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Chapter 2. Shifting Ground in Roscommon
- University of Massachusetts Press
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36 2 Shifting Ground in Roscommon { The conflicts and changes of 1828 to 1834 marked British politics for generations. . . . [They] cemented in place a claim-making repertoire of meetings, marches, petition drives, electoral campaigns, social movements , associations, firm-by-firm strikes, and related forms of action. —Charles Tilly, Popular Contention The following amendment is to be proposed by Mr. O’Connell, on the next stage of the Irish Coercion bill:—“That a select committee be appointed to inquire into the causes which have produced outrage and murders in certain districts in Ireland; and especially to ascertain to what extent agrarian disturbances may be traced to the practice of depopulating estates, and to ‘other circumstances connected with the existing relations between landlord and tenant in that country’; in order that such crimes may be prevented by the removal of their causes, and specially by the enactment of just and salutary laws relative to the tenure and occupation of land.” —Roscommon and Leitrim Gazette, May 2, 1846 No understanding of the rent strike in Ballykilcline is possible without knowing the ground on which it happened: the history preceding the strike of both the Irish people generally and the residents of Kilglass Parish in particular. By the 1830s, when the rent strike began, the Irish had opposed the British in Ireland for centuries. A major battle in the Williamite War took place at the River Boyne in 1690 when the Protestant William of Orange defeated the Catholic King James II for the Crown of England, an outcome with enormous repercussions for Ireland. Soon after, the English seized Ballykilcline, which was only a mile or two west of the Shannon River. A bridge over the Shannon waterway at Ruskey in Kilglass Parish links Roscommon with Counties Leitrim and Longford. Roscommon has been called the heart of Ireland, and geographically it is that—a landlocked county in the middle of the country, in the province of Connacht, which nevertheless has miles of shoreline on the rivers and lakes that lace Shifting Ground in Roscommon 37 its countryside. Central Roscommon is a broad fertile plain, but a ridge of low mountains, Slieve Bawn (“white mountain”), cuts through the barony of Ballintobber North and the parish of Kilglass. In antiquity, this territory was peopled by the Firbolgians, a dark-haired tribe short in stature. Robert Kee called them the true Irish race (Kee 1972, p. 9). Ballykilcline was and is part of Kilglass civil parish, which hugs the Shannon River several miles northeast of the market center at Strokestown. After taking Ballykilcline, the Crown then leased out the property. A century later, in 1793, the townland was sublet to the Mahons for forty-one years, which ended in 1834 (Scally 1995, p. 25). The name Ballykilcline means, loosely, the place of the church of Cline, and indeed Clines lived there even in famine time; they too—the family of Patrick and Eliza Cline Kelly—were evicted from the land by Crown authorities . Kilglass means “green church” in Gaelic, and the local Catholic history dates to St. Patrick’s travels in the vicinity about 400 A.D., when he Catholicized the Irish people. References to a Catholic church in Kilglass can be found in twelfth-century church records (Coyle 1994, p. 17). The tenants’ embrace of Catholicism is an important factor in their story, since it separated them in Ireland from their rulers and later in Rutland, Vermont, from the Yankee elite; in consequence, it forged a powerful sense of social, political, and cultural identity among the Irish. After the Boyne battle, in 1703, the English imposed the Penal Laws to keep Irish Catholics in economic and political bondage. Informers who told on lawbreaking Catholics were rewarded. The laws forbade Catholics to buy land or to lease it for longer than thirty-one years. When a Catholic died, his land had to be divided equally among all his heirs, guaranteeing that their holdings grew steadily smaller. Catholics could not vote or hold office. They could neither enter the professions nor serve in the military. They were barred from education (a restriction that produced the clandestine “hedge” schools). Catholics could not carry a sword or own a gun or a horse of any value. They could not engage in some kinds of commerce and had to pay special fees to trade in towns. Their bishops were banished ; priests had to register and were barred from keeping church registers (Connolly 1998, pp. 438, 439; Gilder Lehrman website).1...