A History of Ireland in 100 Objects

by Fintan O'Toole

  76. Robert Emmet’s ring, 1790s

  The emerald stone in this ring may symbolise imperialism: it came from India and was given by Sir John Temple to his cousin Dr Robert Emmet, the Irish State physician. But the design, cut in Dublin in the 1790s, symbolises something very different: a woman playing a harp, with, in the background, pikes and a liberty cap - emblems of Irish republicanism.

  The ring, which seems to have been copied, was used by Emmet’s revolutionary sons, Thomas Addis and Robert, as a seal and apparently as a token of trust. Myles Byrne, a fellow conspirator in the United Irishmen, recalls meeting Thomas Addis in Paris and giving him

  “a paper containing the impression of the seal-ring which I had been the bearer of from his brother, Robert. As soon as Mr Emmet had compared this impression with his own seal-ring, he crossed the room, took me in his arms and embraced me with affection.”

  Thomas Addis Emmet was among the United Irish leaders interned in Fort George, in Scotland, in 1799 and released in 1802. His younger brother Robert was expelled from Trinity College Dublin in 1798, rightly suspected of radical activities. Robert went to Paris and discussed with Napoleon (now established as a dictator) and his foreign minister Charles Talleyrand the possibility of a new rebellion, this time focused on the capture of Dublin Castle, the centre of government power. Robert returned to Dublin in 1802, determined to put this plan into effect. He was in some respects a romantic idealist, but his military ambitions were real. He hoped to link up with a rump of rebels from 1798 who were holding out in the Wicklow hills under Michael Dwyer. He also planned to use more sophisticated technology: hinged pikes that could be more easily hidden, short muskets for urban street fighting and signal rockets that he test-fired in the spring of 1803. Emmet and his co-conspirators also developed something that would play a significant role in Irish and world history: the improvised explosive device.

  Emmet succeeded in catching the government by surprise with his plans for the rebellion, fixed for 23 July, but seems to have done the same with his own men, many of whom were also unprepared. Most of those who gathered in Dublin on the day lost faith in their youthful commander and returned home, and instead of the 1,000 strong army that Emmet had been expecting, he ended up leading a drunken rabble of 80.

  Emmet sent a rocket signal to countermand the rising, which nonetheless unfolded as a confused melée, in which the lord chief justice, Lord Kilwarden, was piked to death. Emmet and much of the leadership withdrew into the south Dublin hills, but Emmet was arrested in Harold’s Cross on 25 August, taken to the castle, tried on 19 September and executed on Thomas Street the following day.

  Emmet’s youth (he was 25 at the time of his death) and idealism, his dramatic parting from his beloved Sarah Curran, the disappearance of his body and his speech from the dock—‘when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written’—created a myth of heroism and blood sacrifice that lived long after him.

  77. Wicker cradle, nineteenth–twentieth centuries

  This cradle, woven from wicker, was collected on Inis Óirr, one of the Aran Islands, in the 1950s, but it is probably much older and is of a type widely used in nineteenth-century Ireland. That it was made with such loving skill suggests both its necessity and its importance. Ordinary Irish people experienced in an extreme way both the joys of having children and the pain of losing them.

  In the early-nineteenth century the population in Ireland was growing faster than anywhere else in western Europe. In 1807 Thomas Malthus wrote that ‘Among the subjects peculiar to the state of Ireland is the extraordinary phenomenon of the very rapid increase of its population’. At the end of the eighteenth century the population was probably about 5 million; by 1845 it had risen to about 8.5 million. By 1845 31 per cent of the entire population of the United Kingdom lived in Ireland. This is all the more remarkable given that, between 1815 and 1845, about 1.5 million people left Ireland, mostly for Britain, Canada and the United States.

  Love was in the air because the almost universal adoption of the potato as a staple crop made it possible to form a family with very little land. The potato, which was something of a wonder food, may also have contributed to the general good health of Irish women and, therefore, their very high fertility. (It is striking that high fertility in Ireland was not just a Catholic phenomenon: Quakers in pre-famine rural Ireland had more children than those in rural England.) Irish women were also sexually conservative—generally chaste before marriage and faithful within it—and few seemed to have used birth control. Children, moreover, were welcomed, as they often are in poor societies, as an insurance policy for their parents’ futures. English agronomist Arthur Young noted, of the Irish poor, ‘their happiness and ease relative to the number of children’. Up to the 1820s, when cottage industries began to be wiped out by competition from factories, children were valuable workers in the home.

  Furthermore, the cost of an extra mouth was minimal: families had little to give a child beyond the food they grew themselves. Because of the failure of most parts of Ireland to industrialise, the number of smallholdings grew disproportionately: in 1845, 55 per cent of all Irish landholders held farms of less than four hectares (10 acres), and another 20 per cent of farms were smaller than eight hectares (20 acres). In addition to the problem of having so many subsistence farmers, Ireland was becoming more unequal: while overall incomes were rising modestly, the poor were getting poorer. In 1835 the Poor Inquiry Commission asked local Catholic and Protestant clergy, magistrates and land agents to say whether the condition of the poor in their area had improved or disimproved since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1815. Most reported a deterioration. Perhaps a quarter of children died in infancy, making the cradle a bittersweet object, redolent both of hope and of loss.

  78. Daniel O’Connell’s ‘Chariot’, 1844

  In September 1844, this extravagantly ornate ‘chariot’ was drawn through the streets of Dublin by six splendid grey horses, accompanied by a crowd of around 200,000 citizens. Sitting on the gilded seat was the most celebrated, adored, feared and despised Irishman of his time: Daniel O’Connell. He was being taken from Richmond Bridewell, on the site of what became Griffith barracks in Dublin, to his home on Merrion Square.

  O’Connell, his son John and others were found guilty on conspiracy charges after a 24-day trial that opened on 15 January 1844. They were sentenced to twelve months in prison, fined £2,000 and bonded to keep the peace for seven years. On 4 September, however, the House of Lords overturned the verdict. The ‘chariot’, 3 metres high and 4.5 metres long, was specially made for O’Connell’s glorious re-entry into the city, and modelled on the triumphal cars of ancient Rome. It was upholstered in purple silk and blue wool and adorned with gilded mouldings and decorative overlays, depicting shamrocks and stylised classical foliage. The sides showed Hibernia with the increasingly familiar national iconography of harp, round tower and wolfhound. On the back was a representation in gold of a harp surmounted by the word ‘Repeal’, summarising O’Connell’s campaign for repeal of the Act of Union.

  O’Connell was a political phenomenon, with good claims to be the inventor of mass democracy, not just in Ireland but around the English-speaking world. His first great cause was Catholic emancipation. It had been widely believed that the quid pro quo for the union would be a lifting of the remaining legal disabilities for Catholics, including the right to sit in parliament, but opposition from George III and then from his son blocked reform. O’Connell, a barrister and member of the Dublin Catholic Committee, built the Catholic Association as a mass movement, funded by the ‘Catholic rent’—monthly subscriptions of as little as a penny. In July 1828 he won a historic election in Clare by 2,057 votes to 982. In April 1829, the Roman Catholic Relief Act enabled Catholics to enter parliament and hold high civil and military offices.

  O’Connell, now known as the ‘Liberator’, achieved a status unique in the world: political authority without insti
tutional power. French writer Gustave de Beaumont noted in 1839 that:

  what we find nowhere else is the continued empire of a single man, who during 20 years has reigned over his country without any title, save popular assent, every day required and every day given…his power is only maintained on the condition of incessant action; hence that feverish agitation by which he is distinguished.

  O’Connell’s agitation encompassed the rights of Jews and American slaves, but focused primarily on repeal. His campaign failed; but it put Ireland at the centre of British politics and created a politicised population whose skills would help shape politics, not only in Ireland, but in Britain and the US.

  79. Stokes ‘Tapestry’, 1833–53

  This remarkable table cloth, measuring eight feet by four and showing 250 different figures in 31 panels of inlaid felt patchwork, is the work of one man over 20 years. Stephen Stokes was born in Plymouth in 1802 and enlisted in the army as a boy. In 1819 he entered the 63rd Regiment, then stationed in Ireland, transferring to the 1st Royal Dragoons in 1826. On leaving the army in 1836 he joined the newly formed Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), initially as a sergeant. He retired as inspector of mounted police in 1855 and became superintendent of the Turkish baths in Lincoln Place. He died in 1900 at the age of 98.

  Stokes seems to have been self-taught and presumably began his project to stave off the boredom of barracks life. His patchwork evolved into a panorama of political, military and even cultural affairs. At the centre are Queen Victoria and Prince Albert reviewing the troops, the royal coat of arms and a vivid depiction of the capture of a French standard at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 by the 1st Royal Dragoons, presumably described to Stokes by colleagues in the regiment who were veterans of that epic clash.

  The real fascination of the patchwork, though, lies in its scenes from ordinary military life and from very different aspects of Irish affairs. Running across the width of the cloth, there is a funeral procession for a dead dragoon. Another sequence shows soldiers being punished for breaches of discipline by having to break rocks or march with a heavy wheelbarrow, all supervised by a provost marshal with an enormous pipe. A later panel shows a member of the DMP mounting a white horse—possibly Stokes himself.

  There are contrasting scenes from Irish life. One is of Donnybrook fair, a proverbially riotous annual gathering south of Dublin. Another is the visit of the celebrated ‘Swedish nightingale’, Jenny Lind, to the Theatre Royal in Dublin in 1847. For the following year, however, Stokes depicts ‘The Irish Constabulary and the Boys of Ballingarry’, representing the abortive 1848 rebellion of the Young Irelanders. This group, a violent breakaway from the mainstream repeal movement, had serious ambitions and approached the French revolutionary government. After two of its leaders, John Mitchel and Charles Gavan Duffy, were arrested, about 100 members engaged in a desultory skirmish with 40 policemen in Co. Tipperary, an engagement derisively known as ‘the battle of the Widow McCormack’s cabbage-patch’. William Smith O’Brien, Terence Bellew McManus, Thomas Francis Meagher and Patrick O’Donohue were sentenced to death but were instead transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1849.

  Stokes’s depiction of the ‘battle’ is striking for two reasons: he shows the rebels as giants compared to the diminutive policemen; and he gives prominence to a very early depiction of the rebels’ flag: a tricolour of green, white and orange. Brought from Paris, where it was displayed to show the Young Irelanders’ affinity for the French revolution, it symbolised, said Meagher, the hope that ‘beneath its folds the hands of the Irish Catholic and the Irish Protestant may be clasped in generous and heroic brotherhood’—an aspiration yet to be fulfilled.

  80. ‘Captain Rock’ threatening letter, 1842

  One of the great hidden objects of Irish history is the threatening letter. For a burgeoning population of very poor tenants, Daniel O’Connell’s campaigns for Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Act of Union had less urgency than matters that bore on their immediate survival: rent, land tenure and the tithes that were extorted from Catholics to pay Church of Ireland clergymen. For much of the nineteenth century, the most violent resistance of the anonymous poor was personified in a single, mythical figure, Captain Rock, whose name was appended to thousands of threatening letters, like this one sent to Thomas Larcom, the chief surveyor of Ireland, in 1842.

  Secret, oath-bound societies, generally known as Ribbonmen, survived the repression of the 1798 rising. Liberal republicanism was largely eclipsed in their ideology by a millenarian and sectarian fervour crystallised in an exotic word: Pastorini, the pen name of Bishop Charles Walmesley, whose reading of the Book of Revelation led him to predict in the 1770s that God’s wrath would punish Protestant heretics in 50 years time. During an outbreak of famine and fever in 1817, condensed versions of Pastorini’s prophecies began to circulate among rural Irish Catholics. The idea that Protestants would be wiped out by 1825 gained a powerful hold.

  A Co. Limerick blacksmith called Patrick Dillane, distinguished in the art of throwing rocks, was ‘christened Captain Rock by a schoolmaster…by pouring a glass of wine on his head’. The name became a code for the sense that, as a Rockite puts it in a story by William Carleton, ‘we’ll have our own agin’.

  Rockism swept through Munster and south Leinster between 1821 and 1824, with savagely violent attacks on landlords, agents, tithe collectors, and middlemen. More than 1000 people were murdered, mutilated or badly beaten. The millenarian fervour was evident in threatening letters containing phrases like the exuberantly apocalyptic ‘Vesuvius or Etna never sent forth such crackling flames as some parts of Donoughmore will shortly emit’. (The letters were not at times without a certain grotesque humour: ‘In compassion to your human weaknesses and in consideration of the enormous weight of your corpulent fraim [sic], I mean to rid you of these inconveniences by a decapitation’.)

  At its height in North Cork, Rockism could bring thousands of men and women into open insurrectionary action against troops and yeomanry. The Rockites won no military victories, but their campaign of arson and murder did succeed in cowing local magistrates, stopping the collection of tithes and lowering rents. The intimidation of witnesses and ‘informers’ created a period of virtual legal immunity.

  It took large-scale military occupations, mass hangings, transportations and the introduction of the brutal Insurrection Act, suspending civil liberties (most of those sentenced were accused of nothing more than breaking the curfew), to end Captain Rock’s three-year reign of terror. Even then, the memory of the violence was evoked in subsequent decades, as this letter shows, to threaten unpopular landlords or officials with a name that remained charged with ferocity.

  81. Empty cooking pot, nineteenth century

  For the Irish rural poor, the open fireplace of a small stone cottage was the locus of comfort and security. Suspended over the turf fire was a large, three-legged, iron cooking pot. By the nineteenth century, these vessels were almost always mass manufactured in a style that harked back to mediaeval times; they continued in use until the mid-twentieth century—this six-gallon example, from Corelish East, Grean, Co. Limerick, was purchased by the National Museum in 1965. These pots became a talisman of survival. Folklorist Estyn Evans noted that during the years of the Great Hunger—the potato famine of 1845–9—victims ‘clung to the pot when all else was gone’.

  Famines were not rare in Ireland: there were perhaps 30 severe episodes between 1300 and 1800, including a disastrous failure of the potato crop in 1740. The sheer size of the population dependent on the potato, however—three million or so—made the arrival, in August 1845, of the potato blight fungus phytophthora infestans the worst such event in Irish history. That year, one-third of the crop was rotten and inedible; by 1847, most of the seed potatoes had been eaten by desperate people. In the first year of the famine, the Tory government of Robert Peel responded by importing £100,000 worth of Indian meal from the US and establishing a programme of public works. The Liberal administration of
Lord John Russell, which took office in 1846, continued the works programme, but was reluctant to interfere with market forces. A combination of laissez-faire ideology, a ‘providential’ evangelical theology that saw the famine as God’s way of correcting the vices of the Irish and a severe economic recession in Britain greatly limited the scale and speed of the official response. While some private organisations, notably the Society of Friends (Quakers), made heroic efforts to save lives, the government refused to stop the export of food from Ireland—causing extreme bitterness for decades to come.

  In February 1847 ideology and theology were set aside and public kitchens were established, to feed the starving without demanding work in return. In September, however, the government insisted that further relief would be supplied only at already overcrowded and insanitary workhouses. This concentration of sick and starving people undoubtedly created ideal conditions for the spread of the diseases—principally typhus and relapsing fever—that killed more people than hunger alone. Misery was piled on misery; landlords, under pressure from rising taxation and falling rents, evicted tenants at a rate that rose to 100,000 a year by 1850.

  Roughly one million people died (proportionally more than in any other known famine) and a similar number emigrated. Patterns of mass migration were reinforced. The decimation of the cottier class changed both the social structure and the prevailing culture—those who died or left were disproportionately Irish-speaking. A new Ireland emerged from the disaster, as Catholic beef farmers took over the vacated land. The famine ended but, in these respects, it has never gone away.