Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century could be a violent place. In certain areas, in particular Co. Tipperary and, at times, in other locations, rates of homicide could be considerably higher than those found in present-day Ireland and Europe. The nature of some violent activity also suggests that violence could, in certain contexts, come to play a prominent part in the socio-economic, cultural and political life of the country. Pre-Famine Ireland can at times appear, from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, to be an extraordinarily violent place with groups meeting in open combat at social gatherings such as fairs to vent sectarian or factional animosities or at events such as elections to express political rivalries. Indeed, the most striking difference between that time and the present is the incidence of group and collective violence, particularly, though not exclusively, in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The periodic outbreaks of unrest where violence was used to address wider socio-economic grievances particularly relating to land also suggests a society where violence could, at times, become the primary means of dealing with economic and social conflicts. Both agrarian unrest and sectarian violence might easily offer the impression of a country in which violence was a dominant means of dealing with conflict, and undoubtedly helped to feed perceptions of Ireland as a violent society.

Such activity needs to be seen in context, however. The available statistical evidence indicates that, in much of the country and for much of the period under review, the extent of violence was contained. The incidence of homicide was not particularly high; it was comparable, on a national level and in most individual counties, to rates found in other countries at the time and is by no means out of line with rates found in modern-day Europe. There is also little evidence that rates of homicide were much higher in some areas in the nineteenth century than they had been in the eighteenth. The more qualitative evidence drawn from the responses offered to the Poor Law Commission also indicate that violent conflict was by no means ubiquitous or a major source of social unrest.

The first half of the nineteenth century, following the Act of Union, is often seen as a time of increased and increasing sectarian tensions in Ireland. This rise in sectarian feeling was both reflected in and extenuated by a variety of different developments. To begin with, there was the legacy of the political upheavals of the 1790s, culminating in the 1798 Rebellion. Despite the avowed anti-sectarianism of many of those involved, the 1790s witnessed an upsurge in sectarian animosity and violence which left Irish society ‘more bitterly polarized than before’. It also contributed, in the longer term, to a ‘legacy of militant Catholic nationalism and Protestant loyalism’ in the country. The latter being most clearly expressed in the form of the Orange Order, an oath-bound society dedicated to the maintenance of Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, and the former finding expression through organisations such as the Defenders and, later, the Ribbonmen.

The issue of Catholic emancipation also came increasingly to dominate the political agenda. Although the distinct possibility or even expectation of Catholic emancipation had been raised before the Act of Union, it was thwarted in the early decades of the nineteenth century and was only granted under a considerable degree of popular and political pressure in 1829. In the intervening period there was an often acrimonious campaign for emancipation. In particular, the highlighting of Catholic grievances by the Catholic Committee during the first two decades of the century and, perhaps more importantly, the emergence in the 1820s of popular Catholic nationalism as a significant organised force in Irish political life, in the shape of the Catholic Association, served to emphasise sectarian divisions. The 1820s, therefore, witnessed, as Connolly puts it, a ‘sharp resurgence of sectarian hostility, affecting all levels of Irish society’.

Some of the activities undertaken at this time by the major church bodies in Ireland, Anglican, Catholic and Presbyterian, also seem to have increased tensions between the Catholic and Protestant communions. The renewed vigour, enthusiasm and organisational discipline of both the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland served to heighten the tension between them.

Disputes over the use, control and occupation of land have been central to explanations of violent conflict in Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century. The focus of study has very much been on conflicts between and among the various social groups in rural society and the degree to which these were rooted in and accentuated by the demographic pressures and prevailing economic conditions of the period. Cornewall Lewis argues, for instance, that rural unrest in Ireland was primarily rooted in pre-existing tensions in the relationship between landlord and tenant, which were accentuated by the demographic and economic circumstances of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century with the ‘increase of the agricultural population, the want of employment and the consequent desire to get possession of land’. The conflict of interests between landlord and tenant found its clearest expression in the often violent activities of agrarian secret societies which were, in Lewis's view, ‘a vast trades’ union for the protection of the Irish peasantry’ whose chief object was to keep the occupier ‘in possession of his land, and in general to regulate the relation of landlord and tenant for the benefit of the latter’.

Landlord/tenant relationships also feature prominently in the historiography. For Beames, the main source of rural conflict in pre-Famine and Famine Ireland was conflict between tenant farmers and landlords over ‘the occupation and control of land’. Beames regards such conflicts as arising not so much from pre-existing divisions within the land system, but rather from attempts to change that system. It was, he claims, the activities of ‘a particular type of enterprising landlord’ and the incursion of the ‘pressures of the market’ into local society which gave rise to violent conflict. The activities of agrarian secret societies were, for Beames, primarily a reaction to the incursion of such market forces. For Joel Mokyr too, the primary cause of economic conflict was the ‘difference of interests between landowners and tenants’. He also identifies the roots of this conflict in broader economic changes. In particular, he cites the desire on the part of landowners, post-1815, to consolidate small farms into larger ones in order to reap the greater benefits of pasture farming over the more labour intensive tillage farming which had dominated the rural economy from the late eighteenth century.

A quantitative analysis of homicide is by no means an unproblematic exercise. Both historians of crime and criminologists have long recognised the difficulties involved in the use of official records of crime as indicators of wider patterns of criminal behaviour, and any study of homicide depends on the availability and reliability of official sources. It is necessary, therefore, to reflect on some of the main methodological problems involved in using the available sources for a study of crime in general and of homicide, in particular, in Ireland from 1801 to 1850.

Methods

Is it possible to understand wider patterns of criminal activity through an analysis of criminal statistics? There is no shortage of debate on this issue within the existing historiography. While there are a number of different approaches, broadly speaking, there are two views on the question: (a) those who argue that statistics can, in certain circumstances, provide an insight into actual criminal activity, and (b) those who reject this argument and claim that criminal statistics can only be used to gain an understanding of the interests, priorities and assumptions of the authorities.

In the context of the nineteenth century, V.A.C Gatrell provides perhaps the most sophisticated defence of the first position by adopting what might be termed a (qualified) positivist approach. From this perspective, crime statistics, while by no means a wholly accurate reflection of actual crime levels are, if interpreted judiciously, the best available indication of patterns of criminal activity. Gatrell acknowledges that ‘crime rates cannot tell us how much crime […] is committed in society.’ This is due not only to the fact that there are limits to the capacities of the authorities in detecting and recording crime, but also because the priorities, interests and assumptions of the authorities themselves can impact in significant ways on the pattern of recorded crime. This, of course, raises serious difficulties in using the statistics in order, for instance, to assess long-term trends. Changing priorities may impact upon the levels of recorded crime, or the levels of crime recorded, thereby offering a false picture of the actual state of criminal activity.

Sir Richard Hussey Vivian, commander of the armed forces in Ireland, addressing a select committee on the state of the country in 1832, remarked on the ‘extraordinary carelessness of human life’ amongst the mass of the people – declaring that, although generally hospitable, they ‘would have no sort of hesitation in taking up a stone and committing a murder’. Before the 1839 select committee on crime in Ireland, Joseph Tabeteau agreed that there was ‘a very great disregard’ for human life ‘manifested in the feelings and practice of the peasantry’ and noted that ‘even after death it is astonishing how soon the thing passes away, without leaving any remembrance, even at the very inquest there is very little feeling shown.’ Maxwell Hamilton, the crown solicitor for the north-east circuit, stated before the 1852 select committee on outrages that there was ‘a great recklessness of human life’ which arose from the ‘great demoralizing effect on the minds of the people’ of witnessing murders. For others, Ireland stood out from much of the rest of Europe as a violent place. Writing in the mid-1830s, George Cornewall Lewis claimed that ‘in a large part of Ireland there is still less security of person and property than in any other part of Europe, except perhaps the wildest districts of Calabria or Greece.

Travel writers too noted a tendency towards violence and often dwelt on its prevalence in Irish life. Henry Inglis, while recounting a faction fight in the west of Ireland in 1834, reflected on the general ‘abundance of fighting’, he had encountered on his journey through the country. For John Barrow, travelling along the south coast in the autumn of 1835, fighting was a ‘pastime’ among the ‘lower class of Hibernians’ who, particularly when under the influence of whiskey, had an ‘extraordinary propensity’ to fight. Such fights were, moreover, as often with their ‘nearest relations [and] friends’ as with ‘foes’. Caesar Otway, reflecting on the negligence of the Irish lower classes in curbing the ‘tempers of their children’, found little surprise in the fact that in Ireland ‘the savage hand [was] so often lifted up to strike and commit a homicide.’ For Gustave de Beaumont, writing in the late 1830s, Irishmen were both ‘violent and vindictive’, displaying ‘the most ferocious cruelty’ in their ‘acts of vengeance’.

Studies of violence in Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century have generally focused on conflicts arising from the rural economy and, to a lesser extent, from religious divisions and popular, or more particularly, Catholic alienation from the existing political and legal order. Indeed, it has been often assumed that these were the primary causes of violent activity in Ireland at that time. There can be little doubt that such studies have added immeasurably to our understanding of Irish society in the nineteenth century. The problem with this emphasis, however, is that more personal and less directly economic, political and religious disputes have not received the attention they merit. This chapter redresses this imbalance by exploring the part played by lethal violence in what I term personal disputes. Any wider understanding of patterns of violent activity in Ireland at this time depends on a study of such cases. This is not least because, as Carolyn Conley has noted for the late nineteenth century, ‘the bulk of Irish violence was personal’ and ‘agrarian, political and sectarian violence constituted only a small part of Ireland's criminal violence’. This assertion holds true for the pre-Famine and Famine period too.

This is evident from reports of homicide cases in national samples for Ireland from 1843 to 1845 and between 1847 and 1849, as well as a more long-term study of four counties – Co. Armagh and Co. Fermanagh in the north, and Queen's Co. and Co. Kilkenny in the south of the country. Personal disputes were the single largest cause of homicide in all the above samples. Despite the fact that violence arising from personal disputes constituted such a significant element of violent activity in the nineteenth century, it has received relatively little attention. There are two main exceptions to this. Desmond McCabe has examined the role of violence in personal relationships in pre-Famine Mayo, while Carolyn Conley, in her study of late nineteenth-century Ireland, has also focused on the more personal origins of violence. For McCabe, the use of violence was linked to a sense of personal and familial honour, the attainment and achievement of which was central to the maintenance of personal and familial security and status within communities.

Was pre-Famine and Famine Ireland a violent society? The dominant view among a range of commentators at the time, and in the work of many historians since, is that violence was both prevalent and pervasive in the social and cultural life of the country. This book explores the validity of this perspective through the study of homicide and what it reveals about wider experiences of violence in the country at that time. The book provides a quantitative and contextual analysis of homicide in pre-Famine and Famine Ireland. It explores the relationship between particular and prominent causes of conflict – personal, familial, economic and sectarian – and the use of lethal violence to deal with such conflicts. Throughout the book, the Irish experience is placed within a comparative framework and there is also an exploration of what the history of violence in Ireland might reveal about the wider history of interpersonal violence in Europe and beyond. The aim throughout is to challenge the view of nineteenth-century Ireland as a violent society and to offer a more complex and nuanced assessment of the part played by violence in Irish life.

My debts are many. I would like to thank An Roinn Dlí agus Cirt agus Comhionannais/ the Department of Justice and Equality and the Irish Legal History Society for funding the original thesis on which this book is based. The thesis was supervised by Professor W.N. Osborough of the School of Law at University College Dublin and Professor Desmond Greer of the School of Law at Queen's University Belfast. I owe a great debt to both for sharing their knowledge of and enthusiasm for Irish history with me. I am also grateful for the additional funding and conducive working environment provided by the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway, which enabled me to continue my research there. In particular, I would like to take the opportunity to thank the then Director of the Institute, Nicholas Canny, and the project leader, William O'Reilly. I would also like to thank Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh for his support at that time.

The question of motive is a rather difficult one to address as homicides can be and generally are classified in a variety of different ways. As Wilson and Daly have pointed out, ‘the prevailing criminological conception of motives in homicide is a wooly amalgam of several potentially independent dimensions: spontaneity versus premeditation, the victim–offender relationship, and only a relatively small dose of […] substantive issues.’ The solution offered by Wilson and Daly is to try and isolate the substantive issue and to make it the primary focus of inquiry. While this is a perfectly valid approach, there are risks involved in privileging one factor over another when attempting to understand the motives behind violent activity. In some cases, the substantive issue can be the most significant factor. This is evident, for instance, in homicides involving robbery where it is generally the desire to take the victim's property that is central to the act rather than necessarily the relationship between the parties. In other cases, it is the relationship between the parties that is to the fore. For instance, in cases of spousal homicide, the act may arise from a relatively minor argument, but its real motivation may lie somewhat deeper in the relationship between husband and wife.

Thus, in some cases, it is clearly the relationship between the parties that is the primary cause of the dispute and it is the tension within this relationship that elevates the substantive issue to a position of significance. In other cases, it is the substantive issue which upsets or disrupts the relationship between the parties. To exclude either of these factors would be a mistake, but in order to classify the cases it is necessary to emphasise or privilege what we believe to be the dominant element in the act. This is, of course, by no means a foolproof method of classification and is obviously quite a subjective exercise. It is, however, a necessary one if any wider understanding of the contexts in which these homicides occurred is to be reached. The discussion here will focus on the four main categories of cases which are dealt with in this book, namely, personal disputes, personal family disputes, land-related disputes and, finally, disputes arising from sectarian animosity.