Brian Griffin

Cork University Press, 2024. 208 pages.

ISBN: 9781782055990

Why, land is the only thing in the world worth workin’ for, worth fightin’ for, worth dyin’ for, because it’s the only thing that lasts.

Opening with a quote from Gone with the Wind may be facetious, but whether in romanticised depictions, or within Irish history itself, the importance of land to Irish lore and myth-making is clear.

Brian Griffin’s new monograph on crime and criminality in Ireland from 1870 to 1920 explores the role of land as a motivating force behind the crime statistics, before going on to consider the extent to which this was the whole story.

The idea has been promulgated of Irish society as more than averagely violent in this period. The view from London (and occasionally Dublin) was certainly in alignment with this characterisation. Specifically, the political motivation for much of the unrest seemed to signal trouble. Listing the headline examples, Griffin notes: the 1882 murders of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke in Phoenix Park; the agrarian disturbances which roiled much of the country; the sectarian tensions which sporadically broke out in Belfast rioting; and, as the period drew to its close, the intensification of Republican violence. More often than not it seemed that police and officials were expressing fears about the state of the country.

Was this the sum of crime and criminality in Ireland in this period? Griffin’s aims in this short and entertaining book are to trouble any assumptions we might have that this was “it” for crime. The book’s intentions are, first, to take a close look at agrarian crime, and unravel some of the received wisdom on this phenomenon. Secondly, to put agrarian crime into perspective by contextualising it with reference to the “ordinary” crime trends in the same period. While the offences that kept officials up at night were either political or subversive in nature, in truth most crime was nothing of the sort. Most criminality was of the kind that continues to fill our courts. Here Griffin builds on existing scholarship which excavates the histories of “ordinary” crime in Ireland. The book offers “the first in-depth general overview and discussion of crime – both agrarian and non-agrarian – in Ireland in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth” (3).

* * *

Chapter 1 examines agrarian crime, looking in particular at the activities associated with the Land War, the Plan of Campaign, and the Ranch War, and noting that for the period under review, agrarian crime was fairly widespread, certainly outside of Ulster, and was notable for its intensity in some regions. Despite this, however, Griffin writes that “it is important to note that, for most of the period, most of the country was unaffected by serious crime and disorder of an agrarian nature” (6).

Griffin explores agrarian offences as the most common form of collective crime in Ireland, while refuting notions of the extent to which this was truly “organised”. Terrible tales of oath-bound secret societies startled the elites, fed by accounts of police and judiciary, but the reality of the matter was more complicated. Taking the case of Westmeath, which experienced a particularly fraught period in the late-1860s/early-1870s, Griffin considers the evidence that Ribbonism was not the chief culprit, but that offences were mostly perpetrated by individuals or loosely affiliated groups that were not centrally directed. The damage is clearly the same to the victim, but the threat to society is less so. However, Ribbonism was a convenient explanation for authorities, especially when they failed to apprehend the culprits.

Crucially, the reliance on RIC and other official sources is noted as the inevitable stumbling block for historians of crime and punishment. It is often difficult to get beyond the official view to obtain a clearer sense of what is happening.

One of Griffin’s key arguments is that the broad range of offences we think of as “agrarian” had a more catholic range of motivations and features than we might think. Land hunger was very real, but it did not necessarily mean that this was foremost in the minds of perpetrators. While we may think of this period as one where interpersonal violence of this stripe was committed between tenant and landlord, many of the agrarian outrages involved a much broader spectrum of victims and offenders including intra-tenant and employer/employee disputes. Land hunger and poverty ensured that trivial grievances or family disputes could easily erupt into violence, leaving bodies in their wake.

Towards the end of the period, Griffin identifies Republican activists at work in both perpetrating agrarian offences and the policing of them. He cites the involvement of Sinn Féin activists in cattle-driving, for instance, while also noting that as the RIC withdrew from parts of Munster and Connacht, effective policing of crime and disorder fell to the IRA.

The chapter concludes that while there was of course some level of organisation in many of the agrarian offences, it is not the wider, centrally organised conspiracy that many branded it as. The motivations behind the offences were also more diverse than history sometimes allowed, and they did not all spring from some generally agreed on communal grievance.

Crucially, while taking aim at some of the misconceptions about agrarian violence in Ireland, Griffin concludes that by some measure, the violence was “exceptional” within the broader United Kingdom context, springing from “deeper and more enduring conflicts and insecurities at the heart of the country’s systems of land ownership compared to other parts of the UK” and western Europe (47).

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“Ordinary” crime and its policing form the subject of chapter 2, which is contextualised with reference to crime in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. In particular, Griffin explores the incidence of ordinary crime in urban areas, particularly Dublin and Belfast, and notes the higher rates of crime here compared to rural areas.

Something that can be elided in discussion of the agrarian disturbances of the time, and when taking the official perspective, is that the levels of many criminal offences actually declined across the period. A hysterical focus on agrarian outrages caused distortion of perspective for some, who were blind to the relative peace and tranquillity of large tracts of the country.

Just as today, the majority of crimes committed throughout the country were trivial, non-indictable offences. The generally pacific nature of the countryside is relayed in a few contemporary anecdotes, including one from novelist Stephen Crane who visited County Cork in 1897 and remarked on how much time the local constabulary spent fishing. One sergeant in particular was seen so often on his belly spying into a pool that the local people “did not believe the rumour that he sometimes stood or walked like a human” (57). Something that is inescapable though, is that despite the many accounts of law-abiding districts, Ireland was more heavily policed than any other nation in the United Kingdom. This intensity and the networks in which many RIC were enmeshed ensured the capacity for heavy surveillance and information-gathering.

Griffin advances a number of explanations for Ireland’s relatively low levels of ordinary crime, not the least of which is emigration, which has often been conceptualised as a safety-valve, ensuring that considerable numbers of men of peak offending age had left the country. The idea is also raised that this period saw general declines not only in Ireland, but elsewhere, and that this was the outcome of a “civilising process” at work, evident in the shifting tolerances for certain behaviours.

Relying on official crime rates, particularly when there were definitional and recording differences across jurisdictions, as well as contrasting policing styles and numbers, means, as Griffin concludes, that it can be difficult to definitively agree or disagree with previous historians who made pronouncements as to Ireland’s violent character in these years. One thing he is clear on however, and that is the gap between the policing of cities and that of rural areas. As Griffin states: “In many ways, the exhausting and frequently dangerous daily round of DMP men in Dublin or RIC men in Belfast was more akin to that of policemen serving in British cities such as Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Manchester or Glasgow than that of members of the constabulary who served in rural Ireland during periods of agrarian tranquillity” (71).

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In his final chapter, Griffin tackles the question of frequent offenders, the “criminal classes”, and the police. The criminal classes, the “residuum”, were spoken about as an urban underclass engaged in criminality to make their living. Griffin cites the organisation of the crime statistics themselves to demonstrate what purchase this terminology had, as five categories of offender are separately presented under ‘criminal classes’, namely: prostitutes, habitual drunkards, suspicious characters, vagrants and tramps, and known thieves. Clearly, in many respects, this broad category of offender represents an example of the criminalisation of poverty itself.

In this final chapter, much of the content touches on the gendered nature of criminality. In his exploration of the unfortunate case of the habitual offender, Griffin runs through some examples of offenders with charge sheets as long as your arm, many of whom were women. In many cases, the petty but prolific offending behaviour of poor women saw them experience “life by instalments” in prison. One elderly woman from Derry had racked up 500 previous convictions.

Just as official statistics can overstate the presence of vast conspiracies of oath-bound secret societies, so, as Griffin points out, the same documents can underplay certain categories of criminal offending. The dark figure of crime inevitably includes a vast number of unreported offences of a sexual nature and gender-based violence. The Carrigan Committee of 1930-1931, undertaking its work just a decade after Griffin’s period ends, would certainly put lie to the myth of a crime-free society. Griffin explores the prevalence of the sexual exploitation of children and the under-reporting of offences such as rape and domestic violence. Certainly, in contrast to some of the zealous policing of considerably more trivial offences, the difference is sobering.

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Throughout the book, Griffins draws on a comprehensive range of contemporary newspaper reporting, archives, historical writing and secondary literature to illustrate his arguments. In gathering his material, Griffin also presents many fascinating anecdotes. For example, in explaining that plenty of the threatening letters sent under the broad umbrella of the Land War were actually hoaxes, Griffin relays the story of curate’s wife Helen Waters and her friend Mrs Ogilvy, wife of the local coastguard commander. These fine upstanding women of Adrigole parish assumed the poison pen to threaten away a new curate, fresh off the boat from England, who was “an objectionable prig” and who regularly spoke down to his new Irish flock from the pulpit. Sub-inspector Waters tried in vain to conceal his wife’s misdeeds, but found it impossible to cover up their poisoning of the curate with laxatives. You will be gratified to learn that they ultimately succeeded in their goal of driving this man away.

The book brings Ireland into dialogue with trends and patterns observed in Britain, and Griffin concludes by making the argument for further transnational work to explore and perhaps explode the idea of Irish exceptionalism in the arena of crime and violence in this period.

Griffin’s monograph is part of a new series from Cork University Press, Studies in Irish Crime History, with series editors Richard McMahon and Ciara Molloy doing a fantastic job of putting out entertaining, accessible and interesting titles.