A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  A terrible famine, followed by a typhus fever epidemic, swept the country in 1816 and 1817. About 65,000 people died, but the death toll might have been much higher had not Peel acted promptly. He set up a central committee and gave it the authority to distribute nearly £50,000—which he extracted from a very reluctant Exchequer—to local relief committees. This kind of intervention was unheard of in other distressed parts of the United Kingdom. Peel followed this up by instituting local boards of health to establish and manage publicly funded fever hospitals.

  After Peel left Ireland in 1818 there were few more such attempts at dynamic impartiality until the Whigs came to power in 1830. Grateful for the support of O’Connell as the Great Reform Bill was being steered through parliament, the Whigs felt obliged to do more for Ireland. If the Whigs really could give ‘Justice to Ireland’, O’Connell concluded, then his demand for repeal of the Union could be parked for a long time to come.

  Episode 174

  THE TITHE WAR

  Perhaps the most hated tax in early nineteenth-century Ireland was the tithe, which earmarked about one-tenth of the produce of the land for the upkeep of the clergy of the Established Church. This was considered most unjust by those farmers who were not members of that church, in particular Catholics, who formed never less than three-quarters of the population.

  The tithe was usually collected in kind in the form of corn, eggs, poultry and the like, which made its levying both highly visible and open to abuse. Then in 1823 the Tithe Composition Act set up a procedure for ‘commutating’ payment in kind into payment in cash. This created fresh injustice: the new valuations were based on the average price of corn over the seven years leading up to November 1821. Since then the price obtained for corn in the market had fallen sharply, plunging by almost 25 per cent between 1820 and 1830. Resentment intensified because lands previously exempt were now included. In the parish of Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny, for example, tithe had formerly been levied on 2,000 acres, but under the new system 12,000 were liable for payment.

  The harvest of 1829 had been very poor, and in the following year angry farmers in south Leinster began to meet at hurling matches to organise resistance. On 13 December 1830 in the Kilkenny parish of Graiguenamanagh some cattle seized for non-payment of tithe were put up for sale. Though a large crowd was present, there were no buyers. The farmers had hit on a highly effective way of dislocating the collection of tithe. The example of the farmers of Graiguenamanagh was soon followed in the surrounding parishes of Goresbridge, Powerstown, Gowran and Borris.

  Sir John Harvey, Inspector-General for Leinster, rushed some 400 policemen, supported by the militia, to Co. Kilkenny. But, he reported, seizures for tithe ‘proceeded very slowly or not at all, and so few cattle will be at the sale’. The ‘tithe hurlers’ refined their tactics: boys acting as sentinels warned of approaching police by blowing hunting horns; livestock were then all locked up (these, through a legal point, could not be distrained) and only let out at night to graze. In Co. Cork people celebrated by singing ‘The Barrymore Tithe Victory’:

  We cannot, we will not—we’ll go to the auction,

  And let us then see which foul fiend of the faction

  Will purchase your cow, Kate, at cant or at fair,

  Or guarded by Lancers in fine hollow square.

  At a meeting in Maryborough in Queen’s County (now Portlaoise in Co. Laois) on 10 February 1831 Pat Lalor declared to wild cheers from a great crowd that he would no longer pay tithes but would allow the parson to seize his goods, and that he was sure no man could be found to bid for them. He was right: great numbers of local people gathered for the sale of his cattle and sheep in March 1831, but there was not a single bid, and the rector’s agent had no choice but to buy them himself. The animals were taken under guard to Dublin and shipped to Liverpool. Even there no buyer could be found, and eventually the animals perished from starvation. The ‘tithe hurlers’ had branded the distrained cattle with the word ‘TITHE’ and, on the day of the sale, circulated printed notices in Liverpool including an extract from Lalor’s speech.

  James Doyle, the Catholic Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, now came in behind the tithe hurlers. In an open letter he declared that tithes were no longer legally binding, because a quarter of the money collected was supposed to be set aside for the poor, and it was not. His letter was quoted from platforms at innumerable meetings:

  An indomitable hatred of oppression is like a gem upon the front of our nation which no darkness can obscure. To this firm quality I trace their hatred of tithe: may it be as lasting as their love of justice.… Can Ireland, the poorest nation in Europe, support the most affluent and luxurious priesthood which does not profess the religion of the people, nor minister to the wants of the poor?

  As the movement spread throughout Leinster and much of Munster, blood began to flow. On 22 May 1831 at a fair in Castlepollard, Co. Longford, police opened fire, killing seventeen people:

  They drew up round the market-house their chief he made them fire,

  While the astonished flying crowd on all sides did retire.

  ’Twas human blood they wanted—their deadly aim they took,

  And Castlepollard streets with gore were running like a brook.

  On 18 June at Newtownbarry, Co. Wexford, during a tithe sale where no one could be found to bid, the Yeomanry shot dead fourteen people in a stone-throwing crowd. On 14 December 1831 tithe hurlers laid an ambush to await a force accompanying a process-server at Carrickshock, two miles from Knocktopher, Co. Kilkenny. Twelve policemen and three of the ambushers were killed:

  Who could desire to see better sport

  Than Peelers groaning among the rocks,

  Their skulls all fractured, their eyeballs broken,

  Their fine long noses and ears cut off.

  Deprived of income, many Anglican rectors were in difficulties. One clergyman wrote: ‘I have now but one woman servant, and I believe I am not the only clergyman in the same situation, reduced from comfort to absolute poverty.’ He was fortunate: other Protestant clergy, including the incumbents of Naas, Co. Kildare, and Golden, Co. Tipperary, were murdered.

  The turbulence and violence increased and spread in 1832 in what was now described as the ‘Tithe War’. There were reports of a meeting in Co. Longford involving 120,000, and another in Co. Cork at which 200,000 were believed to be present. Under the Peace Preservation Act, the government ‘proclaimed’ the most disturbed districts and imposed heavy fines and prison sentences on leaders of the movement. Daniel O’Connell, for his part, hated the privileges of the Established Church, but he was anxious to remain within the law. His great object now was repeal of the Act of Union, and in a letter to the people of Kilkenny he declared that the anti-tithe meetings ‘are illegal’ and added: ‘We are on the fair road to Repeal, and only by Repeal can church taxes and tithes be abolished.… The conduct of the people of Kilkenny will only harm Repeal.’

  In addition to passing legislation giving itself fresh special powers, the government cut the costs of the Established Church by suppressing ten of its bishoprics. The Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, ruefully admitted that the movement had succeeded ‘in practically abolishing tithes by force and is compelling the state to make up the loss to the clergymen from the public purse’. Seizure of livestock and forced collection continued, but the government felt obliged to vote £1 million to make up the shortfall. O’Connell succeeded in getting the government to reduce the tithe by a quarter in 1838 and making landlords responsible for its collection. The country calmed down, but the tithe remained a corrosive issue for many years to come.

  Episode 175

  ‘PROPERTY HAS ITS DUTIES AS WELL AS ITS RIGHTS’

  For most of the 1830s Daniel O’Connell and Irish MPs supporting him had helped the Whig governments carry through a series of momentous reforms. In return the Whigs did much to change how Ireland was governed. In particular, they undermined the power of Ireland’s exclusive elite, the Protestant A
scendancy.

  In 1831 Chief Secretary Edward Stanley established a national system of primary education, with teachers’ salaries almost entirely paid by the government. By 1840 nearly a quarter of a million young people were receiving formal education in just under two thousand of these schools, known as ‘National Schools’. England was not to have a national system of education for another thirty years.

  Passionate Anglican though he was, Stanley sought to have Catholics and Protestants educated together. The object of government policy, he said, was to have in Ireland ‘a system of education from which should be banished even the suspicion of proselytism, and which, admitting children of all religious persuasions, should not interfere with the peculiar tenets of any’. This was a view shared by the Catholic Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, James Doyle, who had written in 1826:

  I do not know of any measures which would prepare the way for a better feeling in Ireland, than uniting children at an early age and bringing them up in the same school, leading them to commune with one another and to form those little intimacies and friendships which often subsist through life.

  The Catholic Church at first cautiously welcomed integrated National Schools, but the Presbyterians of Ulster were hostile from the outset. The Anglicans of the Established Church then announced that they intended to educate their children separately. And, finally, after Bishop Doyle had died in 1834, the Catholic Church also insisted on Catholic National Schools for Catholic children. The government could not resist such pressure, and so all the National Schools became denominational.

  In 1835, the year in which Daniel O’Connell’s alliance with the Whigs was formalised, Thomas Drummond took up his post as Under-Secretary—in effect, the head of the Irish civil service. Employed for many years by the Ordnance Survey, this Scot had come to know Ireland well. He had seen the wretched condition of the peasantry and had been appalled by the tyranny of the landlords. Now he had a chance to make a difference. The answer to unrest, he believed, was not coercion and repression, but the creation of an administration which would win popular confidence by being impartial.

  In 1833, four years after Catholic Emancipation, there was still not a single Catholic judge or paid magistrate. All the high sheriffs with one exception, the overwhelming majority of paid magistrates and grand jurors, the five inspectors-general and the thirty-two sub-inspectors of police were all Protestant. In just a few years Drummond was able to change all that. Catholics were appointed to important legal posts, and Drummond drafted a Constabulary Bill, successfully steered through parliament in 1836, which eliminated the baleful influence of local men of property, set new standards of professionalism, and encouraged Catholics to join up and be promoted. The Irish Constabulary rapidly gained acceptance in the countryside and reduced levels of crime. When Tipperary magistrates in 1838 demanded harsh measures to suppress disorder, Drummond knew that the trouble had been caused by the eviction of poor farmers. In his reply to the magistrates Drummond wrote:

  Property ... has its duties as well as its rights.... To the neglect of these duties in times past is mainly to be attributed that diseased state of society in which such crimes can take their rise ... and it is not in the enactment and enforcement of statutes of extraordinary severity, but chiefly in the better and more faithful performance of those duties ... that a permanent remedy for such disorders is to be sought.

  Drummond also played a major part in reducing the influence of the Orange Order. In 1835 a parliamentary select committee produced a 4,500-page report on the institution. For MPs the alarming conclusion was not only that the Yeomanry was controlled by the Orangemen, but also that the army was full of lodges; this was especially worrying, as the British Grand Master, the Duke of Cumberland, was King William IV’s brother and a field marshal. To prevent stern action by parliament, Cumberland dissolved the army lodges in February 1836, and the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland closed itself down in the following April. The Orange Order continued in Ireland, but it was largely deserted by the upper classes. Almost another fifty years were to pass before the institution recovered its prestige and influence.

  Daniel O’Connell, however, was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the results of his alliance with the Whigs. The time had come, he believed, to demand repeal of the Union.

  Episode 176

  THE REPEALER REPULSED

  For ten years Daniel O’Connell had worked along with Whig governments to achieve justice for Ireland. By 1840, however, his patience had run out. The crop of reforms had been miserable enough, he believed. A Poor Law, with harsh provisions, had been enacted in 1838, completely ignoring thoughtful recommendations made by high-powered committees in Ireland. Following an impressive report which denounced unrepresentative local government as incompetent and unfair, only ten elected corporations had been created in Ireland in 1840.

  O’Connell now launched a great campaign for repeal of the Union and the restoration of the Irish parliament. O’Connell decided to begin with Ulster. He had once toasted the ‘immortal memory’ of William of Orange by drinking a tumbler of Boyne water, and he never ceased to hope that northern Presbyterians would join him. In January 1841 he accepted an invitation to speak in Belfast.

  The Rev. Dr Henry Cooke, now the main spokesman for Presbyterians, declared that repeal was ‘just a discreet word for Romish ascendancy and Protestant extermination’. He promptly challenged O’Connell:

  When you invade Ulster, and unfurl the flag of Repeal, you will find yourself in a new climate.... I believe you are a great bad man, engaged in a great bad cause—and as easily foiled by a weak man, armed with a good cause, as Goliath, the Giant of Gath, was discomfited by the stripling with no weapon but a sling and two pebbles from the brook.

  The original plan for a procession into Ulster was dropped. The government, for its part, was taking no chances. It engaged two steamers to take north detachments of the 99th Regiment from Dublin; the Enniskillen Dragoons were called to Belfast; and the artillery arrived with four pieces of cannon.

  Immense hostile crowds congregated in Dromore, Hillsborough and Lisburn. But they had to be satisfied with burning O’Connell in effigy, for on Saturday 16 January he slipped through incognito. O’Connell did indeed find himself in a new climate in Belfast. He did not even dare leave the safety of Kern’s Hotel in Donegall Place to attend Mass at St Patrick’s the following morning. It was not until Tuesday 19 January that O’Connell faced the public in the open. On the balcony of Kern’s Hotel he threw off his green cloak to reveal a splendid suit of Repeal frieze, with a white velvet collar and Repeal buttons. But he could not be heard, as the Belfast News-Letter reported:

  Yells, hisses, groans, cheers, and exclamations of all descriptions were blended together in the most strange confusion imaginable ... ‘Ha, Dan, there’s Dr Cooke coming’—‘No Pope’—‘No Surrender’—‘Come out of that ye big beggarman, till we shake hands with ye’—‘Put out the Ballymacarrett weavers ...—‘Dan O’Connell for ever’—‘Hurrah for Repeal’, etc.

  That evening, as O’Connell attended a soirée in the May Street Music Hall, a stone-throwing battle raged outside, while a

  still larger body of people traversed the town, shouting and yelling...they smashed the windows of several houses, confining their rage, principally, to the residences of persons to had been accessory to the late Repeal.

  A well-aimed stone broke through a window and sliced through a blind to shatter the great chandelier in Kern’s Hotel. Meanwhile the office of the Vindicator, the Belfast Repeal journal, also came under attack, as was recorded by a journalist inside the building:

  While we write, they are after being repulsed by the police, in the fifth attempt to break open the door; and there is scarcely a whole pane in the front of the office.

  Next morning, escorted by four cars full of police and a body of police cavalry, O’Connell left Belfast for Donaghadee. As he approached the cross-channel vessel a woman threw a cup of tea at him. At the gangplank O’
Connell attempted polite conversation with an old fisherman, saying: ‘You have very pretty girls here.’ The old man replied: ‘Yes, but none of them are Repealers.’