We can gauge just how violent the times were by noting some statistics: between 1780 and 1795, 232 men and ten women were hanged in Dublin, according to the Hibernian Journal. That means that there were around twelve a year, from a population of about 180,000. It appears, through English eyes, as an accelerated pattern compared to the English ‘Bloody Code’ in which, to put it simply, the propertied hanged the propertyless.

As the gangs linked to trades and occupations, they sank into the menacing and underhand existence of secret societies, oath-taking and in extreme cases, arson of the property of the opposition. There is no wonder that it was in Dublin, in 1786 that the Police Act was passed, making the first centralised police force in Britain and Ireland.

Near the end of this tumultuous century there were food riots in the Liberties, and once again, out came the gallows, busy both at Newgate and at Kilmainham common and in the gaol itself. It takes an effort of the imagination, walking the tourist-packed streets of Dublin today, to imagine the anarchy and barbarity abroad in the city in the 1780s and 1790s, but it was indeed one of the worst locations for sheer violent unease and fear in the whole of Europe. The gang warfare earlier in the century had laid the foundations for the kinds of escalation of disorder we find in the revolutionary period, the time when, after all, Dublin lawyer Wolfe Tone and his associates, was about to try to lead a rebellion against England in 1798. To make sense of all this street crime and physical threats from one faction to another, we can point to both political and economic distress and disquiet. But in the so-called ‘Age of Reason’ the pleasures of the Enlightenment were for the wealthy majority: for most it was make some solidarity or sink into a morass of poverty and deprivation.