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

The Carrickshock Incident, 1831 41
gore’. 17 They also celebrate the mutilation of the constables’ bodies,
as in this passage from the popular Carrickshock Victory:
They had the rabble along before them,
Like wolves opposing the Shepherd’s ock.
’Till in death’s cold agonies they left them groaning,
In the boreheen of Carrickshock.
Who could desire to see better sporting,
To see them groping among the rocks.
Their skulls all fractured and eye-balls broken,
Their ne long noses and ears cut off.
A New Song Called the Battle of Carrickshock, set to the popular tune St
Patrick’s Day, describes how:
When the boys sallied round as they came to the ground,
And frightened those hounds with their bawling,
But a crack in the Crown soon brought Butler down,
And the process server for death was left sprawling.
The Captain ordered re when he saw him in the mire,
The con ict became most alarming,
But a blow on the jowl soon brought him down,
Before Patrick’s day in the morning.
Then the Peelers did fall, without murmur or bawl,
Then their guns and their bayonets were shattered,
How sad was their case, when their eyes, nose and face,
When their lives and relocks were battered.
Verses of this kind exemplify what is perhaps the most conspicuous
feature of the contemporary ballads: their vengeful and triumphalist
tone. All of them represent Carrickshock as A Good Thing; a crucial
victory for ‘Us’ against ‘Them’, a sure sign of the imminent destruction
of Protestantism and the restoration of the land to its rightful owners.
Watt Murphy’s ballad Carrickshock Victory recalls the predictions of Protestant
annihilation in 1825 that had been foretold in the so-called ‘Pastorini
prophesies’ that swept through the region a decade earlier. 18
These now became linked to the events at Carrickshock and to the
better days that would surely follow:
We heard the text of the divine sages,
That when the date of the year is gone,
That one true Catholic without a weapon
Would banish legions from Slievenamon. %
17 Kean’s Farewell to Ireland, NAI, CSO, RP, 1832/950.
18 See James S. Donnelly Jr, ‘Pastorini and Captain Rock: Millenarianism and
Sectarianism in the Rockite Movement of 1821–4’ in Samuel Clark and James S.
Donnelly Jr (eds), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914 (Manchester
University Press, Manchester, 1983) pp. 102–39.
Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1)