A Whiteboy general, William O’Driscoll, declared: ‘We will continue to oppose our oppressors by the most justifiable means in our power, either until they are glutted with our blood, or until humanity raises her angry voice in the councils of the nation to protect the toiling peasant and lighten his burden.’11 The Whiteboy oath was everything. It gave men a feeling of belonging. And it warned against betrayal. The avenging secret society bound together by oaths became the most powerful force to challenge the established order in early nineteenth-century rural Ireland. ‘I sware I will to the best of my power,’ the oath-taker would declare, to:
Cut Down Kings,
Queens and Princes, Earls, Lords, and all such with
Land Jobbin and Herrisy.12
The English writer Arthur Young, who toured Ireland in the 1770s, wrote about the Whiteboy insurrections and the oppression of the labouring poor. ‘A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant, labourer or cottier dares to refuse to execute,’ he noted. ‘Disrespect or anything towards sauciness he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security.’ Young, who had travelled all over the British Isles, was shocked to observe in Ireland long lines of workers’ carts forced into the ditches so that a gentleman’s carriage could pass by. ‘It is manifest,’ Young wrote of the mounting insurgency, ‘that the gentlemen of England never thought of a radical cure from overlooking the real cause of the disease, which in fact lay in themselves, and not in the wretches they doomed to the gallows.’ He then added with unsettling prescience: ‘A better treatment of the poor in Ireland is a very material point to the welfare of the whole British Empire. Events may happen which may convince us fatally of this truth.’13
A landlord in Con Brosnan’s home area of Newtownsandes described the situation in March 1786. ‘We are so pestered with Whiteboys in this country that we can attend to nothing else.’ Landlords were restricted because ‘all law ceases but what the Whiteboys like; not a process is to be served, not a cow drove, nor a man removed from his farm on pain of hanging’. The Whiteboys had erected gallows in Newtownsandes, Listowel and Ballylongford with ‘their entire aim … levelled at the tithes’.14 Traditions of violent resistance were becoming embedded. A decade later a local man, Phil Cunningham, became a leader of the United Irishmen rebellion in County Tipperary. Transported to Australia he died leading a rebellion against the British in 1803.
The fear of a native revolt accompanied by French invasion loomed large in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century politics, as the Whiteboy attacks created panic among local Protestant populations. One informer’s account refers to a ‘meeting of the White Boys at Myre [in Tipperary, where] it was resolved on to burn the houses of the Protestants, and to massacre them in one night, after a landing made by the French, as was expected’.15
Government retribution was harsh. Hundreds of rebels or suspected rebels were transported to Australia. Public hangings were often carried out in the rebels’ home districts. Con Shine, a local carpenter, recalled an execution by soldiers near Listowel in 1808, as told to him by his family: ‘They drove 2 poles in the ground below at the cross and put another pole across they then put him standing in a horse’s car put a rope around his neck then pulled away the car and left him hanging there. He was hanging there all day. The soldiers use to come often and give him a swing for sport and leave him swing away for himself. All the doors were shut that day. You would not see a head out the door.’16
Around Ballydonoghue the Catholic Church condemned the Whiteboy attacks and pledged ‘firm attachment to Our Gracious King and to the Constitution … we will not enter into conspiracy against the laws of our country’.17 A priest in Listowel went further and urged his flock to collect £26 as a reward for anybody giving information on those responsible for the burning houses in the parish. The state archives for the period reflect the efforts made by local priests to discourage support for the Whiteboys. The Listowel magistrate, John Church, records parish meetings across north Kerry and praises the efforts of the clergy while noting claims by the church that the disturbances were caused by poverty and poor weather ‘more than any political motive as maliciously insinuated in some publick Prints’.18 By the late 1820s the campaign for Catholic Emancipation led by Kerryman Daniel O’Connell was on the threshold of success. The church did not want chaos and violence. From the time of the Reformation Catholics had faced a range of restrictions. But in the wake of Cromwellian (1649–53) and then Williamite (1688–91) wars, the repression intensified and a wide range of ‘Penal Laws’ was gradually introduced, targeting Catholics, as well as Presbyterians and other dissenters from the Anglican order. The laws were meant to ensure the ascendancy of Anglicans, with restrictions on Catholic landholding, worship, education, and even a prohibition on Catholics owning a horse worth more than £5. This last imposition was to ensure that strong swift beasts that would be useful for cavalry were kept out of the hands of Catholics. Enforcement varied in different places and with the passage of time some of the most punitive laws were rescinded, but by the 1820s Catholics were still excluded from Parliament and from being judges or senior civil servants. The effect was to make religion synonymous with the power of the minority. Very soon the reverse would obtain. The campaign to achieve Catholic Emancipation galvanised the Irish poor and gave Europe its first great campaign of peaceful mass protest. By 1829 the battle for religious liberty was won and the confessional demography of Irish life had been asserted. The Catholic Church emerged as the most powerful force in Irish life, a role it would not willingly relinquish for the next century and more. But the Church would struggle to control the unrest which arose from the poverty and injustice of the times.
The Whiteboys were succeeded by the ‘Rockites’ in the 1820s, inspired by the millenarian writings of Signor Pastorini, the pseudonym for the English Catholic bishop, Charles Walmesley, who predicted the imminent demise of Protestantism. The north Kerry poet Tomás Ruadh O’Suilleabháin saw the coming deliverance of his people from landlordism and English rule:
It is written in Pastorini
That the Irish will not have to pay rent
And the seas will be speckled with ships
Coming around Cape Clear.19
The local landlords around Ballydonoghue were frightened by the threats of a Protestant apocalypse. In nearby Tarbert