Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 290

Hitherto the historiography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish rural rebellion has been dominated by studies that could be described as belonging to the ‘spasmodic’ school of protest studies. In a sense this is not too surprising, for, to many commentators at the time, Ireland was seemingly in a state of constant rebellion. Against a limited metropolitan toll of the Jack-a-Lent riots, Luddism, the Bread or Blood riots, and Swing, historians of Irish protest have documented the Houghers’ movement, Whiteboy movements, Rightboy movements, Ulster Oakboy and Steelboy movements, Ribbonism, Rock, and the Tithe War. Arguably the most important – and certainly the most politically iconic – ‘movement’ of all was that instigated by the United Irishmen, the initially middle-class and Belfast-based organization that blended republicanism and Tom Paine’s natural rights discourse in seeking parliamentary reform and Catholic and Dissenter emancipation. Such a heady mix of doctrines and goals proved massively attractive not only to the merchants and traders of the major Irish towns but also to the tenant farmers and cottiers of rural Ireland. Their planned rising of 1798 was brutally put down by the combined forces of Dublin Castle and the British state, and the last of the republican rebels was crushed at Vinegar Hill, County Wexford, on 21 June.

Conventional understandings relate that, thereafter, with the exception of a small-scale rising supported by a French landing at Killala, County Mayo, in July 1798, the United Irishmen had been totally routed, the absolute nadir coming in July 1803 when Robert Emmet returned from his exile in France to lead one last failed rising on the streets of Dublin. Patterson’s welcome study, building upon Nancy Curtin’s pioneering revisionism, offers a useful corrective. Focusing upon counties Antrim and Down in Ulster, south Muster, Galway and Mayo, and South Leinster, Patterson not only shows the value of studies of republicanism and agrarian protest between the landmark episodes of rebellion, but also demonstrates that wherever one looks in the archive it is possible to find evidence of continued United Irishmen organization and activity after 1798. This persistence in the face of the bloody repression of the ‘Great Rebellion’ and the subsequent imposition of martial law over large parts of Ireland attest to the widespread popular adherence to the tenets of the United Irishmen and the continued fear of reprisals amongst landlords, Church of Ireland clergymen and magistrates. In Antrim and Down – major Presbyterian settlements – overtures by the Orange Order proved remarkably ineffective at converting Presbyterian farmers and linen weavers to Loyalism: Patterson shows that the resurgent Defender movement proved a greater attraction, thus rejecting the received notion that Dissenters flooded to Orangeism. Sectarianism was not a by-product of the failure of the 1798 rebellion: its emergence can be pushed back, Patterson persuasively argues, at least another five years. Indeed a broadly based United Irishmen organization is shown to have been remarkably enduring against the repeated purges and systematic sweeps of the countryside by the yeomanry. Even post-1798 fissures and a failure to agree on strategies did not render the organization politically inert.

In Cork, an agrarian county then wealthy on the back of the Atlantic provisions trade, and in the surrounding counties, much of the post-1798 protest assumed forms and practices of earlier Whiteboy-ism, secret agrarian societies noted for their use of violence against the persons and property of tithe-holders and rack renters. Yet such an interpretation masks the more complex organizational forms and political doctrines assumed by the protestors. They were, Patterson shows, without doubt, United Irishmen. In large part, protests in this area as well as in South Leinster, can be attributed to the extraordinary efforts of ‘rebel’ leaders, individuals who often had links with France. Arguably though, Patterson’s most important contribution is to show that, against the ready resort by Loyalists to violence against Catholics and their property, and in the form of Dublin Castle’s use of summary and post-trial executions, the post-1798 actions of the United Irishmen were far more violent than before. This ‘brutalization’ of Irish society was the important legacy of the failure of the Great Rebellion.

In conclusion, Patterson’s superb book stands as a landmark in the study of Irish society at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is splendidly researched and constructed, convincingly argued and does not pull its punches. One minor criticism is that Patterson tends to over-egg his pudding by offering copious detail and multiple examples to back up his assertions, thereby disrupting the flow of his argument. But this is small beer. Together with Dooley’s The murders at Wildgoose Lodge (2007) and Huggins’s study of protest in prefamine Roscommon (2007), Patterson’s study offers a useful new model for Irish protest studies wherein the dramatic episodes of conflict are grounded in the local socio-political contexts as well as the prior and subsequent protest histories.