I

The events of 1857 came in four distinct phases. The first began on 12 July, when Revd Thomas Drew held a service for local Orangemen at Christ Church in Durham Street. Since its formation in 1795, the Orange Order had related to the British–Irish state in changing ways. The offer of conditional loyalty had been accepted in times of crisis, but otherwise met with a series of failed efforts to suppress the order. The Orange Order had dissolved in 1835 ahead of a possible ban. It had reformed in 1849 and, in public at least, the respectable gentry leadership accepted the legal ban on party and religious processions which had been in place, with a brief interlude, since 1829. Drew already had a reputation for preaching in what was known as a ‘controversial’ style. His 12 July sermon was an extreme version of a genre common to a section of evangelical Protestants. Drew laid exclusive claim to civil society for the Protestants of 1688, then moved to a sustained attack on ‘Romish’ errors in the name of his Bible Christianity, mixing all this with a catalogue of atrocities and sexual innuendo. The sermon was reprinted the following Friday in the Downshire Protestant and later as a separate pamphlet.Footnote ¹⁰ Few who heard that Drew was preaching to Orangemen would have been in any doubt as to the content. The sermon was followed by a night of uneasy calm, then on Monday crowds gathered and seven nights of rioting followed, including stone throwing, gunfire, drumming, street beatings and house wrecking. The military were called in to assist the police and constabulary on the Wednesday but it was several days before calm was restored. August was marked by intermittent Protestant street preaching and the formation of a Gun Club in the Catholic Pound. On 6 September, a sermon preached outside the Harbour Office by Revd Hugh Hanna provoked another outburst of street rioting which spread across the town.Footnote ¹¹ Phase Four was the inquiry itself. A fifth phase of disorder followed in 1858.

The court opened on 14 September. It was conducted by two Dublin lawyers. The lead was taken by David Lynch. He was Whig and Catholic, a friend and ally of Thomas Larcom, under-secretary of state for Ireland. Less is known of Hamilton Smythe. He was Tory and Protestant.Footnote ¹² The Dublin lawyers set out the terms of the inquiry on day one. They made a clear statement of the manner in which the court should provide the pluralistic and conflict resolution elements of civil society: ‘All sides then we shall hear; it is an open Court for the purpose; we shall hear all classes who may appear before us furnishing to us, or to our Secretary, the names of such witnesses as they wish to be called … this is a public Court of Inquiry, where everything will be fairly and openly conducted … this will have a quieting effect on the state of things which is at present existing.’Footnote ¹³ The task of the court was to establish ‘facts’ by hearing evidence and cross-examination. The various ‘parties’ aimed to gain credit and to preserve or create reputations before the publics of Westminster and Dublin, as well as before the local publics of Belfast itself. The implicit ‘rules’ for gaining such approval emerged with considerable clarity and can be identified in quite formal terms: not to engage in violent activity except in self- defence; never to be first to initiate violence; not to intimidate or provoke others; ‘others’ were to be tolerated and respected; not to engage in secret or closed activities; always to obey and respect the law. The two lawyers emphasised that their task was to find out what happened, not to initiate prosecutions nor to conduct an extensive inquiry into the history of politics and social relationships in Belfast and its hinterland. Hamilton Smythe and David Lynch worked hard to assert clear rules of evidence and exclude hearsay and opinion. They admitted to allowing considerable latitude to witnesses because they recognised that the inquiry process had a conciliatory purpose. If this was to be effective, all sides must feel they had had a fair hearing.Footnote ¹⁴

The battle to establish facts and demonstrate that the other side had broken the ‘rules’ was as fierce as the stone throwing, beatings and gunfire of the streets. The importance given by all protagonists to establishing public facts of this kind was a recognition of the importance attributed to the public sphere of opinion in the attenuated politics of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland and its multiple publics.

Lynch and Smythe were immediately faced with a squad of lawyers whose skills and reputations had been honed in the bare-knuckle politics of Belfast. They were men familiar with the court as a political arena. They had worked in the registration courts, operated in parliamentary inquiries into corrupt election practices, and taken part in the prosecutions that followed Orange and Ribbon clashes in the Belfast hinterland. Dolly's Brae was the most lethal of many. They had dragged the Municipal Corporation into the chancery court of Dublin, bringing effective municipal politics to a halt for several years. For these men, the courtroom was the extension of political conflict. John Rea ‘appeared on the part of the Roman Catholic inhabitants of the district which had suffered most during the riots in July’.Footnote ¹⁵ Rea, a liberal Presbyterian who identified with the Young Ireland movement in Belfast, was already well known for his combative interventions into Belfast politics and his part in investigations into the deaths at Dolly's Brae.Footnote ¹⁶ Rea tried to tell the commissioners how to run the inquiry and was firmly put in his place by Lynch. There were to be no ‘statements’, no cross-examining of witnesses as to their character, no adjournments, and ‘the questions asked should bear directly on the subject of the Inquiry’. Alexander O'Rorke appeared for William Watson, ‘one of the memorialists’. Watson was a leading member of the Catholic middle class and an important owner of residential property in the area affected by the July riots. O'Rorke also had in mind the interests of the sparse Catholic middle class.Footnote ¹⁷ Mr M'Lean stated he appeared ‘for other parties’, but had only been given his instructions that morning.Footnote ¹⁸ His questions suggested he represented a general Protestant Conservative corporation interest. Over the previous fifty years the once influential liberal Presbyterian element of Belfast society had been diminished and marginalised.Footnote ¹⁹ The growing Catholic middle class was weak, few in numbers and excluded from any elements of power, but increasingly self-aware. For both these groups, courts of all kinds had become a major means of assertion.

The early days of evidence involved officers of the Irish and of the local state. The central figure was William Tracy, resident magistrate, appointed by the Irish administration in Dublin with the legal responsibility for directing and authorising the actions of police, constabulary and military. He came from a minor Church of Ireland family based around Armagh where he was married. His sons went to the Royal School at Armagh and then to Trinity College in Dublin. One of them entered the East India service after success in the new competitive examination system. William Tracy joined the constabulary in its early days and was part of the formation of the national force in 1836. In 1838 he was appointed as resident magistrate near Limerick, stationed in Castleconnell. He was active in Famine relief notably in co-operation with the local Quaker congregation. He was also an active Freemason in both Limerick and Belfast. He was posted as resident magistrate to Antrim in 1849 and to Belfast in 1852. By 1857, he was experienced in riot control. He was injured in street disorders in York Street in 1852 when dispersing an attack on a Catholic Teetotal Society outing. He joined the Antrim Militia and supported a number of local charities, including the Belfast Sailors’ Home, the Belfast School of Arts, the Belfast Anacreontic [Music] Society and the Freemasons.Footnote ²⁰ By the time he came to give evidence in 1857 he was an active and well-known citizen.

The second day, Tuesday 15 September, and part of the following day were devoted to William Tracy. Commissioners began by asking about his perception and experience of the July riots. Tracy was a tough character, a magistrate, a policeman, aware of the rituals of the law, and familiar with both street and courtroom. He had been driven to the limits of exhaustion by the events of July, getting little sleep for several nights. He had spent August on sick leave in Dublin and returned to Belfast on 8 September.Footnote ²¹ The commissioners led him through a day-by-day account of the riots. This was followed by cross-examination from the lawyers for the Catholic and liberal interest. They had a clear agenda. They wanted to discredit the Belfast municipal police force and, by implication, the Belfast Corporation. They wanted to implicate the Orange Order in all aspects of the violence and mismanagement of Belfast. They wanted to demonstrate that Catholics were victims of Protestant violence and exclusion. Tracy responded with discipline and patience. He refused to confirm anything that was not directly within his immediate experience. Rea and O'Rorke placed a variety of crucial assertions into the public domain by skilled leading questions. O'Rorke wanted the riots identified with a pattern of behaviour going back to the killings at Dolly's Brae. He wanted Tracy to support his claims and Tracy was very careful to say he knew nothing about this. Another target was the Belfast municipal police and, whilst Tracy was happy to agree that he thought the constabulary system was superior, he asserted ignorance of the details of municipal policing.Footnote ²²

Tuesday was a major success for the Catholic ‘parties’. They demonstrated that the municipal police were probably bigoted and sectarian, and certainly ineffective.Footnote ²³ The Orange Order was shown to be provocative, violent, secretive and acting on the edge of legality. This was helped by the fact that ‘Orange’ was an accepted epithet for any aspect of Protestant culture which the witness disliked and was not applied solely to members of the order. Amongst the ‘facts’ established were the peace-keeping efforts of William Watson, responding to a request from Tracy to urge the crowds from the Pound District to disperse.Footnote ²⁴ Tracy was the perfect public servant who refused to provide judgment and political opinion. He was anxious to show that he had the cooperation of everyone, especially the local magistrates and police chiefs. This disciplined and measured performance concealed his crucial relationship with Dublin Castle.

Central to William Tracy's relationship with Dublin was Thomas Larcom, under-secretary of state for Ireland since 1853. Amongst the anxieties of the summer, Larcom was a crucial source of advice, guidance and support. Larcom saw himself as central to the task of building a stable, fair and effective system of government for a post-Union, post-Catholic emancipation and post-Famine Ireland. As he reflected on the events of the summer he directed two thoughtful memoranda to his political masters. In theory, Irish government was directed by the lord lieutenant in Dublin Castle and the chief secretary in the cabinet in Westminster. The quality of those involved varied and it was telling that Larcom directed his first memorandum to Lord Carlisle, lord lieutenant, not to Horsman, then the rather erratic chief secretary. Under the brief Conservative regime of 1858–9, the chief secretary, the diligent and evangelical Lord Naas, brought up in County Meath, was the target of his reflections, and not the earl of Eglinton, a big spender known for his interest in horse racing and a ‘medieval’ tournament held in 1839.Footnote ²⁵

The memoranda were occasioned by an attack on the Irish administration and an attempt to abolish the position of lord lieutenant and move the centre of authority to London. This was mounted by radicals, including J. A. Roebuck and Sharman Crawford. In response, Larcom laid out his analysis of Irish government and society, and the principles on which he worked during the uneasy years of the 1850s. He warned that the English system which left responsibility for law, order and justice with the counties and the boroughs was totally unsuited to Ireland. There were two reasons for this. The first was the mistrust of the gentry by ‘the poor’. This was important as the bulk of the justices of the peace were recruited from gentry and urban elites. The second reason was what he called ‘party’ tensions, in other words a sectarianism that was by no means restricted to Belfast. Catholic emancipation, he noted, had effectively destroyed ‘local machinery’. This created a need for the centralisation of Irish government in matters of education, poor relief and, above all, policing. Centralisation, he told Carlisle, was necessary because, ‘the people everywhere mistrusted each other but all were satisfied with whatever the Government decided’.Footnote ²⁶

The system of stipendiary or resident magistrates was an essential part of a centralisation designed to counter disruptive ‘party’ tension. Larcom noted that:

The second element of his argument was the need for direct links between ‘civil government and the army’. A general election in Ireland, he wrote, required 10,000 military, an equal number of constabulary and sixty-nine stipendiary magistrates, ‘the Magistrates of the Government commanding usually more confidence than the local magistrates, who are necessarily connected with one party of another’. A copy of this was sent to Palmerston by Lord Carlisle and to Lord Naas when he arrived in March 1858.Footnote ²⁸ Naas received a number of communications, repeating earlier arguments but extending Larcom's analysis in ways influenced by events in Belfast.

Larcom's Ireland was not like England. Inequality and mistrust between gentry and people, as well as tension and conflict between ‘parties’, all required prompt and firm action from a centralised administration and detailed knowledge of the localities. Military, constabulary and stipendiary magistrates were essential to gaining tranquility and the trust of the people. A modest knowledge of Irish history might see this as excessively optimistic but Larcom saw his system of government as a machine which at times was out of gear. When it came to dealing with Belfast an important cog in the machine was William Tracy, resident magistrate. He was to supply ‘minute and intimate knowledge in a Country where all is transition and change, where class is ranged against class, interest against interest and where the most difficult thing in the world to get at is Truth’.Footnote ³⁰

Tracy related to Larcom at two levels. The official level was recorded in the papers of the Chief Secretary's Office, preserved in Dublin Castle. During the threats and disorder of July and September, Tracy wrote detailed reports. They arrived next morning and were stamped and entered in the register. During the worst disorders he sent an evening telegraph. These reports were handed to Lynch and Smythe when they left Dublin for Belfast and formed the basis of Lynch's early questioning at the inquiry as well as much of the narrative of the Report.Footnote ³¹ Here Dublin Castle learnt about Drew's sermon, shots fired and the initial success of the local police directed by Tracy, the mayor and Doctor Magee, another magistrate, in keeping the peace. An Orange arch was removed and a young Catholic arrested after riding around waving an orange lily.Footnote ³² The reports were a careful record of ‘outrages’ and ‘riotous proceedings’ as well as Tracy's own activities. His late nights on the streets were followed by mornings in the police court. The rioters exploited ‘the back streets – full of lanes and courts’. There was an absence of light, ‘the lamps having been put out’. He called the military at eleven o'clock. By Thursday the local magistrates were ill and exhausted, and the police, three of whom had been badly injured, were refusing to enter the Catholic Pound.Footnote ³³ Tracy now called out the troops. He was careful to make sure that local magistrates who had helped him received the lord lieutenant's thanks. Tracy read the Riot Act before ‘I ordered the Military and Police to clear the streets’.Footnote ³⁴ Part of the purpose of the reports was to record that magistrates, police and military were acting within the law.

As resident magistrate, Tracy had a double subordination, to Dublin and to the magistrates in Belfast headed by the mayor. He worked hard at both relationships. On 20 July, he reported:

Tracy's tactics were consistent. The local police were first deployed. If they failed then the local unit of the Irish Constabulary was brought in. If that failed the military was used, both dragoons and infantry. The Riot Act was read before each intervention, thus keeping them within the law. Tracy was criticised by Bishop Cornelius Denvir for not doing more to protect Catholic homes and stop the Orange marches and party tunes along the Lisburn Road.Footnote ³⁶ Robert Knox, the Church of Ireland bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore, wrote of the ‘mistaken leniency’ of magistrates.Footnote ³⁷ Tracy was proud of the fact that he made minimal use of the military and avoided the need to open fire on the rioters. He had a distinctive and gendered expression of values. He told Larcom of ‘the impossibility of dealing with the rioters without killing women and children … we never got near the ruffians except when they were surrounded by women and young persons, the apprehension of slaying the latter kept us from the last resort although I have some of the best marksmen on the garrison selected for special service against them’.Footnote ³⁸ In his daily reports to Dublin Castle, Tracy was full of praise for the magistrates and the officers of both military and constabulary.

There was a second level to Tracy's relationship with Larcom. In a series of letters usually marked ‘confidential’ he wrote to the under-secretary in a very different tone, in which he was not afraid to pass judgment or express his anxieties. These were amongst the papers which Larcom took away with him when he left office. Tracy praised Major Hood of Depôt Battalion and Captain Sagar, 8^th Hussars, but their commander Colonel Townshed ‘is a nervous old man, is peculiarly crotchety and talks an infinity of nonsense … receive his reports with great caution’. His letter of 20 July, written as an uneasy calm descended on Belfast, showed the stress of being resident magistrate as well as frustration regarding the criticism he was receiving. He ‘could not have been more active’. Since 11 July he had returned ‘from the streets’ not much before 3 a.m. each morning, and ‘then I have to attend the police court each morning at half after ten … I rarely left the court before six o'clock in the evening and was again in the streets before eight o'clock’.Footnote ³⁹ Tracy felt his experience and local knowledge were essential to keeping a fragile order on the streets. Belfast was suspicious of outsiders. One military commander refused to recognise directions from local magistrates. Larcom intervened at this point and sent Charles Hunt as acting R.M. while Tracy went on sick leave to Dublin. Hunt was a Tipperary man, recently appointed to County Antrim and stationed in Ballymena.Footnote ⁴⁰ This supportive relationship with Larcom continued into October during the preaching riots and the inquiry. In September Tracy warned: ‘In addition to the previous and manifold difficulties of this wicked place, we have now to contend with the angry passion of the Presbyterian body, who have been prepared for strife by Dr Cooke's most injudicious speech’.Footnote ⁴¹ In October he asked for advice. The mayor, as chief magistrate, was refusing to act against the Custom House rioters despite the obvious and illegal obstruction of the highway; ‘if the Mayor will not take measures to carry out the municipal regulation of his own town, should I an officer of the government do so … I beg to ask your advice confidentially’.Footnote ⁴² Larcom advised, ‘as long as there is no disturbance and your attention is not called to any such matter, you need not interfere’.Footnote ⁴³

In early August, the lord lieutenant received the memorial asking for a public inquiry into the riots and their causes. It was led by William Watson, whose housing property had been badly damaged in the riots. Tracy felt the inquiry was directed at himself and saw it as part of the hostilities. He told Larcom it would be ‘injurious if complied with as an investigation now would open up old wounds which are nearly healed’. It would be ‘an addition to the existing animosities both sectarian and political’. The cause of the riots was ‘mutual ill-will amongst low Protestants and Roman Catholics which no investigation can make more clearly understood … I have heard several sensible people – some of them magistrates – speak on the subject and all of them express their opinion that nothing but evil could arise from the inquiry sought’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Larcom was supportive of this view and wanted more constables and military at his disposal. The chief secretary and lord lieutenant, aware that the system of governance in Ireland was under attack from English radical politicians, had an audience in Westminster and ordered the inquiry.Footnote ⁴⁵

Evident from the start was the skill with which the Catholic/Liberal lawyers used the inquiry. They had clear aims to discredit the local municipal police force, and place blame on the Orange Order. Catholics were to be presented as blameless victims of Protestant violence and exclusions. Tracy maintained his public servant discipline and refused to go beyond his immediate experience despite the efforts of Rea and O'Rorke to draw him into value judgments. The second day of his evidence Tracy gave an account of the wrecking of William Watson's properties. It was an account which demonstrated the malevolence of the ‘Orange’ party, the inability and unwillingness of the municipal police to offer protection and offered a reminder of Watson's contribution to calming Catholic crowds.Footnote ⁴⁶

By Wednesday, the Protestant conservative interest woke up to what was happening. Frederick R. Falkiner arrived at the hearing: ‘I have received instructions to appear here on behalf of several parties on whose fair fame imputations had been cast yesterday’. Falkiner was an occasional leader writer for the Belfast News-Letter, firmly identified with the Protestant conservative corporation interest.Footnote ⁴⁷ He was a more effective cross-examiner than M'Lean and by the end of Wednesday had reversed some of the damage suffered by the Protestant/corporation interest. He established that the first house wrecking was that of a Protestant in the Catholic Pound and brought the existence of the Catholic Gun Club, formed in August, into the ‘facts’ of the inquiry.Footnote ⁴⁸ It was not until day six of the inquiry that a Mr Purcell arrived with specific instructions to represent the interests of the Orange Order itself. He had a clear idea of the very serious ‘game’ being played out in the courtroom.

Lynch told him, ‘When we hear the stories told on each side, we shall then have a body of evidence … it is distinctly evidence; and when tested by cross-examination the truth may be arrived at’. Lynch assured him that the inquiry was not about ‘the punishment of offenders’ but Purcell was aware of the multiple publics of Ireland and Britain and that the potential for legislation depended upon the outcome.Footnote ⁴⁹

Although the Catholic middle classes of Belfast were structurally weak, they used the inquiry in a purposeful manner suggesting sophisticated organisation. The Catholic political organisation both of Repealers and of Young Ireland sympathisers may have lost momentum, but there remained a political experience and self-assurance which was put to good use in 1857.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Catholic/Liberal lawyers were purposeful and, especially O'Rorke, showed considerable skills in using the inquiry. They were aware that the audience comprised not only two Dublin lawyers but a variety of public opinions. In contrast, the Protestant lawyers displayed remarkable clumsiness and naiveté. They turned up late and even when they had turned up showed little sense of political purpose, often being reduced to the classic strategy of cross-examination with endless questioning and requests to repeat details, hoping to reveal inconsistencies and discredit witnesses. Perhaps the Orange Order and its allies assumed they were protected by their links with elements of the landed ascendancy and their claims of conditional loyalty. The earl of Enniskillen made reference to assistance given in periods of rebellion over the past sixty years: ‘There was a rebellion in the country, and they were obliged to make use of us. They adopted the same course that they always adopted before when there was a rebellion. They called on all loyal men to come forward.’Footnote ⁵¹ Annual reports and accounts were deposited with the commissioners. This accorded well with the nineteenth-century culture of civil society which attributed legitimacy and public worth to the rituals of well-conducted open public meetings with chairman, debate and votes, together with the publication of reports and accounts.Footnote ⁵² These attempts to show that they were respectable members of civil society showed the same naiveté regarding the nature of the inquiry they faced. The commissioners read the reports, and the printed records of members expelled for marrying ‘a papist’. They were not impressed.Footnote ⁵³ Organised Protestant society was effective in registration courts, municipal elections and the manipulation of parliamentary elections but much less so when faced with the subtleties of a public court of inquiry.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, involved the evidence of senior police and constabulary. The commissioners regarded these men as authoritative sources for what actually happened during the disorders. The lawyers engaged in scoring points for their various ‘parties’. O'Rorke and Rea paid attention to the sectarian recruiting practice of the municipal police, the police tolerance of Orange party processions and the acceptance of the municipal police in Protestant areas. Harris Bindon, Sub-Inspector of Constabulary stationed around Belfast, was a source of evidence on Orange processions, drumming and attacks on the houses owned by the Catholic, William Watson. The Protestant side continued their recovery, showing more evidence of early attacks coming from the Catholic Pound, of meetings of the Gun Club and placards inciting Catholics to attack the street preachers in August and September. The last two they linked to the Catholic radical newspaper, The Ulsterman. Friday finished strongly for the Protestant side. Revd William M'Ilwaine, minister of St George's church gave evidence. Many Catholics hated him for his ‘controversial’ sermons, but he presented himself to the inquiry as the responsible face of evangelical Protestantism. He agreed that he had taken part in open-air preaching, but had withdrawn when asked to do so by the magistrates. This was all part of the work of the Belfast Parochial Mission. Reports and documents were available. They were ‘enlightening and benefiting the humbler classes of society’. Nothing controversial was said in the open-air sermons. There was no obstruction of public thoroughfares. He placed the blame for disturbances on the newspapers, especially The Ulsterman. He agreed with O'Rorke that he had ‘a special regard for Catholics’, although Lynch got him to admit that ‘his love of Catholics’ involved converting them to an evangelical faith.Footnote ⁵⁴ It was all very civilised. This was a committed evangelical, fully engaged in the rationality of civil society. He was glad to clear up the matter of that Orange meeting in Antrim in 1849: he was a ‘spectator’. In relation to his sermons to Orangemen, they always went to church when the Twelfth was on a Sunday, but without emblems, banners or processions. The day finished with the evidence of Hugh Heaney, one of the few Catholics on the municipal force. He declared that he had never been ill-treated by others in the force.Footnote ⁵⁵

By Friday night, in the face of the charm offensive from M'Ilwaine and the soothing words of the equitable Hugh Heaney, the Catholic/Liberal case was losing the considerable momentum that had been gained at the start of the week. The Catholic/Liberal side responded by bringing a series of witnesses with evidence and experience of attacks on Catholics. Two Catholic curates demonstrated the petty nastiness of Orange street culture with an account of the harassment of a funeral. Boys with orange lilies blocked the roadway while another waving an orange handkerchief, hallooed and shouted ‘Here's in honour of King William’.Footnote ⁵⁶ William Martin was a Tipperary man and regarded all this with a mixture of interest, alarm and insulted feelings. His colleague William Blaney from Ulster was less impressed and awarded the boys ‘a fool's pardon’. Hugh Graham, a carter on the quays, was less fortunate and left bleeding on the ground after being attacked by men demanding that he cursed the pope. Widow Donohue, a milk seller, and her daughter gave an account of the wrecking of her cabin by a Protestant mob. Ellen Crawford and Hopewell Kelly, both Catholics, told of being driven from their homes in Protestant streets.Footnote ⁵⁷ Perhaps most effective was the evidence of Jonathan Jones from Liverpool, a tenant of Mr Watson, a linesman for the telegraph company who had been asked to give evidence by Watson and talked of the house wrecking in Quadrant Street and the hostility of the police to Catholic women: ‘I heard some parties of the local police use the expressions “Go home you bitches; go home you bloody whores”’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Purcell and Falkiner could do little more than try and pick holes in the detail of this evidence and discredit the witnesses. Jones was accused of being an atheist and a Chartist. In a rare tactical error from the Catholic/Liberal side, James Carolan was brought in to extend evidence of police inaction when an illegal Orange arch was erected in Stanley Street. Carolan was a compositor at The Ulsterman. His presence allowed attention to be directed to the posters and editorials coming from The Ulsterman which were claimed to incite violence by Catholics.Footnote ⁵⁹

William Watson's network, especially his tenants, was a vital source of witnesses. A key group were the Catholic girls who worked in Grimshaw's Tea Lane Mill. They had to run the gauntlet of Protestant violence each morning and evening as they crossed the Saltwater Bridge to work. A subtext of this was the inability and unwillingness of the police to protect them. Purcell and M'Lean suggested that the girls were just as aggressive as their Protestant attackers, and that they had been coached and bribed in their evidence. At times the tension in the courtroom was evident. The mill girls proved more than able to look after themselves: ‘Q. 5417. Is that a new shawl? – What would you give to know? You are none the wiser. I did not steal it.’ The mill girls showed themselves expert in defending class and gender as well as sectarian boundaries. M'Lean's attempt to discredit the evidence of Margaret Jane M'Dowell was met with skilled and determined ‘cheek’.

The girls were a formidable element in sectarian confrontation. For a while they had defied Protestant violence by going to work in a gang of fifty or so. At night twenty girls danced along the Catholic end of Durham Street and sang: ‘Hurrah for Mullan's corner/ And to hell with Sandy Row.’Footnote ⁶¹

If the conservative evangelical Protestant leadership had hoped to portray themselves as reasonable people doing their best in difficult circumstances, their efforts were destroyed on the second Friday of the inquiry by the appearance of Revd Hugh Hanna, minister of Berry Street Presbyterian church, whose outdoor sermons had provoked the September riots. Hanna came across as arrogant, aggressive and unrepentant, with little interest in the magistrates’ law and order agenda: ‘Q. 7904. And would you consider it your duty to preach when you believed riot would ensue? – I would, sir. Our most valuable rights have been obtained by conflict; and if we cannot maintain them without that, we must submit to necessity.’Footnote ⁶² He had no regrets about ignoring the magistrates and brought the full weight of Presbyterian history to his justification: ‘The Presbyterian Church, in all ages of her history, has regarded the interference of the civil magistrates, in religious worship and discipline, with extreme jealousy and aversion. It was that interference that precipitated evils on Scotland in time of the Covenanters.’Footnote ⁶³ He went on, ‘I am right in my opinion. I usually am. … I believe it to be the duty of a Christian minister to render obedience to all lawful injunctions of the authorities; but where they are unlawful to resist them. … I am acting under the sanction of my own judgment, and the high authority of the Divine Word’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Rea and O'Rorke, who had been busy trying to show the two Dublin lawyers that the Protestant leadership of Belfast was antagonistic and aggressive, can hardly have believed their good fortune.

The remaining days of evidence added little new. The earl of Enniskillen presented the respectable face of the Orange Order. There was an ill-organised attempt to show Protestants as victims of street beatings. Robert M'Connell, a shoemaker and native of Glasgow, was somewhat bewildered by what he had witnessed but turned up at the inquiry because ‘I heard the Protestants were giving evidence. A man called and told me to attend at Mr M'Lean's office’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Conservative/Protestant side lacked O'Rorke's brilliant presentational skills and the formidable network of O'Rorke and Watson which provided an endless supply of witnesses who had been on the receiving end of Protestant violence. The remaining days provided evidence of the bad temper of municipal council meetings and the tensions surrounding the parliamentary election earlier in the year.Footnote ⁶⁶

The last day of the inquiry provided one of the finest performances from the Catholic/Liberal side. The formidable Bernard Hughes, O'Connellite, master baker, major employer, supplier of bread to a large portion of Belfast, and one of the few Catholics ever to gain election to mid-century Belfast Corporation, provided a sharp insight into the working of the police committee and the experience of being an outsider on the corporation. He finished with the claim that ‘this town is governed by Protestants, but the bone and sinew of the town is Roman Catholic … it is a Roman Catholic town … the majority of the working classes are Roman Catholic’.Footnote ⁶⁷ His cheerful appropriation of the Protestant work ethic to his own political purposes evoked predictable fury which, no doubt, gave Hughes considerable satisfaction.Footnote ⁶⁸ Lynch and Smythe had had enough and retired to Dublin to write their report.Footnote ⁶⁹

II

The inquiry was one aspect of the political contests of 1857 as much as an account of what happened. In an immediate sense the Catholic/Liberal side ‘won’ the contest in the Belfast courtroom. The report followed the Catholic/Liberal agenda and reflected the philosophy of government expressed by Larcom and Tracy. The originating cause of the riots was the increasing ‘pomp’ of the ‘12^th of July’ celebrations, which were ‘regarded as a studied insult by the Roman Catholics’. The Orange Order was identified as an organisation which ‘tends directly to interfere with the peace of this part of the Kingdom’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The second target for blame was the changing nature of street preaching in matters of place as much as content. Hanna chose ‘the habitual walk of all the working classes on Sunday’. His preaching and language was ‘a public and marked insult to the Roman Catholic people; and they in passing would be forced to endure a proclamation of their inferiority’. The report dismissed arguments from rights. There was no ‘abstract right to insult your neighbour’.Footnote ⁷¹ Because the preaching was now in a public place, ‘its effect was to shift the scene of rioting from its peculiar districts, and to involve in riot and outrage the best parts of the town which before had been peaceable and orderly’.Footnote ⁷² The report recommended the reform of local policing and the provision of a stronger constabulary force. In July ‘this force was plainly insufficient for the protection of life and property’.Footnote ⁷³ They recommended that whilst the ‘12^th of July’ festival was celebrated ‘the arm of the Executive Government in Belfast shall be strengthened, and a force kept up sufficient at once to put down outrage on both sides’, in other words the centralisation of authority backed by main force after the manner of Larcom's memoranda.Footnote ⁷⁴

There were limited and immediate gains for the Catholic/Liberal side. The major gain was a recognition of what was happening in Belfast by significant sections of English and Westminster opinion. The Times agreed that the blame was clearly attributed to the link between the Orange anniversary on 12 July and ‘open air sermons’. The ‘character’ of public preaching was ‘totally altered; it became controversial and aggressive’. This produced an explosion ‘like a spark falling on powder’.Footnote ⁷⁵ This mattered for, as Hugh Hanna himself protested, The Times was ‘at least half the Government of England’.Footnote ⁷⁶The Ulsterman was delighted by this and by the directive that no members of the Orange Order were to be made J.P.s.Footnote ⁷⁷ Efforts were made to improve the ability of constabulary and military to respond to disorder but little was done about the police or the chaotic and sectarian nature of municipal politics, in part because of the unstable nature of government in Westminster. In the aftermath of the Report, Larcom recommended an inquiry into the financial mismanagement of the borough which had paralysed effective municipal government and reflected many of the divisions evident in the 1858 inquiry.Footnote ⁷⁸

In the long run, the most enduring impact was on the historiography of the city in which sectarian violence and bigotry was either dominant or optimistically marginalised. Recent literature has worked to correct this lack of balance.Footnote ⁷⁹

The impact of the Report and its nature as an account of Belfast in 1857 was limited in several ways. Lynch and Smythe presented their court as a place of reconciliation in which judicial rationality negotiated difference over fact and policy. It was to be an area of openness enshrined by the state and informing debate in the public sphere, analogous to much recent civil society theory. Immediate difficulty was caused by matters concealed from the court and the Report-reading politicians and public.

Newspaper reports indicated that the calm authority of the Report did not always reflect the daily experience of the court. Lynch and Smythe experienced problems keeping order. Adam Hill, superintendent of police, one-time sub-treasurer to the corporation and member of a local Orange lodge, was cross-examined by John Rea. The News-Letter, anxious to discredit the inquiry and dismiss charges of prejudice and inefficiency against the corporation and local police, recorded a disorderly squabble between the lawyers as M'Lean interrupted:

The squabble continued in a manner never recorded in the official Report. The same applied to the opening exchanges between Lynch and Rea which were less decisive in the News-Letter than in the Report.Footnote ⁸⁰

More serious for an understanding of what was happening was the way in which many aspects of Catholic organisation were concealed. Prominence was given to William Watson's calming influence as community leader,Footnote ⁸¹ but there was little curiosity over the ability to gather crowds from the Pound or the manner in which funds were rapidly collected to pay the fines of any Catholic rioter taken to court.Footnote ⁸² This ability was characteristic of an organisation often referred to as Ribbonmen. Watson and others denied the existence of Ribbonmen in Belfast after arrests had been made in the early 1850s.Footnote ⁸³ In late 1858, Tracy reported that, acting on the information of one Henry D'Alton, a Spaniard, and accompanied by sixty constables with fixed bayonets, he raided the premises of Mrs Unity M'Kay on the corner of Great Edward Street in the Cromac district. He found fifteen men meeting in an upstairs room. The ‘secretary’ of the meeting and the initial informant both disappeared and the authorities had to rely on two ‘approvers’ or informers to build their case that this was indeed a meeting of an illegal Ribbon Society. Like the historian, the authorities found it hard to work out what was happening. They found no papers in the room. Tracy was sure it was part of a Ribbon organisation, in other words, lodge based, networked across Ireland and beyond, bound together by oath, passwords and secret signs, while plotting violence and subversion against British authority in Ireland. The evidence showed a group of mainly young men enjoying a convivial evening, bottles of whiskey on the table. They purchased some passwords and probably exchanged subversive views. They included four lawyer's clerks, four labourers, a waterman, a huxter, a baker, a quay porter, and a factory worker. The crown claimed that there were twenty lodges and 600 members of Ribbon organisations in Belfast, and built their case on the desire of so many to run away and the fact that the passwords reported in Belfast turned up in other parts of the country.Footnote ⁸⁴ Jury trials twice failed to reach a verdict. The Belfast News-Letter, the local Protestant conservative newspaper, claimed this was because each jury included one Catholic who clearly refused to accept the uncorroborated evidence of an informer. The difficulties of turning arrests into convictions was common to the relationships of authority and Ribbonism.Footnote ⁸⁵ Catholic solidarity was active in support of the arrested. At the trial, the gallery had to be cleared of disorderly supporters. Subscriptions were collected to enable those who had escaped arrest to leave the country. One ‘approver’, John Kelly, died in August 1859, leaving the crown to rely on Hugh Carolan. He was kept under guard – in part to prevent contamination of his evidence. His family were moved to lodgings near a police station. In August 1859, Tracy reported ‘his house was beset by a mob and he and his family menaced last week in Belfast. Therefore I have no doubt the man's life would not be safe were he to remain in the country’. Eventually a passage to Australia was arranged at government expense, although at the last minute his wife and family refused to go with him.Footnote ⁸⁶ Care needs to be taken with this evidence. For many, Ribbonmen was a generic term of fear and disapproval but there was evidence of well-organised networks, often linked to influential community organisation.Footnote ⁸⁷ The 1840s had generated an experience of organisation provided by the Repeal Association, the Young Ireland-related Drennan Confederate Club and a Catholic Teetotal Society. The latter was believed by many Protestants to be a front for the Ribbonmen. All were inspired in different ways by mutuality, community defence, opposition to British rule through repeal of the Union and thoughts of a mass rising.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Catholic population of the Pound and Cromac were by no means the simple victims of Orange violence portrayed in the evidence.

The disorganisation and mistrust between the various agencies of law and order were also concealed from the commission. In Belfast three agencies were involved in keeping order: the military, the Irish Constabulary and the local police force. A small Harbour Police force may have been responsible for allowing the ‘ships carpenters’ to attack the crowds gathered to oppose the street preaching.Footnote ⁸⁹ Confusion was increased by the existence of two categories of magistrates, the mayor and local magistrates on the one hand, responsible to the corporation, and the resident magistrate, responsible to Dublin Castle. At best these relationships were ones of uncertainty. In March 1857, at the time of parliamentary elections, Larcom instructed the military commanders to look to the resident magistrate or use their own discretion.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the early summer of 1858, relations reached breakdown. On 13 April, two sub-constables were brought before the magistrates’ court. They had attacked several of the local police who were patrolling the Ormeau Road. The police suffered minor bayonet wounds and fought back with their batons, inflicting head injuries and a broken arm on the drunken constables.Footnote ⁹¹ Tracy reported to Larcom with his usual mixture of patience and despair, ‘a disgraceful affray’. This was more than a drunken brawl. Tracy had long been aware of ‘a want of cordial feeling, and the existence of petty jealousies between the two establishments’. This had increased since the inquiry and gained an increasing sectarian content; ‘the local police constantly speak of the other force as “the Papist Constabulary”’. Significantly, John Rea was the lawyer chosen to defend the constables. Tracy felt he could not use police and constables for any ‘common purpose’ given the ‘general Knowledge of their friends, amongst the lower orders’. He urged ‘legislative measure for the absorption of the Police into the Constabulary and having one force and one system for both Town and County’.Footnote ⁹² It was to be 1865 before this took place.Footnote ⁹³

The sectarian violence of nineteenth-century Belfast had a powerful capacity to perpetuate itself. There were long standing causes, memories of conquest, subordinations and land appropriation, as well as continued contests for space and employment. The inquiry recognised more immediate ways in which memories of recent violence and antagonism and rituals of confrontation produced conditions for the next outbreak of violence. The commissioners acknowledged that each episode of violence extended ‘the number of parties between whom individual hatreds exist’.Footnote ⁹⁴ A comparison of the memoranda which Larcom wrote in 1857 for Lord Carlisle, and in 1858 for Naas, showed a change in policy. The peace of the country depended on the lord lieutenant, the stipendiary magistrates and the constabulary but in 1858 the emphasis was on the fact that ‘a state of things like that at Belfast last summer calls for prompt and immediate action’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The same month Lieutenant Colonel James Colborne told his commander in Belfast that requests for military aid ‘were by no means … premature’ but contributed to ‘the tranquility of the town’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Embedded in the Report was evidence of elements of a market economy running counter to the sectarian economy. When William Watson gave evidence, he outlined his policy of encouraging both Catholic and Protestant tenants for his new houses; a basis for cooperation as well as a means of extending the demand side for his property.Footnote ⁹⁷ In Sandy Row, Protestants tried to defend their Catholic lodgers and Grimshaw and others made equally ineffective efforts to protect their mill girls from mob attack. The expulsions found Catholics in Sandy Row and Protestants in the Pound.Footnote ⁹⁸ Any ability of such a market economy to counter sectarianism was rapidly destroyed once ‘the crowds’ were allowed to gather. With this in mind there was a subtle change in policy direction from Tracy and Larcom when trouble again erupted in 1858. In 1857, Tracy had considerable pride in the gentle build up of the use of force against the street riots. By 1858, he and Larcom were looking for an immediate and pre-emptive response.Footnote ⁹⁹

The limited impact of the commission was only one aspect of the fragile authority of Dublin Castle. Seen from the Chief Secretary's Office, Belfast was only one call upon limited resources. The letter books in Dublin Castle were full of requests for troops and constabulary to supervise the elections, as well as disturbances in fairs and markets.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ July 1856 saw the mutiny of the North Tipperary Militia, mainly caused by lack of suitable clothing. It required a unit of the regular army to calm matters.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Troops were required to guard the judges’ lodgings in Limerick and the mayor of Bandon made regular requests for help around 12 July.Footnote ¹⁰² The election of April 1857 required seven regiments of cavalry, five of infantry and several depôt battalions.Footnote ¹⁰³ More serious were the potato riots in Galway. Potatoes were a sensitive subject in the western ports. 651 tons had been shipped out before April 1857. A detachment of the 59^th Foot was required to escort more to the railway station and H.M.S. Advice arrived in aid of the civil power.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The following year, troops were sent to deal with a ‘disturbance arising out of the use of reaping machines’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In the summer of 1857, the Evening Post, a Dublin paper, was comparing Tipperary with Belfast.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

At the start of July 1857, the Belfast newspapers began to report disturbing news from India which would place even more serious limitations on resources. The mutiny, or rebellion as some preferred to call it,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ added an important dimension to the instability of cultural and social relationships in Ireland. In Dublin, Larcom was used to receiving copies of seditious ballads and broadsheets from magistrates in all parts of Ireland. He was normally fairly relaxed about what he saw, but when it came to ‘The Ballad of the Bowld Sepoys’ he ordered the magistrates to destroy any copies they could find. The news from India fed a long-standing belief that Ireland could be freed by a violent uprising inspired and assisted from across the sea.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Graffiti and posters to this effect appeared in many parts of Ireland, notably in the south-west; ‘Hurrah for Ireland ! – THREE CHEERS FOR THE SEPOYS!!’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In Belfast, the debate over the mutiny intensified divisions. Revd William M'Ilwaine and his fellow evangelicals blamed the failure to Christianise ‘the natives’ and planned to send 100,000 copies of the New Testament. They were sure that misfortunes suffered in India were punishments for ‘national sins’ including ‘the public desecration of the Lord's Day by the Post Office’.Footnote ¹¹⁰The Ulsterman blamed ‘the crimes of British rulers in India … [like] the fierce and sanguinary policy which desolated Ireland for so many centuries’.Footnote ¹¹¹ In August, Revd Dr Drew inspired the Christ Church Protestant Association with a fine example of ‘controversial preaching’ which took a very different lesson from Irish history; ‘in the fearful massacre of 1641 … the violations, maimings, choppings, disembowlings, burnings etc in Ireland were exactly similar to those inflicted in the present year’.Footnote ¹¹² Over the summer, sepoy became a term of abuse. There were ‘Romanish sepoys’ and ‘Orange sepoys’. The news of the mutiny proved an inspiration to groups dreaming of rebellion as well as a justification to those who wished to exclude and denigrate liberal attitudes and the reviving institutions of the Catholic church.

Just as Tracy, Larcom and others realised that prompt action to flood riot areas with troops and constabulary was required and not the ‘wait and see’ of early days, Ireland was being stripped of first-class military units. As summer advanced and Belfast threatened to slip out of control, Kingstown Bay was full of ships taking troops out of Ireland. In May, the troops ordered to India included the 60^th Rifles and the 95^th Regiment. At the end of the month, the 88^th Depôt Regiment embarked for Liverpool leaving only three units in the depôt at Belfast. On 16 July, five regiments of foot, a battalion of the Rifle Brigade and two troops of horse were ordered to prepare to leave. Throughout July and August, the Belfast papers had regular reports of troops being loaded onto ships.Footnote ¹¹³ In September, Major James Colbourne, military secretary in Dublin, wrote to the under secretary,

Seaton promised that reinforcements could be speedily conveyed to the Northern District by railway should the riots be renewed in Belfast.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It was little wonder that the reform and abolition of the unreliable local police would have to wait for a decade of increasing animosity.

The lack of resources was compounded by a basic ignorance in Dublin. This ignorance was demonstrated in September when Dublin Castle ‘proclaimed’ Belfast under the Peace Preservation (Ireland) Act, 1856. This enabled magistrates to confiscate any arms which had not been registered with Tracy. This meant naming the parishes and townlands involved. The proclamation of 19 September named the parish of Shankhill in the barony of Upper Belfast and the townland of Ballymacarrett. It was rapidly found that this was inadequate and a second proclamation naming more County Down townlands was produced on 3 October. This was crucial to authorities whose reaction was marked by an anxious legality.Footnote ¹¹⁶ It was another example of delay at a crucial moment. More surprising, given Larcom's leadership of the Irish Ordnance Survey, was the lack of knowledge of the rapidly changing geography of Belfast. In early August, he wrote to Leach at the survey, ‘can you send me a large scale plan of Belfast of pretty recent date?’ He wanted a map ‘with the names of the streets written and the principal buildings with names, this week’. He told Leach, ‘I have a map and guide book which professes to be complete to 1854 but obviously is not’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The map in the Larcom papers was published by John Henderson, Castle Place, Belfast, ‘with all recent additions and improvements to the present date’. Larcom's copy was annotated in a simplistic manner. The Pound was ‘a bad part’ and Sandy Row had ‘frequent riots’. ‘The district coloured green is chiefly Catholic’ was written in one margin and Albert Street marked the boundary. The lack of an up-to-date map was a major problem for Dublin as much of the worst disorder took place over the identity of new areas such as William Watson's housing, the Custom House steps and the Harbour Office. The Henderson map did not mark the new Custom House, although the Harbour Office and Corporation Square were there.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Larcom was not happy and in September a more formal demand went to Leach. References to the tracings he received were duly entered on his copy of the Henderson map.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The 1850s was a decade in which many regimes learnt to manage and control social violence.Footnote ¹²⁰ In Belfast, key social structures worked against efforts to limit the reproduction of sectarian violence.

The relationships of social class both within Belfast, and between Belfast and Dublin, were both imperfect and dysfunctional. There were two models of social class at work in the courtroom and on the streets of Belfast. Neither was able to promote the engagement envisaged by Larcom, Lynch and Smythe. They envisaged a hierarchical society in which a dominant and educated upper class used their authority to impose leadership over lower social classes. This was evident in their solution to the damage being done by the Orange Order. They recognised that legislation could not suppress the order but appealed to those with influence to ensure that these ‘festivals’ were ‘discontinued’. They led to ‘violence, outrage, religious animosities, hatred between classes, and too often, bloodshed and loss of life’.Footnote ¹²¹ This was an elegant theory but compromised by evident contempt: ‘Man is an imitative animal. There has been strong language used by men in the higher classes, and that example must go down the stream to the lower orders.’Footnote ¹²² ‘The districts of which we have spoken particularly were inhabited by the poorer and least educated classes, with feelings not disciplined or kept in check by the influences which education and social intercourse exercise upon the higher classes’.Footnote ¹²³ Approaches to people like Hugh Hanna were unlikely to be helped by attitudes, expressed eloquently in a letter from Lord Downshire to Lord Carlisle. Downshire was sorry to hear about Hanna's intention to preach: ‘you may not be aware that 3 or 4 years ago he was a porter in the shop of a tailor and outfitter in High Street [McGee]. Your excellency will best know how to treat a man like this who has long wished for notoriety and who cannot be got at in the way that a gentleman can be dealt with’.Footnote ¹²⁴

Map 1:

Map of Belfast produced for Henderson's Belfast directory, probably the 1854 edition. This copy was annotated in light of tracings received from the Irish Ordnance Survey Office and written reports from William Tracy. N.L.I., Larcom papers, MS 7624, f. 2. Reproduced with permission of the National Library of Ireland. (The electronic version of this article carries the map in colour.)

A model of social class more appropriate to the growing industrial city envisaged division and contest between a working and a middle class for space and authority within the inequalities of property and production. This shaped earlier value judgements. The initial response to violence had been limited by the restriction of disorder to poorer working-class areas. There was a specific class dynamic. The July riots were tolerated as normal because they were a matter of two working-class areas. The September riots were quite different. They took place in public spaces around the Court House and Harbour Office. The effect of the open-air preaching was to threaten ‘the best parts of town’.Footnote ¹²⁵ This was very different from the industrial north of England where sustained action sought to incorporate a ‘respectable’ working class into a liberal politics and to exclude sectarian divisions from key elements of civil society. The 1830s and 1840s had been marked by often violent working class disorder and threat, and by the fragmentation of the middle classes by party and religious faction.Footnote ¹²⁶ By the 1850s, this was beginning to resolve itself through what has been called the ‘Liberal accommodation’. Main force Chartism, drilling in the fields and the manufacture of pikes and arms in urban backstreets was transformed into a political radicalism which eventually became part of the Gladstonian Liberal party backed by artisan votes.Footnote ¹²⁷ Main force and illegal trades union activity was being replaced by disciplined and legal labour organisation. This did not mean an end to urban conflict but the move substantially contained such conflict within civil society. Such changes in social relations had been assisted by three factors relevant to Belfast. Disorder and political threat had been curbed by restrained and often overwhelming military force.Footnote ¹²⁸ The middle classes had created an extensive and varied associational culture which ensured spaces deliberately neutral in terms of religious and political identity. Leeds, after all, had, in 1835, elected the first Catholic mayor since the Reformation.Footnote ¹²⁹ The middle classes had then used elements of this associational culture not only to consolidate their own class identity and purpose but also to form a cultural alliance and negotiation with the educated artisan working class through agencies as varied as temperance societies, mechanics institutions, building societies and, later, a variety of sports associations.

There were elements of such a culture in Belfast but the commissioners were incapable of spotting this amongst the evidence they gathered. The much-criticised Gun Club was itself a pure example of artisan mutuality. Meetings were held with a chairman. Subscriptions were collected and lots drawn.Footnote ¹³⁰ The subscriber whose lot was drawn then received the benefits of the ‘club’. Such practice dominated the early building societies in their terminating form. The asides of many witnesses revealed an active artisan culture of radical self-help and self-directed education very like the moral force Chartism of England.Footnote ¹³¹ John M'Cabe was the flax dresser who had been attacked on his way back from Tea Lane Mill. Purcell cross-questioned him in a clear attempt to discredit him. What he revealed was a very respectable working-class contribution to civil society. M'Cabe had visited the Rougher's Friend Society based in Mr Moffat's house near York Street. It was not a Catholic society. It was not concerned with regulating wages; ‘we pay a penny a week to support any that are sick’.Footnote ¹³² Englishman, Jonathan Jones, a tenant of William Watson, gave a graphic account of police ineffectiveness, threatening Catholic crowds and Protestant attacks on Catholic houses. He took shelter in a very educated artisan activity. He made a cup of tea and read Cassell's Illustrated Penny Paper. Footnote ¹³³

The possibility of a sustained attempt to incorporate a respectable working class into a liberal politics was hindered not only by the temptations of sectarian loyalties but also by the class contempt by which the elite and middle class groups approached the working class. Even the commissioners saw them as little better than animals who should not be subjected to religious excitement. Hughes and Watson were perfect ‘self-help’ people who would have been liberal heroes in most English industrial towns, yet they were marginalised by Belfast's elite.Footnote ¹³⁴ The leadership in both Belfast and Dublin lacked the ability and willingness to manage class relationships either by way of liberal incorporation or by taking the hierarchical responsibilities which English urban elites adopted from the gentry. The inability of the Dublin and Belfast leaderships to guide class relationships towards any form of accommodation was intensified by the imperfections of civil society. Belfast did indeed have an active civil society but one which failed to match the expectations of liberal civil society theory expressed by Tocqueville and others and implicit in the ideology which Lynch and Smythe brought to the courtroom.Footnote ¹³⁵

Belfast displayed an imperfect civil society. The voluntary association played a central part in the working of civil society and Belfast created a wide range of such societies.Footnote ¹³⁶ Many of them had clear sectarian identities.Footnote ¹³⁷ This was not unusual in English industrial cities where, for example, the bulk of the education system was sectarian based. What was lacking in Belfast was a ‘neutral area’ which could bring together association, family and local governance.Footnote ¹³⁸ The slender Catholic middle class found none of the gaps available in many cities. Unitarian groups, a body as objectional as Catholics to the evangelicals, found spaces for major contributions to civic life in Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and Leeds.Footnote ¹³⁹ At the same time, societies identified with specific religious groups distributed benefits with little reference to denominational identity. In Belfast, a powerful strand of evangelicalism felt compelled to accompany benefits with attempts at conversion.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In Belfast associations like the Chamber of Commerce, the Natural History and Philosophy Society, and the Working Classes Newsroom and Library had little space for Catholics.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Since the 1840s, the Catholic population had generated a variety of associations, from the political Repeal Association to teetotal and friendly societies. By the 1850s, they had built strong networks around people like Hughes and Watson, and the lawyers who worked with them in the courts. Belfast had two civil societies which worked to strengthen class relationships within the major sectarian blocks but created increasingly strong barriers between these groups. Other features of social organisation, notably the Orange Order and the Ribbonmen lacked the transparency and modularity which civil society theory required for effective operation as a basis for negotiation, openness and the making of choices.

There were glimpses of how civil society theory expressed in the courtroom might have operated. The Catholic Gun Club, which had been formed to defend the Pound, was disbanded as a direct response to the inquiry and the consequent pronouncement from the lord chancellor against Orangemen acting as magistrates.Footnote ¹⁴² Any ambitions which Dublin might have had to control and reduce conflict were overwhelmed by social forces which they half understood despite the work of the commission and the detailed reports from Tracy. The years 1857 and 1858 were times in which disorder in Belfast slipped out of control. In part, this was due to lack of resources as troops were shipped east to India and exhaustion overwhelmed people like Tracy. There was lack of understanding in Dublin as men like Larcom tried to create a state built upon strong central control. Attempts to generate elements of a coherent and cohesive set of relationships were hindered by the dysfunctional options of class society, and the partial operation of a civil society which was, in practice, a double civil society, which acted to further division and was little match for the lack of transparency and the prescriptive tyranny imposed of those claimed as ‘family’. The inquiry itself was partial in its understanding of conflict and partial in its ability to provide a forum of conflict reduction but, when read together with the papers from the Chief Secretary's Office and the archives of Thomas Larcom, revealed much of the complex social and cultural forces at work in a key decade for Belfast.Footnote ¹⁴³