The victors write the history - often said but not so often examined; cliché and all as it is, there is in it the truth that should make us always stop and query and question and wonder.  Who, for example, speaks for the republicans of Carlow in ’98; and who gives them their place; and who expresses their aspirations and hopes; Farrel1 certainly tells of their despair.

An of course Farrell is the greatest of the published sources. Interestingly enough he has been influencing our approach to 1798 since well before that marvellous Telefis Eirennn programme and its moving title "When are you to die, friend?" and well before Roger MacHugh's edition of it was published in 1949.¹

As Father MacSuibhne has pointed out, some of it was published in the Irish Packet in May 1908.²

But will Farrell bring us closer to the "boys", will we understand their motivation and their actions from his account?  I don't think so, and for quite a few reasons. One that he himself seems to have been quite innocent of the radicalism of the movement, a radicalism put by Bill Nolan for example into Robert Proctor's mouth.³ Indeed one wonders if Bill - whom I did not know - was in fact trying deliberately to go beyond the veil of Farrell's opacity on matters political.  See for example the very opening of his book, his narrator 76 years old, as against Farrell’s concluding note mentioning his own age then - 73.  But, as are so many others that too is a question we cannot answer.

Another question difficult of reply is wither Farrell's account was uninfluenced by any other - Musgrave's vicious account had been long since published and in many editions and this in turn is the basis of Ryan's account of the Rising.⁵ Both of these could have been available to Farrell who wrote his between 1832 and 1845.⁶ and an examination towards a concordance of all of these would be worthwhile -  Another source and a much neglected one was the series "Slaughter in Carlow" serialised in Watty Cox’s Irish Magazine in 1811,

Signed "A Carlow Friend" this work was - there is no gainsaying Fr MacSuibhne on this⁷ - written by Thomas Finn brother of Counsellor William (of Emerald Lodge) who in turn was married to O'Connell's sister.  Now Watty Cox's Irish Magazine was quite popular for its time "the impression was annually 60,000",⁸  and we know Farrell to have been quite a reader. Given both facts and the author being from the town it is at least not unlikely that Farrell could well have read Finn.  Sister Maura Duggan in her magistral thesis on the topic has shown many correspondences in fact⁹ - but then they may well have been but that: a closer analysis of the various works will be needed before anything more definite can be urged.

But there is quite a divergence in attitude between Finn and Farrel1. Finn wrote as a Catholic, and he wrote with a vitriol that corruscated - but he did not write as a republican. Indeed his political 'position’- as the 'in phrase' of today has it - would be hard enough to define.  But beyond that again there is no element of apology or apologia about his account.  There is in Farrell's - there is, I sense, an element of justification of self by disparagment of his erstwhile comrades: a distancing of himself from the more radical among them; and an effort to cast himself in a rôle of innocent abroad which he certainly could not have been. He survived the horror of the slaughter, but the blame for it in his version is primarily placed on the United men (rather than on the system and times within which they evolved) - the blame in Finn's is on the Orangemen, and that too is a shallow rendition of cause and effect in the Carlow of '98.

We will return to Finn in a while. Meantime I will try to illustrate my point or at least indicate my thinking on this (I have not arrived at any firm 'position' on the historiography either) by looking at Farrell's comments on the Irish Volunteers, and setting them in the context of the facts as I see them. He gives a fairly idyllic picture of the old Ireland of his youth and says inter alia

We had also the Old Irish Volunteers; scarce a town or village in Ireland but had a Corps, but in Carlow in particular there was one of the handsomest dressed Corps and best appointed in every respect that could be found. There were three regular Companies in it; the Grenadier Company; the Light Infantry and the Battalion, and clothed at their own expense. There was scarcely any man, even in the most trifling business, but could afford to buy his own clothing and not only that but could afford his time to go to drills and parades and times to go a long distance to reviews and pay all expenses himself.¹⁰

As regards the last sentence the truth is almost the opposite - there was almost no man who could afford etc, except the wealthy landed and town burgeois class, who were a' very small minority in Carlow as in any other county.  Or maybe this is an example of Farrell displaying - perhaps unconsciously - his own predilictions, his own automatic almost acceptance of the feudal-type structure on 18th century Irish society. But then there is much ambiguity in Farrell's book - he talks of Blaris Camp (one of those infiltrated by the republicans) as one "considered to be the strongest garrison in the people's cause"¹¹ having already described those same republicans (the United Irishmen) as "that heavy curse of Ireland".¹² Perhaps it is that his real feelings come out in his description of the executions and torture and in the invective against Pitt, despite the oath of allegiance he took before an Orangeman, FitzMaurice, as part of the campaign to save his life.¹³

But to get back to the Volunteers, Farrell mentioned them as part of the idyllic past when they had their "own Parliament"¹⁴ overlooking as in so often the case that 1798 happened within the span of that parliament. (The 1782 changes in the structure of the legislature led to what is called the independent Irish parliament, and - even though he resigned from it - Grattan's parliament. The reality or not of its independence has been dealt with in a fine article by J C Beckett over twenty years ago.¹⁵)  Finn interestingly enough does not refer to the Volunteers - he is not in any euphoric recall; his aim is quite obviously to record the horror and to pinpoint the blame as he saw it at local level. It is necessary to turn then to the fictional account, and to dare the challenge of Bill Nolan's first two sentences:

This book is not authentic history, nor is it presented as such. Therefore the critic who sets himself to demonstrate the extent to which the incidents related may have deviated from the facts of known history will be tilting at windmills.¹⁶

I will be Don Quixote then and do so with a certain regret that Bill had not adhered more closely to the chronological frame - I cannot see how the anachronisms help the book, nor indeed how it could not have been improved by avoiding them. And in my view they could have been avoided.

Sometime around 1770 he has his hero's father being invited to join "the Butler Yeomanry, which was commanded by Sir Richard Butler of Garryhundon".¹⁷ Now the Yeomanry corps were not formed until twenty-six years later: there was interestingly enough a volunteer unit formed that year (1770) in Kilkenny specifically aimed at the Whiteboy rising of that period. There was none such so early in Carlow - but Nolan's could readily have used a Kilkenny parallel of 1770 without any deleterious effect.  Three or four years later Ned Hickey (the hero/narrator) has a run-in with Cornwall's troop: of "yeoman cavalry" killing two of them^18, meets Sir Thomas Butler with another group of yeomanry¹⁹, mentions another²⁰, and makes repeated references to "Cornwall's Yeomanry" and to other yeomanry corps in the following pages.²¹ Nolan puts the words into Sir Edward Crosbie's mouth (in 1775) that "They are the curse of this country"²² - probably a conscious rebuttal of Farrell's designation of the United Irishmen as the curse of Ireland. (By way of note here Crosbie didn't lease Viewmount until 1792 and at the period in the novel was a student for the Bar in Dublin).²³

---