Rebel Motives and Mentalities: The Battle for New Ross, 5 June 1798*

REBEL MOTIVES AND MENTALITIES: THE BATTLE FOR NEW ROSS, 5 JUNE 1798* TOM DUNNE was the 1798 rebellion in Wexford a matter of “insurgency” or of “revolution ”? Or to put it another way: what was the motivation and mentality of the rank-and-file rebel? This remains the most important and the most difficult question concerning the rebellion and one that has received disappointingly little attention in recent work. This essay proposes one possible answer by focusing on the key and relatively well-defined group of rebels who captured briefly, then lost, the strategic town of New Ross in the bloodiest engagement of the rebellion. I The term “insurgency” I take to denote popular resistance to what is perceived as political or economic oppression. It has long been applied in this way to the Wexford rebels who are still referred to colloquially as “the insurgents.” Its reactive, spontaneous, and traditional connotations were stressed in nineteenth-century Catholic histories such as those of Edward Hay and Patrick Kavanagh, and led to its rejection by Miles Byrne in his 1863 Memoirs. After a lifetime in the French army Byrne had, as Tom Bartlett points out, a “customary military distaste for insurgency” and so “constantly stressed the military discipline and good order maintained by the Irish rebels, in effect denying that they were insurgents.”1 By contrast, my dictionary defines the term “revolution” as “the forcible overthrow of a government or social order in favour of a new system .” It is understood to involve modern revolutionary aims and ideoloTHE BATTLE FOR NEW ROSS, 5 JUNE 1798 5 * An earlier version of this essay was delivered in June 1998 at the conference on “1798, 1848, 1898: Revolution, Revival, and Commemoration” at University College, Cork, organized by the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland. 1 Thomas Bartlett, “Miles Byrne: United Irishman, Irish Exile, and Beau Sabreur,” in The Mighty Wave: The 1798 Rebellion in Wexford, ed. Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), 126. gies, and this is what was signaled by the slogan (or “logo”) of Wexford’s official bicentenary-commemoration body, “Comóradh ’98,” that is, “the United Irish revolution.” While clearly anachronistic in the sense that no actual “revolution” took place in 1798, this slogan claims a basis in recent historical research. The government of the Irish Republic also adopted it as the official state view during the bicentennial commemorations because of its powerful resonances with nationalists and their hopes for the Northern Ireland “peace process.” Among historians it has been promoted most vigorously by Kevin Whelan (also a major influence on the official commemoration ), who has urged that “we must relinquish our obsession . . . with pikes and deaths, murder, mayhem, and martyrdom. We should instead stress the living principles of democracy and pluralism which the United Irishmen formulated.”2 To suit this essentially political agenda the 1798 rebellion in Wexford has been transformed from the bloodiest and one of the most sectarian episodes in modern Irish history into, paradoxically , a model and symbol of hope for a future pluralist, peaceful, consensual Ireland, when the dreams of “United Irishmen” will at last be realized.3 The “Comóradh” slogan involves a distortion and popularization of Louis Cullen’s important 1987 hypothesis that, contrary to received opinion and the accounts of the United Irish leaders themselves, there was a significant United Irish presence in Wexford before the rebellion.4 Cullen offered no new documentary evidence (nor has any come to light since), but instead he brilliantly interrogated the main contemporary accounts, particularly those of Edward Hay and Thomas Cloney, and argued persuasively that in order to minimize the culpability of their non-involvement in the rebellion, they concealed the presence of a United Irish organization . In addition, he used a list that Richard Musgrave had published in 1801, together with scattered references to the military ranks of rebel leaders and his unrivalled knowledge of kinship groups and radical politics, to project an organization of six to seven United Irish “regiments” and to link their distribution to the outbreak and early course of the rebellion. It was a tour de force, offering a new understanding of hitherto puzzling THE...