IRISH DISTURBANCES. INTRODUCTION. For the last seventy years Ireland has been the scene of constantly recurring disturbances; sometimes consisting only of the murder of a few persons, or the burning of a few houses, and sometimes rising to general insurrection. Successive governments have apparently exhausted every means in their power to suppress the evil, but without success. The statutebook has been loaded with the severest laws; the country has been covered with military and police; capital punishment has been unsparingly inflicted; Australia has been crowded with transported convicts; and all to no purpose. Committees and Commissions have collected piles of evidence; the most various plans of policy have been recommended by different persons; some have attributed the turbulence of the inferior Irish to their inherent barbarism; some to their religion; some to their hatred of England; some to their poverty; some to their want of education. Much new legislation has been tried, and in vain 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: and there are persons who altogether despair of establishing permanent tranquillity in Ireland, and who think that it is an exception to all the ordinary rules of government. Such reasoners sometimes even push their political fatalism so far as to conceive that there is an innate and indelible tendency in the Irish to disturbance and outrage; that Ireland has been cut off by nature : B from the rest of the civilized world, and been foredoomed to a state of endless disorder; so desponding, indeed, is their language, that they almost seem to view the Irish people in the same light as Don Juan d'Aguila, the Spanish commander, who (as we are told by Lord Bacon) after the battle of Kinsale, “said in open treaty, that when the Devil upon the mount did show Christ all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them, he did not doubt but the Devil left out Ireland, and kept it for himself *." At a time when many questions affecting the welfare of Ireland are under public discussion, and are likely soon to occupy a large portion of the attention of the legislature, it seems desirable that some attempt should be made to ascertain the true causes and nature of the disturbances in question; and to discover whether there is anything so extraordinary in the character of the poorer classes in Ireland as to bid defiance to the best established rules of legislation; or whether the appearances alluded to may not be explained without supposing any deviation from the general course of human nature. With this view, I propose, in the first place, to trace the history of the various local disturbances which prevailed in Ireland in the latter half of the last century (so far as the imperfect accounts of them given by contemporary writers will permit), and next, fully to explain, by means of evidence taken by several parliamentary committees, the nature of these disturbances, which have continued, with partial interruptions, but unaltered character, from about the accession of Geo. III. to the present day. * Of a war with Spain: Bacon's Works, vol. v. p. 276.-Ed. Montagu. 3 CHAPTER I. HISTORY OF IRISH LOCAL DISTURBANCES FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY. By the settlement of Ireland after the revolution of 1688, the power of the new government was so firmly established, that no combined movement took place in favour of the ancient dynasty, not even during the Scottish rebellions of 1715 and 1745*. The system * The feeling so long and so ardently entertained by the Jacobites of Scotland in favour of the family of their former princes, did not prevail in Ireland to anything like an equal extent, notwithstanding the large numbers of Catholics in the latter country. "As to the Pretender (says Swift, in his 7th Drapier's Letter, written soon after 1724) his cause is both desperate and obsolete. There are very few now alive who were men in his father's time, and in that prince's interest; and in all others the obligation of conscience has no place. Even the papists in general, of any substance or estate, and their priests, almost universally are what we call Whigs, in the sense which by that word is generally understood." Vol. vii. p. 46. ed. Scott. "It is notorious (says Plowden, Hist. Review, vol. i. p. 336), that when Murray, the Pretender's secretary, gave up all the letters and papers relative to the last rebellion in Scotland, a scheme which had been planning and contriving for seven years before, it plainly appeared that the Jacobite party had no dependence upon, or connexion or correspondence with, any Roman Catholic in Ireland; the very name of that kingdom not having been once mentioned throughout the whole correspondence." Dr. Campbell, in his Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland, published in 1777, speaking of the common people of Athlone, says, "Curious to learn their sentiments as well as manners, I have entered into conversation with them as often as possible, and I could not find them so much attached to the house of Stuart as I apprehended. They have frequently spoke of James II. with indignation. He called the Irish cowards, and said that all was lost through their fault at the battle of the Boyne: this they have not forgot, and do not fail to recriminate; they brand him with a name the most opprobrious in their language, and expressive of the most dastardly cowardice. Some of them have said to of Irish government, adopted in order to further the Protestant and English interest, and the severe penal code against the Catholics, though unsuccessful in converting the natives to the reformed faith, nevertheless so coerced the mass of the people, as to prevent any open insurrection. By degrees, however, as population increased, the closer contact of the miserable peasantry led them to form local and limited combinations, for the purpose of shaking off those burdens which pressed most heavily upon them, but which, when thinly scattered over the face of the country, they could not hope successfully to resist*. The first of the risings which originated in this new state of things, and which had little or nothing in common with the previous troubles in Ireland, (such as the great rebellion of 1641,) was that of the Whiteboys, or Levellers, in 1761. These insurgents were so called, because they wore white shirts over their clothes, as a badge of their union, and because one of their principal objects was the levelling of the fences of newly-inclosed waste land. The immediate cause of their rising is stated as follows by Dr. Curry, the earliest and best informed writer on the subject: me, 'We expect little good from any of the race of Sheemas-a-caccagh." P. 273. See also Curry's Review of the Civil Wars in Ireland, vol. ii. p. 252, 260. On the tranquillity of Ireland about the middle of the eighteenth century, see a pamphlet by Dr. Lucas, entitled "A short but true History of the Rise, Progress, and happy Suppression of several late Insurrections, commonly called Rebellions, in Ireland." Reprinted. Dublin, 1760. * It appears, from accounts which cannot be very wide of the truth, that the number of Catholics in Ireland, in 1733, was less than a million and a half. See Edinburgh Review, No. 124, p. 514. Towards 1790, the population of Ireland was about four millions; of which about three millions were Catholics. London Review, No. 3, p. 230. In 1834 the number of Catholics in Ireland was 6,427,712, as returned by the Commissioners of Public Instruction. It has therefore more than quadrupled itself in a century. "About this time great tumults had been raised, and some outrages committed in different parts of Munster, by cottiers and others of the lowest class of its inhabitants, occasioned by the tyranny and rapacity of their landlords. These landlords had set their lands to cottiers far above their value, and, to lighten their burden, had allowed commonage to their tenants. Afterwards, in despite of all equity, contrary to all compacts, the landlords inclosed those commons*, and precluded their unhappy tenants from the only means of making their bargains tolerable. Another cause of these people's discontents was the cruel exactions of tithe-mongers; these harpies squeezed out the very vitals of the people, and by process, citation, and sequestration, dragged from them the little which the landlord had left them. These are the real causes of the late tumults in Munster, and it may be safely affirmed that there is no nation that has not had tumults from such or the like causes, without religion coming into question." A letter from a gentleman in Youghall to his son in London (printed in the Gentleman's Magazine for April, 1762), likewise states, that the Whiteboys" all along pretended that their assembling was to do justice to the poor, by restoring the ancient commons and redressing other grievances." * By commons is here doubtless meant merely waste land. If there had been a right of commonage over these wastes, and they had not been private property, the landlords would have been unable to inclose them without the consent of the commoners. Dr. Curry's State of the Catholics of Ireland, in his Review of the Civil Wars in Ireland, vol. ii. pp. 271-2, (London, 1786). Dr. Curry was the author of an anonymous pamphlet, published in 1766, entitled, "A candid Enquiry into the Causes and Motives of the late Riots in Munster; together with a brief Narrative of the Proceedings against the Rioters, in a Letter to a Noble Lord in England," which he in part repeats in the extract given in the text. See the Preface to his Review, p. iv., and for the high opinion of this tract entertained by impartial persons, see O'Conor's History of the Irish Catholics, Part I., p. 318-9. This statement occurs in the Gentleman's Magazine, vol. xxxii., in "A succinct Account of a Set of Miscreants in the Counties of Waterford, Cork, Limerick, and Tipperary, called Bougheleen Bawins (i. e. |