“Law of their own”: Notes on legal alterity in early 19th‐century Ireland

Abstract

This article investigates intersections between legal and literary discourse in Ireland in the early 19th century, and explores how judicial tropes, in particular that of an “alternative judiciary”, shape perceptions of Irish identity as well as cultural expression. Whilst Ireland and the Irish were typically characterized as lawless, this article examines the ubiquitous presence of alternative legal systems, focusing on the writings of Thomas Moore (1779–1852) and William Carleton (1794–1869). These representations, and the questions of authority and legitimacy that they provoke, are considered within critical debates about the development of literary forms in Ireland, and the inherent relationship that legal alterity evokes between textual and judicial authority.

Keywords:

• law
• Whiteboys
• Thomas Moore
• William Carleton

Notes

1. Frank Whitson Fetter suggests that either Mortimer O’Sullivan or Henry Phillpotts was the author of this article (164).

2. In more recent political contexts Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception has examined the difficulty of defining “the state of exception” because of “its close relationship to civil war, insurrection, and resistance” (2). The “state of emergency” allows the encroachment of executive power and has the potential, Agamben argues, to convert democracies into totalitarian regimes.

3. There is some affinity here with Homi Bhabha’s concept of “colonial mimicry”, which he describes as “one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge” (85). Bhabha, however, focuses on colonial forms of imperial government whereas the legal mimicry or doubling of the Whiteboys is outside all official forms and all the more threatening for its genuine subalternity.

4. See also Curran’s description of O’Connell:

 Body and soul are in a state of permanent insurrection. See him in the streets, and you perceive at once that he is a man who has sworn that his country’s wrongs shall be avenged. A Dublin jury (if judiciously selected) would find his very gait and gestures to be high treason by construction, so explicitly do they enforce the national sentiment of ‘Ireland, her own, or the world in a blaze’. (2: 165)

5. See Elliott (19). Interest in the Brehon accelerated throughout the 19th century; Charles Graves published a treatise on the subject entitled Suggestions (1851) and he was subsequently influential in establishing the Brehon law commission under John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry, whose transcription, The Ancient Laws and Institutes of Ireland, was published between 1865 and 1901.

6. Emer Nolan, in her comprehensive annotations to her edition of Memoirs of Captain Rock, notes that Hickey was executed in March 1823 for Rockite activities in Co. Kerry; Hickey’s legal counsel was O’Connell, who gave an account of the trial to Moore, describing Hickey as “a sort of Captain Rock” who “always wore feathers to distinguish him” (Moore 214).

7. PRO, HO 100/203, Wellesley to R. Peel, 21 Jan. 1822.

8. In an editorial for the Belfast paper the Vindicator (18 July 1840), James Clarence Mangan joked that “Poker [Carleton’s pseudonym] has made a discovery of a countless number of Ribbonmen in Dublin, all of whom use secret signs unintelligible to any but themselves”. These Ribbonmen are, however, “behind counters in silk‐mercer’s shops – and examining ribbons, as Ribbonmen should be” (Mangan 16–17).