South-west Donegal, Ireland, June 1856. From the time that the
blight first came on the potatoes in 1845, armed and masked men
dubbed Molly Maguires had been raiding the houses of people deemed
to be taking advantage of the rural poor. On some occasions, they
represented themselves as 'Molly's Sons', sent by their mother, to
carry out justice; on others, a man attired as a woman, introducing
'herself' as Molly Maguire, demanding redress for wrongs inflicted
on her children. The raiders might stipulate the maximum price at
which provisions were to be sold, warn against the eviction of
tenants, or demand that an evicted family be reinstated to their
holding. People who refused to meet their demands were often
viciously beaten and, in some instances, killed - offences that the
Constabulary classified as 'outrages'. Catholic clergymen regularly
denounced the Mollies and in 1853, the district was proclaimed
under the Crime and Outrage (Ireland) Act. Yet the 'outrages'
continued. Then, in 1856, Patrick McGlynn, a young schoolmaster,
suddenly turned informer on the Mollies, precipitating dozens of
arrests. Here, a history of McGlynn's informing, backlit by
episodes over the previous two decades, sheds light on that wave of
outrage, its origins and outcomes, the meaning and the memory of
it. More specifically, it illuminates the end of 'outrage' - the
shifting objectives of those who engaged in it, and also how, after
hunger faded and disease abated, tensions emerged in the Molly
Maguires, when one element sought to curtail such activity, while
another sought, unsuccessfully, to expand it. And in that
contention, when the opportunities of post-Famine society were
coming into view, one glimpses the end, or at least an ebbing, of
outrage - in the everyday sense of moral indignation - at the fate
of the rural poor. But, at heart, The End of Outrage is about
contention among neighbours - a family that rose from the ashes of
a mode of living, those consumed in the conflagration, and those
who lost much but not all. Ultimately, the concern is how the poor
themselves came to terms with their loss: how their own outrage at
what had been done unto them and their forbears lost malignancy,
and eventually ended. The author being a native of the small
community that is the focus of The End of Outrage makes it an
extraordinarily intimate and absorbing history.
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