On the main street in Gorey, a market town in north Co. Wexford near the county border with Wicklow, stands the Market House. A simple five-bay classical structure, it was originally built in 1709. The current building is a modern replacement. This has been the civic centre of the town for almost 300 years. It has variously been a courthouse and a school and in modern times has accommodated the town council. It is a building of some charm and little real distinction, such as one might meet in any provincial town: discreet, tactful, unostentatious.
In the first half of 1798 it was a prison. This was where Anthony Perry was brought on 21 May on the orders of the local magistrates. Co. Wexford was in a state of suppressed hysteria, as much of Ireland had been since the abortive French landing in Bantry Bay in December 1796. Fifteen thousand crack revolutionary troops, units of the finest army in Europe, had almost effected a landing in a country ill-prepared to resist them. They had sailed on the orders of the French Directory — the revolutionary government — and thanks to the persuasive powers of Theobald Wolfe Tone.
Tone was a liberal Anglican lawyer, pamphleteer and political organiser. He was one of the founders of the Society of United Irishmen in 1791, a body reflecting the optimism of the early years of the French Revolution and dedicated to a republican, non-confessional secularism as a new basis for Irish identity and independence. This aspiration came up against older, entrenched confessional realities as the decade wore on. Sectarian tensions in southern Ulster between Catholics and Protestants — mainly Anglicans — led to the foundation of the Orange Order in 1795 and to the growth of the Defender movement among lower-class Catholics (see chapter 48). There followed a pitiless dragooning of Ulster by crown troops under General Gerard Lake in a search for arms; it bore far more heavily on Defenders than it did on Orangemen. Gradually, the anti-revolutionary hysteria spread south and the methods that had been deemed successful in Ulster were applied in Munster and Leinster.
The United Irishmen were well established in Co. Wexford but unlike Ulster, where the Orange–Defender division ran true along sectarian lines, there was a significant minority of liberal Protestants who supported the movement because of its French Revolutionary principles. Likewise, there was a significant minority of Catholics in the county, including all of the senior clergy, who were opposed to the United men and supported the crown.
Spies and raids by the military had all but disabled the United movement in Dublin, thus compromising the prospects for a planned national rising. This did nothing to restrain the zeal of crown forces at local level. In Co. Wexford, the North Cork Militia (most of them Catholics) was set to work. This zeal was not entirely misplaced. The United Irishmen had been plotting a rising with French support, but the latter did not materialise and the Dublin arrests threw all plans into confusion. In desperation, a pre-emptive attack was set for the night of 23 May 1798.
Martial law was declared in a number of counties and many atrocities were committed in the search for arms and for local leaders. On 27 April, Wexford was proclaimed and the Militia got to work. There followed the now familiar terror pattern: arbitrary arrests, house burnings and torture, including a new refinement known as pitch-capping, in which boiling pitch was applied to the victim’s skull and set alight; by the time it set hard, it could only be detached by the unfortunate victim by pulling his hair and the skin of his scalp with it. The worst of this dragonnade focused on the north of the county, where the United movement was strongest and where sectarian tensions were more brittle than in the south.
Anthony Perry was a liberal Protestant landowner of some substance, farming near Inch, a village north of Gorey. He was also a leading member of the United Irishmen in the north Wexford/south Wicklow region. On the orders of the Wexford magistrates, he was arrested on 21 May and brought to the Market House in Gorey. It took the best part of five days to torture a confession out of Perry but the Militia men — prominent among them a particularly sadistic creature known as Tom the Devil — eventually succeeded. He did not reveal the names of all the United leaders in the county, but he revealed some of the most prominent.
He was released on 26 May, by which time the now enfeebled national rebellion had broken out and the United units in the county were mobilising. Despite his injuries, he joined the rebels and played an honourable part in the month-long struggle that ensued in Wexford. It ended on 21 June at Vinegar Hill, just above Enniscorthy in the centre of the county, with a crushing victory for Lake’s crown troops over the United men. In that month — the bloodiest in modern Irish history — about 30,000 people died. Horrible atrocities were committed on both sides. While the crown troops made no pretence of having any ambitions other than repression and victory, the secular ideals of the United Irishmen did not always survive the fires of more traditional animosities: the rebels were guilty of a number of nakedly sectarian crimes against Protestant captives.
After Vinegar Hill, Perry and some others retreated north into the fastnesses of the Wicklow Mountains. He was eventually captured on 21 July at Edenderry, Co. Kildare, fleeing west towards Connacht with another leading Wexford rebel, the Catholic priest Mogue Kearns. They were hanged on the spot.
The Wexford rising of 1798 was a confused muddle of secular idealism, sectarian violence and pitiless government repression. Its effect on the minority of liberal Protestants in the county — and by extension, in the country — was chastening. Thereafter, the Protestant tradition in Ireland is overwhelmingly unionist and disinclined to flirt with secular republicanism. A similar effect was felt in Ulster, where a short-lived Presbyterian republican rebellion was crushed (given their democratic structures of church government, Presbyterians were drawn to republicanism more spontaneously than any other group in Ireland).
The year of liberty — 1798 — is often proposed as the fountainhead of a republican tradition that was secular, non-sectarian and central to all that followed. It was not. What emerged from the ashes was a theory not sustained in practice. Instead, the failure of secularism cast the nineteenth century in a confessional mould. The Orange Order proved to be the most enduring development of the 1790s. As for Irish nationalism, when it begins to mobilise in formidable numbers in the 1820s, it does so on a specifically confessional demand: Catholic Emancipation. Within a generation of 1798, Catholic unionists and Protestant nationalists were increasingly unrepresentative of their respective confessional communities. The immediate consequence of the rising was the passing of the Act of Union, the ending of the Irish parliament, and the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
