Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘their entire aim … levelled at the tithes’.14 Traditions of violent resistance were becoming embedded. A decade later a local man, Phil Cunningham, became a leader of the United Irishmen rebellion in County Tipperary. Transported to Australia he died leading a rebellion against the British in 1803.

      The fear of a native revolt accompanied by French invasion loomed large in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century politics, as the Whiteboy attacks created panic among local Protestant populations. One informer’s account refers to a ‘meeting of the White Boys at Myre [in Tipperary, where] it was resolved on to burn the houses of the Protestants, and to massacre them in one night, after a landing made by the French, as was expected’.15

      Government retribution was harsh. Hundreds of rebels or suspected rebels were transported to Australia. Public hangings were often carried out in the rebels’ home districts. Con Shine, a local carpenter, recalled an execution by soldiers near Listowel in 1808, as told to him by his family: ‘They drove 2 poles in the ground below at the cross and put another pole across they then put him standing in a horse’s car put a rope around his neck then pulled away the car and left him hanging there. He was hanging there all day. The soldiers use to come often and give him a swing for sport and leave him swing away for himself. All the doors were shut that day. You would not see a head out the door.’16

      Around Ballydonoghue the Catholic Church condemned the Whiteboy attacks and pledged ‘firm attachment to Our Gracious King and to the Constitution … we will not enter into conspiracy against the laws of our country’.17 A priest in Listowel went further and urged his flock to collect £26 as a reward for anybody giving information on those responsible for the burning houses in the parish. The state archives for the period reflect the efforts made by local priests to discourage support for the Whiteboys. The Listowel magistrate, John Church, records parish meetings across north Kerry and praises the efforts of the clergy while noting claims by the church that the disturbances were caused by poverty and poor weather ‘more than any political motive as maliciously insinuated in some publick Prints’.18 By the late 1820s the campaign for Catholic Emancipation led by Kerryman Daniel O’Connell was on the threshold of success. The church did not want chaos and violence. From the time of the Reformation Catholics had faced a range of restrictions. But in the wake of Cromwellian (1649–53) and then Williamite (1688–91) wars, the repression intensified and a wide range of ‘Penal Laws’ was gradually introduced, targeting Catholics, as well as Presbyterians and other dissenters from the Anglican order. The laws were meant to ensure the ascendancy of Anglicans, with restrictions on Catholic landholding, worship, education, and even a prohibition on Catholics owning a horse worth more than £5. This last imposition was to ensure that strong swift beasts that would be useful for cavalry were kept out of the hands of Catholics. Enforcement varied in different places and with the passage of time some of the most punitive laws were rescinded, but by the 1820s Catholics were still excluded from Parliament and from being judges or senior civil servants. The effect was to make religion synonymous with the power of the minority. Very soon the reverse would obtain. The campaign to achieve Catholic Emancipation galvanised the Irish poor and gave Europe its first great campaign of peaceful mass protest. By 1829 the battle for religious liberty was won and the confessional demography of Irish life had been asserted. The Catholic Church emerged as the most powerful force in Irish life, a role it would not willingly relinquish for the next century and more. But the Church would struggle to control the unrest which arose from the poverty and injustice of the times.

      The Whiteboys were succeeded by the ‘Rockites’ in the 1820s, inspired by the millenarian writings of Signor Pastorini, the pseudonym for the English Catholic bishop, Charles Walmesley, who predicted the imminent demise of Protestantism. The north Kerry poet Tomás Ruadh O’Suilleabháin saw the coming deliverance of his people from landlordism and English rule:

      It is written in Pastorini

      That the Irish will not have to pay rent

      And the seas will be speckled with ships

      Coming around Cape Clear.19

      The local landlords around Ballydonoghue were frightened by the threats of a Protestant apocalypse. In nearby Tarbert one landowner learned of Pastorini’s tract being read ‘among the lower orders of Roman Catholics, who … expect to have the Protestants exterminated out of this kingdom before the year 1825’.20 An agent working for Reverend Stoughton was battered with stones, stabbed to death and then had his ears and nose cut off and placed on public display by his attackers.21 The Rockites, like the Whiteboys before them, were suppressed with customary brutality while O’Connell succeeded in diverting the mass of the rural poor into peaceful campaigning. When the Bill for emancipation was voted into effect on 13 April 1829, the people of Ballydonoghue could look up and cheer the flaming bonfire of triumph on top of Cnoc an Óir. Five years later they gathered for the opening of their new church, a stone building that spoke of permanence and where the Purtills still observe the rites of their faith. The campaign for religious freedom awakened people to the power of their numbers. But the hunger and the structural injustices of rural life ensured that violence would come again. Tithes remained a bane of local life and when they prompted an outbreak of agrarian violence a decade later the Stoughtons were targeted.

In January 1833 the Morning Chronicle recorded that a bailiff working for the Reverend Anthony Stoughton and his brother Colonel Stoughton of Listowel was murdered by being ‘struck on the back of the head with a stone and received about twenty bayonet wounds’.22 On another occasion a horse belonging to the brothers was cut in two. The so called ‘Tithe War’ witnessed a familiar ritual of midnight raids but also the politics of highly organised intimidation, not just aimed at the clergy but against those who agreed to pay their tithes. State retribution was harsh, with instances of troops shooting on protesting crowds. But the conflict marked the beginning of the end of the Church of Ireland as the established church and in 1838 the government acted to transfer responsibility for the upkeep of Anglican clerics to the landlords.*

      Poverty is not a necessary precondition for civil strife, but mix it with memories of dispossession, in a system based on the supremacy of a minority, and the emergence of groups such as the Whiteboys, and others in years to come, seems utterly logical. They were men and women with nothing to lose and the raw courage of youth. They did not fight for a nation state, or the republican ideals of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen. They fought for the ground beneath their feet.

* The final phase in the decline of Church of Ireland power came with the Irish Church Act of 1869 which did away with the payment of tithes and replaced them with a life annuity.

      3

       My Dark Fathers

      My Dark Fathers lived the intolerable day

      Committed always to the night of wrong,

      Stiffened at the hearthstone, the woman lay,

      Perished feet nailed to her man’s breastbone.

      Grim houses beckoned in the swelling gloom

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