By Daragh Fitzgerald
The recent commencement of excavations at the site of the former mother-and-baby home in Tuam brings into stark light one of the most sinister outworkings of the rise and dominance of the Catholic Church in Ireland, a process that took off in the nineteenth century, particularly after the Famine. Sarah Roddy’s Money and Irish Catholicism: an intimate history, 1850–1921 shows that Ireland’s post-Famine devotional revolution was in large part built on the money from ordinary laypeople. Virtually every Irish Catholic gave pennies or pounds to the Church in this period, making its income so unprecedentedly enormous and diffuse as to be beyond enumeration. One hugely successful way in which the Church generated funds was through ‘gambling for God’—priests and nuns running raffles and lotteries on an industrial scale. If this conjures up images of Ted and Dougal listening to Ghost Town by the Specials on Craggy Island, it could not be further from reality. These raffles were national, and sometimes international, affairs which generally involved a ‘bazaar’ or ‘grand fancy fair’ with decorative stalls, notoriously over-priced goods and entertainment for visitors, while prizes were routinely £100 or £200 pounds. Despite the wide coverage in the press and the regularity of these lotteries, they were illegal under UK law.
Confluences of law and history is a collection of papers composed for the Irish Legal History Society by esteemed scholars, including Jane Ohlmeyer, Paul Bew, Patrick Geoghegan and regular History Ireland contributor Felix Larkin. Donnell Deeny’s contribution considers the trials of Arthur Donnelly, who was accused of attempted murder and returned for trial on three occasions for firing on a crowd passing his property on 16 August 1872. A ‘respectable’ Catholic businessman in Lurgan, Co. Armagh, Donnelly was one of fifteen commissioners elected once the town was granted its own local government in 1855. The crowd at whom he fired were from the Good Templars, a temperance association who in fact had charged on Donnelly’s house in what was the continuation of disturbances in the town since the Feast of the Assumption the previous day. Donnelly was arrested on the 17th and accused of shooting a man called Bell, who, despite rumours, did not die from his wounds; indeed, it was unclear whether he had been wounded by a gunshot at all. Nationalists alleged that Donnelly was being framed by the ‘Orange faction’, and the unionist Irish Times and Times of London similarly blamed Orangemen for the unrest. Donnelly walked away from his trial a free man before a retrial in 1874, which concluded that he was innocent of wrongdoing, but he was due to be on trial again when he passed away in 1886. Donnelly was buried in Dougher, and visitors might see barley growing from his grave. In 2006 his great-great-grandson served as a High Court judge in Downpatrick courthouse, where Donnelly had previously been tried, while his great-great-granddaughter sat beside him in her capacity as sheriff of Down.
Readers will know Ian S. Wood from his articles in History Ireland over the years, and his latest work, Years of trial and terror: the Irish state and Northern Ireland, 1969–75, assesses how the Irish state reacted to the first few years of the Troubles. In 1969 Fianna Fáil, the ‘Republican Party’, was back in power, and Dr Patrick Hillary was minister for external affairs; he was primarily concerned with Ireland’s entry into the EEC, but Northern Ireland also came into his remit. That the six counties were ‘external affairs’ was a sign of how the Irish state viewed the worsening situation in the North. Woods covers in great depth the Dublin–Monaghan bombings, for which nobody was ever charged, and the Arms Crisis and tribulations of Captain James Kelly, described by Tim Pat Coogan in his typically provocative style as ‘an Irish Dreyfus’.
A remarkable Irishman who reported on the real Dreyfus trial for the Daily Telegraph, along with other dramatic events of the period such as the Boxer Rebellion, Turkish massacres in Armenia and later the Peace Conference at Versailles, is the topic of Kevin Rafter’s Dillon rediscovered: the newspaperman who befriended kings, presidents and oil tycoons. Emile Joseph Dillon was born in the tenements of Dublin, and family lore has it that his grandfather fought with the pikemen in 1798. A master of disguise, on his dispatches Dillon hid his true identity behind various covers—a priest, a Cossack officer, a Kurdish chieftain and even an Armenian woman.
Another Dubliner who was a trail-blazer in the era of New Journalism, though one from a very different background from Dillon, was press baron Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror. ‘Miserable conflict and confusion’—the Irish Question and the British national press, 1916–22 demonstrates how newspapers like these covered news from Ireland from the Easter Rising to the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Debate regarding solutions to the interminable ‘Irish Question’ and reporting on Irish grievances featured widely in the British press during this period, and Ireland was regularly given its own subheading in newspapers, a distinction not afforded to Scotland or Wales. While some articles were reminiscent of Swift’s Modest proposal, the press could also be highly critical of British state policy, as they were in the aftermath of the events of Bloody Sunday and the burning of Cork. British public opinion, much of it informed by such press coverage, was a constraint on British government policy and an important factor in bringing about a political settlement.
All great cities have a great fire; while many will know of the fire in 1684 that destroyed much of Dublin Castle, Las Fallon recovers a less-popularly known incandescence in 1875—The great Liberties whiskey fire. Dublin at the time was the capital of a whiskey empire, with city distilleries producing ten million gallons per annum at their peak in the nineteenth century. Much of this was based in the Liberties, where the people of the tenements witnessed ‘a burning flood’ when a fire in Reid’s malthouse spread to Malone’s bonded warehouse, which contained 5,000 barrels of whiskey, and produced an explosion and apocalyptic streams of burning spirits six inches deep. The ingenious fire brigade, aware that adding water to the burning whiskey would only aggravate the flames, instead used manure and tenement refuse as a retardant. Thirteen Dubliners lost their lives in the mayhem, not from the smoke or flames but from over-indulgence in the flowing alcohol, which many swept up and drank with pots, shoes or their hands.
Beyond the Pale and Highland line: the Irish and Scottish Gaelic world is a collection of essays exploring themes of lordship, political culture and social mores of these lost Gaelic worlds. Despite considerable regional differences, Irish and Scottish Gaelic societies had a common Goidelic language, literary heritage and cult of saints. Unlike Ireland, however, Scotland was a kingdom with its own long-established monarchical traditions, while post-Reformation Scotland moved much closer to Protestant England and became less receptive to Irish lords.
Readers despairing at the government’s Waterford Whisperers-type proposals for the GPO can comfort themselves with The Malone Mausoleum, Kilbixy, Co. Westmeath, an example of historical conservation done right. The striking mausoleum is a pyramid of finely dressed ashlar on a stepped podium with corner plinths, all set above the cubic mass of the chamber. It belongs to the family of Lord Sunderlin, his uncle Anthony and his brother Edward Malone, a renowned commentator on Shakespeare who described the bard as ‘one of Ireland’s most meritorious sons’. Its structural integrity was threatened by water ingress, but its conservation has ensured that the mausoleum can be appreciated by future generations.
Sarah Roddy, Money and Irish Catholicism: an intimate history, 1850–1921 (Cambridge University Press, €114.49 hb, 272pp, ISBN 9781009456685).
Niamh Howlin and Felix M. Larkin (eds), Confluences of law and history: Irish Legal History Society discourses and other papers, 2011–21 (Four Courts Press, €45 hb, 320pp, ISBN 9781801510851).
Ian S. Wood, Years of trial and terror: the Irish state and Northern Ireland, 1969–75 (Ulster Historical Foundation, €18 pb, 176pp, ISBN 9781913993627).
Kevin Rafter, Dillon rediscovered: the newspaperman who befriended kings, presidents, and oil tycoons (Martello Publishing, €25 pb, 399pp, ISBN 9781739608675).
Erin Kate Scheopner, ‘Miserable conflict and confusion’—the Irish Question and the British national press, 1916–22 (Liverpool University Press, €43.50 pb, 288pp, ISBN 9781836243977).
Las Fallon, The great Liberties whiskey fire (Eastwood Books, €12.99 pb, 76pp, ISBN 9781916742673).
Simon Egan (ed.), Beyond the Pale and Highland line: the Irish and Scottish Gaelic world (Manchester University Press, €105 hb, 296pp, ISBN 9781526178411).
William Laffan (ed.), The Malone Mausoleum, Kilbixy, Co. Westmeath (The Follies Trust, €10 pb, 72pp).