Tommy Downshire's Boys: Popular Protest, Social Change and Political Manipulation in Mid-Ulster 1829-1847

In May 1829, in the heart of Ulster's weaving district, a canal barge carrying potatoes for export during a trade recession was attacked and destroyed near Porta down by an armed mob headed by a fictitious leader called 'Tommy Downshire'.¹ As the exporter was Catholic and the attackers Protestant, some contemporaries branded the attack sectarian. If so, it could readily fit familiar patterns. Mid-Ulster engendered the Orange and Defender societies in the 1790s, and was considered a bastion of Protestant political ascendancy after the Union. It is often seen as an irremediable cockpit of sectarianism, producing a range of problems from nineteenth-century riots to the modern 'troubles', when it encompassed the notorious 'murder triangle' and the Drumcree Orange parade dispute in Portadown.² However, it is less well known that the area also had strong economic protest traditions which included a non-sectarian dimension and stretched back into the eighteenth century.³ Between 1829 and 1847 waves of 'Tommy Downshire' protests, sometimes involving both Catholics and Protestants, erupted against landlords and capitalist linen manufacturers. Newspapers likened these protests to the English 'Swing' riots and Chartism, and they featured extensively in the correspondence of magistrates, policemen and the government; yet, despite this contemporary notoriety, Irish historiography is silent on 'Tommy Downshire's Boys'.

I

Although Ireland, like Britain, experienced extensive protest in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it has only been systematically investigated since the late 1970s in studies inspired by the 'history from below' school of British Marxist historians like Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé and E. P. Thompson.⁴ These pioneers saw method behind the madness previously thought to characterize protesting crowds. Thompson's 'moral economy' thesis on eighteenth-century food rioting crowds remains especially influential. He argued that such activity was not mindless, but had clear aims to restore prices to customary levels accepted by a paternalist gentry and plebeian consumers, and based on shared notions of fairness. This traditional 'moral economy' was evoked in response to a modernizing 'market economy', and its restoration was sought by the calculated use of limited violence and ritualized threat.⁵ Such research stimulated further studies, some incorporating social science models to categorize types of 'collective activity' according to its traditional or modernizing nature. Most saw traditional 'pre-industrial' types of local reactive protest being replaced by progressive forms engendered by industrialization. This 'modern' form manifested itself on a wider geographical scale than traditional localized protest. It was organized on an associational rather than a communal basis, and was more proactive than conservative in its aims. Modernizing protest was linked to the development of class-consciousness. Food rioting declined and industrial strikes grew, with the 1830s being seen as the watershed.⁶

The 'discovery' of Irish protest stimulated studies of various movements ranging from the Munster Whiteboys to Ulster's Oakboys and Steelboys.⁷ The contemporary British impetus to fit protest to interpretative models migrated to Ireland, although Rudé cautioned that 'the forms and issues of rural Irish protest are so confused that it is hard to tell one movement or one type of protest from another'.⁸ Several historians found social change a causal factor and applied 'breakdown' models to situations where market forces disrupted customary relationships in the rural economy. Irish protest has also been tested against violence typologies. Adapting Thompson's model, Thomas Bartlett argued that violent opposition to the 1793 militia levy foreclosed an Irish moral economy.⁹ Thus the Whiteboys and Steelboys of the 1770s were 'conservative' with limited violence, but the Defenders mark a 'transformation' in increased violence, a more formalized and wider organization and a sectarian, 'anti-state' ideology. Although 'traditional' violence lingered in places into the early twentieth century, the 1790s saw 'modern' patterns emerge, leaving older types in 'rapid decline' by the 1830s.¹⁰ Social protest has also been tested for its politicizing potential, revealing continuities between the experience of mobilization and the emergence of political nationalism, both insurrectionary and constitutional.¹¹ Recent work has considered how far the British crowd historian Mark Harrison's...