Wild deeds, rough justice – An Irishman’s Diary about the Wildgoose Lodge massacre and its aftermath

When I last wrote about the saga of Wildgoose Lodge, in 2009, a Sligo reader sent me an extraordinary letter that had been in her family for generations.

It was 23 pages long and hand-written, on July 30th, 1851, by one Anthony Marmion, then living in London, but apparently a native of Dundalk. He had sent it to the editor of the Dundalk Democrat. And via that editor's granddaughter, the Sligo reader, the letter was still in perfect condition 160 years later.

I put it away carefully after reading, and had almost forgotten it until an impending major anniversary of the Wildgoose Lodge massacre reminded me.

By an ominous coincidence this coming April, while the 1916 centenary dominates agendas elsewhere, it will be 200 years since the first of the grim events in Louth. So I re-read the letter, written by a man who had been on the panel of jurors for the subsequent trials, but who was never chosen, for reasons that become obvious.

Recalling the events 35 years later, Marmion gets a few details wrong. His articulacy never wavers, however, nor does the neatness of his writing, even as he rages at the “legal butchery” he had witnessed a generation earlier. No wonder the Louth magistrates didn’t want him on their juries.

For readers unfamiliar with the history (told superbly in Terry Dooley's 2007 book, The Murders at Wildgoose Lodge) or even with William Carleton's famous short story, I should recap briefly on what was a tragedy in three acts.

It started with a raid on the lodge, in April 1816, by masked men seeking guns. Such raids were commonplace in that troubled area then. What was different about this one was that the residents made a complaint and named names.  In a county under martial law, this was enough to hang the suspects, and three men duly swung, despite severe doubts about their guilt.

Revenge came six months later, around Halloween, when a large force of "Ribbonmen" descended on the lodge at night. Some were sworn to secrecy in a nearby church by a schoolmaster, Patrick Devane. They then razed the house, along with the eight occupants, including a baby.

After that it was the state’s turn for retribution. A conspiracy of silence in the area, lasting months, was finally broken by a mixture of threats and huge rewards. Devane was caught and – in the ruins of the lodge itself – hanged.

But many others were named too, mostly by criminals saving their own necks. There is little doubt now, if there was much then, that the massacre was used as an opportunity to rid the area of undesirables.

Nor did the rough justice end with the 18 executions. For a more lasting impression, the bodies were left hanging for months at strategic public locations, rotting in iron gibbets and tar sacks, under armed guard.

That was the scene Carleton walked into, literally, en route from Tyrone to Dublin in 1817. His gothic account was part invention, but in a completely believable accompanying note, he mentions that local people avoided eating fruit that year, lest the flies had feasted elsewhere.

Marmion’s 1851 letter was provoked by a more recent case in Dundalk. But this quickly leads him into a long and impassioned retrospective on the Wildgoose Lodge trials, with their “prejudiced judges, corrupt and arbitrary magistrates, subservient sheriffs, packed and unintellectual juries, iniquitous and perjured informers and a sanguinary police, all arrayed to persecute unto the death any portion of the humbler classes who dared to question their authority, whether right or wrong”.

There follows 20 pages detailing the liberties he had seen taken with justice during the case.

Then, finally, he declares that of the 27 men convicted (the last nine escaped death sentences), “only four” were guilty.

Beyond his name and origins, Marmion does not identify himself in the letter.  But he must be the same person who subsequently wrote a book called The Ancient and Modern History of the Maritime Ports of Ireland, published in London in 1855.  Certainly the introduction, which laments the fate of a country "long oppressed by penal laws and bad government", is similar in tone.

It also seems fair to assume that he was related to a man from a slightly earlier period whose name is on a statue in Dundalk.

Entitled the Maid of Erin,  the statue commemorates the United Irishmen of 1798. But it mentions two in particular, including another Anthony Marmion, executed for his part in the rebellion.