on 14 February 1925, titled ‘Peace and Prosperity or War and Poverty?’ reported on Éamon de Valera’s visit to the city and warned the Sinn Féin president was conspiring ‘to destroy the Free State’.^[36]

At a rally in support of Bolger in Ballyragget, Eoin MacNeill claimed the current generation of anti-Treaty republicans were a poor imitation of the original movement, fit for heckling at rallies but little else. A far cry from his colleague Kevin O’Higgins’ earlier suggestion that de Valera was planning to wade through their blood.^[37]

MacNeill accused the anti-Treaty side of behaving like terrorists for threatening and intimidating people’s homes during the Civil War. Cumann na nGaedheal councillor John McKenna compared anti – Treaty behavior to that of the Black and Tans. Similar to ‘whipped curs’ McKenna condemned the anti – Treaty IRA for blowing up bridges and roads, and in the end resorting to petrol cans to try and break the will of the Irish people.^[38]

In February, Liam Burke mocked the new generation of republicans in Kilmacow and Mullinavat who had recently sprung into existence and claimed they were nowhere to be seen ‘when the fight was up to them.’ ^[39] Peter De Loughry claimed the country had become ‘inundated with warriors’ who never took the slightest interest in politics, not alone fighting the British.^[40]

On 15 February, the local priest addressed a large meeting after Mass in Ballyhale. Fr. Grace claimed some of the men who disrupted the crowd by shouting ‘Up De Valera’ could be heard singing The Soldiers Song in public houses but were the first to run whenever they heard the Black and Tans coming.^[41]

Fr Grace’s comments were typical of the aspersions cast on recruits who joined the IRA during the truce of July 1921. These recruits became known as ‘trucileers’, a derogative term later used by the pro – Treaty side to delegitimise the anti – Treaty IRA. The pro – Treaty propaganda machine portrayed the newer generation as jumping on the ‘bandwagon’ and a cowardly imitation of the ‘original’ IRA who fought the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries during the War of Independence.

Despite Cumann na nGaedheal’s claims that the present generation of anti-Treaty republicans were a ‘trucileer’ like imitation of the pre-Truce IRA in Kilkenny, the majority of IRA Volunteers that fought the British were the same as those who fought the Free State forces.

Half the Sinn Féin candidates who stood in the local elections in Co. Kilkenny later that year had been active IRA members before the Truce, with several holding senior positions at Battalion level. Patrick Bryan, a bookmaker and alderman from Kilkenny City, served as quartermaster of the entire Kilkenny Brigade. Michael Owens was vice-commandant of E Company, 3rd Battalion, and had been active both before the Truce and throughout the Civil War. Similarly, Thomas Comerford served as officer commanding E Company, 1st Battalion, and was responsible for areas such as Ballycallan, Threecastles, and parts of Kilkenny City.^[42]

Michael Barry, the Republican candidate, had been involved in the Irish Volunteers, held a senior position at Battalion level of the IRA during the War of Independence and the Civil War, and was interned in 1920. 

Result

As the campaign drew to a close, tensions began to rise.  Scuffles broke out after de Valera addressed a rally and a former Free State Army captain was assaulted by an ex-republican prisoner.^[43]

As the  electorate of Carlow–Kilkenny awaited the result, the hostility did not end at the count. Republicans claimed they had been harassed throughout the campaign by the press, the pulpit, and the police, and accused the Civic Guard of removing posters and intimidating campaign workers. Bolger emerged victorious in the end securing 24,142 votes to Barry’s 16,830. The Kilkenny People described the outcome as a victory for ‘common sense.’ ^[44]

As their supporters left the count, one final act of defiance was heard as anti – Treaty republicans shouted, ‘Up Barry.’ Peter De Loughry responded by claiming very few of those shouting were to be seen when his brother was hanged.^[45]

The series of by – elections caused by the resignation of the National Group TDs, was a national triumph for the government party, which secured seven out of nine seats. The National Group failed to secure a seat. Sinn Fein on the other hand, won two seats and increased their vote in every constituency. Despite their upward trajectory, the following year would bring a devastating blow for the abstentionist party when Éamon de Valera left to form Fianna Fáil.

James Roughan, however, would not live to see this new departure. He possibly never fully recovered from the beatings he received in prison and died from a brain hemorrhage on 20 December 1925. He was 52.

References

[1] Anne Dolan, Commemorating the Irish Civil War p 154.

[2] Drisceoill, D.Ó. (2026), ‘A Sort of Armed Argument’: Ireland’s Civil War of Words. History. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229x.70083

[3] On 6 March 1924, Cosgrave received an ultimatum from a representative of a new organisation, known as the Irish Republican Army Organisation (IRAO). The organisation was led by Charles Dalton and Liam Tobin, who were angered at the demobilisation of over 30,000 soldiers and nearly 50 staff officers. The letter also threatened mutiny and expressed frustration over the government’s complacency on partition and the national question.

[4] Irish Independent 23 December 1924.

[5] Military Service Pensions Archive: https://militarypensions.wordpress.com/2023/12/01/15

[6] Kilkenny People 17 January 1925 page 9.

[7] Kilkenny People 17 January 1925 page 9.

[8] Kilkenny People 17 January 1925 page 9.

[9] Kilkenny People 17 January 1925 page 9.

[10] Kilkenny People 17 January 1925 page 9.

[11] Kilkenny People 7 February 1925 page 3.

[12] Kilkenny People 7 February 1925 page3.

[13] Kilkenny People 7 February 1925 page3.

[14] Kilkenny People 14 February 1925 page 3.

[15] Jason Knirck, Afterimage of the Revolution page 34.

[16] Kilkenny People 7 February 1925 page3.

[17] Kilkenny People 7 February 1925 page3.

[18] Kilkenny People 14 February 1925 page 3.

[19] Kilkenny People 7 March 1925 page 7.

[20] Eoin Swithen Walsh Kilkenny: In Times of Revolution 1900 – 1923, page 74,75.

[21]Dan Stapleton/bmh/BMH.WS1208.pdf#page=1

[22] https://www.militaryarchives.ie/uploads/bmh/BMH_WS_0980_IO.pdf#page=5.00

[23] Edward J. Aylward BMH_WS_0980_IO.

Tadgh Dywer BMH_WS_1356_IO.pdf

Edmund Grogan BMH_WS_1281_IO.pdf

[24] Kilkenny People 14 February 1925 page 3.

[25] Kilkenny People 14 February 1925 page 3.

[26] Disappeared but Still Remembered: Unearthing the IRA’s Lost Victims https://www.ucc.ie/en/theirishrevolution/feature-

[27] Kilkenny People 14 February 1925 page 3.

[28] Gavin Foster, The Irish Civil War and Society: Politics, Class, and Conflict.

[29] Kilkenny People, 7 March, page 3.

[30] Gavin Foster, The Irish Civil War and Society: Politics, Class, and Conflict.

[31] Kilkenny People 7 February 1925 page 3.

[32] Jason Knirck, Afterimage of the Revolution page 12

[33] Kilkenny People 7 February 1925 page3.

[34] Kilkenny People 14 February 1925 page 8.

[35] Kilkenny People 14 February 1925 page 8.

[36] Kilkenny People 14 February 1925, page 5.

[37] Kilkenny People 14 February 1925 page 3.

[38] Kilkenny People 7 March, page 7.

[39] Kilkenny People 7 March 1925 page 7.

[40] Kilkenny People 28 February 1925 page 6

[41] Kilkenny People 21 February 1925 page 9.

[42] Bureau of Military History, MSP: MA-MSPC-RO-154

[43] Kilkenny People 14 February 1925 page 5.

[44] Kilkenny People 14 March 1925 page 5.

[45] Kilkenny People 14 March 1925 page 5.

The two were the figureheads of a very personalised rivalry in the 1980s between Fianna Fial and Fine Gael. Haughey was framed as the brash populist and Fitzgerald the cerebral liberal.

As we discuss though, the two men shared a great deal in common in terms of background and developmental strategy. While they ostensibly clashed over social issues and how to bring peace to Northern Ireland, there was much posturing, particularly from Haughey’s side, that masked a broad agreement in terms of policy.

Eoin O’Malley is an Associate Professor in political science at the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. There he teaches politics and public policy.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to our Patreon page for The Irish Story if you would like to support our work.

John Dorney and Cathal Brennan talk about the evolution of the Fenian movement from 1867 until the early 1900s. Part one here. First broadcast on the Irish History Show.

We talk about the Fenians on both sides of the Atlantic attempts to recover from the debacle of the 1867 rebellion.

What emerged were essentially two tendencies. One favoured a broad front approach known as the ‘New Departure’ in which the Fenians’ resources were thrown behind the Land League and later Home Rule campaigns in Ireland.

The other, very largely funded from the United States, favoured small scale armed action, including the Phoenix Park assassinations in Dublin and the ‘Dynamite campaign’ in Britain itself.

Both approaches left their mark. Attacks in Britian especially undoubtedly made a political impact in British politics but were widely condemned by many Fenians.

The Land League and Home Rule movement cemented a democratic nationalist movement in Ireland but Irish Republicans gradually grew dissillusioned with the failure to advance the goals of full Irish independence.

Towards the late nineteenth century, militant Fenianism in Ireland died down and the Irish Republican Brotherhood regrouped around the ideas of cultural nationalism and infiltrating new organisations such as the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association.

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This year marks the 150^th anniversary of probably the most daring prison escape ever thought up by an Irish man; that of the springing of six Irish Fenian political prisoners from a British run maximum security prison in Fremantle, Western Australia to freedom in the United States on the whaling vessel Catalpa.

The background to the imprisonment was that the six, James Wilson, Robert Cranston, Thomas Hassett, Martin Hogan, Thomas Darragh, and Michael Harrington were all members of the British army and consequently were convicted of treason felony for joining in the Fenian movement, aimed at ending British rule in Ireland in 1866.

Initially sentenced to death this was later commuted to life penal servitude in Fremantle, Western Australia. Between 1869 and 1871 pardons were granted to most of the imprisoned Fenians but these prisoners labelled as ‘military’ were not included and were amongst the last of the Fenian prisoners held there.

Fremantle was selected by the British for its naturally inhospitable environment as sitting between the shark-filled Indian ocean on one side and the desert like scrublands on the other, it made for easy policing. There was virtually no way out for a would-be escapee plus the authorities were able to utilise the prisoners for heavy labour purposes outside the prison during the day without fear of escape.

Eventually one of the six James Wilson managed to smuggle a letter out via a sympathetic priest to John Devoy, a leading Fenian, at that time working as a journalist in New York, pleading for a rescue attempt. In cahoots with John Boyle O’Reilly, a Fenian and rarity as a Fremantle escapee (1869) now living in Boston, they managed to raise funds and purchase a merchant ship, Catalpa.

They converted the ship to a whaling vessel and employed an American, sympathetic to the cause, George Smith Anthony, a twenty-eight-year-old whaling boat captain, to set sail for Rockingham in Western Australia on the 29^th April 1875, a distance of over 20,000 kilometres.

Devoy and Boyle O’Reilly concocted a clever ruse. First, they sent two Fenians, John Breslin and Thomas Desmond, ahead to Perth. Posing as wealthy businessmen, under the pseudonyms Collins and Johnson they were able to make contacts on the ground, note any security gaps and generally put it about that they would be needing manual labourers over the course of their business venture. Breslin even managed to make a number of visits into the prison itself under the guise of seeking such labour.

During those visits he managed to convey to the six men that on the 17^th April 1876, they must ensure that they were part of prison labour gangs working outside the prison. As part of the preparation, they even arranged to have the telegraph wires cut between Fremantle and Perth on the date in question to slow down any possible reporting of the incident to the authorities.

On the 17^th April as promised Catalpa and a small rescue boat manned by Captain George Smith Anthony and a small team stood off shore in readiness. Breslin waited at an agreed spot with a horse and wagon. Wilson and the five others, Cranston, Darragh, Harrington, Hogan, and Hassett having escaped their work gang, rushed to the meeting point whereupon they jumped into the wagon and sped to the waiting rescue boat at Rockingham beach.

Once they were aboard, the boat took off for the Catalpa but got caught up in a raging sea storm by which time the authorities were onto them. Unable to make it to the Catalpa they spent the night tossing on the turbulent ocean. At morning light as the storm died down, they made their way towards the Catalpa only to find themselves being hotly pursued by the armed  Steamer the Georgette, which had been commandeered by the colonial governor.

Miraculously, the small rescue boat was not spotted as the Georgette made straight for the Catalpa instead on to which they were refused access on the basis that they were outside the colony’s 3-mile limit. The Georgette was then forced to return to shore to refuel. However, early on the 19^th the now refuelled Georgette again followed the Catalpa drawing alongside it and demanding that the prisoners be handed over, even firing a warning shot across its bow.

George Anthony, knowing that they would easily be out-armed, instead hoisted the American flag up the mast and declared that any attempt to fire on it would be regarded as an act of war against the United States. The officers on board the Georgette had to admit defeat at this point and retreat whilst Catalpa sailed away into the Indian Ocean, and towards freedom in New York.

On receiving the news of the successful rescue on the 6^th June, John O’Boyle Reilly immediately released the news to the press. This prompted huge celebrations in the United States and in Ireland but was met by outrage in both Britain and Australia. Nonetheless, no diplomatic issues arose between the States and Britain as a result of the actions of Captain George Anthony.

The arrival of the Catalpa into New York on 19^th August 1876 was greeted by thousands of cheering Americans and republican sympathisers who lined the harbour to welcome them.

The six men remained on in the United States integrating into society there rather than risking re-arrest by returning to Britain or Ireland. Most would remain active in the republican movement and they continued to be treated as heroes by the American diaspora for the rest of their lives.

Having recently attended the absolute masterpiece, Catalpa, a one-man epic rendition by the actor Donal O’Kelly, with music and sound effects by Trevor Knight in the Civic Theatre, I was totally spellbound. If you are fortunate enough to get an opportunity to experience this play for yourself, you will be treated to a marvellous insight into the sheer brilliance of those who pulled of this incredible feat, 150 years ago this year.

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