Patrick J Duffy writes: Michelle McGoff-McCann suggests that the role of the coroner as a ‘figure of authority’ in a modernising Ireland after the Famine has been underestimated. Her study highlights the significance of the coroner as a uniquely independent county official in local and legal administrative history throughout the nineteenth century. She also highlights the local impacts of poverty and famine and the reactionary role of local county elites, with some extraordinary inquest reports which cast light on the nature of local community life in the turbulent nineteenth century.
William Charles Waddell acted as coroner for over three decades in Co Monaghan. This is the author’s second investigation of Waddell and the Irish coroner system: her Melancholy Madness (A coroner’s casebook), published twenty years ago, was based on 861 inquest reports on deaths between 1856 and 1876 in the county. Two other casebooks were subsequently discovered for the periods 1846-55 and 1876-77, which are included in this volume’s discussion. Her research graphically illustrates the vagaries of life and death in the nineteenth century and the corruption and inequities of local administration in recording cases of death, as well as the broader operation of the law in the period. In addition to demonstrating the comparative absence of coroners’ work in the historiography of post-famine Ireland, the author who is of American and Monaghan heritage, aims to draw attention to the significance of the county’s sectarian history in a broader Irish context.
Coroners were empowered to investigate sudden, violent, abnormal or unexplained deaths and had legislative authority to appoint juries of local people to conduct inquests. This is where potential for conflict with local power-brokers arose. Waddell’s background as a landed Presbyterian squire who also worked as a land agent, merchant and farmer, and with his historical pedigree (descendant of a Scottish planter in the seventeenth century), implies that he almost certainly secured the coronership through patronage and political connections with the local political elite. However, he ultimately demonstrated an independence of mind in his gradual transformation to professional coroner.
His experience as coroner took place against the background of a more general move towards social reform in nineteenth century Ireland. The professionalisation of the coroner’s role in the reform of social administration came in the later decades of the nineteenth century. From 1870, appointments to the civil service were by open competition and not the nepotism or patronage which characterised such appointments in earlier decades. The evolution of the coroner’s role in what she calls the ‘management of death investigations’ reflects this evolution from a position held by men with inherited status to one with legal or medical qualifications as outlined in the 1881 Coroners’ Act. The ultimate progression of the coroner’s office was established in 1894 at a meeting in Dublin’s Gresham hotel when the Irish Coroners Association was formed.
County Grand Juries, the local government body which preceded the establishment of County Councils in 1898, were composed of up to twenty-three local representatives selected by the county High Sheriff. They fixed the salaries and fees of public officials and were increasingly hostile to the independent role of the county coroner. As power brokers who controlled local patronage, all were men, most were landowners (or their agents) representative of county families, and most were Protestant from the early 1700s. Catholics were grudgingly admitted after the Catholic Relief Act of 1793 but it continued as a select Protestant-dominated club until the 1830s. Waddell’s successor as coroner in 1878, Robert Hamilton Reed, was a Presbyterian medical surgeon, and a grand master of the Monaghan Masonic Lodge.
In the post-famine decades Waddell’s investigations of death in workhouses, gaols and asylums highlighted corruption and mismanagement in local administration. He increasingly exposed deficiencies and malpractice in the Poor Law and famine relief system which led inevitably to legislative reform resisted by Grand Juries and Poor Law guardians. Finally the 1898 local government act abolished Grand Juries and established county councils, who were responsible for appointing coroners in their jurisdictions.
Coroner’s inquests as records of death provide incidental insights into life and living conditions in nineteenth century Ireland, beyond newspaper accounts and databases such as censuses and commissions of enquiry. Not many coroners’ reports have survived. In this case the coroner spotlights individual deaths of ordinary people behind the bald statistics – ‘these unknown people, destined for obscurity, lost in the memory of a troubled landscape, are now remembered’, as McGoff-McCann suggests in Melancholy Madness. It is a history, not of ‘another country’, but one very much like our own today.
Waddell’s records illuminate the social, economic and political contexts of the Famine and the poverty of the middle decades of the nineteenth century. He reports on death and famine, death and poverty in gaols and workhouses, at fair days and other gatherings, and death in railway accidents – in an overarching context of sectarian and party politics and the dominant role of the landowning elite. Local proprietors being investors and shareholders in new railway construction, for example, leads to suspected cover-ups of accidental deaths on the railway. The inquests, in their prosaic accounts of accidents, domestic rows in families and violence between neighbours, shine a light on the working lives of women, for example – undertaking chores in and around the house, and outdoor tasks like gathering creels of sods, drowning flax, keeping fowl, breaking stones on the roadside in public works, as well employment as beggars, prostitutes, servant maids in private houses or institutions like workhouses and hospitals. Deaths associated with drink and drunkenness featured prominently in inquests. There were graphic accounts of violent deaths from gunshots, blows of a spade on the head, being beaten by stones, assaulted in riots by named individuals, falling into drains, into the Ulster canal, off roofs, deaths in sectarian affrays or agrarian violence.
Inquests also reflected the dominantly patriarchical nature of society. In the criminal assizes, for example, the author notes that regardless of overwhelming evidence, male juries were unlikely to find against men for killing their wives. ‘Domestic privacy’ was respected and the primacy of men’s rights and social status over their wives appears on multiple occasions in the coroner’s casebooks. Monaghan juries rarely secured convictions for the murder of women and other marginal groups. An 1849 murder of two women, a ‘barbarous and revolting murder’, was widely reported throughout newspapers in Ireland and Britain in which the coroner’s jury named two male relatives as the perpetrators. The subsequent criminal trial found them not guilty, undermining the authority of the coroner and inquest juries who often had better local knowledge of murder cases. Local government in Co Monaghan was quite corrupt, with jury tampering, fraud and abuse of authority a regular occurrence.
The sectarian nature of society in Monaghan was reflected in failure by juries in court to convict Orangemen, most notoriously in the case of Sam Gray of Ballybay who avoided conviction for murder on a number of occasions. The sectarianism of society in Ireland, and in Monaghan particularly, is reflected in many jury verdicts, juries which were disproportionately representative of the Protestant community: as late as 1882 (a half-century after Catholic emancipation and thirteen years after Disestablishment of the Church of Ireland), a government return identified the religious persuasions of those men who held positions as Resident Magistrates, Justices of the Peace, and coroners – in Co Monaghan only seven Catholics held such office while the rest comprised fifty-nine Anglican Protestants and one Presbyterian. Comparisons with inquest and coroner practice in Britain highlight the sectarian nature of Irish society, resulting in a contradictory system of justice and legal administration predominately under the control of the Protestant local elite which did not parallel British practice.
The office of Irish coroner was open to corruption and inefficiency. In 1819, the dean of Ferns considered coroners to be ‘the lowest and most contemptible characters’. With other public officials they were often lampooned in the writings of William Carleton, Dion Boucicault, Gerald Griffin, and in Somerville and Ross’s Irish RM. Corruption in local government (including the office of coroner) was manifested in blatant sectarianism, preferment, jobbery, gross incompetence, drunkenness, and the packing of juries to influence verdicts. Waddell’s reports eventually helped to reveal to the public some of the injustice and corruption at the heart of county society.
Grand juries often refused coroners’ fees (paid per inquest, which must have influenced the coroner’s practice ) often because the Grand Jury wanted to keep costs down or to exert control on the work of the coroner. In 1856, Waddell defended the independence of the coroner: ‘I have had to resist many attempts to interfere with the discharge of my duties, as well from the grand jury as individual justices.’ Inquests held on the poorest members in society such as cottiers, beggars and other marginal groups, were considered a waste of public money by many Irish elites. Waddell’s inquests exposed the lack of humanity among members of the local landed class during the Famine crisis: the Grand Jury’s finance committee (comprising Sir George Forster of Coolderry, Fitzherbert Dacre Lucas of Castleshane, Tristram Kennedy land agent of the Bath estate, Lt Col Arthur Gambell Lewis of Scotstown, and Monaghan and Kilkenny magistrate Edward Golding of Gowran Castle) cut back on coroner’s fees and called for the abolition of the office. In 1848 attempts were made by a number of county grand juries, including the Monaghan jury, to abolish the office of coroner as an interference with their local authority and a ‘useless functionary’ performing unnecessary inquests on paupers, whose work would be better left to the discretion of local gentlemen, resident magistrates, and the constabulary. As the nineteenth century progressed, Grand Juries were gradually stripped of their powers by central government, following the setting up of Poor Law unions and town councils.
Waddell’s work as coroner revealed (often incidentally) abuses of power and authority in Monaghan during a time when the county’s political life was controlled by a landowning, conservative elite, well represented by editorials in The Northern Standard, the conservative unionist paper established in 1839. Only a handful of Waddell’s inquests on famine deaths was reported in the paper. Indeed the author suggests that the Northern Standard reportage of Waddell’s inquests on Famine deaths played down the extent of the devastation in the countryside, supporting the political stance of the landowning elite to divert public anxiety and suppress evidence of catastrophe as far as possible. In February 1847, an inquest on the body of a five-year-old child found frozen in the snow and mutilated by dogs was inconclusive, avoiding an overt link to the Famine crisis.
The work of the coroner investigating dead paupers was viewed as a cost imposed on the county rates. There were comparatively few inquests on death in workhouses, which were considered ‘normal’ and not worth investigation. Throughout Ireland during the Famine years there was a general move not to hold inquests on cases of death by starvation – as The Fermanagh Reporter suggested ‘where causes of death were self-evident the services of the coroner are now dispensed with’ to avoid ‘unnecessary expense’. ‘In June 1847… the corpse of an old itinerant beggar … was found lying dead in a pigsty … after eight days unnoticed’. The cause of death was so obviously starvation that ‘the authorities did not deem it necessary to hold an inquest on the body’. Waddell’s inquests during the Famine years in the late 1840s served to highlight the mis-management and restrictive bureaucracy of relief measures. For this reason during the Famine, clergy were anxious to get coroners inquests ‘as a means of obtaining some justice for the dead’ and exposing the inadequacy of the relief system.
In the later nineteenth century, a multiplicity of legislative reforms by central government, such as regulations on data collection in censuses, births, deaths and marriages, public health and sanitary services, were all measures which paralleled the gradual professionalisation of coroners’ reports.
The Irish Coroner. Death, murder and politics in Co. Monaghan, 1846-78, by Michelle McGoff-McCann, is published by Four Courts Press at €35. Patrick Duffy is emeritus professor of Geography, Maynooth University, where he taught historical geography and landscape studies for many years. Author of Exploring the history and heritage of Irish landscapes, (Dublin 2007); Landscapes of south Ulster: a parish atlas of the diocese of Clogher (Belfast 1993). Editor of Monaghan: history and society (Dublin 2017).
October 5th 2024
