What Can Be Found in Old Newspapers

      

     Each week I check the genealogy news for Ireland, and each week I'm disappointed. No new records means no new discoveries, so no new blogs. I'm currently considering purchasing a month's subscription to a newspaper site in the hopes something interesting may turn up, but in the meantime I'm posting an excerpt from the narrative I wrote long ago about my family in Counties Carlow and Kildare, the McGarrs and O'Horas; drawn in part from contemporary newspaper accounts to show what wonderful stories can be found even if one's ancestors didn't make it into print by name...

     Although Ireland was overwhelmingly Catholic everyone who worked the land was required by law to pay a tithe to the protestant Church of Ireland. This presented a real hardship for tenant farmers already hard pressed to clothe and feed their families. To add insult to injury, protestant landlords who did not farm the land but instead devoted it to pasture for livestock were exempt. After winning emancipation, an organized campaign of resistance to the tithe began and spread rapidly. In 1831 a list of tithe defaulters was drawn up by the government with orders to seize their goods and chattel. With the signing of that order, the opening salvo of the Tithe War had been fired. Over the following years robberies, murders, cattle maiming, riots and arsons became commonplace.

     The defaulter lists for Ricketstown and Ballyraggan no longer exist, so it is impossible to say if Michael Hore and Daniel McGarr refused to pay their tithes, but resistance in their area was high. In County Carlow, the protestant minister Rev. John Whitty, who was the beneficiary of the tithes collected locally was especially disliked by Rathvilly Catholics. Years earlier he had ordered the seizure and sale of the cattle of a tithe defaulter, so enraging Catholics that 5,000 of them stormed the sale and carried off the cattle.

     This time around, the residents of Rathvilly Parish were no less determined to protect their property. The following excerpt from The Pilot, a Dublin newspaper, details how they outwitted the troops sent to distrain the livestock of defaulters--

August 1834-- Mr. Whitty has a tremendous force at present…they have been out every day this week and were not able to effect a single seizure in the entire parish. The moment the troops are drawn out in marching order, a person on top of a hill lights a faggot of furze, and two minutes after, every person in the parish is out and not a four-footed animal is to be found in it by the time the troops arrive. When the troops come up, they are always received with, ‘three cheers for the King and the British Army.

     The situation had not changed a great deal when two years later this headline appeared in a less sympathetic newspaper, The Wexford Conservative—

Desperate Attack On Sheriff Police And Military At Rathvilly By Mob

Yesterday, the Sub-Sheriff, chief constables Fitzgibbon and Traunt, forty of the constabulary and twenty of the 23rd Fusileers proceeded to post tithe notices on church and chapel doors. At Rathvilly, large masses of men lined the walls enclosing the chapel yard, armed with pitchforks, scythes, bludgeons and stones while the women had a plentiful supply of boiling water. Finding the gates locked the sheriff proceeded to the house of Priest Gahan for the key, but he was not to be found. The Sheriff next ordered the police to scale the walls to post the notices on the chapel, upon which the party were assailed by a general volley of stones and missiles.

     Both Rathvilly and Baltinglass parishes were blessed with what would today be termed activist priests. Father Gahan in Rathvilly, as we have seen, made himself unavailable when the British came looking for the churchyard key, and Father Lalor in Baltinglass was just as supportive of his parishioners. When Daniel O’Connell came to Baltinglass in 1843 for one of his public anti-tithe meetings, it was Father Lalor’s curate Rev. John Nolan himself who helped arrange the details.

     In 1836 Father Gahan delivered a report to the local Poor Law Commissioners declaring it unrealistic to expect disturbances related to the tithe to halt as long as such was demanded. He added his belief that the condition of the “poorer classes” had greatly deteriorated over the past two decades as to their food and raiment, with most of his parishioners being poor farmers who lived in houses of mud or sod. In about twenty instances in the parish two or more families shared a cabin.

     When it was finally realized that the costs associated with collecting the tithe were far greater than the benefits it brought -- one officer noting, “It cost a shilling to collect tuppence” -- the collection was suspended. From then on, the rate was reduced and included in rent payments, bringing at least partial relief to the long-suffering Catholic population.