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

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The Carrickshock Incident, 1831 37 mid-day on Wednesday, 14 December 1831, at the height of the tithe war. Thirty-eight armed constables were guarding a hired agent, or process server, as he delivered legal summonses to tithe defaulters: that is, people – mostly Catholics – who had not paid the taxes levied upon them to support the local Church of Ireland parson. Called out by the ringing of chapel bells, a crowd of more than a thousand men, women and children surrounded the police as they moved along a road between the villages of Hugginstown and Ballyhale. They wanted the process server, a local man named Edmund Butler, whom they intended to punish by forcing him to his knees, beating him and making him eat his summonses. ‘Give us Butler!’ they yelled repeatedly to the constables, ‘We’ll have Butler or blood!’ The man in charge of the column, Captain James Gibbons, a middle-aged veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who had fought at Waterloo and was a constabulary of cer of six years’ standing, doggedly refused. People and police soon found themselves squeezed tightly together in a narrow lane, or boreen, that was enclosed on both sides by high stone walls. The swelling crowd pressed in on the constables, making movement in any direction impossible. Suddenly, a young man lunged in among the police, grabbed the process server by his coat and tried to pull him toward the outside. A constable yanked Butler back. Then, without warning, someone hurled a st-sized rock that slammed into Butler’s skull. He pitched forward and dropped among the legs of the constables, his papers ying about him. Captain Gibbons, astride his horse at the rear of the column, shouted the order to re. A handful of constables got off rounds, but because they were packed together so densely in the constricted boreen, none could take proper aim, let alone reload. With that, people began to wrench heavy rocks from the walls and heave them down upon the constables. ‘The stones hit each other [in the air] they were so thick’, recalled one who was there, ‘they were like a shower’. Others attacked the police with pitchforks, clubs, hurling sticks and their bare hands. Minutes later, 13 constables – including Captain Gibbons – and the process server Edmund Butler lay dead or dying, most from shattered skulls and appalling stab wounds. Another 14 of cers suffered severe injuries; only 11 of the 38 came away unharmed or with minor scrapes. Of the crowd, three were killed and an unknown number injured. 3 Although clashes between armed authorities and groups of civilians were depressingly familiar events in pre-famine Ireland, this brief encounter seems to stand apart from most of the others. Besides the extent of its carnage – 17 dead and scores badly injured in the space of a few minutes – it is remarkable chie y because of who its victims 3 This description of the incident is based mainly upon the depositions of surviving constables found in the National Archives of Ireland, Chief Secretary’s Of ce, Registered Papers (hereafter NAI, CSO, RP), 1831, K-25. Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
38 Gary Owens were. Unlike other encounters of this kind in which crowds usually bore the brunt of the violence, most of the casualties at Carrickshock were policemen. What was more, their attackers did not use rearms. Nevertheless, the Carrickshock incident is not a prominent event in Irish history. For one thing, it lacked some of the familiar prerequisites: contemporaries recorded no acts of uncommon bravery; no stirring words spoken before, during, or after the ghting; no participants boasting that they had won a memorable victory. Nor did the incident have momentous consequences: it did not bring about the abolition of tithes or even change the way that they were collected. It is not surprising, therefore, that in most general histories of nineteenthcentury Ireland the affair is literally a footnote, if it is mentioned at all. But to people in the locality it has always been much more than a footnote. It was when History with a capital ‘H’ came to their neighbourhood; when something extraordinary happened that set their community apart from other places. For more than a century and a half, they and others would interpret the incident through poems, songs, pamphlets, paintings, sculpture, novels, speeches, rumours, public demonstrations, folk tales, commemorative monuments and yards upon yards of newsprint. These were the means by which people tried to make sense of what happened in that muddy laneway on that December morning and to communicate it to others. They were expressions of collective remembering, what has come to be called ‘social memory’. The ways that societies remember their pasts have become a subject of intense scholarly interest of late, particularly among historians of France, Britain, Russia and the United States. 4 The impact of this phenomenon upon Irish historiography can be gauged in a host of recent studies that have examined how later generations constructed and utilized some of the country’s more prominent sites of memory – the siege of Derry, the 1798 rebellion, the great famine, the 1916 rising chief among them. Without exception, they have shown how ‘Big Events’ drift in and out of public consciousness over time and are interpreted according to the changing needs, preoccupations and perceptions of successive generations. Their research suggests, in other words, how some dominant sites of memory have worked in an Irish context. 5 But how have less conspicuous events such as Carrickshock been popularly imagined and portrayed? How have people in small, some- 4 One observer even suggests that a kind of ‘memory industry’ now sets the agenda for historical scholarship. Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations, 69 (2000) pp. 127–50. 5 See especially Ian McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001), and The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology (Four Courts, Dublin, 1997); Kevin Whelan, ‘’98 After ’98: The Politics of Memory’ in Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Cork University Press, Cork, 1996) pp. 133–75; James S. Donnelly Jr, The Great Irish Potato Famine (Sutton, Gloucester, 2001); and Ma/´r/´n n/´ Dhonnchadh and Theo Dorgan (eds), Revising the Rising (Field Day, Derry, 1991). Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)
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The Carrickshock Incident, 1831: Social Memory and an Irish cause ...

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