Context

Into post-Union Ireland, Daniel O'Connell strode. The state of the nation was deeply problematic, an account that revisionist historians have not seriously dented. Rural poverty was supremely evident in the hundreds of thousands of miserable one-room cabins dotted across the country. Beggars were, as travellers noted consistently, omnipresent. The population was especially vulnerable to bad weather and harvests – the poor summer of 1816, for instance, caused an outbreak of typhus which in the following three years killed 65,000 people. Cycles of rural violence led by groups with eccentric-sounding names like the Threshers and Caravats, the Shanavests and the Ribbonmen were particularly prevalent in the first three decades of the century. This was one form of Catholic mobilisation far removed from O'Connell's populist initiatives but significant in another way. Instead of regarding them merely as evidence for disorder, the importance of these secret societies, for Bartlett, lies less in their purpose and activities and more in the experience of politicisation and socialisation that they provided. They were a focus for the articulation of grievances and the organisation of protest. They brought their members (all male) ‘face to face with the power – or more commonly the powerlessness of the state’.

From the top, there was the often vain attempt to restore order. Transportation to Australia was a convenient solution and one increasingly employed by a government determined to export the danger to the other side of the world.