In the recent Irish film, Black ’47, a Connaught Ranger pursues a blood-laden campaign of revenge against all embodiments of British authority he encounters, including members of the Irish Constabulary, a land agent, a magistrate, British soldiers, and the English landlord of a fictional estate in Connemara. Most of these figures ensconced in British power structures refer to the Ranger, called Feeney, as either a ‘Ribbonman’ or someone who has lately taken up with ‘the Ribbonmen’. The film's deployment of the term Ribbonman is an apt one encompassing the shadowy nexus connecting interpersonal violence, political aspiration, secret societies, and agrarian life in Ireland during the nineteenth century.
Kyle Hughes and Donald M. MacRaild's Ribbon societies in nineteenth-century Ireland and its diaspora: the persistence of tradition is an attempt to untangle this web of connections. It pursues this agenda through a largely chronological narrative that begins by locating the origins of Ribbonism in the revolutionary traditions of Defenderism, moves through transformational moments in its history, including an in-depth analysis of the trial of Richard Jones in 1840, continues by outlining the generative effects of the diaspora on Ribbonism's character, and ends by uncovering the continuities between Ribbonism and the development of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Rather than summarise each chapter in turn, I instead want to highlight the facets which make this book an important contribution to the corpus of scholarship on secret societies, violence and politics in nineteenth-century Ireland.
The spine that runs through Hughes and MacRaild's book is an interpretative framework that relies on ‘tradition’ as a means by which continuity was transmitted to Ribbonism in a variety of forms across spatial and temporal contexts. This focus on tradition is born of necessity as the authors make clear that the available sources do not allow for the construction of genealogies based on membership records or minute books. Nevertheless, the emphasis on ideas and symbols is a welcome one for its ability not simply to trace the forms Ribbonism took (‘Ribbonism's malleability was one of its biggest assets and helped to ensure its proliferation’, p. 62), but the ways ‘general’ Ribbonism functioned in the public mind (pp 22–5).
Thus, Ribbonism's exclusively Catholic membership, its anti-Protestant symbols, and politically-motivated passwords served as cement binding the majority of Ireland's population to the governing classes’ long-held beliefs about Irish Catholicism's disloyalty and politically subversive nature. In short, whether Ribbonmen were nationalist revolutionaries with a clear political programme or not (the authors take a tactful middle road on this question, see pp 7–8), their presence in Irish society offered justification to politicians wishing to enforce the state's claims to a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force across the Irish countryside.
The other lodestar in this work is an acknowledgement of the networks of people and ideas that connected Ribbonism across space. The authors are particularly adept at demonstrating how personalities shaped the Ribbon society's fissures and fusions from Dublin to Ulster, as well as the importance of the Irish in Britain and America in promoting associational charity, which often facilitated ‘a degree of political discussion’ (p. 233). These connections also uncover the fractious development of Irish nationalism as a coherent ideological force across the nineteenth century. For example, the authors focus attention on Daniel O'Connell's shadowy links with individuals affiliated to Ribbonism in the 1820s and 1830s, while also demonstrating how his inability to quell Ribbon violence impeded his brand of constitutional nationalism from becoming hegemonic.
Similarly, the authors highlight the tensions present in the post-Famine nationalism of Fenianism and its charged relationship to the older, and often parochial, agrarian programme of Ribbonism. In one richly descriptive section (pp 275–89), Hughes and MacRaild lay out the violent confrontations between Fenians and Ribbonmen in the Ulster borderlands of the 1860s and 1870s as an illustrative example of broader national tensions between Cardinal Paul Cullen's discipline over Catholic orthopraxy, the role of nationalism in Irish Catholicism's identity, and the place of republicanism.
As someone who has spent considerable time in some of the archives on which this work is based I know first-hand of the blind alleys and dead-ends that often frustrate the ability to tell cogent stories about the personalities we encounter. Hughes and MacRaild have played the role of archival bloodhounds, tracking snippets of information across disparate sources where others may have given up. As a result, the reader is treated to a myriad of elucidatory stories – stories about personalities, like Richard Jones or Bernard Duggan, whose individual lives are adroitly used as illustrations of the broad continuities and changes in political and nationalist traditions among Irish Catholics across the long nineteenth century.
