Vol. 4: Fagan, Patrick.

Type: Article

Fagan, Patrick. ‘The Dublin Catholic mob (1700-1750)’, Eighteenth-century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, Vol. 4 (1989), pp 133-142.

This article discusses the frequent riots on Dublin’s city streets in the first three decades of the eighteenth-century. According to Fagan, these incidents went virtually undocumented by the major Irish newspapers, which had a mandate to reprint news from the London papers rather than to record local events. Fagan provides evidence about mob violence from journal articles and from correspondence and discusses the Dublin Catholic mob and its role in “obstructing the execution of the laws relating to the practice of the catholic religion”. According to a letter written by Archbishop William King of Dublin in 1727, mob violence and the baiting of priest-catchers were common occurrences in the city. The summer of 1726 was a particularly turbulent one, when armed forces stormed a catholic celebration in honour of the ‘Pretender’ in St. Stephen’s Green. The article describes the riots, round-ups of mob suspects and priests, and clashes between the catholic mobs and protestant mobs, the Ormond Boys and the Liberty Boys.