Seamus: Yes, but let us not restrict our discourse too rigidly. Generally speaking, between 1600 and 1800 the form of antagonisms consistent with the furtherance of the Christian Conquest was known in Europe as Mercantilism-come-Capitalism. Most of the governing states of western Europe were heavily influenced by its orientation, which was an assortment of policies and measures designed to keep the nation state prosperous, Christian and through trade abroad, manufacture at home, and the collection of precious metals – mostly gold -- economically independent (Bullionism).

Sean: Accepting that, where do we go from here?

a. Regicide

Seamus: Let us look back for a moment. I think we can agree that the Christian conquest has by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries come a long way from the fraudulent Empire of the Patriarch Sylvester, just as Ireland has come a long way, in time at least, from the fraudulent claim of Laudabiliter. Moreover, Christianity now divides the new nation states as it divided countries under the Papacy. In the sixteenth century it was the British versus the Spanish, and Elizabeth sent the armada packing, even onto the shipwrecked coast of Western Ireland. And the British and the French was a permanent Christian feature of hate. Sooner rather than later the Irish Catholic and the English Protestant would be formed in the same forge. The European Reformation, therefore, will divide Europe into a North and a South, and these polarities enter the Irish political scene alternatively as war, as Martyrology and as crime. Consider the following points:

     1. The execution of Charles I on January 30 1649 by Cromwell and the English parliamentarians marked the end of monarchy and the passage of monarchical powers in England to parliament. Some three weeks before hand, on January 4, the House of Commons more or less stated this fait accompli. The Commons declared, inter alia, 'that the people, are, under God, the original of all just power...”

Sean: And why do you think that is? The cruelty of Oliver Cromwell would strike anyone dumb, not just Irish men, but quite a few English men as well.

Seamus: Why they are struck dumb is because they have never moved away from the conception of an overall power in the person of the Pope – and no matter what he did, it didn’t matter. He was far away, he was never thought of as a politician, and even if the Catholic Church never allowed democracy to enter its theocratic ranks, the Irish never cared, never analyzed, and were never concerned with it. This, unfortunately, is very much part of the problem with Catholicism and with Ireland. What most Irish men should have asked themselves long ago was: where do they imagine Parliament came from? Who invented it? And who, indeed, carried it socially through such resistance, that they could borrow rather than make it for themselves. That, in effect, they could pretend, as with English soccer, that they stole it from some passing stork or other. It never would dawn on Irish men to think that if they resisted the Catholic Church and had to forge democracy out of their relationship with the Pope, that they, too, in the process would have to change, that they would have to adopt different personalities, and that, in effect, they would become something new – and that something might well be Protestants!

Sile: But you still speak within Christianity. Protestantism is merely a different type of Catholicism.

Seamus: Now that’s a peculiar way of putting it, or, maybe, it is no more than we have already said about the avant-garde and the rear garde of Christianity.

Sile: Well, as a point of interest, where do you think the moral conviction of which you speak came from? How did the Puritans manage to draw upon such messianic drive to take out their King and lop off his head, if not from the very Christian conquest, which you castigate?

Seamus: You can say it was Christian, if you like, but you may wind up saying that any attempt to reach a higher social or personal form, or to cling to virtue, springs from Christianity. It doesn’t. Aristotle knew all about reaching a higher form, long before the Christians dreamed of harnessing to their own arsenal. And the old pagan Irish knew about virtue. Did you ever hear Stanihurst on their widespread practice of Fostering (otherwise called Gossipred or Compaternity)?

` You cannot (says he) find one instance of Perfidy, Deceit, or Treachery among them; nay, they are ready to expose themselves to all manner of Dangers for the safety of those who sucked their Mother’s Milk; you may beat them to a mummy, you may put them upon the Rack, you may burn them on a Grid-Iron, you may expose them to the most exquisite tortures that the cruellest Tyrant can invent, yet you will never remove the innate Fidelity which is Grafted in them; you will never induce them to betray their duty`

Seamus: Well, Stanihurst was a monk himself. It seems that the middle ages had nothing but monks. Anyway, the above quotation comes from James Ware’s The History And Antiquities of Ireland (translated by Walter Harris Esq.). And it is perfectly wrong to thing of Christianity as the font of all goodness. If Nietzsche had his way, he would banish it from the face of the earth. We need not get so dramatic. It is sufficient if we understand that Christianity takes the human condition and appropriates it to its own mission. Human goodness was there long before there was Christianity, so we need not ring our hands and think that the world of all human value and warmth will crumble because there are no Christians any more. There will always be humans, and they will make their own morality.

In any event, my point about the Christian conquest is its capacity to divide and continue to divide. I never said it wasn’t a powerful and lethal coercive force, maybe an unstoppable one! It is all these things. And Max Weber was perfectly correct when he identified the constant struggle for beliefs and convictions, for the hearts and minds, as it was a kind of warfare. If you aren’t a Christian, however, then the forceful spread of Christianity is more like a rampaging monster than an enlightening religion; behind which is perhaps the most aggressive and coercive propaganda since time began. One thinks more of Tyrannous Rex than of T.S.Elliot’s ‘unoffending feet.’ Not too long ago, before the Americans got started, the RC Church organized its allies (the Irish, the Spanish, the Australians) to direct their considerable attention on East Timor. Was this a replay of John Paul 11 and Ronnie Reagan organizing the downfall of Communist Russia, by bringing it to its starving knees, and, together with Blair, Ahern and Bush, making great inroads into the Muslim hinterland?

Sean: While the Christian Church claims to be peaceful, its record is quite the opposite. Only the Church would deny that – and even when they do deny it, they hardly do so with any conviction any more. Its like their religious spiel. They never really talk religiously, but always economically, lawyeristically, about rights here and rights there –never as a concerned religion might speak. But that detracts from our current discussion. If I understand you correctly, you feel that one of the central Irish questions respecting the Irish Protestants is: how could the Republic of Ireland ever develop a democratic system, or a legal system or an administrative system, if they hadn’t borrowed them straight from the Protestants? You’re saying it was nowhere present in the Holy Roman set up, which still wavers between the confessional and the polite inquisition, not just on women and sexuality, but in a totalitarian grip on everything administrative, including the political parties, the Bar/Bench/Civil Service ensemble?

Seamus: Now, you’ve got it. And the eighteenth century is when progressive men forge ahead with a new kind of freedom, despite the drawback of the Catholic Church. It is as if Christianity has had its own civil war and the avant-garde is comprised of the reformed churches and the rear garde still hangs on to a medieval type of belief. The Irish and the English, already split over former things, are now retrenching on this ongoing issue as well.

Sean: Before moving on to an Irish configuration, is there not a comparison to be made with the eighteenth century state of Scottish nationalism?

Seamus: There surely is. The Act of Union of 1707 uniting Scotland and England was designed, inter alia, to secure a Hanoverian succession to the throne after the reign of Queen Anne. For at least three decades after the Union there was no visible improvement to the lower orders, and while there was some resistance to the Jacobite cause, between the famines and the taxes the majority probably were against the Union. The Stuarts line became associated with Catholicism and however commendable this was in Ireland; it was by the same token anathema to the Scottish Kirk.

Sean: Apt though it is to remember Culloden with a stave or two, there are few poems that I find suitable.

Sean: Well, if you look at the ones by Andrew Laing and Robbie Burns, maybe like me you will dislike the first for its suggested 6/8 rhythm and the second because of Burn’s surrender to the female aspect of the defeat.

Sean: I just find it unsuitable to the devastation that I consider Culloden represented. It was every bit as bad as the take-over of Irish life by the Parish Priest.

Seamus: What about Hugh McPherson. Maybe he has something appropriate or one of the Gaelic poets?

Sean: Let’s leave it. All the Gaelic poets seem to do is lament some religious object or other, some bishop’s passing or some Biblical non-event. The trouble with the Gaelic poets is their utter boredom. It was Burns who rescued the Scottish poets from such a national depression as the Irish suffered. -- Can we move on to some engagement with Irish criminology?

Seamus: Surely, but bear the execution of Charles 1 in mind when we come to mention that of Damiens, the regicide. Also bear in mind that the Catholic persuasion of the Irish to halt the Roundheads was an attempt to thwart not just the effects of the Reformation, but the development of Parliament and an English Republic as well. In some ways it also constituted a move – like Jacobinism -- back to government by Pope rather than forward to government by Prince, foolish Prince, no doubt, but a secular one nevertheless. You might also remember that the Irish Catholic rising of 1641 was orchestrated on Charles 1’ s behalf, that it was inspired by the Holy Roman interest, that it was to some extent even subversive of everyone’s interests except the Pope’s, and the ensuing tensions in Ireland were attributable to such subversion. Every Irish man, I believe, has to make up his mind as to the progressive nature of the Reformation and the progressive nature of Cromwellian Parliamentarianism. If there is another answer to these questions, I have never heard them, certainly not in Ireland.

Seamus: Because those who appreciate secular democracy or Parliamentary – even of the variety that George Bush considers eternally fixed as it came over in the Mayflower – have to explain to themselves how it could possibly have come about had power never passed from the Prince to Parliament? The Americans imagine it to be a one off and that it had no prior existence and cannot have a future progression. That is why America still cannot understand what either democracy is or what Communism was. And it is this that they have in common with the Irish – a fervent ignorance of history. But for the Irish it might mean that they not only discover the fixed mould into which Catholicism has poured them for all eternity, but that there was an older civilization on the Island that wasn’t ‘Irish’ – but that was Gaelic and that they existed long before the Jews were ever colonized by the Romans.

Sean: You also mentioned before that at or around this period – with the passage of power from Prince to Parliament in British terms -- that the RC Church exploited Irish weakness to the full.

Seamus: You must remember that it was only in the 17th century, with the flight of the Chieftains and the decline of the Irish language, that one could say that English control over Irish life (as with Roman Catholic control) was absolute; for it was only with the removal by the British of the native chiefs, especially after Kinsale in 1603 that the way was clear for the Catholic clergy to occupy their place. The Parish Priests are a little like Cuckoo; they inhabit nests they never made nor sired. Yet they get everyone to call them ‘Father’. Just as the British placed their man (the Sheriff) in every significant conurbation, so, too, the Holy Romans placed their main man (the Parish Priest) smack where the Irish Chieftain used to sit. This was the ordinary logic of the double imperial conquest: and it was the sheer persistent genius of the Holy Romans to convince the Irish that there was only one conquest, English, and that it was totally evil Being more connected to Rome and less connected to the people, the Parish Priest was well placed to run Ireland as if he was a homegrown native. He organized around the Sheriff (and retained control over the births, the marriages and deaths departments). Now he could control Irish knowledge, Irish ignorance, and through them fashion reproduction, fertility, sexual and social and political behavior as he pleased. There was nothing he could not touch or control, nothing too big, too small or too remote. For long periods this control was riveted to Irish culture such that Irish and Roman resistance to the overlord was seen as the same thing. And this was easy when we think of the events of the seventeenth century. In the Battle of the Boyne (1690), when the Protestant King of Orange, William 111, defeated the Catholic King James 11 and his French supporters an era of Protestant supremacy took over. The old rivalry between France and England, so much a factor in the history of the British Isles, will reassert itself again at the end of the century, but this time with respect to Presbyterian Ireland. In the meantime Protestantism is in the ascendant, especially after the Catholic revolt of 1641, which yet again legitimated the harsh treatment Irish people were to suffer as a result of the ambitions of the Roman Church.

By the eighteenth century, then, the Holy Roman Empire was well and truly split like the Cartesian cogito into a European divide of Nation States. What increasingly distinguished the Northern Protestant states and the Southern Catholic ones was the ‘Work Ethic’. This was the new civil method of distinguishing those nations that gathered respectively around the polarity of Catholicism and Protestantism. Within this dichotomy, of course, was the further dichotomizing fact of the division of labour, the production of wealth, and the intensifying consciousness of these differences as moral phenomena that needed redress – class-consciousness! By the end of the century this consciousness is to shatter Europe with particular resonance in Britain, France and Ireland. How we interpret these phenomena is of particular interest to the history of the eighteenth century, and while we cannot cover all the relevant issues, the following, we claim, is of essential interest to Irish criminology. Sean: In criminological terms how would you describe the passing of power from Pope to Prince?

Sile: I know that when you say ‘Prince’ you mean to import the female term ‘Princess’, as well. But might I mention the enormous contribution of Elizabeth to the Protestant cause.

Seamus: I suppose the best way to describe it is in the terms of how contemporaries theorized it. Whatever else the philosophes believed; few of them denied the enlightenment of monarchical government. With the realization of the nation State, power passed abruptly as well as gradually from the Pope to the Prince and for a while the Prince occupied a place not too distant from the former Pope. This, of course, meant, inter alia, that to use his power most efficiently, it had to be brought into the narrow reach of the Absolute Monarch and his Curia Regis, which is what happened during the reigns of Louis XIV, Joseph II and Maria Theresa of Austria, and Catherine the Great of Russia. And whether the legitimation for such absolute authority sprung from ‘divine right’ or a social contract based on enlightened service to the state or to the people if of little real consequence, save and in so far as the ‘divine right ‘and the ‘social contract’ were ways of configuring crimes and punishments as diverse as the ‘ lettre de cachet’, the occasional shenanigans of ‘Star Chamber’, and the more frequent pitch-capping of some croppy or other.

c. Class, Crimes, Punishments And the ‘Work Ethic’

Seamus: The class hierarchy of crimes-and-punishments arises by virtue of the fact that what was a more stratified society is now hardened around class-boundaries, which makes criminological issues more simple in some respects than hitherto – a fact that will be recognized at the end of the century by the class antagonisms of the French Revolutionaries.

In Ireland, where the French influence was popular if differential as between Catholics and Presbyterians, the circumstances (according to the author of this Website) could not be more inimical to a ‘ class’-based revolution. And however much criminal and penal reforms are compared or seen in parallel with mainland Britain, because of the overriding significance of the hegemony of religious divisions, they have to be understood accordingly.

Sean: Nevertheless, the influence of the Americans, the French Revolution and the particular work of Thomas Paine, did have an impact.

Sile: Of course they did. But that does not explain why Ireland was any different than the French in raising a revolution?

Seamus: But it does; for we must understand that the resonance of the revolution – just as the act of Regicide resonates in the antagonisms of those who have a King -- sounded more amongst those societies which had moved from a simply stratified society to a class-bound one. For only here was the ancien regime recognized as a class and only through that could the working class recognize itself as such as well. Those societies that were simply stratified cannot see these things and are thus unconscious and empty imitators, mothers of borrowed ideas who never experience the social compulsion of their predicament. Anyway, how do you say that power passed into the new arrangements of the Nation State?

Sile: But when English executed Charles 1, there was no revolution, as there was in France a century later.

Seamus: Yes-and-no. ‘Yes’, there was a Revolution. It ran through the warp and weft of English society, centering not just on Parliament but also on the religious allegiance of the Monarchy and the need for the new religion. And ‘no’ – there was no Revolution, because a Parliamentary revolution, rather than one expressed in terms of class, was not considered a revolution a hundred years earlier.

Sean: So, what changes do you say were revolutionary?

Seamus: The ordinary changes, which we in Ireland take for granted – until, that is we make comparisons. These were once revolutionary. Where we talk about change, but never did it, it was they, the British, the Puritans who did the actual changing, yet we fail to appreciate that fact. Without them no Parliament was possible. Beginning with the Nation State, Lords Spiritual and Lords Temporal, for example, entered a new alignment under the King. The Irish, by comparison, have no such arrangement and are thereby fed by ethical notions outside their culture that are not generated by them. More generally, what had been Offences Against The Faith in earlier centuries under the Papacy had eventually materialized in the new Church/State-nation as Offences Against the State. Again, an Irish comparison here is open to speculation and while the more affluent amongst the Irish will attempt to laugh, even today, in the twenty first century, would they dare laugh at the notion of ‘Moving Statutes’ or the blessed bones of ‘St Theresa’. Notable in secular England was the transmutations from Heresy, Witchcraft, and Blasphemy to Treason, Regicide, corruption of the blood, and Scandalum Magnatum. The laws of Libel were designed to curtail accusations against structurally positioned VIPs as well as to protect the middle-class distribution of the powerful in the service of the State, under which the appropriation of criminal matter was processed by the State’s new priesthood, the lawyers.  Solicitors and Barristers operated under the State in much the same manner as the Dominicans and Franciscans had operated under the Papacy; the only difference between the priest and the lawyer being that the priest flattered himself that he mediated the ways of God to his flock and the lawyer flattered himself that he mediated the laws of the land to the citizen. In the Irish Republic these distinctions are sometimes wasted or non-existent.

In a way the eighteenth century, when criminal justice was a personal matter, gave birth to what we call the Criminal Justice System. First of all, differences were settled by war (like the religious wars) and then by the wars between the Nation States (France versus England, England versus Spinet) and, also, the civil wars, which defined the new states. In a way the process was one in which the ecclesiastical courts gave way to the courts martial, which eventually gave way to the judicial system of justice. In establishing the judicial system, the birth of the Police, the growth of capital sentences (very frequent at first), the reform of the courts, the development of the new priesthood of lawyers around the state, and the prisons and reform institutions. All these recidivist-ridden institutions are defined for the first time in a modern sense in the eighteenth century, and in most respects Dublin followed London. If anything Protestant Ireland listened to the reformers like Howard, more than other British cities. In Sir James Fitzpatrick M.D. they found their own reformer – and there was much to reform. Dublin Newgate, while never as promiscuous as London Newgate, was run on the same lines. So, too, the Black Dog prison captured by Gilbert (History of Dublin) and in this and other respects (such as the Police) Ireland – as with Northern Ireland today – to some extent became an arena of experiment as well as innovation.

Seamus: And if there was a class hierarchy of crimes, there had also to be a corresponding class hierarchy of punishments. Again the first and most ferocious of these had to do with killing the King. What had hitherto been anathema under the Popes and, indeed, damnation, was now personified in the killing of the monarch. Here the punishment for Regicide still clung to its medieval roots, the very tortures and terrors that Beccaria was trying to reform (Of Crimes And Punishments.). Foucault (Discipline and Punish), in his famous account of Damiens, the Regicide, he recounts how on March 2 1757, when taken to the Place de Grave and placed on a scaffold, his

“Flesh is torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds'

It took renewed efforts before the tugging horses finally quartered Damiens’s bodily parts; the horrors recounted by Foucault were operated under the overview of a Christian iconography.

Sean: What then about the working classes or the lower order, if you will? Surely they were very much affected by these changes?

And amongst the lower orders, the Northern and Southern European aspects were easily distinguished; for they were marked by a proliferation of new punishments, not just extending the prevalence of capital offences, but the alteration of punishments from the use of the Galley sentence in Southern Europe to the use of the Bridewell/Zuchthaus in the North. Hand in hand with the work ethic was the Workhouse and the House of Correction, not to mention the growing use of schools, ordinary and special, and including the development of schools to service the ships and the trades to service the factories.

But perhaps the most enduring classic for linking the changing forms of crimes-andpunishments with the vicissitudes of the work ethic over the Mercantilist era is Rusche and Kirkheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure. Others have pointed out that the control of labour was only one aspect of several other functions accompanying penal changes – amongst which were the humanitarian substitution of transportation for the death penalty, the reformation ‘by industry and good works’ of the deviant, and the social rehabilitation of the criminal, especially after the 1895 Gladstone Committee’s recommendations on Prisons.

Prison architecture, like the Galley ships, also reflected the ‘work ethic’ as it was carried to the common criminal. There are several works which work this area such as Jeremy Bentham on Panopticon, or, indeed, Foucault (Discipline and Punish) on Bentham’s Panopticon or Michael Ignatieff’s A Just Measure Of Pain, or Robert Evans -- The Fabrication of Virtue (English prison architecture, 1750—1840 (Cambridge University Press1982). All of these and others besides constitute a rich literature on prison history extending from the eighteenth century onwards.

d. Developing the Criminal Justice System

Sean: It should not be forgotten that the eighteenth century is the age of classical music, and it is hard to think of it without hearing a Mozartian or a Handelian flourish. The dismal economists like Adam Smith, and Bentham seem less lugubrious when compared to the men of letters like Swift, Molyneaux, Malthus, Johnson (Samuel), not to mention De Sade, Voltaire and Baudelaire, historians like Gibbons, Lecky and Gilbert, reformers like Beccaria, Romilly, Howard and the Irish ‘Howard ‘, Fitzpatrick, not to mention the philosophers George Berkeley, David Hume, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, etc., etc., etc. The list is endless and the concerns equally so. Our job is to boil everything down to some cabbage-like concepts that we can hang on to. It would be much easier if we could listen to Don Giovanni or, more pertinently, The Magic Flute, and just hear the eighteenth century rather than try to conceive of it through endless texts.

Sile: As if things were so simple. In any event I would have preferred Cosi Fan Tutti. Or better still, let’s sit and just look at Ryan O’ Neill in Barry Lyndon. That’ll give us a whiff of the electricity-less eighteenth century. And on the reformer front I prefer names like Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelly, and later on Elizabeth Fry, and two lesser known seventeenth century Quakers, Elizabeth Fletcher and Elizabeth Smith, who introduced the Irish to the precepts of Quakerism, for which offence, unlike the fate of St. Patrick, they found themselves confined to Dublin’s Newgate by the Lord Mayor.

Sean: I’m sorry to interrupt you two but our interest here is to review society through the criminal institutions or, alternatively, to view the criminal institutions through society, not through the prevalence of Operas….

Seamus: Nevertheless an Opera like The Magic Flute, which in our time has lost most of its political significance, gives us Mozart’s quite preference for the Masons of his day over the contemporary Catholic forces of reaction, whether they were found in excoriating Papal Bulls or in the pinching personality of Bishop Colorado, his patron.

Sile: It is often forgotten that the inspiration of both Cromwell and the author of The Magic Flute are laden with Christian iconography, no less, one might add, than were John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. The point I am making is that the values of the Christian conquest, having been internalized, are then ‘Protestantised’ or ‘Psychologised’ to suit the new political arrangements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a way the Ten Commandments are individuated in the same manner as ‘possessive individualism’ is induced and becomes part of the adoptive social skills by which the new materialism of the age is assimilated. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in medicine, as in law, as in religion, the secular bias, following the Judeo/Christian bias against the female, unfolds and scaffolds the new secular priesthood as exclusively male.

Sean: And added to these changes were the introduction of the Police, a detective force, and an array of prison reforms – all of which items are detailed elsewhere.

2. Ireland, Rural and Urban Crimes

Sean: What about Irish crime at this time? I know that while all the above phenomena resonated in Irish developments throughout the eighteenth century, there is, as always, a particular Irish dimension, isn’t there?

Seamus: Yes, but what do you mean by the Irish dimension?

Sean: I mean that European developments are felt in Ireland; but that Irish social arrangements are quite different than those applying to Europe. I mean that in many respects Ireland was never of Europe, merely in it.

Sile: What do you mean by that?

Sean: I mean precisely what I say: And if it is true that Ireland has no history, as has been claimed so often on this Website, then it explains much of what I mean. I also mean that the Irish social arrangements between Church and State – now between Catholic Church and Catholic State in the South -- go back to the initial as well as the continuing tensions created, as you said, by the Christian Conquest. I am also saying that the original tensions – that is between the two sovereign powers – the Church and the State, is lost in Ireland, where the Church is sovereign, and is under attack in Europe, where the Church lays constant siege – and will do so even more under Ratzinger. The Papal Curia governs the only remaining European Empire and no single country can match it. Ireland is – and has been, since 1922 – a Vatican satellite, no more!

Sile: I understand what you are saying. I just feel that it is hard to imagine that these tensions do not seem to have altered since their inception and yet they still operate subterraneously within the European historical framework.

Sean: Well, maybe the ‘Irish dimension’ really means the state of the dialectic between the Holy Roman/Irish interest and the Protestant/British interest in Ireland has entered a new dimension. This time it is not for the Protestants to preach; it if for the Catholics to rebel. And under Ratzinger the Church may well disintegrate in its attempt at world conquest.

Seamus: If that’s the case, then Irish culture has a role to play – this time a role that is not defined by the Pulpit, but one that grows out of a thinking, reflecting, give-meback- my-power type of people. In any event, here we are again, talking about Irish criminology and being dragged back into Church’s concerns, the identity of the Irish Church and State being too great for us to skirt. Maybe that’s what the ‘Irish dimension’ will come to mean – a breaking away or a redefining of things. Usually, when people speak about it, they hide it under phrases about ‘Irish culture’, ‘Irish peculiarities’, and ‘Irish character.’ These all fudge the analysis. By ‘Irish’ is meant a cultivated Christian space in Irish intellectual and administrative life that results primarily from the eradication and forgotten existence of the indigenous Gaelic people and the occupation of that space by the Christian conquistadores. This is precisely what ‘Irish’ means, and during my lifetime I have never known it to mean anything else. The ‘Irish’ are the Christian conquerors, regardless of the efforts made by the Catholic ‘ Irish’ to persuade themselves and everyone else that the Protestants are a bit more Anglo-Irish than they, who, as Catholics, are somehow more native, more authentic, and therefore less predatory.

Sile: For me Ireland in the eighteenth century is one of sadness and schizophrenia. We know that the use of the English language is rising as the widespread use of Gaelic is declining. The anvil, upon which the past and the future are forged, lies between the backward look and the vision forward, and both are as blurred as it is possible to get.

Sean: For me the eighteenth century is the age of classical music, and it is hard to think of it without hearing a Mozartian or a Handelian flourish. The dismal economists like Adam Smith, and Bentham were positively jovial when compared to men of letters like Swift, Molyneaux, Malthus, Johnson (Samuel), reformers like Beccaria, Romilly, Howard and the Irish ‘Howard ‘, Fitzpatrick. Utilitarianism or the Social Contract Theory is every bit as applicable in Presbyterian Ireland as elsewhere. I know you have made the case that the rebellion was an Irish bourgeois event. But before we look at the details in Wolfe Tone’s thinking, could you outline something of the crimes and punishments that we are talking about?

Seamus: Without going down an egoistic or a sentimental road might I say that for me it meant 600 Carlovians (Catholics) being slaughtered by a Protestant garrison and having their bodies dumped in a Croppy Hole in ’98 Street, Graiguecullen, where my father lived during the war years? And there is hardly one account that explains it, including the account of Michael Farrell who lived through it. In some ways, he remains uncomfortably neutral. He was a reasonably well off saddler journeyman, who knew the poor and the rich in the town. He joined the United Irishmen, but at a certain juncture found them ridiculous. They were meant to be secret, for example, but they all got their hair ‘cropped’ so that they would be known to themselves. They didn’t seem to realise that it was futile to think that you were a secret body, when you stood out with a cropped head for one and all to see. Farrell felt that they were naïve, ill equipped and somewhat off the wall. I think he stops short of calling them ridiculous. Anyway he counsels against war in the condition they are in. And he does it so convincingly that it throws suspicion on himself. For even tough he and his friends were arrested and tortured he survives where others were hanged and writes his memoirs long after the events. Apart from his account, there is the Father Mac Sweeney’s account. This is not a contemporary account, and if one were to believe Mac Sweeney, one would imagine that the essentially Presbyterian uprising was begun in St Patrick’s college and was waged only by holy Irish Catholics who either had a priest in the family or adopted some family who had. Then there is Ryan’s History of Carlow. In it we find the Orange account, and it claims quite straightforwardly that the Priests had been egging the Catholic Irish on throughout the 1790s and that they more or less incited that part of it that applies to the Catholics.

Sean: So, we have an irreconcilable position again, straddling as usual the Christian Conquest.

Sile: Carlovians, like the men of Wexford and elsewhere -- and the men of Belfast today -- went out to kill themselves. Why? Just because they initially differed with each other as Christians. It is thanks, therefore, to Christianity that Irish people kill each other still.

Sean: Can we not get away from this most morbid subject? Why can’t we admit it – we don’t even constitute a Goddamn society! We are some kind of herd or horde of Christians. In any event, what about the other forms of crime and punishment besides being a Christian and getting pitch-capped for it by your nearest and dearest neighbours.

Seamus: Perhaps if we list some of the most popular crimes and punishments of the eighteenth century, we would get something like the following list.

     Treason                  Hanging +

At the same time the widespread use of wool, iron and coal, opened up overseas markets and the routes to India and America, which, by 1776, had its civil war and was closing off the intake of convict labour.

And while much has been written about the secret societies, the Shanavests, Philibeens, Drins, Reaskawallahs, and other Faction Fighters, their precise location in Irish life has not been convincingly made. Some have said that they were a response to the enclosures of land and that the secret societies went out at night to maim cattle and break down ditches – a society of levellers. Others have associated them with the phenomenon of Faction Fighting – a spontaneous outbreak of cultural or tribal exultation that necessarily spent itself in beating the bejasus out of each other across tribal animosities. This also has some merit. But whatever the case – and we would prefer to leave such a large question to a more detailed study – we cannot deny that the most foregoing of the secret societies formed around the Defenders and the Peep-O’Day-Boys, these being the more serious minded and the more purposeful of the secret societies.

Before proceeding further with these, we might mention some forms of Urban Crime in the eighteenth century. Apart from the trade and gown riots, Dublin was given much to Urban crime.

b. Urban Crimes:

Urban crimes in the metropolis at this time included such offenders as ‘Chalkers’, ‘Houghers’, Weavers and Butchers, Liberty Boys, Ormond Boys, `’Bucks’, ‘Bloods’, and `Pinkindindies`,

‘As soon as the shades of evening fell the dangers from footpads and highwaymen were infinitely more serious. For instance, we read: ' A few nights since Mr. Hume was attacked by two footpads in Merrion Street, and robbed of two guineas and his watch. They warned him to behave quietly, and give up what he had about him; for if he made any resistance, they would cut him without mercy.' (Town and Country Weekly Magazine, 19th January 1786.)’

… That no lack of severity on the part of the authorities can be held accountable for this prevalence of robberies with violence may be inferred from the following account of an execution at Kilmainham. (The ancient Danish place of execution was Gallows Hills, east of St. Stephen’s Green and south of Lower Baggot Street. A gallows still stood near St. Stephen's Green in 1786, and here the four pirates mentioned shortly, were hanged) 'The execution of five footpads on Saturday last' (25th June 1785) 'was, by an accident, rendered distressing to every person capable of feeling for the misfortunes of their fellow 20 creatures. In about a minute after the five unhappy criminals were turned off; the temporary gallows fell down, and on its re-erection, it was found necessary to suffer three of the unhappy wretches to remain half-strangled on the ground until the other two underwent the sentence of the law, when they in their turn were tied up and executed.' This extract is a good example of the sentimentalism iii such matters which characterized the period.

Three more executions were carried out at the same place on 26th January 1786. The presence of so much wealth in Dublin, while so many of its inhabitants were destitute, must be held accountable for much of this crime, as we find it noted' in Twiss’s tour that 'footpads, robberies, and highwaymen are seldom heard of except in the vicinity of Dublin.'

In the city, however, scarcely a week seems to have passed in which some burglary or robbery with violence is not chronicled. Such being the condition of the streets, we need scarcely wonder that the roads in the neighborhood of the city were infested with highwaymen. In a number of the same weekly paper we read: 'The lads of the road were rather unfortunate on Sunday last, and that too on a cruise in which they expected to levy considerable contributions (Donnybrook Road at fair-time), for between the hours of nine and ten, six of them having' stopped a capriole (sic) near Cold blow Lane and called on the gentlemen therein to deliver their money, one of the gentlemen instantly presenting a musket at them they made a precipitate retreat. Their next attack was on a coach, in which unfortunately for them were four Independent Dublin Volunteers, full armed, two of whom, as soon as one of the robbers presented a pistol at the window, jumped out at the other, and after knocking the villains down with the butts of their firelocks, seized them, notwithstanding a desperate resistance, and brought them to town, where after securing five of them for the night, they had them next morning brought before the sitting magistrate, at the Tholsel, and committed to take their trial.'

Indeed, gentlemen belonging to the volunteers often took upon themselves to patrol the streets at night, and thus men of rank might be found discharging the duties now committed to the capable charge of the Metropolitan Police.

But crime was not limited to robberies or ‘coiners’. In March 1766 four pirates, captured near Dungannon Fort, Waterford, were hanged in St. Stephen's Green, and their bodies suspended in chains on the south wall and afterwards removed to the Muglins, a cluster of small rocks near Dalkey Island.

The dangers of the streets, said Fitzpatrick,

were further added to by the conduct of the 'Bucks' and 'Bloods,' young men of fashion, who founded the notorious 'Hell Fire Club,’ the remains of whose clubhouse still form a landmark on the summit of one of the Dublin mountains. They are said to have set fire to the apartment in which they met, and ‘endured the flames with incredible obstinacy … in derision … of the threatened torments of a future state.' (Ireland Sixty Years Ago, Dublin, 1851, p.18.)

The conduct of these 'Bloods' may be gauged by the following extract from a contemporary newspaper: 'Three Bloods passing through High Street amused themselves by breaking windows, and on one of the inhabitants complaining of their ill-conduct, they pursued him into his shop, struck him violently, and had the brutality to give his wife a dreadful blow in the face. Two of them were soon obliged to retreat and leave their companion behind, who was lodged in the Black Dog Prison' (Formerly Browne's Castle (Mayor in 1614), converted into an inn, known, from its sign of a talbot or hound, as the Black Dog, and early in the 18th century used as the Marshalsea Prison.)

Moreover, according to John Edward Walsh in Chapter 1 of his Ireland 60 Years Ago Dueling, Houghing and Rioting were more of a sport than a crime. In his description of the Town and Gown Riots, the Liberty Boys attacked the Ormond Boys as a matter of habit…

These feuds terminated sometimes in frightful excesses. The butchers used their knives, not to stab their opponents, but for a purpose then common in the barbarous state of Irish society, to hough or cut the tendon of the leg, thereby rendering the person incurably lame for life. On one occasion, after a defeat of the Ormond boys, those of the Liberty retaliated in a manner still more barbarous and revolting. They dragged the persons they seized to their market, and, dislodging the meat they found there, hooked the men by the jaws, and retired, leaving the butchers hanging on their own stalls.

The gownsmen were then a formidable body, and, from a strong esprit de corps, were ready, on short notice, to issue forth in a mass to avenge any insult offered to an individual of their party who complained of it. They converted the keys of their rooms into formidable weapons. They procured them as large and heavy as possible, and slinging them in the sleeves or tails of their gowns, or pockethandkerchiefs, gave with them mortal blows. Even the fellows participated in this esprit de corps. The interior of the college was considered a sanctuary for debtors; and woe to the unfortunate bailiff who violated its precincts. There stood, at that time, a wooden pump in the centre of the frontcourt to which delinquents in this way were dragged the moment they were detected, and all but smothered. One of the then fellows, Dr. Wilder, [Rev. Theaker Wilder, a good mathematical scholar was tutor to Oliver Goldsmith. He was elected Fellow in 1744; and died in 1777:] was a man of very eccentric habits, and possessed little of the gravity and decorum that distinguish the exemplary fellows of Trinity at the present day. He once met a young lady in one of the crossings, where she could not pass h