John Minahane

Carrickshock And A Hut In Carrignavar

Just ten years after the battle of Keimaneigh in County Cork (January 1822), celebrated by Máire Bhuí Ní Laoire, came the battle of Carrickshock in County Kilkenny (December 1831). Between the two, the campaign led by Daniel O’Connell for Catholic Emancipation had achieved success (1829).  But what did this ‘Emancipation’ amount to for tenant farmers and labourers in the Irish countryside?

It would not have much relevance to such people if it didn’t lead on to other things.  Repeal of the Union, of course, was what came next for O’Connell.  But the first thing that popular energies really went into was a campaign against Tithes. 

   Tithes were huge taxes that were legally due to the local Church of Ireland parsons.  Legally, it did not matter that Catholics felt there was no justice in requiring them to support a Church they didn’t themselves belong to.  A non-payment of Tithes campaign, based on passive resistance, got going in the year 1831;  the parsons responded with a determined effort to collect arrears. 

   That was the context of what happened in Carrickshock.  An attempt was being made to serve summonses on local people, demanding that their arrears be paid.  The agent (or ‘tithe proctor’) who was to serve the summonses was accompanied by a body of almost forty armed policemen. 

   This proctor was an especially obnoxious and insulting man, hated by the locals. When he and his armed guard approached the area where he was to serve his summonses, they were surrounded by a crowd of over a thousand men, women and children, who were summoned by the ringing of church bells.  The men had no firearms, but they had pitchforks, scythes, hurleys, mallets and stones.

   The crowd was directed by a local hedge-school master (and 1798 veteran) called William Keane, with a couple of lieutenants.  They repeatedly told the police captain that they wished no harm to the police, they just wanted the tithe proctor.  Their intention was to beat him up and make him eat his summonses.  When the captain refused to consider this, the leaders deployed the crowd so as to manoeuvre the police contingent into a narrow lane where they were effectively trapped. 

   An unsuccessful attempt was then made to seize the tithe proctor.  Following this, he was hit by a heavy stone.  The police chief gave the order to fire, but his constables had no room to shoot effectively;  the crowd responded by raining stones on the police and wading in with their other weapons.  In a few minutes’ fighting thirteen policemen and the tithe proctor were killed.  Three members of the crowd lost their lives.

   This event had a peculiar shock effect, because it reversed what usually happened in such confrontations:  the police took the brunt of the casualties, not the crowd.  In a crowd/police confrontation a few months earlier, in Castlepollard, County Westmeath, thirteen people in the crowd were shot dead by the police, and there were no police casualties.  Something similar would have happened in Carrickshock, of course, if the police captain’s order to fire had been effective.  But the leaders of the crowd had outmanoeuvred him. 

The Aftermath Of The Battle

   The first response of the Callan merchant, Humphrey O’Sullivan, who is famous for his unusual practice of keeping a diary in Irish, would have been typical of many of the “weighty folk”, as he described his kind (daoine tromaí).  His entry on 15th December1831, the day after the Carrickshock event, has the comment: “This is a bad business for the Irish, as the English will take revenge on them”.

Daniel O’Connell, for his part, condemned both the killing of police and the killing of members of the crowd.  But what soon became clear was that Carrickshock was in fact a major morale boost to the anti-Tithe campaigners.  The men who fought the police were regarded as heroes.  They had shown the campaign’s depth of determination and made it known to the other side that to take an uncompromising attitude could be costly. 

   By the Summer of 1832 the authorities were making attempts to change the law, at least to remove the most humiliating aspects of Tithe collection.  On the other hand, attempts were still being made to collect arrears. These attempts, however, faced ever more highly organised resistance.  And even if it was in Kilkenny (though some say it was in Tralee) that a speaker at a meeting declared, exaggerating a little as campaigners do, 

“Since the day when the tithe was put in its grave in Carrickshock by the men of Kilkenny, the best men in Ireland, not a penny has been paid to the ministers or ever will be” (Ón ló ar cuireadh an deachmhadh san uaigh i gCarraig Seac le fearaibh Contae Cill Cuinnigh, na fearaibh is fearr in Éirinn, níor díoladh pingin leis na ministéiridhe agus ní dhíolfar go bráth)—wherever this was said, it testifies to the event’s impact!

   A very important part of the Carrickshock phenomenon was the follow-up.  Because, of course, local people were afterwards arrested and charged with murder.  Something had to be done for them, as Séamas Ó Cathail did not forget to point out in his celebratory poem:

Chuaigh scéal ar an mbualadh thar na tonnta taoscach’

go Talamh an Éisc ’gus go Sasana Nua, 

gur ídíodh an aicme a bhí ag creachadh na nGael bocht –

is ná tugaí iontaoibh le h-aon díobh níos mó!

Éirigí i bhur seasamh agus nochtaigí bhur gclaidhthe,

bíodh príosún dá réabadh agus géarghlas ar lúth,

agus scaoiligí abhaile fearaibh Chill Chéise,

agus ná ligí aon díobh a dhaoradh insa chúirt!  

The news of that beating went over the swelling waves,

to Newfoundland and New England,

that the tribe who’d been robbing poor Gaels were destroyed –

and do not trust any of them ever again!

Rise and stand up, and bare your swords,

let prisons and harsh fetters be burst,

and set free and bring home the men of Kilkeasy,

don’t let any of them be condemned in the court!

The prisons were not in fact burst into.  The eighteen men accused of murder were not forcibly set free.  But something was done which was even better:  the jurors in their trials were either intimidated or won over!

   In July 1832 an enormous mass meeting was held near the village of Ballyhale, within a couple of miles of Carrickshock.  This was the largest of a series of anti-Tithe mass meetings held in the south of Ireland that Summer.  200,000 people were said to have attended.  Speakers and audience made pointed references to Carrickshock, and so did banners representing some of the huge contingents who attended.  Several thousand people from Waterford, with 700 horsemen and a brass band, marched behind a coffin with a banner giving the date of the Carrickshock battle, saying: 

Tithes!

The frightful source of misery and bloodshed

Died on the ever-memorable 14th of December, 1831

Requiescat in pace – Amen

As reported in The Times (14.7.1832), those immediately behind the coffin acted as mock-mourners, gleefully mock-keening the corpse.

   Gary Owens, of whom more later, says that this was “but one part of a well-organised and determined campaign to sway the opinions of jurors”.  And, if such a campaign was needed, then it was successful.  Two weeks after the Ballyhale meeting, three of the Carrickshock defendants were tried and all were acquitted by their juries.  Deciding to cut its losses, the State then withdrew its case completely against the other fifteen accused.  

   The hills in four Counties all had bonfires that night, according to Humphrey O’Sullivan.  St. James’s Eve (July 24) was bigger this time round than Midsummer, Séamas Ó Cathail said:

Ní raibh cnoc ná coill im radharc sa réim úd

ná raibh sop á shéideadh agus réabadh ar fál,

ag tabhairt fios feasta don óg is aosta

gur bhuaigh Oíche Fhéil’  Shéamais ar Oíche Fhéil’  Sheáin!

As far as I could see, no hill or wood

but had heather blazing and bursting through bounds,

letting young and old know from here on

that Saint James’s Eve has beaten Saint John’s! 

Only An Incident?

   In later times the battle of Carrickshock was a source of particular pride in south Kilkenny and Waterford.  A monument was raised at the spot in 1925, commemorating the three anti-Tithe campaigners who died and giving an honourable mention to William Keane, the hedge-school master who had been “outstanding in the fight”.

   A journal called Cultural And Social History 2004, I, has an article by Gary Owens of the University of Western Ontario entitled, “The Carrickshock Incident, 1831:  Social Memory and an Irish Cause Celebre”.  Owens is concerned, first of all, to reduce the scale of the event (to a mere ‘incident’, as in his title).  It wasn’t anything big, he argues, it had no large consequences.  It was merely something that local communities puffed up.  And he has some supercilious commentary on the fact that the monument erected in 1925 gives the names of the dead anti-Tithe campaigners, but omits the names of the dead policemen and tithe proctor.

   Not much time need be wasted on this last point, which is typical of recent revisionist commentary.  The fact is, it has never been the practice of people who erect monuments to commemorate the enemy.  And the policemen of 1831, the peelers, were considered enemies by the mainstream Irish public of 1925,  because they had assisted in the robbing or ruining (depending on how one translates that much-used word creachadh) of the ordinary rural men and women of the 1830s, as described by Séamas Ó Cathail. 

   Ó Cathail’s fierce loathing of the police can be matched by other poets of his time:  by Raifteraí, for example (who prays to God go bhfeice mé peelers lag marbh sínte, “that I may see the peelers stretched out dead”), or Dáibhí de Barra, writing in the context of another violent crowd-police confrontation in East Cork in 1833: 

“No man of good reputation joined that band, but only poor idle vagrants and wicked topers of evil repute, so that a horse or a cow, a pig or a sheep, dare not walk the road but that some peeler would have a halter on it so as to get money for a drink out of it…  There was not on the face of the earth a crowd more despised and more hated by the Irish than they…”

   I am more interested in Owens’s contention that Carrickshock did not really count for much:

“The Carrickshock incident is not a prominent event in Irish history… in most general histories of nineteenth century Ireland the affair is literally a footnote, if it is mentioned at all”. 

But the fault might be in those general histories.  Events like this have more subterranean influence than appears above the surface.  And, when Owens goes on to say that—

“contemporaries recorded no acts of uncommon bravery;  no stirring words spoken before, during or after the fighting;  no participants boasting that they had won a memorable victory”, 

he is leaving out of account the fact that contemporaries had to take account of the English law and what it might be able to make of imprudent praises of individuals. 

   Even taken literally, what Owens says is not accurate.  Séamas Ó Cathail certainly boasts of a memorable victory won.  He says he himself wasn’t present, though we don’t know whether or not that is true: 

Is ’á mbeinnse ar an bhfaiche a raibh an treascradh á dhéanamh, / bheadh fios in mo véarsa dén fear díobh ab fhearr, 

“If I’d been at the ground where the toppling was done, / my poem would know who was the best man of all!” 

The best man of all was presumably William Keane:  the acknowledgment recorded on the monument, that he had been “outstanding in the fight”, assuredly goes back to contemporary opinion.

   William Carleton, in his novel The Tithe Proctor published in 1849, has notable things to say about the events of 1831-2:

“Perhaps nothing, after all, can test the inextinguishable hatred of tithes which prevailed at that period, more than the startling and almost incredible fact that the government, aided by as sound a lawyer, and as able an attorney-general as ever lived, and a powerful bar besides, were not able, during the following spring and summer assizes, to convict a single individual concerned in this massacre, which is now a portion of our country’s history, and still well remembered as that of Carrickshock, in the county of Kilkenny.

   “This double triumph of the people over the tithe and police, created a strong sensation throughout the kingdom, and even shook the two houses of parliament with dismay.”

Michael Davitt’s View

   Startling and almost incredible, indeed, was this jamming of the English machinery of justice.  Arguably, Carrickshock won the initiative for the anti-Tithe campaign, and the British authorities were not able afterwards to win it back. 

Michael Davitt seems to have held this view.  In his unsentimental review of early 19th century politics in The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, he remarks that

 “English rulers… conceded more to the action of a few peasants who attacked and killed a small body of soldiers and police at Carrickshock during the tithe war of the thirties than to all the huge Repeal meetings addressed by the great tribune [i.e. O’Connell] for ten years”. 

   Davitt’s comments on the anti-Tithe campaign generally are of interest:

“The anti-tithe agitation of the thirties, being a mixed agrarian and creed movement, and inviting the cooperation of the Catholic clergy on the latter ground, showed greater force of organisation than the previous, irregular Whiteboy combinations.  The influence of O’Connell’s methods of organised public gatherings was felt in the more general plan of uniform passive resistance adopted in the tithe war.  Distraint for cattle was systematically obstructed;  tithe proctors were waylaid and beaten, just as process-servers were in 1880-1, in the days of the Land League;  and the power of social ostracism was brought to bear upon traitors to the popular revolt against an abominable form of sectarian ascendancy.  But the effective power behind the agitation against the payment of tithes was that of the Whiteboy spirit—the young men who ran risks and drilled at night, cultivated arms, and otherwise kept up the social antagonism to the law that made the land the property of a rapacious and anti-Irish class.”

   As for Carrickshock, Davitt thought that more of the same might possibly even have averted the mass starvation in the late forties:

“A dozen repetitions of Carrickshock in the three southern provinces, in the early part of 1846—in reply to Peel’s proposed coercion—would have largely saved the situation”.

   In short, Carrickshock was important.  Detailed accounts of what happened, by the surviving policemen, were afterwards published in reports of trials and drawn on by William Carleton for his vivid description of the lead-up to the fight (he prefers not to describe the fight itself) in The Tithe Proctor.  

Much of the journalistic commentary was of course hostile.  However, Gary Owens shows that there was already an English-language journalism that shared broad sympathies with the campaigners and was prepared to see something heroic in their fight (the Kilkenny Journal). 

   Some English-language ballads were composed to celebrate the event.  One very vivid example, which captures the most essential point in its title (Carrickshock Victory), was published as a penny broadsheet and was very popular.  It was composed by a hedge-school teacher, Watt Murphy (who is also the author of the Kilkenny hurling anthem, The Rose Of Mooncoin).  But it remains true that for witty high spirits, bold expression, communication of atmosphere, and quality of verse, there is nothing to compare with the two songs by Séamas Ó Cathail, and especially his first one, beginning Is fada athá deachuithe ag cealg ar Ghaeil bhocht,  “The poor Gaels have long been stabbed by tithes”. 

   Of course, he too must have been under pressure to compose in English.  In his fourth verse he seems to say so.  He makes some sort of pun on the tithe proctor going out with his police escort, his tuataí geala, “bright (-coated?) yokels, louts”, or tua-taí geala, “bright-axe men”, then he suddenly feels he’d better help with a translation:

lena thuataí geala a ghearrfadh go faobhrach —

ach geallaimse gur maolaíodh na h-airm sa ghleo!

Aoinne agaibh feasta ná tuigeann crua-Ghaelig,

cuirfead-sa i gcéill díbh brí-éifeacht mo sceoil —

le h-athrú na teanga ’gus casadh ar an mBéarla

gur hatchets a ghlaofainn gan bhréag ar mo namhaid! 

with his men of bright axes for sharp-edged cutting —

but I warrant you, those weapons were blunted in the fight!

Any of you who don’t grasp the hard Irish,

I’ll spell out the meaning of my story for you:

changing the language and turning to English,

hatchets is my true name for my enemies! 

Tom Dunne On The 19th Century Poets

What was really going on in that Gaelic culture in the decades before the Famine, when the mass change of language from Irish to English was well underway—even in regions like South Kilkenny—and was constantly accelerating?  One of those who have tried to provide some answer to the question is the recently deceased Tom Dunne, Emeritus Professor of History in UCC.

   At a crucial point in his development Tom Dunne went to Cambridge University and, as Brendan Clifford pointed out in an article some years ago, Cambridge was bad for his mind.  Nevertheless, he has merits that are not to be found, for example, in his fellow Cambridge graduate and protégée Michelle O’Riordan, author of The Gaelic Mind And The Collapse Of The Gaelic World, a book as pretentious and hollow as its title.  Even though he had been trained to think Irish nationalism was the root of all evil, Dunne still insisted on some old-fashioned truths.  In particular, he took issue with the ‘New British History’, which sought to ‘normalise’ Ireland within the United Kingdom. 

   The attitude of New British Historians was:  let’s look at Ireland in the eighteenth century;  is everything war and chaos?  By no means!  In fact, everything is quiet; people are going about living their lives, they are communicating, negotiating, petitioning for rights and testing loopholes, working, buying and selling things, organising things…  And you with your ‘conquest and colonisation’ obsession, you’re flattening out all that varied normal life! To which Dunne replied:

“Nowhere else in the ‘British Archipelago’ experienced anything like the radical, violent revolution that transformed Ireland from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, destroying its indigenous elites, planting their lands with colonists who were perceived as alien in culture and religion, imposing that alien culture, and most crucially its language—and achieving all this through a series of bloody wars, mainly won by English armies. ‘Conquest and colonisation’ still seem the best (though not only) description of that process to me” (‘Ireland, Irish And Colonialism’, The Irish Review No. 30, 2003). 

   Dunne was aware that there was a huge 18th century Jacobite literature in Irish that had insights and perspectives to be found nowhere else (with a firm grasp of the reality of conquest and colonisation).  For those proposing to write the history of Ireland, it could not be irrelevant.  When he looked a bit more closely, he could see that literature running right up as far as the Famine.  Poets of the 1820s, such as Máire Bhuí Ní Laoire and Raiftearaí, had those insights too.  But, Dunne complained, they used the same anti-colonial language that was used in the 17th century!  (They did not respect the imperative of progress!!)  Nevertheless, that 19th century poetry would need to be looked at:

“Early modern Ireland should always be seen as a bilingual world, and indeed it can be said that a real revolution in Irish history writing will occur when that key insight informs research from that period right up to the Famine.” 

   Of the articles by Dunne that I have to hand, the one that gives most attention to 19th century literature is entitled ‘Tá Gaedhil bhocht cráidhte: memory, tradition and the politics of the poor in Gaelic poetry and song’.  His main argument seems to be that two streams distinguish themselves in the work of the pre-Famine poets.  The truly popular poets like Máire Bhuí and Raiftearaí gave voice to social discontent and kept up the demand for an overturn of the conquest, but  they were well on the road to extinction:  they soon ceased to exist, being swallowed up in the great language change from Irish to English.

   By contrast, the more learned poets allegedly turned their backs on political and social affairs and became a kind of early Gaelic-revivalists or antiquarians, concerned with the Irish language rather than the Irish people.  One example of this, according to Dunne, was Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin. (Mícheál Óg had been the main United Irish organiser in Cork in 1798, and for a couple of years after that he was forced to lie low.)

“Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin turned increasingly after 1798 from the tradition of political opposition to the colonial settlement to the need to salvage the literary tradition, by saving the language itself…

  “The subaltern peasant voice continued through his lifetime and beyond, as we have seen, in ‘filí pobail’ like Máire Bhuí and Raiftearaí, articulating a desire for justice and revenge, rooted in the enduring ‘memory’ of colonial expropriation that had both a literary and a communal basis. As the community that mainly sustained that tradition became increasingly bilingual, and moved towards extinction, a scholarly revival movement developed, which had little interest in the popular culture of the living language.”

Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin

Such is Dunne’s case, and it has no foundation.  The distinction he is making does not hold up.  Breandán Ó Buachalla afterwards pointed out that in caoineadh (the poetry of lamentation or keening), it was not possible to distinguish sharply between the learned and literary caoineadh and the popular unsophisticated caoineadh:  professional keeners drew upon both of them, they could turn up side-by-side in the same poem, they intertwined.  And, similarly we cannot say that the learned poets did not contribute to popular movements like the anti-Tithe campaign, because demonstrably they did. 

   Séamas Ó Cathail is just one example.  I suppose Dunne, if he’d known of him, might have given him that condescending label, “the subaltern peasant voice”.  (In fact, with his reference to “hard Irish”, crua-Ghaeilge, cited above, Ó Cathail evokes the culture of the learned poets, proud of their mastery of the “hard Irish” of ages past. — The label, anyhow, does not suit Máire Bhuí or Raifteraí either.)

   As for Mícheál Ó Longáin, the idea that he lost his sense of social justice is ludicrous.  Dunne has no excuse for this notion:  he had at his disposal a selection of Ó Longáin’s poems, made by Rónán Ó Donnchadha.  This does not contain very much from the last two decades of the poet’s life (1817-37), but there’s still enough to disprove what the emeritus Professor of History is saying. And, in particular, there is one poem from 1822 which blows the argument away, and one is surprised that Dunne didn’t notice. 

   The manuscript heading, written by Ó Longáin himself, tells us that the author composed this poem—

“after he had been living in a small, wretched and very smoky hut, and on a farm of bad land that was too expensive for him, in the parish of Dunbulloge or Carrignavar near Cork City, in 1822. Our names were on the doors that year.” (The reason why residents’ names had to be on the doors is presumably connected with the rapid spread of the Rockite rural rebellion in nearby regions, specifically in North Cork. The battle of Keimaneigh took place in January of that year.)

   Ó Longáin himself, in fact, was an instance of social oppression.  He was himself a case for redress. If he wrote about social injustice (and he did, as in the poem that follows), he could draw on experience.  Knowing that he was capable of composing a poem like this, and with the skills he had as a scribe and editor of poetry, it is hardly surprising he resented having to do the drudgery of working a small farm. 

   Institutionalised modern academics, of whom Tom Dunne was one, find it difficult to comprehend that there was continuity in Irish poetry, even long after Cromwell and William.  How could there possibly be continuity when the institutional continuity had ceased?  Prior to the seventeenth century, the poets had been an officially-recognised order, they had enjoyed institutional supports:  lands to sustain their schools, rewards for poems, many special payments. 

   When such supports are withdrawn, how can people who work in non-literary professions mainly of low status, as publicans, tradesmen, teachers in officially unrecognised schools, and so on, how can they realistically claim continuity with the elite poetry of yesteryear?  They do indeed give all the appearance of making that claim.  Deprived of institutional backing, an underground community, forming itself somehow or other, stubbornly continues the work.  They feel a duty to sustain the great culture of Ireland, and they do their duty as best they can.  

   However, the tenured academic may simply refuse to accept that this is possible.  On the other hand, when following the track of Ó Longáin, the academic might be expected to understand how difficult things could be for this ambitious and enterprising poet, when all officialdom was hostile and he had no backing or grant-aid of any kind.  Tom Dunne shows no understanding, maybe because he has a preconceived theory that impedes him.

   The poem below has five stresses per line.  These stresses rhyme, all the way through the poem:  ú – a/ai/ea – a/ai/ea – ao/é –í.  The second and third stresses also rhyme internally.  Ó Longáin knew well that precisely this metre had been used by some of the greatest poets in Ireland over the previous two centuries and a half.  He wanted to prove that he too could make the music.  Triumphing over his living conditions (because what is said in the second verse must not be taken as final), he produced this excellent poem.  In doing so, Ó Longáin claimed a place in the long line of the top poets of Ireland, the filí and draoithe.

Fuacht na scailpe-se, deatach is gaoth gheimhridh,

cruas na leapa so s’s easpa brait lae ’s oíche,

muarchuid teacsanna, deachuithe is glaoch cíosa,

tug buartha cathach mé, easpaitheach éagaointeach.

Mo scuaine leanbh go dealbh gan aon ní acu,

’s an tsuaircbhean chneasta, a mbanaltra bhéilbhinn sin,

cruas na reachta so ag Gallaibh dár ngéirdhíbirt,

do bhuair, do mheathlaigh, do mhairbh go léir mh’intinn.

Ar cuaird dá dtagadh sin, caraid dom fhéafraí-se,

níor thualaing mh’achmhainn a fhreastal ná a chaomhdhíon liom

ag sluaite Danar ag taisteal gach aon oíche

ar fuaid ár mbailte ag bagar an chlaondlí ’rainn.

Uain ná aga níl agam do ghléas caoilphinn

le a luaifinn grafadh mo leabhar i saorscríbhinn;

atáid uaim iar scaipeadh go seachmhallach saobhnaíseach, 

suarach searbh ar aiste nár chéim cuí dhom.

A Uain Ghil bhanaltran bheannaithe an chaomhRí sin

d’fhuascail scata ó pheannaid na ndaor-gclaoinbheart,

ruaig-se Gallaibh as fearannaibh saorChríomhthainn

uainn tar caise, is nár chasaid go h-éag choíche.

The cold of this hovel, the smoke and the winter wind,

this bed that’s so hard, with not enough clothes day or night,

and numerous taxes, tithes, and demands for rent,

have made me gloomy, impoverished, sad, complaining.

My brood of children destitute, without anything,

and the kindly cheerful woman, their sweet-voiced nurse;

this hard regime of the English, our cruel expellers,

has cowed, depressed, entirely killed my spirit.

If friends should come to visit, asking for me,

I have no power to serve them or give them shelter,

with the tyrants’ forces patrolling every night

round our villages, threatening us with the crooked law.

I have no leisure or time to prepare my slender pen

that I used for writing my books in noble script;

they are gone from me, scattered carelessly, foolishly,

exchanged for a mean, sour task that’s unfit for me.

Bright Lamb of the Blessed Nurse and gentle King

who freed a great crowd from wrong-doers’ punishment,

chase the English out of noble Criomhthann’s lands

over the flood, and may they never ever return!

My English version can only give a shadow of the original.  –  Next month I hope to conclude this series, with some more on the poets of the early 19th century.

(Sources: Anti-tithe speech: S. P. Ó Mórdha, ‘An anti-tithe speech in Irish’, Éigse 9 (1960-61); Séamas Ó Cathail: two poems in Dáithí Ó hÓgáin (eag.), Duanaire Osraíoch (Baile Átha Cliath 1980); Raiftearaí on the peelers: in his anti-tithe poem Éirigí suas is ná failligí an uair; Dáibhí de Barra: Brian Ó Cuív (ed.), ‘A Contemporary Account in Irish of a Nineteenth-Century Tithe Affray’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 61C (1960-61); Michael Davitt: The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (London 1904), pp. 35, 35-6, 53; Dunne, ‘Tá Gaedhil bhocht cráite’: in Rebellion and Remembrance in Modern Ireland, ed. Lawrence M. Geary (Dublin 2001); Fuacht na scailpe-se: Rónán Ó Donnchadha, Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin (Baile Átha Cliath 1994), p. 128.)