Irish Rebellion of 1798

Towards the end of January 1798 the British Government of Ireland were informed, by the Viceroy, of "very unpleasant" accounts of the Midlands. Throughout Queen's County civil disorder had reached such a state that Magistrates were asking for curfew and martial law This was done February. But the country was in the grip of a revolutionary fervour that had been spurred on by Irish/French attempts to undermine the British Government from its Irish region. Irish peasants were tearing down trees to fashion pike handles as weapons all over the south. Colonel St. George, a heavily armed and guarded Magistrate for Cork and Tipperary, was cruelly assassinated. He had warned the Irish Cabinet that the revolution had already started.

Irish costume in the 1790s - detail from woodcut of the period

This murder was one of many at the time which also included the shooting of Mr Dooling, a respectable gentleman of over a thousand pounds a year near Parsonstown in King's County. He was shot dead in front of his wife by a gang of forty attackers.

The Irish Rebellion continued to spread from the South and West to a peak where Dublin itself was under threat. However, the under armed revolutionaries were defeated in a fierce battle at Vinegar Hill before Napoleon's 1100 French soldiers, landing at Killala Bay, could assist. The effect of the unrest was to lead to the 1801 Act Of Union to calm the the Country in a closer joining between Ireland and the rest of the British Isles.

The Act promised but did not deliver, as a result of interference in Government by George III, an element of Roman Catholic emancipation. While disaster for the British Government was averted the causes were left untreated.

Later, just before the main Irish Rebellion of in May 1798, the British troops rounded up as many leaders that they could to establish as much intelligence of the uprisings as possible. Successive arrests and torture led the interrogators to the south of Ireland. A Protestant named Anthony Perry, very much an activist in the insurgence, was arrested on the 23rd and brought into Gorey a garrison town in the north of County Wexford for questioning. Beatings were common place but for Perry the soldiers used a "pitch-cap". This was a dreadful form of torture, supposedly invented by a Sergeant appropriately nick-named 'Tom-the-Devil'. Black sticky tar was mixed with gunpowder and smeared on to Perry's head and rubbed into the scalp. Beating and questioning would have continued culminating in setting light to his head...

In his terror and agony Perry understandably broke and confessed to all of his actions with the United Irishmen the revolutionary organisation into which he had been sworn only a year earlier by his Solicitor in Dublin. He named twenty-two members of the organisation and agreed to act as a prosecution witness which led to further arrests and the seizure of large amounts of arms. The Solicitor who swore him into the United Irishmen was one Matt Dowling.

Sources:
"The Year of Liberty-The History of the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798", Thomas Pakenham1992 edition by Orion Books. (ISBN 1-85799-050-1)
Faulkner's Dublin Journal 3rd and 14th February 1798
Freeman's Journal 13th and 15th February 1798
Saunder's Newsletter 16th and 23rd February 1798.