Great review of Riotous Assemblies by John Dorney!

John Cunningham gives much food for thought in his account of how the Irish-speaking community of Lettermullen in Connemara became involved in a stand-off with the police and the coastguard in 1873, over the salvage of shipwreck. The police started off by allowing the locals, under the 1854 Salvage Act, to keep some of the salvaged goods in return for help recovering the wreck, only to change their minds halfway through and forbid them to take any washed up timber – in the end shooting 300 rounds of ammunition at the islanders who were collecting it and killing two. Two points arise here. The first, being whether it really possible to speak of ‘rule of law’ in 19th century Ireland when the authorities could simply change it when they felt it expedient. The second concerns the nature of the Irish “imagined community” at this juncture. For the police were English-speaking Irishmen and seem – in these pre-Gaelic revival days – to have regarded the Gaeltacht people not as, ‘pure Gaels’, but as “ignorant” and savage”.