1998 Constructions of Irish Identity in Enniscorthy: Personal Reflections on the 1798 Uprising and Its Legacies

Enniscorthy, County Wexford, serves as the center for all activities in the 1998 commemoration of the 1798 Irish rebellion. A fitting location for remembrance; for here is the heart of a victory that, although secured only temporarily, endures as a part of Irish national identity. The ordinary people of Wexford won and held a free Irish republic for one long, bloody month against the rising might of the British military, and they have not forgotten it. After spending many summers among friends and family in Enniscorthy over the past fifteen years, I have become an American with an Irish home. Every street and field is dear to me now, and so it felt natural to set out in the summer of 1996 to discover just what 1798 means to the people living in the Slaney Valley at the foot of Vinegar Hill today. How might they shape their sense of Irishness in terms of their fellows who fought two hundred years ago? After all, it was a people’s rebellion—even more so than my own American Revolution had been—and it was the people’s conceptions and representations of it that I wanted to know. I also knew that Irish people in general, and Wexford people in particular, would be well-educated, literate, and lively conversationalists.

I chose Enniscorthy to focus my efforts for reasons stronger than my personal fondness for the town. You see, by the time the sun set on the 28 May 1798, poorly armed rebel forces had routed the garrison and taken the town. As historian Daniel Gahan explains, “The Battle of Enniscorthy, as it soon would be called, was one of the most important engagements of the rebellion. It gave the rebels command of the entire central section of the country and provided their campaign with almost irresistible momentum. In addition, hundreds of men and women from the town joined their ranks [at the main camp] on Vinegar Hill.” ¹ Less than a month later, on 22 June, the people in nearby Wexford Town could hear the rumble of British artillery hammering into the rebels on those same exposed hillsides. In the extended and fierce battle of Vinegar Hill, ² thousands died, the majority of them “non-combatants” or “camp followers,” as they are referred to impersonally by many history books. The residents of Enniscorthy today who have shared their thoughts with me speak of them differently. When asked, they talk of those who died as flesh-and-blood men, women, and children who color the town’s memory with their presence, an enduring presence that helps shape the citizenry’s sense of themselves. ³

Anyone there will tell you that even in July, the wind cuts through jackets and sweaters as though they were tissue paper on the top of Vinegar Hill. I know, because I have stood there often over the past fifteen years, scrambling over spongy turf and bare granite outcroppings or trotting worn paths through heather, brambles, blackberries, and wild roses. I have taken photos of my children, father-in-law, nephews, friends, and my husband. Every picture features either hats pulled down to the eyes or hair blown outlandishly, the rich, earthy checkerboard of Wexford farms rolling to the silvered Slaney River and the winding streets of Enniscorthy below. We smile in the pictures. We clown. Adults brace one hand on a child’s shoulders and point with the other to landmarks in the distance. My eleven-year-old son frowns at me, and I remember his asking, “What do you mean by Needham’s Gap? There’s no mountain over there.” ⁴ We button our shirts to the neck, and sometimes we tell the stories of the place.

Vinegar Hill is one of those rare places where layers of time and human history tumble around us in the vigorous wind, a place that demands its stories be told. The story most insistent began in 1798 and continues to reverberate today. Two hundred years ago a brief but pivotal Irish victory died here, along with thousands of...