ResoluteReader: Breandán Mac Suibhne - The End of Outrage: Post-famine adjustment in rural Ireland

Monday, October 05, 2026

Breandán Mac Suibhne - The End of Outrage: Post-famine adjustment in rural Ireland

In April 1856, Patrick McGlynn, a school teacher in Beagh, a very small village in the isolated far west of Donegal, wrote a letter. It was a letter that would precipitate dramatic events for the locals. It was also a letter that meant McGlynn scabbed and betrayed many of lower class people in his region. It arrived with Daniel Cruise, the local magistrate, and in it contained an offer that, in return for protection, McGlynn would betray the local, illegal and underground, activist network known as the Molly Maguires. McGlynn wrote "I have a means of ascertaining their movements and that I will inform either you or the police when I become certain that they shall attack a house or some other depredation". Catching them in the act, he went on to suggest "will not only deter the remainder from such acts in future but restore peace to the country."

In the wake of the Irish Famine, poverty, hunger and unemployment continued at appalling levels in West Donegal. The Molly Maguires were one reaction to this. A clandestine network that used violence and the threat of violence to try and redress injustice. Some of these actions were violent, and resulted in serious injury and death. More often they were threats. Either way, they were part of trying to restore a more "moral economy". An economy in which prices were deemed acceptable and of a level that ordinary people could afford, where land was available and where rents didn't destroy peoples lives.

But the Molly Maguires were a direct threat to the landowner classes and a system that enriched them, while driving the further consolidation and engrossement of land. Using McGlynn's letter, Cruise hoped to capture, imprison, deport and otherwise punish a layer of rebels that were threatening the accumulation of capital. The years since the famine were seeing a transformation of the Irish economy and a consequence transformation of the rural environment, landscape and agriculture itself. In a process with startling similararities to the enclosures that were ongoing in England, rural Ireland was seeing its fields consolidated, its traditional peasantry displaced, land engrossed into larger units farmed on capitalist lines and common land (and the commons in general) privatised.

This is the context for Breandán Mac Suibhne's detailed history of a small part of west Donegal. He uses McGlynn's betrayal as a jumping off point to explore the reality of post-Famine rural Ireland, and the wider transformation of the countryside. He explores the struggles of the population, and the authorities' attempts to keep the people down. As a descendent of the region he also locates this all in the traditional stories passed down. Stories that often highlight the injustices suffered by ordinary people and the cruelty and greed of the landowners and their friends.

While placing this all in the context of wider changes, Suibhne offers a micro-history of Beagh and its environs. Sometimes micro-histories can obscure, focusing on minutiae at the expense of historical context. But Suibhne gets the balance right. Here the detail of individual land plots, their "squaring" or consolidation into larger places, the changes of ownership and so on, serve to illustrate the wider transformation. At the same time he never loses sight of the reality of poverty and suffering.

Framing this history is the story of the Molly Maguires, the local betrayal by McGlynn and Cruise's campaign to get punish them. Interestingly here the authorities stuggled a little. The problem for them was that McGlynn named names, but the conspirators were not caught in any acts. Telling the story of what happened to them here feels like a "spoiler". But it illuminates some of the inconsistencies of the law at the time, and the ability of ordinary people to find ways to try and resist. Nonetheless some of the injustices assigned to the accused led to further depredations on their families and had to be further organised against.

Suibhne finishes the book by looking at how rural society changed to try and adapt to new economic realities - the church in particular was used to help pacify and redirect the emotions and frustrations of the population. Others emigrated, some of them taking the Molly Maguires with them, and organising in the US working class. Some of these paid dearly for continuing to resist capital. Much of the story of this time was passed down by word of mouth. Suibhne does a good job of linking historical records to oral tradition, and its fascinating to see what is passed down.

This is a remarkable book. It documents the grand transformation of the European agricultural economy in a very small part of Ireland. It never forgets the human impact of those changes, and it illuminates our modern world in surprising way. I was, by turns, angered, inspired and fascinated. It seems to me to be a book to take with you to Ireland, to remind the reader and the picture perfect landscapes are ones marred by poverty and resistance.