11 - Arson in Modern Ireland: Fire and Protest before the Famine

Summary

The act of deliberately setting fire to property with the intent to cause damage is a crime. In early nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, arson was a statutory offence punishable by death; even after its removal from the list of capital crimes, in 1837, fire setting remained a serious offence that could incur a life sentence or transportation. Since the eighteenth century, arson has also evolved from an individual malicious act to an effective means of collective violence. By burning valuable shelter, crops, infrastructure, etc., arsonists shape the behaviour of their (local, political, other) enemies. In the pre-Famine rural Irish context, for example, fire might drive out a rival landholder from his farm, or impede the tithe collector in his duties. This chapter does not dismiss private vengeance as a key motivator for house and crop burning. David Fitzpatrick, for example, has convincingly reinterpreted many ‘outrages’—previously deemed class or communal conflicts—as intrafamilial violence: competition for resources and a ‘lack of clear criteria for disposing of property’ within Ireland's vast kinship networks might often explain serious acts of rural violence, including arson. ‘Family’ is also, perhaps, especially more useful than ‘class’ as a ‘unit of analysis’ of rural violence, in Ireland, given the ‘complexity’ of landholding before the Famine and lack of clear distinction between, say, farmers, tenants, sub-tenants, and labourers. However, as an unavoidably public attack—fire is highly visible and potentially devastating in its impact—I argue that incendiarism is particularly effective in communicating (broadly defined) communal or collective grievances.

Having re-established control of Ireland via the Act of Union (1800), the British state certainly saw the rebellious potential of fire setting: the contemporary label ‘protest crime’—which encompasses other acts of ‘agrarianism’ including association, forcible possession, assault, animal maiming, and intimidation—recognises arson's status in the official mindset as a simultaneously violent, criminal, and insurrectionary act. Indeed, one of the major methodological problems we face in analysing arson is our reliance for evidence on government records concerned primarily with arson as protest (fires set during riots, rebellions, and other pre-Famine ‘peaks’ of agitation, in other words)—as distinct from criminal acts deemed non-political.