11 killed in Cork faction fight slaughter... RIC used up ammo and fired BUTTONS

FOR more than a century, the annual June Fair had attracted hordes of visitors to the Cork village of Ballinhassig.

That summer’s day in 1845 was no different, as traders plied their wares, visitors and locals met up and traded gossip, and enjoyed refreshments amidst the hullabaloo of the big day out.

But as the market stalls packed up on Monday, June 30, trouble was brewing. A faction fight had been arranged, which would take a lethal turn when the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) stepped into the fray.

By the time the sun set, 11 people lay dead after a frenzy of shooting by police. When some of them ran out of ammo, they resorted to tearing the buttons off their tunics and firing them instead.

For faction fighting, long deplored by Ireland’s law-abiding citizens, the events that day would prove the beginning of the end for an ignoble tradition.

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Faction fighting in Ireland lasted from the start of the 18th century to the end of the 19th, and comprised mass organised brawls at fairs, markets, funerals, race meetings, and other gatherings.

Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people – usually families or parishes or estate tenants – took part, wielding sticks - often the famous shillelagh, made of blackthorn - and stones. Fights could be called for a variety of reasons, from land and family disputes, to long-held grudges. Many combatants would otherwise live peacefully side by side.

The melees often resulted in serious injury and even deaths.

That fair day in Ballinhassig in 1845, it appears the Neills of Ballygarvan and the Sullivans of Ballinhassig had arranged to meet up to do battle. One of the ringleaders, ‘Ranter’ Sullivan, threw his hat into the fair green, according to one account, whirling his stick, giving the faction whoop and calling his ‘brothers’ around him.

However, the RIC, who had been on duty at the fair in large numbers, intervened to stop the fracas and imprisoned ‘Ranter’ in the Dispensary, which drew the large crowd onto them instead.

They drafted in colleagues from Wilton, Douglas, Carrigaline, Ballyfeard, Kinsale, and Ballymartle, under the command of an officer named Hodnett, who lived in Kinsale, and would earn the mantle of infamy that fateful day.

In The Schools Collection, a dossier of true stories and folklore compiled by Ireland’s youngsters in the late 1930s, a 70-year-old farmer from the townland of Ballynabearna in Ballinhassig wrote what may be the closest we will get to an eyewitness account of the 1845 massacre of ten men and one woman.

Bartholomew Cooney, who would have been born just a few years after the tragic events, started off by setting the scene...

“The June Fair, established in 1737, attracted such a vast concourse of people that as many as 20 refreshment booths used to be erected in the village and extra police were drafted in from contiguous stations.”

At the 1845 event, he wrote, “at about 10am, when the business of the Fair had been practically completed, and the gathering had begun to disperse, it happened that some parties, becoming demonstrative, were taken in custody by the police, whereupon friends followed, and rescued the prisoners. This incident, which attracted little notice, Hodnett seized as a pretext to strike terror.

“He divided his forces into three sections, one forming a square near the barracks, another occupying the approach to the village from the opposite end, and the third getting under cover of a wooden hut at the village cross.

“In a moment, Ballinhassig rang with a discharge of firearms. The policemen in the hut had fired, and a woman coming out of a house at the north side of the village cross, fell, mortally wounded.

“A scene followed which Hodnett scarcely anticipated. There was a pause of consternation, a wild stampede, and then, yelling with rage, a body of men charged against the hut. The police discharged a second volley. The people, broken on their onslaught, grew every moment more furious. Hodnett’s assassins, as if now forced to fight for their lives, fired as fast as they could load. It is not known how long this lasted. At all events, the country people succeeded, after several ineffectual rushes, in coming to close quarters with their enemies and proceeded to demolish the hut.

“The firing had ceased a-while for the supply of bullets had run out, whereupon the police utilised the buttons of their jackets, but these did relatively little damage.”

Bartholomew explained how an old woman had the presence of mind to slip under a cart where she saw the carnage unfold. When a policeman was set upon, she saved his life. “Rushing forward, she cried out in broken English, ‘Don’t touch him, boys! He’s innocent, I saw him cock his shooter up to the sky!’”

The murderous police eventually fled the scene, “still discharging... the country people, with the groans of dying neighbours in their ears, and the spectacle of corpses before their eyes, having little inclination to follow them.

“The village cross was a pool of blood. Five corpses lay together in one spot. Twenty others had been more or less seriously injured.”

Bartholomew provided one vignette which had clearly rankled him for almost all of his 70 years.

“The callousness of one individual is remembered. He was a Magistrate by the name of Morney residing at Ballinaboy House, within a couple of hundred yards of the village, and who, while the bloody work was in progress, stood, telescope in hand at the window, and made not the slightest attempt to intervene.”

The dead that day are remembered in a plaque which was erected in Ballinhassig on the 150th anniversary of the tragedy, on June 30, 1995: Maurice Corcoran, Jeremiah Coughlan, Charles McCarthy, Corneilius Ford, John Kerrigan, Julia O’Callaghan, John Desmond, John Hourihan, John Walsh, Tom Delea, and a man named O’Sullivan.

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News of the bloodbath travelled fast.

“Before long, the mail coaches arrived at Halfway that evening,” Bartholomew wrote, “and reports of the tragedy had penetrated to the neighbouring villages and towns, causing everywhere the greatest excitement.”

The slaughter made headline news across Ireland and Britain, where it was raised in the Houses of Parliament, and as for away as Australia’s gold mine fields.

However, it will surprise few to hear that an inquest a month later returned a verdict of “justifiable homicide”. As for the villain of the piece, Bartholomew wrote: “Hodnett lived many years after this day of slaughter, and was stiff-necked and disdainful to the last.”

Bartholomew relied on “local tradition” to tell his story, “verified to some extent by an illustration of the scene of carnage, executed by O’Driscoll of the Grand Parade, Cork”.

He also provided an interesting description of the geography and topography of the scene of the carnage.

“About eight miles south of Cork city lies the little village of Ballinhassig, nestling between the ‘Slumbering Owenabue’ and an eminence called the Mountain, under which the Cork and Bandon railway passes.

“On the off side of the river from the village, a battle was fought in 1600 between the English Invaders and the National Forces under Florence McCarthy. Close by is a glen remarkable for peculiar lights which have often been seen there, and the origin of which is not, I believe, known.

“The aspect of the glen is desolate and barren, a small green field set among brakes, marks a disused graveyard, and a rivulet trickling in the hollow is called in Gaelic the ‘Stream of Lights’. In 1845, Ballinhassig was a busy centre. It had a mill which annually turned out as many as 7,000 barrels of flour.” ****** The outraged reaction to the 1845 massacre drew attention to the issue of faction fights at a time when public distaste for them was becoming more apparent. Their popularity dwindled, and the last recorded one took place at Cappawhite, Co. Tipperary, in 1887, according to the author Lorna Peel.

However, it might not be a coincidence that around that time, hurling began to be codified and organised, and became a popular way for young men to peaceably wage war on neighbouring parishes and counties.

Would it be fair to say that faction fighting is in the DNA of hurling?