The Carrickshock Massacre: Ten Minutes That Shook Irish Policing

THE PÓILÍNÍ PODCAST — “The Carrickshock Massacre: Ten Minutes That Shook Irish Policing”

00:00:03:07 – 00:00:20:11
Announcer
The Póilíní Podcast, hosted by writer Helen Moorhouse and Doctor John Reynolds. Stories of duty and danger, life and the law, police and perpetrators.

00:00:20:13 – 00:00:27:15
Helen
So, John, I’m a history nerd and you’re a history expert. And this is the Póilíní Podcast. It is. What are we doing here?

00:00:27:16 – 00:00:32:19
John
We want to tell stories from the history of Irish policing, which goes back over 200 years.

00:00:32:21 – 00:00:44:02
Helen
And it’s stories that, through the way we tell them and the interesting facts and the little-known snippets, are going to give us an overview of the history of policing in Ireland from the very, very earliest days to where we are today.

00:00:44:04 – 00:00:56:19
John
You could basically think of it as stories coming out of a policeman’s notebook that may or may not be known, seen, or heard before — or, you know, I did almost 40 years in the Guards, and out of my notebooks alone, probably several books could be written from the stories in there.

00:00:56:20 – 00:00:59:08
Helen
You’ve served actively in An Garda Síochána.

00:00:59:09 – 00:01:11:16
John
Yeah, I joined in 1985, and I did almost 40 years, and I worked in a variety of roles — you know, I was in uniform and I was in plainclothes. I was in the Special Surveillance Unit when Martin Cahill was running around the place.

00:01:11:17 – 00:01:21:04
Helen
So this podcast isn’t just about An Garda Síochána today, or about the history of An Garda Síochána. Clarify for us — what is the history of Irish policing?

00:01:21:08 – 00:01:41:10
John
Well, An Garda Síochána was founded in 1922, but it replaced the previous police force, which was called the Constabulary. It had different names over the years — it was the Constabulary of Ireland, then the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the County Constabulary at different periods — but that had policed Ireland really since 1814. And Dublin had a separate police force as well, called the Dublin Metropolitan Police.

00:01:41:10 – 00:01:50:16
John
The DMP, which was unarmed, whereas the Constabulary was always armed, because rural Ireland was a lot more violent and dangerous than the city was — you might be surprised to hear.

00:01:50:17 – 00:01:54:05
Helen
Really? The Guards are only half the story of Irish policing.

00:01:54:06 – 00:02:03:23
John
Yeah, and I mean, in many ways, the history of policing in Ireland is the history of Ireland in the last 200 years.

00:02:04:00 – 00:02:32:09
Helen
Kilkenny city, spring 1832. An unusual sound fills the streets — the slow march of feet, accompanied by a sombre air. A funeral. Onlookers watch as the mourners round a corner and come into view. But it’s not what they expect. It’s children — hundreds of them, in procession.

00:02:32:11 – 00:02:58:07
Helen
Above the noise of the city, they whistle the Dead March. At the centre of the procession, a wooden barrow bumps over the cobbles, bearing a figure in a shroud — a corpse made not of flesh, but of make-believe and mockery: an officer of the Constabulary. Authorities watch; magistrates take notes. In the coming days, two of these hundred mourners will be arrested.

00:02:58:11 – 00:03:28:21
Helen
One of them only 11 years old. The recent event they commemorate is one which has torn through the countryside, leaving anger, grief and defiance in its wake. It’s a high-stakes game to remember — but remember they will, like thousands around the country, and hundreds of thousands more right up to the present day. Carrickshock will never be forgotten.

00:03:28:23 – 00:03:49:15
Helen
This week we’re going back the guts of 100 years. The phrase “the stuff of legend” is often very overused, but the story we’re going to talk about today is quite literally legendary. And we’re going to take a look at the Carrickshock Massacre — a clash on a country road in Kilkenny between Irish peasants, for want of a better word, and the constabulary of the time.

00:03:49:16 – 00:04:20:18
Helen
And it hasn’t turned up in the mainstream history books, but it’s rippled down over 200 years, and it’s been commemorated in — I’ve got a list here — poems, songs, pamphlets, paintings, sculpture, novels, speeches, public demonstrations, folktales, commemorative monuments, and multiple articles and stories. It’s been passed orally down through the generations, and it’s even made its way into the sort of macabre children’s games like the one we heard about in our intro. Talk to us about Carrickshock, John.

00:04:20:19 – 00:04:21:22
Helen
John.

00:04:21:23 – 00:04:51:09
John
Yes, Helen. There’s also a new GAA club called Carrickshock. It’s an extremely significant event in Irish history, but it kind of faded from memory over time, except locally in County Kilkenny, in the rural area where it happened. Maybe that’s because of other events that took place, and also because even at the time, some very prominent Irish nationalists — now, because of independence — distanced themselves from it, because of the nature and extreme violence of the massacre. For the constabulary, they’d only been founded a few years earlier.

00:04:51:09 – 00:05:02:15
John
So it was an absolutely massive event for them, and it changed the way that they operated for the remainder of their existence, up until 1922 — particularly in rural Ireland.

00:05:02:16 – 00:05:26:16
Helen
We’ll do a bit of historical housekeeping, as we do, just to set the scene. So it’s 1831. Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom. This is long before the Famine, and the population is overwhelmingly Catholic. But the power and the money are in the hands of the Protestant Ascendancy and the British administration, despite the fact that we’ve had Catholic Emancipation for two years already at this point.

00:05:26:17 – 00:05:42:21
Helen
So the hallmarks of the time are poverty, religious tension, political unrest — though when wasn’t it like that in Ireland? You’re one year into the Tithe War, which will last until 1836. Tithes — why are they something to start a war over?

00:05:42:23 – 00:06:04:11
John
Well, the tithe was viewed as a very, very unfair tax. I mean, the Tithe War ran from 1830 to 1836. Largely, it was nonviolent — a campaign of civil disobedience, primarily, in protest at a compulsory tax called the tithe. So even though Ireland was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic — the majority — they were the ones forced to pay it, while landowners were not.

00:06:04:11 – 00:06:30:10
John
Known as the peasant farmers, or local farmers, they were forced to give 10% of their agricultural produce, or a cash equivalent, to maintain the Church of Ireland — the Protestant Church of Ireland, which was the minority religion. It was also known as “minister’s money,” and the money raised in tithes was used to maintain or repair Protestant churches, pay the wages of ministers and sextons, and it also paid for rectories, which are known as glebe houses.

00:06:30:10 – 00:06:52:21
John
So even today you’ll see “Old Rectory” — very, very substantial buildings. So there was a huge contrast in the way the Catholic priest lived compared to their Church of Ireland counterparts. And, as you said, Catholic Emancipation happened in [18]29, but the tithe obligation was still there. So you can imagine it created widespread resentment amongst the tenant farmers of Ireland, who had very, very little to begin with.

00:06:52:22 – 00:07:00:18
Helen
So it was pre-Famine, and it was also pre-modern policing. So who was keeping law and order at the time?

00:07:00:21 – 00:07:19:06
John
Well, traditionally in Ireland, policing had been done by the military. There were rudimentary systems of law enforcement over centuries under British occupation — you had things like baronial constables, and you had yeomanry militias — but none of them were really impartial, full-time, paid professional police officers. So it was a very, very new concept.

00:07:19:10 – 00:07:28:24
Helen
John, tell us a little bit about the secret societies, in terms of the build-up to Carrickshock — how that would have worked, the dynamic between all these various factions and so on.

00:07:28:24 – 00:07:45:24
John
Because we were under British rule and Irish people couldn’t own land — I mean, people killed each other for half an acre — a lot of secret societies developed. They were secret, obviously, because a lot of information was going back to Dublin Castle. There were spies and informers everywhere in Ireland. They would attack landowners.

00:07:45:24 – 00:08:09:20
John
They would agitate — partly politically, through representatives, but also with physical force — to try and get better conditions for tenant farmers. Robert Peel, who was the Chief Secretary of Ireland at the time, decided to bring in a new force of policemen to deal with it, and that was a radical idea. The new police were called the Peace Preservation Force, or PPF, and they operated on horseback as a heavily armed constabulary force.

00:08:09:20 – 00:08:28:04
John
So Peel would send these men to counties that were categorised — by Dublin Castle — as being “disturbed,” which is a lovely expression, or violent. And the cost was paid by the local ratepayers and landlords. So it was a totally different model — bringing in policemen for the first time to put down trouble, but then the local landowners had to pay for it.

00:08:28:06 – 00:08:40:12
Helen
So — and then how did these local police forces come to be made up? Who was recruited to them — were they Protestant, were they Catholic, were they local, were they British? And how were they received in the country at the time?

00:08:40:13 – 00:08:58:00
John
Well, I’m sure you can imagine the idea of policing was a very unpopular concept at the time. But Peel was clever enough, and he used his experience in Ireland very, very wisely. When he set up the PPF, he decided that the members had to be — and this is a quote from Peel — “Catholic Irishmen who were veteran soldiers of sergeant rank.”

00:08:58:00 – 00:09:18:13
John
So they had military experience, but they were Catholic Irishmen, and he felt that these men would be far more likely to be accepted riding into a town on horseback than British men in the strange uniform of the PPF. As for the public, well, I suppose their views about the police depended on what was going on around them.

00:09:18:13 – 00:09:38:02
John
It ranged from acceptance, when the country was peaceful, to hatred during periods of unrest — it wasn’t the same as it would later be during the Land Wars. But people got used to the idea once they saw them out in the community. And one journalist wrote that the constabulary gradually became the public face of government in Ireland. They were responsible for everything from muzzling a dog to suppressing rebellion.

00:09:38:03 – 00:09:49:14
Helen
So that’s a pretty broad remit on your job spec when you start. And they looked very dapper in those uniforms, with their lovely tall hats and their very long guns — which turned out not to prove so useful to them, as we’ll see.

00:09:49:14 – 00:09:50:23
John
Lots of gold braid as well.

00:09:50:24 – 00:09:52:05
Helen
Very, very —

00:09:52:09 – 00:09:53:14
John
Dressed to the nines.

00:09:53:19 – 00:10:05:09
Helen
And so in Kilkenny at the time — so the Tithe War is going on, and these fellows are keeping law and order in Kilkenny — was it working? Was it not working? What was the general state of play leading up to this?

00:10:05:10 – 00:10:29:05
John
Not really — tithes were extremely unpopular, and public order issues, as we’d call them today — public protest — was really increasing all over the country. In 1831, in December, the Church of Ireland rector of Knocktopher in County Kilkenny, which covers Carrickshock, a man called Doctor Hans Hamilton, appointed a land agent called James Bunbury to collect overdue tithes from his tenants.

00:10:29:06 – 00:10:47:13
John
Bunbury in turn employed a local butcher — he probably had more sense than to do it himself — a local butcher called Edmund Butler, who was known as “Brazen Butler” locally, and who wasn’t a very popular character. He was employed by Bunbury to serve summonses on the tenants. The local resident magistrate for the area, a man called Joseph Green,

00:10:47:13 – 00:11:07:15
John
he authorised the constabulary escort for Butler, because this was really dangerous work — going around serving summonses and court orders on people who didn’t want to pay the tithes was dangerous. Work and tension had been gradually increasing, and for example, in June 1831, at Newtownbarry in Wexford, the constabulary had fired on protesters, killing 12 and wounding 20 of them.

00:11:07:17 – 00:11:12:18
Helen
So those of us old enough to remember the TV show — this is like the land agent’s enforcer character up in his [unclear].

00:11:12:19 – 00:11:14:11
John
Big — yes, that’s him.

00:11:14:12 – 00:11:20:11
Helen
And he’s pretty much saying, right, this fella is going to need a bit of protection because the locals aren’t happy about this.

00:11:20:12 – 00:11:44:21
John
On the 13th of December, a local man called William Keane, who was reported to be a schoolmaster and a veteran of the 1798 Wexford Rebellion, warned Butler’s constabulary escort that there’d be trouble if he continued to serve the notices. A local said that Keane told him: “You serve for the tithes today, and you’re safe today, but we can assure you, if you come to serve them tomorrow, there’ll be bloodshed.”

00:11:44:22 – 00:12:05:14
John
And I should say that Keane had been part of a delegation that met with the rector, Doctor Hans Hamilton, a year earlier, and pleaded with him to reduce the tithe from 10% to 5%. But Hamilton refused. So, as you can see, the tension was increasing, and had been there for a year, long before Carrickshock took place.

00:12:05:16 – 00:12:16:01
Helen
And the locals had obviously then tried, by peaceful means, to get their tithes reduced. So it’s been growing and building, and when they were ignored, obviously this bad feeling is going to increase.

00:12:16:02 – 00:12:33:06
John
There was one man from Hugginstown, which was one of the areas locally. He recalled in later life how a policeman who was billeted in his house the night before the massacre stayed awake all night praying until dawn. And before he left at daybreak, he said goodbye to the household, and said he had a premonition that he wouldn’t see them alive again.

00:12:33:06 – 00:12:37:14
John
And it turned out that he was one of the casualties of the Carrickshock incident.

00:12:37:16 – 00:12:42:05
Helen
So, out of curiosity, why would a policeman have been billeted in this man’s house?

00:12:42:09 – 00:13:02:09
John
Because they’d been on the road for three days, and it was traditional at the time. I mean, the British Army would have done the same before barracks were built in Ireland — for example, the Garda College in Templemore is a good example; that was built as a British Army barracks in 1814. But before that, when the army marched around the country, they would just commandeer accommodation, or set up tents in the fields.

00:13:02:09 – 00:13:18:05
John
But the Duke of Wellington felt that the military needed proper quarters for discipline, hygiene and health reasons. So when the police were on the road, they would just be billeted in places — or they’d go in and take over a barn or an outbuilding, because there was nowhere else to go. They were a long way from barracks.

00:13:18:06 – 00:13:24:22
Helen
And that can’t have been a very popular decision — just to have these guys arrive and go, “right, we’re sleeping in your barn,” or “get out of your bed,” or making your bed.

00:13:25:01 – 00:13:35:10
John
You’d be expected to provide food and water as well to the group. And you really had no say — if policemen turned up on your doorstep and said “we need accommodation,” what were you going to do?

00:13:35:11 – 00:13:50:07
Helen
There’s not much you can do. No, no. So Butler has his protection, and he’s setting off about his daily business, which is to go and issue these summonses to people who haven’t paid their tithes. And that’s not going down well locally.

00:13:50:10 – 00:14:17:06
John
No. You know, by the 14th of December, Butler had been on the road for three days with his constabulary escort, serving summonses for nonpayment of tithes on people in the parish, and a crowd had started to gather, to kind of follow the group. So the tension was building and building. And the county constabulary escort consisted of forty constables under the command of a man called Chief Constable Captain James Gibbons.

00:14:17:07 – 00:14:24:03
John
Now Gibbons was a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo and the Napoleonic Wars. So he was on horseback at the front of the convoy.

00:14:24:05 – 00:14:41:15
Helen
So as a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, and thinking he’s got all this military expertise — what sort of scenarios might he have encountered, being on a battlefield with thousands of other people? How is that different from policing in a small town in Kilkenny?

00:14:41:17 – 00:14:58:14
John
Well, you know, the huge open battles in the Napoleonic Wars — it would have been in Spain and Portugal, huge open battles with massive armies of hundreds of thousands on both sides. So it was a radically different situation, being in rural Ireland employed as a policeman.

00:14:58:14 – 00:15:03:02
Helen
So he was used to — I mean, those wars, they were hand-to-hand combat really, weren’t they? They were —

00:15:03:03 – 00:15:12:14
John
It would have been, yeah. Primarily on horseback, with swords, and cavalry charges against other cavalry charges.

00:15:12:16 – 00:15:45:17
Helen
On the morning of December 14th, 1831, there’s a visitor to the Glebe House in Knocktopher, home of the Protestant rector of the parish. Chief Constable Captain James Gibbons has his day’s work cut out for him, leading 40 of his men in escorting process-server Butler. As he goes about his unwelcome business, Gibbons calls to pay his respects to Rector Hamilton before setting out. There, observed by the then parish curate — the future Reverend Foote — who sees Hamilton implore Gibbons not to shed any blood in the course of their work.

00:15:45:19 – 00:16:08:19
Helen
“I have a large force,” Gibbons replies. “My instructions are ample, and an Irish mob will fly at the first shot.” He could not have been more wrong. As the party sets out along Kilkenny’s quiet roads, they’re followed by bands of locals who blow horns to summon others. Some accounts say that Brazen Butler taunted them as they went along.

00:16:08:21 – 00:16:16:19
Helen
Then the church bells start to ring — first in Ballyhale, then Knocktopher.

00:16:16:21 – 00:16:25:02
Helen
What follows lasts only ten minutes, but leaves 16 dead and 14 injured.

00:16:25:04 – 00:16:51:09
Helen
So John, this is a very cinematic picture of things. You’ve got Gibbons on his horse, you’ve got Butler — this weakling — taunting the locals, in the middle, with his briefcase, or whatever, his bags of papers and all his official gear. And we’ve got 39, 40 of these guys with their big guns and their big hats around them. And all around them — how many people are in the mob? And they’re carrying pitchforks and torches, as is traditional.

00:16:51:09 – 00:16:52:23
Helen
And what does it look like?

00:16:52:24 – 00:17:15:07
John
Well, the estimates came from the police, who made statements afterwards, of over 2,000 people. Again, it’s very hard to estimate a crowd. The crowd had gathered over the previous three days, and when the church bells summoned people to join in with the others that were there, they brought weapons with them, or found weapons on the road — rocks and things that were easy to pick up.

00:17:15:08 – 00:17:27:14
John
So it was an extremely tense situation, as you can imagine — it started out as just the police and Butler, and then by the time they’d got three days into it, there was a crowd of 2,000 following them. So it’s an extremely tense situation.

00:17:27:14 – 00:17:33:20
Helen
And this idea of the church bells ringing — this was, as you’ve said, sort of the WhatsApp of the time, wasn’t it?

00:17:33:22 – 00:17:58:01
John
Yeah. It was like — how do you signal people in an area like that? I mean, in olden times it would have been a bonfire. But at that stage, the church bell tended to be outside the church itself, so anybody could go and ring it locally to summon assistance. If there was a fire in the village, or some news that needed to be shared, somebody would go and ring the bell, and then people would go to the church, which generally wasn’t far away, and find out what was going on.

00:17:58:01 – 00:18:01:16
John
Why did you signal us to come, and why did you ring the bell?

00:18:01:20 – 00:18:11:13
Helen
Talk us through it, from Gibbons’s point of view — from his horse — and what built up around him, and why he ignored it, why he proceeded.

00:18:11:14 – 00:18:33:18
John
Yeah, it’s possible there was a mixture of hubris or arrogance — that he just decided, “Look, I’m going to do my duty, whatever happens.” And he might have been encouraging his men that no one would touch them. And he did say, as reported — perhaps showing a lack of understanding of policing — that if they fired a shot, the crowd would run off.

00:18:33:21 – 00:18:35:01
John
He was wrong on that one.

00:18:35:02 – 00:18:44:00
Helen
And of course the crowd was pressed in so tightly — am I right in saying the guns were actually too long? They couldn’t actually point them, because there was no room to point them at a person.

00:18:44:01 – 00:18:56:14
John
Yeah — Gibbons would have had a pistol, as an officer. But the other men would have had not only a rifle, but a bayonet on the end of the rifle. In reality it was probably about eight foot long, that they were carrying along this boreen.

00:18:56:14 – 00:19:00:12
Helen
And this boreen was very tight — there were walls on either side. There wasn’t eight foot of space.

00:19:00:13 – 00:19:00:23
John
No.

00:19:01:00 – 00:19:02:07
Helen
Not by any means.

00:19:02:09 – 00:19:20:07
John
As they went down the boreen, a local man called James Tracy — he was only 20 years old — made an effort to grab Brazen Butler, but he was immediately bayoneted by two constables, and then shot by Gibbons from his horse. When the crowd saw this, as you can imagine, they erupted, and then attacked the constabulary. They used stones,

00:19:20:07 – 00:19:40:10
John
hurleys — of course, being Kilkenny — pikes and scythes. And Gibbons ordered his men to open fire, and while managing to get off one shot each, they were completely overwhelmed. Then, within only a few minutes, Brazen Butler was dead, Gibbons was dead, and 11 constables were dead in the boreen. 14 more constables were severely injured.

00:19:40:10 – 00:19:51:12
John
Some of them weren’t expected to survive, and three local men had also been killed — James Tracy, the man who grabbed Butler, and two other men called Patrick Power and Thomas Phelan.

00:19:51:14 – 00:20:11:08
Helen
At what point — so they’d had to filter down this boreen with the walls on either side, and the next thing there’s 2,000 people around them — why do you think Gibbons kept going, even at that point? Why do you think he never made the decision to say “let’s call this off, let’s come back tomorrow, we’ve got a problem here”?

00:20:11:10 – 00:20:32:08
John
He might have seen even a strategic retreat as a failure — it would have damaged his reputation. He’d have to go back to Reverend Hamilton and say they didn’t serve the summonses. Why? Hamilton would complain to the local JP, or to Dublin Castle. And connections and influence were so important in that period that Gibbons might have felt his career would be damaged — that he couldn’t be seen to retreat.

00:20:32:09 – 00:20:51:08
John
Or maybe in the army he never retreated, even strategically. So it could be the case that he didn’t want to be the one to say he’d failed the job he was given, the instructions he was given by Dublin Castle. Having said that, he was the chief constable for the local constabulary, so he was in charge of an entire force of around 124 men.

00:20:51:09 – 00:21:08:24
John
So ultimately, any decision he made, he could say “I made that decision in the interest of my men,” and report back to Dublin Castle — it wasn’t worth the risk. He also should have made sure that Brazen Butler kept his mouth shut, because he was only agitating the crowd. And I’ve certainly been in that situation myself,

00:21:08:24 – 00:21:30:06
John
with somebody agitating a crowd. And what you need to do is get them out of there, take them away from the scene. If you’re making an arrest, or trying to get out of somewhere, you get that person away from anyone who’s rabble-rousing or agitating. And that wasn’t done — apparently Butler was engaging with the crowd, and maybe felt arrogant because he was surrounded by these policemen,

00:21:30:06 – 00:21:33:11
John
thinking, “what are they going to do to me, I’ve got all these guys protecting me?”

00:21:33:12 – 00:21:54:22
Helen
So there were a number of strategic mistakes. He didn’t rein Butler in. His choice of route led them into complete and utter danger. And very soon he found himself completely and utterly overpowered. Do you think, in that moment, he panicked? Do you think he just thought he could shoot his way out of it, as it descended into chaos?

00:21:54:22 – 00:21:56:24
Helen
What do you think was going on in Gibbons’s head?

00:21:57:01 – 00:22:16:06
John
I’d imagine he would have realised they were surrounded and in serious trouble. And then — I mean, immediately when the trouble started, he was taken down straight away, so he didn’t have much of a chance to respond. But I’m sure he realised, for a few seconds, that he had made this fundamental mistake — that they were now surrounded on all sides.

00:22:16:06 – 00:22:25:04
John
The crowd was, was, was really raining down on them, and it was going on. And, in one way, unfortunately for him and a lot of his men, that was it.

00:22:25:06 – 00:22:43:15
Helen
John, in your experience as a former guard, when dealing with a public order incident, as it would be called now — what does the moment feel like when it goes from maybe feeling a little unruly, getting a little out of hand, before it turns into something more serious? What’s that moment in between like?

00:22:43:17 – 00:23:03:04
John
Well, it’s funny, you can actually feel the tension building up. I was at one in Dundalk back then, to do with the Anglo-Irish Agreement, that sort of stuff. We were brought up from Dublin to reinforce the locals, and there were petrol bombs, trolleys and so forth — even driving into the town that day, on the bus, you could feel the tension.

00:23:03:05 – 00:23:32:18
John
You knew something was going to happen, you didn’t know what, but it was constantly reinforced by our sergeants and our superintendent what our role was as a policeman. That’s really, really important — this is what you do, you’re there to prevent trouble. If somebody begins trouble, you make an arrest. In the military, you might fire a shot or charge somebody; in our world, in the police, you’ve got to think about making an arrest and going to court and what happens in the aftermath of making an arrest.

00:23:32:18 – 00:23:50:15
John
But you can definitely feel, walking around the streets, trouble in the air. And you hope it doesn’t happen, but you generally have that instinct — a good instinct — that something’s going to happen. And you always have that tipping point where it’s kicking off — and in our case, when the reinforcements landed, we knew: this is it.

00:23:50:15 – 00:24:07:15
John
Now there’s going to be a full-blown public order situation. And at the time we didn’t have a public order unit, we didn’t have any equipment either — a helmet, I think, was about it. Whereas now, in fairness, it’s a lot more professional than it was.

00:24:07:17 – 00:24:30:22
John
And then, suddenly, it’s over — a couple of minutes later, people have scattered, the damage is done, and you’re trying to work out what to do next. And you’re very, very conscious not to get separated from your colleagues, to stay with somebody. There were only, I think, 50 of us who’d been brought up from Dublin. So you’re concerned about getting surrounded, about running down a street after somebody, being lured into a trap, in an area you’re not familiar with.

00:24:30:22 – 00:24:48:08
John
So it’s very, very tense and nerve-wracking at times. So I can understand a little of what Gibbons maybe felt when he had that moment: “Oh my God, this is really serious now — I can’t get out of it, I can’t retreat, I can’t back up, I’m in a boreen, we’re surrounded, what do we do?”

00:24:48:08 – 00:24:54:13
John
And then somebody grabs Butler, and he’s bayoneted and shot. And that’s it, then.

00:24:54:14 – 00:25:02:21
Helen
And that’s it. Yeah — this was very short, bloody and brutal. This was men with rocks versus men with guns, and the men with rocks were winning.

00:25:02:23 – 00:25:22:01
John
Yeah, it was pretty gruesome. Because the crowd overwhelmed the police at short range and from higher ground, and didn’t have firearms, the dead and wounded policemen received appalling injuries — ranging from shattered skulls caused by rocks, to multiple stab wounds. There’s a lot of folklore surrounding the massacre, giving dramatic, anecdotal accounts of what took place during it.

00:25:22:01 – 00:25:43:01
John
Now, I should say that the surviving policemen did make statements and depositions to Dublin Castle afterwards, so there are different accounts of what went on, from both the protesters’ side and the police’s. And I suppose you have to ask — do you give more credence to the anecdotal information in ballads and songs written years later, or to what the policemen said in the immediate aftermath of the massacre?

00:25:43:01 – 00:26:09:04
John
But still, if you put them together, you can get an idea of what happened. For example, it was said that the crowd wanted to take Butler away from the policemen, force him to his knees, and make him eat the summonses he was trying to serve. It’s also said that when James Tracy fell to the ground, in a kind of Hollywood touch, he said “fight on, boys” before he died on the side of the road — which is a lovely story, though we don’t know if it happened.

00:26:09:06 – 00:26:35:05
John
The constables’ depositions, which are held in the National Archives, describe the stones being thrown at them as so thick that they were hitting off each other in the air and coming down on them like a shower of rain. Another constable reported that only 11 of the 38 policemen escaped uninjured from the carnage. On the man who bayoneted him, one sergeant called Peter Harvey said that he was the man who had bayoneted a man he called Tracy — but in reality it must have been James Tracy.

00:26:35:07 – 00:26:58:23
John
So there is a consistency there, because Tracy was definitely bayoneted, and it seems to have been Sergeant Harvey — but he was also shot by Captain Gibbons before he was killed. So in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, of course, procedures had to take place. A local justice of the peace called Morris Reade arranged for the dead bodies to be removed to a place called Kilmoganny nearby, so that an inquest could take place.

00:26:58:23 – 00:27:15:07
John
So there was a very rudimentary inquest — “that guy was killed by a stone or a bayonet,” and that was the end of the investigation. The inquest jury would say “this guy died because of a stone injury to the head,” or “he was stabbed” — and that was as far as the police investigation into the deaths went.

00:27:15:09 – 00:27:34:05
John
The investigation as to who caused the deaths was a different issue. The wounded were taken to the barn of a Mr Tomlinson, at Rock Hill House, for treatment, and then removal to hospital if they needed to go there — and a lot of them did. And as you can imagine, the place was flooded with reinforcements, from the police and the military as well.

00:27:34:07 – 00:27:55:12
Helen
Let’s go back to the day of the massacre itself. Some of the dead were brought to the barn, and then the magistrates sent people out to sort of tidy up afterwards. What happened to the constabulary that day — the policemen themselves? They’re sort of forgotten, I guess, in this story, and that’s the whole point of our podcast, which is to talk about the police at the time.

00:27:55:13 – 00:28:17:20
Helen
Yeah. And we’ve got Foote, who is the curate — there are some lovely first-hand accounts from him. He wrote a letter fifty years after Carrickshock, recalling what had happened that day. He remembers making his way through the countryside and coming across a horseman with no cap, covered — himself and his horse — in gore, who had been pierced through the neck with a pitchfork.

00:28:17:20 – 00:28:40:12
Helen
Ultimately it turned out — so Foote brought him to the Glebe House, which was barricaded, on high alert in case they stormed the place. The Glebe House was filled with wounded policemen. Doctor Hamilton — fleeing, as it were — was tending to everybody and looking after them. And then Foote saw another policeman, disguised as a civilian.

00:28:40:12 – 00:28:47:03
Helen
He’s on Hamilton’s horse, and he heads off into the countryside. What happened, from the police point of view, from there?

00:28:47:05 – 00:29:05:17
John
There’s actually nothing to tell us what happened. I mean, I suppose from my own experience of being involved in traumatic incidents, you basically go back to work the next day and you kind of get on with it. The men who survived would have returned to duty. I mean, the idea of PTSD didn’t exist.

00:29:05:18 – 00:29:43:17
John
They probably would have been given maybe a lighter role and sent back out on the road again. So, regarding the police investigation — 11 men were arrested and brought to trial at the assizes. Now, the assizes would have been the equivalent of the Circuit Court these days. Sitting in Kilkenny, 1832, 11 men were charged with murder, and collections took place all over the country to pay for them to get legal assistance. No less a figure than Daniel O’Connell defended one of the men, a man called John Kennedy, even though O’Connell himself condemned the killing of both policemen and civilians in the wake of the massacre.

00:29:43:22 – 00:30:07:18
John
So O’Connell, as you know, was a really good lawyer apart from everything else that he did, and he argued that under the circumstances nobody could get a fair trial, because at the time only landowners could vote, and these would have been local men to Kilkenny, expected to serve as jurors while the trial was going on. A crowd estimated at 200,000 people gathered at Ballyhale, which is only one mile from Carrickshock.

00:30:07:22 – 00:30:28:02
John
Dublin Castle believed that this was a clear attempt to influence or intimidate the jury — these landowners making their way on their horses into the assizes in Kilkenny, under a crowd of 200,000 protesting that these men were in prison in the first place. So, as you can imagine, the trial collapsed, and nobody was ever convicted of any involvement in Carrickshock.

00:30:28:04 – 00:30:38:16
John
O’Connell also argued that there were so many songs and ballads about Carrickshock which called the men murderers, that this too was prejudicial to getting a fair trial.

00:30:38:17 – 00:30:46:21
Helen
So the legacy for Irish Catholics — we’ve talked about the symbolism and the rhetoric — Carrickshock became a slogan, didn’t it?

00:30:47:02 – 00:31:06:01
John
Yeah. I mean, policing was, as I said, a relatively new concept, and the massacre was a devastating blow that forced them to reassess their tactics. Unfortunately, Captain Gibbons was blamed by Dublin Castle for allowing his men to be drawn down a boreen where he was surrounded and attacked. So he basically carried the blame for the mistake he’d made.

00:31:06:01 – 00:31:25:06
John
Or maybe he didn’t realise how big the crowd was, but suddenly he was surrounded, and that was it. And, you know, a couple of times I was surrounded myself, in different situations. It’s quite a terrifying thing when you’re on your own, perhaps at night, you can’t get any help, your radio’s not working, you’re out of cover, or whatever, you know. So I can understand some of the pressure nationalists must have felt too.

00:31:25:06 – 00:31:46:01
John
I suppose it gave them a rallying cry, and the word “Carrickshock” was used as a slogan any time they confronted the authorities, right up until the War of Independence. There was an ambush on a police barracks in the area, and the group assembled outside — symbolically, they decided — “we’re going to launch our attack on the barracks,” which was successful.

00:31:46:01 – 00:32:06:00
John
From there, hundreds of poems and ballads were written, and some of them, when you read them, actually name individual policemen, which is quite extraordinary. There’s one here, if I quote it — it says: “On board, the little knave fell beneath the bayonet; in joy of such tidings let us be drinking.” This was a reference to William Boyd, who died in the massacre.

00:32:06:02 – 00:32:29:02
John
Other poems and ballads took delight in the way that the constables had been mutilated. There was a famous song called “The Victory,” and it said: “Who could desire to see better sport, to see them groping among the rocks, their skulls all fractured and eyeballs broken, their long noses and ears cut off.” And I believe locally that even today, during a match, somebody will shout about Carrickshock — that you took on the tithe proctor,

00:32:29:02 – 00:32:36:24
John
so take on these guys on the other team. So it’s still very much part of the folklore for that particular part of Kilkenny.

00:32:37:00 – 00:32:57:15
Helen
John, local newspapers of the time reported Carrickshock simply as a terrible accident waiting to happen, a deplorable but predictable consequence of British misrule and the iniquitous tithe system. Do you agree? Could it have been prevented? For starters, should it have gone ahead? Was it a mistake of logistics, of leadership? Was it inevitable? Did it have to happen?

00:32:57:16 – 00:33:20:19
John
Yeah. I think the issue of tithes was inevitably going to cause serious public disorder in the country. It was blatantly unfair — and, you know, people are aware of the Famine from 1845, but there were other famines earlier in the century too. So people who had very little to begin with were expected to pay 10% of their produce, or its cash equivalent, to maintain the Church of Ireland that they weren’t even part of.

00:33:20:20 – 00:33:45:09
John
Of course it was always going to end in trouble. I suppose it just encapsulates the unfairness of the system — that you couldn’t own land yourself, but the rector had a huge house, a basement, servants, hundreds of acres and horses, and you were paying for that. And during the Famine we had the issue of “taking the soup” — that if you converted to the Church of Ireland, you’d be fed from the soup pots in these tents around the country.

00:33:45:09 – 00:34:09:12
John
So I think it was absolutely inevitable. And I think the police were put in an impossible position. They had to protect those involved in collecting tithes, which put them in direct conflict with the population that they were policing. And that’s never a good thing for any police officer, you know. And they were also seen by the locals as the face of government enforcement, forcing these unfair tithes on them, even though their role, as I said, was to prevent trouble.

00:34:09:13 – 00:34:16:04
John
It wasn’t to collect the tithes — it was to protect the people who were collecting the tithes. But people don’t understand that. That’s a subtle distinction, you know.

00:34:16:08 – 00:34:39:21
Helen
It is indeed. Thanks very much, John. So that’s it from this week’s episode of the Póilíní Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode and you’d like to find out more, then you can subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates and additional background on the sort of things we talk about in the podcast. In our first edition, we have a profile of John and loads of information about his 40-plus years’ experience in the Gardaí.

00:34:39:23 – 00:34:58:01
Helen
You’ll also find us on social media. You can get in touch via email too — for example, if you’re from in or around Carrickshock, or know anything about the events we’ve talked about today, then get in touch. You might have a relative or a connection to some of the stories. You’ll find all the contact details in the show notes, in the podcast description.

00:34:58:01 – 00:35:16:13
Helen
And most importantly, if you’ve enjoyed the podcast, don’t forget to like, comment, or follow. We’d really appreciate it, and it also helps others find out about the podcast too. So thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week with another extraordinary story from our policeman’s notebook. Goodbye.

00:35:16:15 – 00:35:32:20
Announcer
The Póilíní Podcast, hosted by writer Helen Moorhouse and Doctor John Reynolds. Stories of duty and danger, life and the law, police and perpetrators.