The Agreeable Recreation Of Fighting

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1999 by Carolyn Conley

Forty-four people over the age of sixty died in brawls, resulting in only two prison sentences. Brawling was so routine that even the disabled were sometimes involved. A one-handed pensioner in Kilkenny was sentenced to four months for knocking a man down and breaking his kneecap. John Ryan, who started a Christmas Eve brawl at a neighbor's home, was beaten to death with his own crutch. Since Ryan had started the fight, his killers were acquitted.(52)

Occasionally, a judge would express indignation. However, judges could only act on their indignation if the jury convicted. For example, Justice Murphy was appalled when a jury chose to ignore charges of attempted murder against a man who had fractured another man's skull with a stone. When they convicted him of common assault instead, Murphy shouted, "Take back that verdict. I will not take it. Do you think fracturing a man's skull is a common assault? If you do, I'd like to see it tried on yourselves." The jury refused to change their verdict. In another case Justice Harrison angrily asked a witness in a homicide case, "Do you call it a spree when a man's head is broken by a blow?" Another presiding judge complained, "You have evidence of the murderous assault committed on the prosecutor and his brother. In the former's skull you have been shown the crater left by the instrument, proved beyond the shadow of a doubt to have been used by the prisoner. That evidence is uncontradicted, not denied even." When the scolding had no effect, the accused was released on his own recognizance.(53) Heavy jail time for simply participating in recreation was something very few jurors could tolerate.

More often other judges shared the sentiments of Chief Justice Morris who told a Mayo Grand Jury hearing assault charges after a fair, "It was a very common sort of assault in his long experience, both in matters of fact, in words, and in what happened in the country, and will happen more or less to the end of time." He also praised the policeman who "took a good constabulary and judicial view of it, because having been called upon to investigate, he saw there was not very much done and that it would be very hard to find out who did it. He sent one party home and gave them a reasonable start before he let out the other party." The judge also approved of impartiality in the courtroom. "He always observed there was an effort to balance the number of witnesses, and accordingly there were six witnesses for the prosecution and a doctor and six witnesses for the defense and a doctor."(54)

Expressions of concern over recreational violence usually had less to do with the injuries inflicted than with the image projected. As long as the Irish could be portrayed as drunken barbarians bashing each others' brains out for the fun of it, any economic or political hardships could be blamed on the Irish character. The Munster News warned its readers that faction fighting could be used by the English to prove that the Irish were savages unfit to govern themselves. Justice Fitzgerald compared the faction fighters to African tribes then being "civilized" by the British: "The man and women of Ashantee were not half so savage as the men and women of Pallas and Cappamore." Justice Morris, who was descended from an ancient Galway family and took great pride in his Gaelic heritage, was nonetheless convinced that recreational violence reflected a deep-seated character flaw and made political autonomy for Ireland unthinkable. "They showed how pleasantly they lived together when they took to breaking each other's heads and how well they would live together if all control were taken from them."(55)