Mr Ireland, watching from close by, was sprayed with sand and then, before any more developments could take place, four constables arrived and arrested everyone who was present. They were all put into carriages and taken back to Dublin. Ireland points out that Finn’s injured leg was dangling out of a carriage to keep it cool. A Dublin joker said that Finn had gone to the Bull, got cow’d and shot the calf.

The famous Daniel O’Connell was also involved in a Dublin duel. After he criticised the Dublin corporation, he made enemies, and a character called D’Esterre challenged him to fight. O’Connell was a married man, having wed Mary, his cousin, in 1802. There was no doubt that D’Esterre had provoked the argument, but it went to the actual confrontation and he was shot. It took him a few days to die, but before he did so he exonerated O’Connell from any blame, and his second, Sir Edward Stanley, made it clear to O’Connell that there would be no prosecution. O’Connell was later to be on the wrong side of the law (while he was Mayor of Dublin) and was in jail for three months for conspiracy.

Aubrey de Vere, in his memoirs, says that ‘In those days (1830s) a duel was the most mirthful of pastimes’ and he described a meeting of two lawyers in Dublin who met at sunrise in Phoenix Park; ‘one was the biggest and one the smallest’ in Dublin society. But the big man had problems with his eyesight and said he could not see his opponent. The other instructed his second to draw a white chalk line of his own shape on the large ‘carcass’ of his opponent. Such jocularity in chatty memoirs does not even hint at the terrible tragedies that occurred in duels, such as the fight in 1786 between Robert Keon of Leitrim and George Nugent Reynolds. Keon and Reynolds arrived at the place for the duel before their seconds and went on without them; Keon shot Reynolds dead, then he was tried, found guilty and hanged, in March 1788.

In the late eighteenth century there had been some really prominent duels and some, such as a fight between Blaquerre and Bagenal in 1773, had such an effect that there was a public condemnation of the whole nasty business. But for a long time it was impossible to outlaw the practice; all that happened over the course of these years was that the fights were regulated, but not banned. There was always the added problem that when it was linked to army life and manners, there was a code of honour which ran contrary to the law.

Some duels were so high profile that they affected public opinion, and one notable confrontation between Flood and Agar led to duelling being given more general respect and support. This was because Flood, being accused of bribing magistrates, had such support and sympathy from the new middle classes that they took an interest in the case and in the words of one historian, the duel was ‘the talk of the salons as well as the coffee houses’. The outcome was that duelling and its supporting code of honour, were understood and perhaps tolerated more by the public.