The Carrickshock Incident, 1831: Social Memory and an Irish cause ...

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The Carrickshock Incident, 1831 47 remembered for decades as a sign of divine favour toward the crowd in its ght with the constables. 42 The Irish Folklore Commission archives contain numerous tales relating to the incident. They deal with women killing policemen as they ed the scene of the battle; with local ghting factions permanently ending their feuds to take on a common foe; with participants on the run from authorities in the aftermath of the battle; and with the treacheries of landlords and informants. 43 The examples we have examined thus far – from ballads, to speeches, to angry shouts, to rumours and folktales – are reminders that collective remembering functions largely through language; it occurs mainly in a world of words. But it also takes place in a world of things and these, in turn, enhance the narratives through which earlier events are recalled. 44 As Seamus Heaney remarks, ‘Objects which have been seasoned by human contact possess a kind of moral force; they insist upon human solidarity and suggest obligations to and covenants with generations who have been silenced’. 45 The popular nationalist memory of Carrickshock was also constructed around artefacts connected with the incident, artefacts that helped to evoke vivid conceptions of the encounter. These included, above all, weapons used in the battle. Members of the crowd carried away a number of policemen’s bayonets and treasured them for decades as relics of the skirmish. Two of these weapons, along with a pitchfork that had been used to kill a policeman, were collected from veterans of the battle in 1864 and put on public display as part of a remarkable exhibition of patriotic Irish artefacts that American Fenians organized that year in Chicago. 46 Another bayonet was removed from the body of a dying local man and it remains in the possession of his descendants to this day. 47 According to local legend, this same young man died with his head resting upon a particular rock in the boreen wall. When in 1927 the Hugginstown hurling team awarded medals to its members and announced that it was changing its name to the ‘Carrickshock Champions’, a journalist thought it important to record that they did so directly in front of the legendary rock in the wall. It was, he implied, a ceremony that linked the achievements of the young athletes with an equally young local martyr and with the best-known event in the history of their locality. 48 42 Kilkenny Journal, 12 Dec 1917; O’Sullivan, Cinnlae, vol. 3, pp. 93–5. 43 IFC, Schools MS 849, pp. 144, 146, 301; Main collection MS 1240, p. 195. 44 Alan Radley, ‘Artefacts, Memory and a Sense of the Past’ in David Middleton and Derek Edwards (eds), Collective Remembering (Sage, London, 1990) pp. 57–8. 45 Seamus Heaney, ‘A Sense of the Past’, History Ireland, 1, 4 (1993) p. 33. 46 Irish People, 5 March 1864. On the exhibition itself, see Brian Grif n, ‘“Scallions, Pikes and Bog Oak Ornaments”: The Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Chicago Fenian Fair, 1864’, Studia Hibernica, 29 (1995/97) pp. 85–98. 47 Kilkenny Journal, 12 Dec 1917. A photograph of this bayonet is reproduced in John Gaule, FSC, ‘The Battle of Carrickshock: An Episode from the Tithe War, 1831’, unpublished MS, private collection (n.d.), nal page. 48 Munster Express, 16 Dec 1927. Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
48 Gary Owens It was almost inevitable that the boreen itself would become an object of veneration, a sacred space, a site of memory in the most literal sense of the term. As we shall see, this was most evident during the rst decades of the twentieth century when local people made the narrow laneway a place of annual pilgrimage. But perhaps the most eloquent expression of its status in popular memory occurred during the war of independence. On the night of 8 March 1920, nearly 60 armed members of the Kilkenny Brigade of the Irish Republican Army staged a major assault on Crown forces; their target was the Royal Irish Constabulary barracks in Hugginstown. IRA commanders could have gathered their raiding party in any number of spots around the village in the hours before the attack, but the assembly point they selected was, appropriately enough, the Carrickshock boreen. Almost a mile from the barracks and on the downward slope of an open hillside, it offered no tactical advantages whatsoever. Its value lay solely in what it represented to the men who assembled there, not to mention the local population who would learn of it later. By commencing their assault from the very spot where local people had triumphed decisively over policemen nearly a century earlier, they were forging an unambiguous link between the two events. The subsequent success of their operation, which saw the constabulary arsenal captured and the barracks destroyed, enhanced the symbolic potency of Carrickshock all the more. 49 II No single group, including local nationalists, could ever monopolize the memory of Carrickshock. People from outside the community contested it from the start and, not surprisingly, the most outspoken of these were Protestant anti-nationalists. They saw Carrickshock as a metaphor for papist cruelty, a stark reminder of the innate barbarity and evil intentions of the Catholic lower orders. In local tory newspapers the incident was variously portrayed as an act of ‘cold-blooded villainy’, a ‘savage massacre’ and the work of ‘blood-thirsty wretches’ who ‘succeeded but too well in leading on their victims to slaughter’. 50 Loyalist accounts of the killings bristled with volatile sectarian images, the most prominent being the way that the bells of the Catholic chapels in Hugginstown and other villages rang out on the morning of the encounter to gather the massive crowd. ‘While the chapel bells summoned a savage, ferocious and priest-ridden peasantry’, recounted the writers of an 1836 evangelical tract, the constables and process server ‘were decoyed, surrounded and barbarously butchered 49 Kilkenny People, 13 March 1920; Jim Maher, The Flying Column: West Kilkenny, 1916– 1921 (Geography, Dublin, 1988) ch. 4. 50 Kilkenny Moderator, 17, 21 Dec 1831; Leinster Express, 4 Jan 1834. Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
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