In the spring of 1856, acting on tip-off, Daniel J. Cruise, stipendiary magistrate at Mountcharles in County Donegal, directed a party of Royal Irish Constabulary across rough terrain in the hills above the village of Ardara. Their destination, in the coastal townland of Beagh beyond the Owenea River, was the home of James Gallagher, a prospering tenant on the marquess of Conyngham’s estate. According to the informer, Gallagher, and Madge (née Craig), his much-detested wife, were in store for a visit from Molly Maguire – the secret, agrarian, often violent oath-bound brotherhood otherwise known as the Ribbon Society. If true, here was a chance for the magistrate to apprehend this infamous fraternity in the act of committing an ‘outrage.’ But nothing happened. After keeping watch through four separate uneventful nights, Cruise returned to his source. Under pressure, local schoolmaster Patrick McGlynn, who had already said enough to implicate himself, swore the names of more than twenty men from the wider district as belonging to ‘the body’. By the following morning, twenty three had been arrested, and would soon be marched in chains the fifty miles from Glenties via Donegal to Lifford Gaol.
Why did the conspirators plan to target the Gallaghers and why did McGlynn betray them? It is these questions and others that Breandán Mac Suibhne sets out to answer through a painstaking microhistory of the changing world in which they lived. But first, he too must whisper a confession. For the author, this past is not quite another country and nor is this an ordinary history book, because Beagh is his native townland – like the protagonists, he comes ‘from that place’.
The transformation Beagh had begun before the Famine as market forces increasingly encroached and labour migration stretched horizons. Census collectors and ordnance surveyors had started to translate the wilds of western Donegal into language legible to state administration. Most dramatically, to ease enumeration and make rent collection more efficient, the townland had been ‘squared.’ The rundale system – a close knit cluster of houses surrounded by pasture held in common and arable land redistributed periodically among the tenants – was broken up and replaced by individually defined plots between 1839 and 1841. Here as elsewhere, this not only altered the landscape and material basis of rural life, but also carried cultural changes on its shoulders. The old way had its own iniquities and privations but, with its passing, patterns of cooperation were extinguished and ties of mutual responsibility between neighbours, and even kin, were loosened if not immediately severed. Intended to foster self-industry and improvement, this new spirit of individualism set each against all when Hunger came.
In material terms James Gallagher emerged well from the ‘grey zone’ of the Famine years and those that immediately followed. An eighty-acre allotment at the ‘squaring’ had swelled to 160 by the time the arrests were made. But to those men who held court in the back rooms of public houses and dispensed rough justice after dark, Gallagher’s crimes were multiple. Expanding his holding on the cheap, thanks to others’ misfortune, was itself enough to attract opprobrium. He had evicted or planned to evict a number of subtenants. The greatest affront to decency it seems, however, was his treatment of his father. Having got his own name listed in the rental book as occupant, Gallagher had put the old man out and refused to provide for his welfare.
Mac Suibhne’s superb account brings us face to face with subaltern nineteenth-century rural Ireland. Amongst its servant girls and landless men, tenants, teachers, poitín-makers, publicans, and clergy, we encounter factions, feuds, confessional rivalries and petty jealousies, and gain privileged insight into the murky, fractious world of illicit organisation. The arrogant son of a wealthy farmer parades his status by riding into town on his ‘entire horse’, a stallion kept intact for breeding that required careful stabling lest it get excited or excite the mares. A miser priest amasses a fortune from his flock and from his herd of cattle. And a ‘wretched peasant’, who ‘learned to curse a little in America’, ruminates on ‘state and society in Ireland’. Looking out upon his home-place, he ‘rage[s] against the injustice of it all’.
Out of this extraordinary detail a compelling case takes shape. Between Gallagher and those who would inflict punishment upon him ran a jagged fault line that tore its way through rural Ireland in these years, and even through the Ribbon lodge itself. To oversimplify: a rear-guard of the old order – the residue of rundale with its collectivist mentality, embedded in oral tradition, bilingualism, and devotion to local saints and stations – sought unsuccessfully to hold the line against the emergent moral economy. This was an ‘era of infidelity’ when people turned away from those who went before and the things that they held dear. From now on, in lean years as well as fat, ‘every man’ would be ‘accountable for his own portion’ only.
What started as a whisper gradually grows louder as knowledge drawn from family lore, and eventually even the historian’s own childhood memories, becomes voluble over that gleaned from nineteenth-century documents. Along the way we learn the Mac Suibhne (rendered Sweeney or McSwine) family’s own intimate connections to Gallagher’s misdeeds. An evident affection for the place and people makes one wonder at the author’s protest that ‘genealogy’s charms are lost on [him]’. But he is certainly sincere when stating that this is not an exercise in settling scores or ‘casting up’ the sins of a long dead man.
E. P. Thompson famously sought ‘to rescue...the “obsolete” handloom weaver’ and ‘“utopian” artisan’ from the ‘condescension of posterity’. Mac Suibhne too seeks to salvage the voices of the vanquished, the hopes that they harboured, and the codes and the values which made them do the things they did. These were people moved by visions of the future that had not yet succumbed to the one that triumphed in the Famine’s wake.
Born in 1969, the Beagh of his boyhood had seen the back of landlords and the state that once held sway. And yet in other ways it remained ‘that place’ that was forged by and imposed upon those who lived through this period of ‘adjustment’. Its diminished population clinging fast to the isolated farms that they now owned and from which, for a century, every generation since had seen siblings, sons, and daughters expelled without compunction. Viewed in the longer run, Gallagher’s greatest crime might have been to embrace the aspirations of this modern, self-improving, and unsentimental Ireland sooner and more fully than his fellows ever would. While the ripples of those changes have continued to be felt into living memory and our own time, much of the outrage that they once provoked has ended.
