There is a well-developed historiography of rural unrest, popular protest and sectarian strife in nineteenth-century Ireland. But little is known about the quotidian episodes of interpersonal violence that were not always a cause of great concern to communities or courts but that shaped social interaction in important and enduring ways. Richard McMahon's book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of this neglected area.
In his treatment of lethal violence in pre-Famine and Famine Ireland, McMahon raises three types of question. The first is empirical: what was the homicide rate? The second is comparative: was it higher or lower than elsewhere? The third is interpretative: how can a convergence or divergence in trends across countries be explained? Each question is complicated by: issues of measurement (counts of deaths and population estimates are inevitably imprecise); choices among competing theoretical frameworks (the relative merits, for example, of a focus on state formation, the emergence of increased impulse control, or changing conceptions of masculinity); and the selection of appropriate temporal parameters (too short a span of time and a statistical blip may be misinterpreted as a meaningful trend, too long and the problems around data collection are magnified).
None of the aforementioned problems is insuperable. Crime data are always confounded by the existence of a ‘dark figure’ of unreported or unrecorded crime but the scale of this problem is less significant for homicide than for offences where concealment is easier and police and prosecutorial interest is not guaranteed. By omitting infanticide from the analysis, McMahon reduces this problem to manageable proportions. Legal systems may define misconduct differently but there is little variation in the definition of unlawful killing; this facilitates cross-national comparisons. Finally, while scholars might vary in the time periods that they choose to study or the hypotheses that they advance, the fact that the terms of reference can be clearly specified allows for them to be probed and, if necessary, redrawn.
The stereotype of the Irish as predisposed to violence is long established. The simian Irishman with scowl and shillelagh, beloved of the Victorian cartoonist, pandered to the fears of those who were quick to suspend disbelief when it came to the various manifestations of Hibernian barbarism. Casual references to the Irish propensity for violence abound in the popular literature of the time and McMahon's stated aim is ‘to challenge the view of nineteenth-century Ireland as a violent society and to offer a more complex and nuanced assessment of the part played by violence in Irish life’ (p. xi). To this end he uses national statistics to indicate overall trends and supplements this broad analysis with more focused inquiries in four counties (two in Ulster and two in Leinster) where the surviving sources are adequate to the task. When the analysis descends to the level of individual counties the number of cases is small. One must be more than usually cautious when extrapolating rates and trends from events that occur once every several years. For example, there were just seven spousal homicides in Fermanagh between 1811 and 1850.
Acknowledging that work of this kind is fraught with difficulty, McMahon concludes that when the appropriate adjustments are made to the data to ensure that like is being compared with like, the Irish rate of homicide was higher than that of England and Wales and above the European average but the magnitude of this difference is smaller than is sometimes assumed. Irish society may have been violent in the 1840s, he argues, but it was not remarkably so.
Most lethal violence took place between acquaintances or within families. Rural unrest and land disputes seldom resulted in murder. Landlords and their employees accounted for a small minority of victims and were very rarely perpetrators. While few in number, these killings were distinguished by a ‘high level of premeditation and lethal intent’ (p. 113). Tipperary was an outlier, accounting for one in three of all land-related homicides in Ireland between 1843 and 1845. No other county came close to this level of agrarian aggravation.
Religious differences sometimes led to bloody exchanges, but not often. ‘Indeed,’ reveals McMahon, ‘three times as many reported homicides arose from sporting contests … than from sectarian conflict’ (p. 131). He argues that sectarian animosity was deeply rooted but seldom became manifest in serious violence. This was for a variety of reasons including community segregation, emigration and the creation of a centrally controlled police force. Additionally, communities controlled sectarianism for fear of the retaliatory consequences if it was allowed to erupt and the possibility that repeated individual actions would stoke communal confrontations.
McMahon cautions against ‘the dangers of understanding interpersonal violence in this period as simply a product of a distinctive culture of recreational violence or of an honour culture peculiar to traditional societies’ (p. 35). He holds that the differences between past and present are sometimes too starkly drawn and he searches hard for similarities and points of overlap. His emphasis is on the continuities that are to be found between expressions of lethal violence in the mid-nineteenth and late twentieth century.
This argument will be found provocative (and not wholly convincing) by those who subscribe to an Eliasian view of long-term societal pacification resulting from increased levels of social control, a shift from expressive to instrumental violence, a reduction in spontaneous outbursts of aggression, the movement of violence behind the scenes, the gradual emulation by the lower classes of the more civilized behaviour exhibited by their social superiors, and a growing intolerance for conduct that previously excited few concerns.
In truth there is evidence of both continuity and change and where the emphasis is placed is, to some extent at least, a matter of scholarly preference. Violence continues to be a male preserve, although its prevalence among the upper classes has dramatically diminished. Squabbles and simmering resentments between acquaintances have always had lethal outcomes on occasion, exacerbated by the inferior medical treatment available in the nineteenth century and the ready access to firearms in the twentieth. (Many injuries that proved fatal in the 1840s would be treatable today. The significance of this factor is difficult to estimate but if it is large it means that a declining homicide rate cannot easily be equated with a reduction in the propensity for violence.) Violence has moved from the countryside to the city and the criminal justice response it evokes has become less variegated with long prison sentences now the norm. The pernicious presence of alcohol remains constant.
Homicide in Pre-Famine and Famine Ireland is valuable because it forces us to think about parallels between past and present rather than proceeding on the basis that there has been a qualitative shift in the nature of lethal violence. Based on thorough research, its central argument is set out lucidly and confidently and should exercise appeal beyond the realm of criminal justice history.
