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Crime and PoliceSummary of chapter. Crime was divided into ordinary crime like murder, robbery etc. and agrarian crime which was committed by local, often temporary, gangs in pursuit of local aims. This type of agrarian crime fused into political crime and afflicts Ireland to the present day. Illicit distillation during the period of high taxes during the Napoleonic Wars had a similar role to that in the United States during Prohibition. Organised police forces besides the posse of a sheriff were commenced on te basis of local units called baronies, but in time was developed into county forces, and finally a national force. Penology was simple, consisting largely of either hanging or transportation, but gradually a system of penitentiaries was build up.
(iv) The Dublin Metropolitan Police
(v) The County Police and Irish Constabulary ************************************************************************************************************ There
is an interesting list of ordinary crimes brought before the judge at the
Spring Assizes in Mayo in 1846. There were 15 charges of murder, 1 of suspicion
of murder, 1 of manslaughter, 3 of assault and riot, 2 of malicious assault, 3
of affray and violent assault, 2 of common assault, and 2 of assault and
robbery. Against these 29 cases of crimes of violence were only 9 cases of
burglary, robbery without violence, and rustling of animals. (There were also
two cases of rape, but lawyers regarded these charges with suspicion for they
considered them likely to be ruses to entrap an unwilling husband into
matrimony.) Offences against the person were far more common than offences
against property. In 1843 there were 122 charges of murder in There
is always a problem in Crime
is by definition acts against the well-being of society punishable by law. Law
can be defined as enactments by legitimate authority. Crime than therefore be
more simply defined as breaking the law. This definition is followed here with
no distinction between crimes, misdemeanours, etc. In
the eighteenth century attitudes among all classes in Even
if murder was common, some counties were more violent than others. The judges
in assize considered that the calendar of crimes in Fermanagh was particularly
light and in Yet
A
mythology has grown up and has been fostered that this type of crime was
directed at those perceived as national or class enemies, people like
landlords, land agents, and tithe proctors. Actually most of it was directed at
fellow members of the working classes, fishermen against fishermen, smallholder
against smallholder, trade unionist against non-trade unionist. The aim was
always the same, to enforce a common policy among the local group and to
exclude outsiders. It
was obvious when a conspiracy was started in a locality. The Catholic priests
noticed that men no longer came to receive the sacraments. There was a spate of
house-breakings at night to seize arms. Notices were placed outside chapel
gates stating the aims of the conspirators, and everyone was warned not to
oppose them. Those who did oppose them had their hayricks burned, their cattle
houghed (hacked), and they themselves were beaten up, tortured, and even
murdered. Witnesses and jurymen were intimidated. The
crimes in a given area were committed by people of the locality, not by
outsiders. The criminals were almost invariably from the working classes, and
nearly always Catholics. Up to 1830 they seem to have had no political
ambitions, but to have been concerned with what they regarded as local
grievances. Despite what many Protestants believed there was no widespread 'conspiracy' to overthrow Protestantism, or the Established Church, or to restore the land to the old Catholic families, though that did not mean that the local criminals would not cheerfully join in a major conspiracy organised by the middle classes in Dublin. Outbreaks of agrarian crime could spread over
several counties at a time, but always it would seem on the copycat principle.
This does not exclude sending experienced members of a group to assist the
organisation of a neighbouring group. The Government in Despite
the brutal nature of the crimes very little is known about the conspirators. In
their notices they usually claimed they were fighting against popular
grievances like tithes or high rents. But these notices could either have been
genuine or a cover for protection rackets. Some authorities at the time like
William Carleton and Richard Lalor Sheil were inclined to give them the benefit
of the doubt, and attribute good motives to most of them. Carleton had inside knowledge, having been a
Ribbonman in his youth, but he too recognised that there were evil, violent,
and designing men among the leaders. Dr James Doyle and the land agent W. S.
Trench were more scathing in their denunciations and considered the
conspirators lazy, drunken, and worthless wretches. Doyle regarded the
conspiracies among the peasants and miners as the greatest blot in his diocese
and wore himself out striving against them (Fitzpatrick Doyle: Carleton;
O'Donoghue; Trench). Almost
all the Coercion Acts in The
involvement of the agrarian conspirators in the political insurrections in
1798, 1803, and 1848, also remains obscure. The years preceding 1798 and 1848
saw enormous expansions of agrarian crime, or what resembled it. Robert Emmett
in 1803 and Smith O'Brien in 1848 were appalled by the kind of supporter they
had attracted. They had not envisaged a murder campaign. Agrarian-style campaigns of violence marked
the 'Tithe War'. A.M. Sullivan noted an attempt by the Ribbon leader Richard
Jones in the 1830's to steer the movement towards an all-Ireland organisation.
It is likely that the agrarian conspirators and the 'physical force' faction in
the revolutionaries came together in 1848. With the collapse of the attempted
rising in 1848 the wave of agrarian crime came to an end, and remained
quiescent until the outbreak of the so-called 'Land War' in 1879 (Sullivan).
[Top] Illicit
distillation of spirits replaced smuggling as the chief illegal activity and
the pattern of behaviour of the distillers was similar to that of the
smugglers. The laws against illicit distillation like 'Prohibition' in In
his charge to the Grand Jury in Donegal in 1822 Judge Fletcher noted that the
county had formerly been peaceful and law-abiding but now the Calder was full
of crimes of every description. He noted perjury especially, and said that
parents were teaching their children to swear false alibis. Donegal, and in
particular the barony of Inishowen, was the centre of illicit distillation, and
there was open warfare with the police and revenue officers. In many areas in
the east and south of The distillation was in itself only a
form of tax evasion, like smuggling. The fact that it led to so much crime was
not lost on Members of Parliament who wondered if it were essential to have so
much crime, and such strong police forces, merely to collect revenue which
could probably be better raised in other ways. Despite
it reputation in some quarters illegally distilled whiskey, called 'poteen' or
'potcheen' was neither better flavoured, stronger, or cheaper, than legally
distilled spirits, even if it were properly made. Badly made whiskey, like
methyl alcohol or methylated spirits, could cause madness. It was only the high
excises during the War that made the industry profitable. In
1779 the Irish Parliament enacted that only stills of two hundred gallons
capacity or more should be licensed. A large still was more efficient than a
small one and imported coal for heating better than native turf. The excise on
whiskey at the time was only 4 pence a gallon, so the small stills used
illegally were not profitable. Excises on whiskey continued to rise especially
after the outbreak of war in 1793, and by 1805 the problem of tax evasion was a
serious one. The Irish Chancellors of the Exchequer were determined to stamp
out abuses. Troops
had been used since 1779 to aid the revenue officers. This was an extension of
their regular duty to assist in combating smuggling. In 1807 'townland fines'
were imposed on the supposition that everyone living in a given townland knew
what was going on and were conniving in it. A fine was imposed on all the
inhabitants of a townland in which a still or part of a still was found. Between 1807 and 1819 the topic was discussed
endlessly in Parliament, and different Irish Secretaries tried different
methods. In 1815 the excise stood at 6/1½ a gallon and no solution was in
sight. An attempt was made to licence small stills in the hope that a cottage
industry might develop, but this scheme had not the same success in Illicit
distillation gradually declined in the nineteenth century. The excises were
lowered, small legal stills were established, a revenue police and a county
police were established and trained, and the clergy consistently denounced it.
[Top] (iv)
The
Constables
to maintain law and order within the bounds of a parish or manor existed since
the early Middle Ages. In the seventeenth century the
responsibility for policing was transferred to the baronies. A constable was an
officer of a county, a barony, or a parish. It seems that the High Constable in
a county was originally responsible for commanding troops in time of war or
civil disturbance. These could summon a number of petty constables when they
were needed. Each parish from the time of Edward III was supposed to have its
own petty constable, also responsible for keeping the peace and assisting the
Chief Constable. As
early as 1712 in About
1780 there was much agrarian crime, and also much violence and civil
disturbance on the streets of Countries
on the Continent had efficient police forces, The
problem facing de Blaquire was to establish a force which would be efficient
against criminals but would not interfere with the constitutional liberties of
British subjects. He studied the police forces in Henry
Grattan and the ‘Patriots’ were strongly opposed to the formation of any kind
of police force, and in 1795 succeeded in getting the Act reversed and the
nightwatch restored. Dublin was without
an effective police force in the disturbed period leading up to and following
1798, and the only effective police officer was the Town Major, who was
actually a military officer concerned with the discipline of the troops. The
army, the militia, and especially the yeomanry had to be used instead. Not
until 1804 did the Government get the opportunity of putting forward new
proposals, and this time the chief opposition came from the Corporation of
Dublin. Negotiations between the Government and the Corporation dragged on for
four years, and the Irish Secretary who happened to be there at the time, Sir
Arthur Wellesley, got the credit for the establishment of the new force. By
At
first the entire cost of this force was placed on the city, but by 1819 the
Government had agreed to share the cost. By 1846 the Government was paying the
full cost. In 1836, the Dublin Police, like the other police forces was
reorganised, and it remained a separate force until the setting up of the A
by-product of the 1795 Act restoring the (v) The It
had been Blaquire’s intention to conduct a thorough reform of the baronial
constabulary as well, but only modest changes were achieved by his successor
Orde's Baronial Constabulary Act (1787), the 27th of George III. The
appointment of High Constables was removed from the Grand Juries and given to
the Lord Lieutenant, but the appointment of ordinary constables was left with
the Grand Jury. The barony remained the unit for policing. The force was
limited to 16 or 20 petty constables for each barony, about a quarter of what
was ultimately found necessary. Even so in 1792 the number of constables per
barony was reduced by Parliament to eight, and thirteen counties were exempted
altogether from the Act. The police were to be paid from the Grand Jury cess,
and the salary per man was set a £4 a year, scarcely at subsistence level. The
baronial constabulary was charged with such matters as the preservation of
roads and bridges, and the removal of nuisances, obstructions, and
encroachments thereon. Various minor Acts were passed, usually of limited
duration, concerning the regulation of the police, and it is rarely clear which
were still in force at any given date. A general Police Act (1809) was passed
renewing most of the minor acts, and this contained a provision, unusual for
the period, that only Protestants could be appointed constables. Peel later
removed this clause. According
to some accounts the 'Barnies' were as bad as the 'Charlies' but we do not know
if the descriptions we have of them were typical. The Police Act (1822) was
resisted in some counties on the grounds that an efficient and well-drilled
baronial constabulary already existed in them. Nor do we know how civil
policing developed. It is clear that concepts of civil policing owe much to the
experience and practice of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. When
Peel came to In
1822 the Irish Secretary, Henry Goulburn, decided after consultation with Peel,
the Home Secretary, that an entirely new approach was required and the Irish
Police Act (1822) was passed establishing the new police. The new force was to
be formed even in those counties in which there was an efficient baronial
constabulary under the 37th of George III (1787). The county was to be made the
basis of the forces, and every constable was to be a constable for the entire
county. Constables could be ordered by their superiors to serve temporarily in
other counties. They were to number 15 to the barony or half-barony. The Lord
Lieutenant was empowered to appoint officers to every rank in every county but
could leave some or all of these appointments to the local gentlemen. The Chief
Constables and other constables were to act under the direction of the civil
magistrates, but police magistrates were also to be appointed. There was little
new or controversial in these proposals. The
Act went on to provide that the police force would be armed with muskets, would
live in barracks, and would be subject to a military discipline. A police
inspectorate for the whole of There
was no bias against Catholics in selecting recruits but a requirement of
literacy favoured Protestants. Goulburn felt that former members of the militia
with good records should be favoured, but some judges felt it necessary to warn
against a too hasty recourse to firearms. By 1824 2717 constables were
appointed of whom 845 were Catholics. The baronies were allowed to keep the old
constabulary as well but were responsible for its full cost while the
Government paid half the costs of the New Police. The constables, though
subject to the local magistrates, were only to obey orders from their own
officers in accordance with the Police Regulations approved for them. The
Government was determined that the police would only be used for the purposes
for which they were established, and would not be dragged into acting as
bailiffs to serve writs or warrants, or to collect tithes. The Government
consistently defended police officers in the courts up until 1836 against
charges of refusing to obey orders of magistrates or writs of the courts. It
took nearly fifteen years to hammer out the relations between senior police
officers, county magistrates, and the justices in the courts in
The
New Police became very unpopular in parts of the South and were soon the
subjects of murderous attacks. As already noted, murders and attempts at murder
were not uncommon but the new police officers seem to have been specially
singled out especially on fairdays. In a normal attack a large body of drunken
farmers would try to cut off a small body of policemen and try to beat them up
with sticks. Whether they wished actually to murder them is unclear. The small
numbers of policemen present compared with the larger files of armed soldiers
formerly employed made successful attacks easier, and some thought that the
troops should be called out again. The police took to defending themselves with
live ammunition, but this did nothing to deter the attackers. Between 1823 and
1830 84 people were killed and 122 severely wounded in affrays with the police.
In the same period 35 policemen were killed and 439 severely wounded in the
attacks on them. In 1831 alone 35 policemen were killed. This was during the
confused period of disturbance commonly called the 'Tithe War', though resistance
to tithes was only one of the factors involved.
What prompted these attacks, or why they were persisted in when the
police began using life ammunition to defend themselves,
remain mysteries. We can, however, suspect that the police had begun actively to
investigate the secret agrarian societies. From
1828 onwards the various Irish Secretaries considered further reforms of the
Irish police but for various reasons the necessary legislation was not passed
until 1836. The Irish Constabulary Act (1836) reorganised the county
constabularies as a national police force called the Irish Constabulary, and
after 1867 the Royal Irish Constabulary, the name by which it is best known. It
was freed from all subjection to the county authorities and made subject only to
its own police inspectorate appointed by the Lord Lieutenant. It was made the
sole police force in In
1839 the Dublin Evening Post
commenting on the efficiency of the police noted that the numbers of those
committed for trial had greatly increased since 1807: 1807 3,512 committals secured by 48,559
soldiers There were of course more than one
factor involved in this increase, but still the success of the police in bring
criminals to trial is clear. In
the debates on the New Police in 1822 it was mentioned that in most cases of
crime nobody was ever charged, and even coroners' courts returned verdicts of
manslaughter if no witnesses appeared. The
organisational model of the Irish Constabulary was widely imitated throughout
the empire, and after independence the former colonies organised their forces
on similar lines. [Top] It
seems that a corporate body that had a right to a constable also had a right to
maintain a gaol at least for temporary detention until the accused could be
brought before magistrates and lodged in the county gaol (jail). When watchhouses and
later police offices or stations were established these too became legal places
for detention. (Official usage favours the spelling gaol, though dictionaries
favour jail; the pronunciation nowadays is the same -OED) Persons could be detained in gaol while awaiting trial, or
while awaiting hanging or transportation, or because they were sentenced to
terms of imprisonment, or for debt. In 1826 all gaols except county gaols were
abolished, though the new police still retained the right to detain offenders
or suspects overnight in the police stations. The Habeas
Corpus Act (1781) of the Irish Parliament extended legally Habeas Corpus to In
the eighteenth century, largely perhaps because of low conviction rates, there
was a tendency to make as many crimes as possible capital offences. The
presumption was that anyone actually caught stealing a sheep or a few yards of
linen was, or would become, a habitual thief. If the jury thought this unlikely
they could and did refused to convict. Though there
are tales of young people being transported for stealing a handkerchief the
average jury was likely to have a pretty shrewd notion of the character of the
accused. Even in the
eighteenth century there were doubts about the humanity and ineffectiveness of
capital punishment and the ideas of Baccaria had some influence. Throughout the
nineteenth century successive Governments removed the death-penalty from an
ever-increasing number of crimes. The Crown and Government Security Act (1848)
made acts of treason not directed against the person of the monarch into
felonies punishable by terms of imprisonment. Capital
punishment or execution was always by hanging by the neck. This was done by
breaking the neck swiftly, not by suffocation, and by the nineteenth century
was common to both men and women. The use of torture had never been legal in The
hangings always took place in public, normally on a scaffold erected outside
the gaol or courthouse, but in any place the judge might direct. There were no
other punishments like drawing or quartering even for high treason. The body
was normally cut down when life was extinct but the judge could order that the
body be left hanging. This was done in Co. Louth following the 'Wild Goose
Lodge murders' in 1818 when the murderers were executed at the scene of their
crime. Women were stilled being executed by burning late in the eighteenth
century, but this practice was discontinued. Transportation
to penal colonies in Those
sentenced only to terms of imprisonment suffered no other punishment but
detention. Those like Daniel O Connell who were so sentenced could hire rooms
and entertain visitors within the prison. Prisons were noted as places of
idleness and even mirth. These aspects of idleness and mirth became
especial targets for prison reformers, and increasingly the sentence included a
measure of labour. The original purpose of introducing work into prisons seems
to have been to teach the convicts an honest trade like weaving, but it very
rapidly became a punishment in itself.
'Bridewells' or 'work-jayles' had been built in the sixteenth century
but by the end of the eighteenth century little work was done in any of them.
By the British Penitentiaries Act of 1779 (passed when transportation to Penal
reform was mooted in the 1760's and was strongly advocated by John Howard at
the end of the eighteenth century. He studied conditions in Irish gaols and was
called to give evidence before a committee of the Irish Parliament in 1782 (DNB Howard). He was an advocate of the
moral reform of the prisoner through solitary confinement and hard labour. An
associate of his, William Blackburn, was asked to improve the buildings at
Newgate gaol in When
the United Irish leaders were imprisoned in Public
attention was focussed on conditions in Irish gaols and the Irish newspapers
reflected the public concern. All the buildings were very ancient and had no
heating other than what the prisoner himself could afford to buy. Glass was
often broken in the windows, and those imprisoned for debt were particularly
badly off for they normally had no money at all. The rates for lodgings in the
two marshalseas (marshalcies), the debtors' prisons, had been set in the reign
of William III. The hire of a room with a bed was 2/6 a week, but the room
itself was only 1/3 if the prisoner brought his own bed,
and 2/- if he shared a bed. In private rooms in the gaol the gaoler charged the
same rates as local innkeepers. The poor were charged one penny a night for
straw on the floors of the common rooms that had no glass in the windows. By
law the Grand Jury had to provide enough food for every prisoner who asked for
it. It was also legal to make a presentment at the Grand Jury sessions to buy
beds and blankets, but the county gentlemen were in no hurry to provide these.
Lord Norbury, who had the reputation of being a very humane judge, tried to
stimulate the Grand Jury in King's County to build a proper gaol. When
Wellesley Pole arrived in Ladies'
committees were formed at the same time to visit the prisoners and to bring them improving tracts and books. The newly formed Irish
Sisters of Charity undertook this work until the practice was prohibited in the
heyday of the 'silent system'. In
1818 Peel abolished all fees payable to the gaoler 'for the entrance,
commitment, and discharge' of any prisoner except in the Four Courts marshalsea
and the city of Urged
by the Government and by the assize judges the Grand Juries began the
construction of modern prison buildings. In the 1820's there were two rival
theories how best to construct a prison.
One system favoured a 'radiating' or star-shaped plan with a central
administrative block with the cellblocks radiating from it. The other system
was called the 'polygonal' though in fact it could consist of only half a
polygon. The administrative block was
placed at the focus of the polygon with the exercise yards in between so that
they could be overseen from the central block. It was argued in favour of this
system that all cells got the benefit of sunlight, that
each prisoner at exercise could be supervised from one spot, and that heating
by the 'hypocaust' system was made easier. It is unclear if a hot-air or
hot-water system was used (SNL) Prison
development reached its peak in |
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