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‘A violent society’?

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Summary

Sir Richard Hussey Vivian, commander of the armed forces in Ireland, addressing a select committee on the state of the country in 1832, remarked on the ‘extraordinary carelessness of human life’ amongst the mass of the people – declaring that, although generally hospitable, they ‘would have no sort of hesitation in taking up a stone and committing a murder’. Before the 1839 select committee on crime in Ireland, Joseph Tabeteau agreed that there was ‘a very great disregard’ for human life ‘manifested in the feelings and practice of the peasantry’ and noted that ‘even after death it is astonishing how soon the thing passes away, without leaving any remembrance, even at the very inquest there is very little feeling shown.’ Maxwell Hamilton, the crown solicitor for the north-east circuit, stated before the 1852 select committee on outrages that there was ‘a great recklessness of human life’ which arose from the ‘great demoralizing effect on the minds of the people’ of witnessing murders. For others, Ireland stood out from much of the rest of Europe as a violent place. Writing in the mid-1830s, George Cornewall Lewis claimed that ‘in a large part of Ireland there is still less security of person and property than in any other part of Europe, except perhaps the wildest districts of Calabria or Greece.

Travel writers too noted a tendency towards violence and often dwelt on its prevalence in Irish life. Henry Inglis, while recounting a faction fight in the west of Ireland in 1834, reflected on the general ‘abundance of fighting’, he had encountered on his journey through the country. For John Barrow, travelling along the south coast in the autumn of 1835, fighting was a ‘pastime’ among the ‘lower class of Hibernians’ who, particularly when under the influence of whiskey, had an ‘extraordinary propensity’ to fight. Such fights were, moreover, as often with their ‘nearest relations [and] friends’ as with ‘foes’. Caesar Otway, reflecting on the negligence of the Irish lower classes in curbing the ‘tempers of their children’, found little surprise in the fact that in Ireland ‘the savage hand [was] so often lifted up to strike and commit a homicide.’ For Gustave de Beaumont, writing in the late 1830s, Irishmen were both ‘violent and vindictive’, displaying ‘the most ferocious cruelty’ in their ‘acts of vengeance’.

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Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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