Dungloe: the scenes of the crimes

On Saturday, May 30th, 1835 there was a row in Charlie Boyle’s house in the Bridge End of Dungloe.
It was a fair day, bringing some 10,000 people to the one-street town in the Rosses of west Donegal. Most of the action was at the Fair Hill, a few hundred yards north of town, where cattle and sheep, donkeys, pigs and horses were sold. But Dungloe itself was also thronged with fair-goers, gaping at showmen and at pedlars’ “standings” and drinking in premises, licensed and unlicensed, respectable and not so respectable.
Charlie Boyle’s place, whether licensed or not, was respectable. Among those drinking there that afternoon were the parish priest James McDevitt, a red-headed man popularly known as An Sagart Rua, and James Kilpatrick, the Church of Ireland minister of the neighbouring parish of Lettermacaward.
But the clergymen were drinking together in a room and, if the priest can be credited, they didn’t hear the commotion when the row got up in the early evening and spilt out on to the street. In fact, McDevitt may not have been in Charlie Boyle’s when the row started. He had read Mass in a house outside town that day and breakfasted at about 1pm. He had only arrived at Boyle’s at 3pm. There, he had one glass of punch, he said, leaving after only half an hour to go out on to the street. Then about 7pm, when he was waiting for his horse to be brought to him outside Boyle’s, Charlie had invited him in and he had taken another half a glass of punch.
The protagonists in the row were Andy Boyle and Philemy O’Donnell, who were “friends” (relations). Boyle was a hard man, “a fighting man all his days, a dangerous man in a fair,” according to one of his own relations.
Philemy, meanwhile, had his three brothers with him. And out on the street, between Charlie Boyle’s and the barracks, the row quickly became a battle with Andy and Philemy and their “friends” and associates knocking lumps out of each other with sticks and bludgeons.
At the barracks, charged with maintaining law and order, there was a small Constabulary detachment comprising a sergeant and four constables, all armed. The Constabulary opted not to intervene, letting Boyle and O’Donnell, each with his “backing”, go at it.
Andy Boyle had “a good many against him and a good many with him”, recalled John Sweeney, the son of an innkeeper. But more, it would seem, were against him than with him and he did not get the better of Philemy.
Coming up to 8 o’clock, the priest, on leaving Charlie Boyle’s after his half a glass of punch, found Andy “stripped’ (his shirt off) and bleeding on the street. He saw him off in the direction of home, walking with him to a gravel pit a hundred yards out the Rutland Road. Then he went back into town.
McDevitt now encountered Andy’s son-in-law Owen Sharkey stripped and bleeding outside Charlie Boyle’s. And tipping him on the shoulder with his whip he told him to go home.
That was the priest’s story. The Constabulary had a different version of events. Sharkey had been arrested for fighting and Sergeant William Armstrong was taking him to the barracks when the priest intervened. In the ensuing tussle, McDevitt had grabbed hold of Armstrong’s carbine (rifle), twisting the bayonet off, and the sergeant had lost his grip on Sharkey who escaped into the crowd. The priest, in other words, had rescued a prisoner from the police.
McDevitt would later admit grabbing the carbine and releasing the bayonet, but say that he had done so in self-defence: the police had attacked him without provocation, he said, and he feared that Armstrong was about to run him through with the bayonet.
One way or another, the Constabulary now detained McDevitt, with two or three constables dragging him backwards through the crowd to the barracks. There, two other men – Daniel O’Donnell and John Boyle – were also prisoners. In the hallway, after a “pulling match” between the police and some fair-goers – the police trying to get the priest into the barracks and the people trying to get him away – McDevitt either tripped over a tub or was knocked over by the policemen and fell on “the broad of his back” on the flagged floor.
To this point, Armstrong may have been unaware that he had made a prisoner of the parish priest for clerical garb was not yet the rule among Catholic clergymen.
McDevitt, bleeding from three cuts on his head, was secured in a room, where Armstrong told him “if he had drunk less punch he’d be better off’’. Then, leaving a constable to guard the prisoners, he joined the other three in front of the barracks, and together they started pushing onlookers, outraged at the treatment of the priest, away from the building with their bayonets.
The arrest of the parish priest caused consternation to sober heads in the crowded town. Fearing a riot, Charlie Boyle and Andy McDevitt of Meenmore, a cousin of the priest, went up to the barracks, asking for him to be released. Armstrong refused and, presenting his bayoneted carbine at McDevitt, told him to stand back or he would run him through. The two men then sent for Peter Boyle, a shopkeeper cum town politician (he was spokesman for the local O’Connellites), to see if he might defuse the situation.
Sanity prevailed before Peter Boyle arrived. Armstrong went to the room in which the priest had been detained. “There’s the door open for you”, he said.
There were people at the door of the barracks and some gathered on the other side of the road as McDevitt came out. He waved his hand in the air telling people, in Irish, to go home and Charlie Boyle started to escort him back to his house near the bridge.
And then sanity prevailed no more.
As Armstrong had been putting McDevitt out the door, he had said “Go home now, you drunken hog!”, adding, as the priest crossed the road, that he would have him before the bench on Tuesday. McDevitt had turned back, retorting, “You blackguard, it is I who should have you before the bench, for taking me without provocation”. And the police claimed that he had said, “My curse and the curse of God be about you” – a claim which McDevitt would deny. And he would deny too that he incited the crowd to “lay about them”, causing a shower of stones to rain down on the police.
Meanwhile, Constable Michael Keenan stepped forward, telling the people in front of the barracks to go home, lest there be a riot.
“Be damned to you”, Armstrong allegedly said to him, “It is fitter you should come here into your rank and be prepared to fire than at that work.”
At this juncture, a stone or stick or sod of turf fired from the direction of the Fair Hill hit the barracks. Armstrong ordered his men to fire. Three men fired up the hill, but he fired first, a second or two before them – downhill in the direction of McDevitt. The ball entered Charlie Boyle’s head below his right ear lobe and exited behind his left ear. He fell at the priest’s feet, 12 or 13 yards from Armstrong. He lived another two or three hours, “sensible” but unable to speak, dying about 11 o’clock.
News of the killing spread through the fair. The police retreated into the barracks and, with a crowd gathering on the hill to the rear of the building, they fired some 13 or 14 shots to disperse it.
The night passed with the town in shock.
Over the next few days, a coroner’s inquest returned a verdict of “wilful murder”, the authorities moved a large force of Constabulary, supported by Revenue Police, into the town to maintain order, and Armstrong and his four constables were arrested and removed to Lifford gaol.
Armstrong and the constables duly stood trial for murder at the Lifford Assizes on Saturday, August 1st. There were allegations that defence attorneys had packed the jury by rejecting Catholics. And there were allegations from the defence that several of their witnesses had been intimidated. Crowds of people had stopped men en route to Lifford and warned them that, if they testified, their ears would be cropped (cut off) – a traditional punishment for informers – or that if they got to Lifford they would never get home.
The trial, which began first thing in the morning, heard McDevitt and some of his parishioners give evidence flatly contradicting that of defence witnesses. The key point at issue was the extent of stone-throwing while McDevitt was in custody and then upon his release: defence witnesses remembered showers of stones, when several citizens of Dungloe saw no stones at all thrown.
Timelines too were unclear: some witnesses had McDevitt 45 minutes in custody, others 10 minutes.
And for many who listened to the evidence there was a strong suspicion that the priest, after drinking more than he cared to admit in his four or more hours at the fair, waded into the fag end of a stick fight, with the good intention of ending it, perhaps, but either oblivious to the Constabulary or determined to prevent Sharkey’s arrest.
“Was the priest drunk?” one of the jurors asked. And defence attorneys asked witnesses if the priest was “in liquor”. He was not, they said.
The jury retired at 11 o’clock. After half an hour a delegation of two came to the judge asking if he would accept a verdict of “manslaughter but in self-defence”. The judge called the jurors back to the box, and told them that the verdict that they wished to return was “nonsensical”, coupling innocence and guilt in such a way as he had never known.
The jurors trooped back to their room. Then, shortly before midnight, they returned with a verdict: they had acquitted the four constables but found Sergeant Armstrong guilty of manslaughter. The judge expressed surprise at the jurors finding a man guilty who half an hour earlier they had “virtually pronounced innocent”. He did, however, “receive” the verdict.
Two days later, he sentenced Armstrong to six months’ penal servitude, commencing from his arrest at the end of May. He would be home before Christmas. It might have been predicted: the file on the case in Dublin Castle bore the title “Riot in Dungloe” not “Murder of Charlie Boyle”.
In truth, the case reflected poorly on the priest and people of Dungloe and liberal newspapers did not protest the verdict. But the O’Connellite Pilot did allege that Armstrong had form. Was he the same William Armstrong, it asked, who had nearly killed a man in Co Meath, by shooting him in the stomach on Christmas Eve? If so, he was not fit to serve in Constabulary and he should not be allowed to re-enlist.
The killing of Charlie Boyle occurred during an extraordinary expansion of the plant and personnel of the State that commenced in the 1820s and continued through the Famine. It was in these years that the Irish Constabulary, National Education and Workhouses were introduced. Popping up now, in even the most remote districts, were new public buildings – schools and barracks, petty sessions courts, workhouses and dispensaries – occupied by people paid from the public purse.
Events surrounding the killing of Boyle illuminate the State’s growing pains in the 1830s and for this reason they are of interest to historians. But perhaps the most intriguing twist in the tale is the fate of Charlie Boyle’s son, Condy, who was 16 or 17 years of age when his father was gunned down.
In the wake of his killing, Condy became the chief local bailiff of the Marquess of Conyngham, proprietor of some 123,300 acres in Donegal, 27,613 acres in Clare, 7,060 acres in Meath, and 9,737 acres in Kent, England. The Marquess, Francis Nathaniel Conyngham (1797–1876), rarely visited Donegal, where one critic styled him “the landlord king of about 40,000 people”, leaving the management of his estate to an agent, typically an outsider, who in turn relied on bailiffs, local men, to divide up land and resolve disputes, collect rent and evict troublesome tenants.
Condy’s father – described as “respectable and influential” at the murder trial – almost certainly held that position himself. Condy had most likely inherited it. And from the mid-1840s, Condy would be appointed to a succession of well-paid public posts, most of which he held simultaneously. He was a process server and a cess collector for the Grand Jury, the forerunner of the County Council. He served the State too as a court crier and interpreter at assizes and quarter sessions. He was also a poor rate collector for the Board of Guardians of the Glenties Union, the body that ran the workhouse and dispensaries, and he was its relieving officer and dispensary warden in Dungloe. Fortune favours the fortunate: the dispensary was in a building in the Bridge End that he sublet to the Union.
Condy, like his father, would get caught up in a “riot”. In the 1880s, a group of shopkeepers, knitting and shirt merchants, led by James Sweeney, put themselves at the head of the Land League and, latterly, the National League in Dungloe: if money was scarce, it would be shop bills not rent that the poor would pay, for the “bosses of the Rosses” were on the side of the people.
In 1888 the League boycotted Maurice Boyle, a hotelier, for supplying goods to the boycotted Constabulary in the neighbouring parish of Gaoth Dobhair. Boyle would compound his offence by applying successfully to become postmaster in Dungloe when, for his political entanglements, James Sweeney lost that lucrative position.
The parish priest, Charles McGlynn, was a strong supporter of the League. Indeed, he arranged for a League post box to be erected to deprive Maurice Boyle of business and facilitate those who had boycotted him. But Condy Boyle refused to join the boycott as did one of his associates, Charlie Gallagher, who had a public house in the Bridge End. The League now boycotted them both.
Matters came to a head on Sunday, December 23rd, 1888, when the families of Condy Boyle and Charlie Gallagher attempted to take their seats at Mass in the gallery of Dungloe chapel, which they had let for the previous six years. There, in their seats, were 16 “roughs of the town”, led by James Sweeney, the businessman cum land agitator. The parish priest, McGlynn, had assigned their seats to his own political associates. A fight ensued. Blood was spilt, including the priest’s, from a whack of Mrs Gallagher’s umbrella.
There followed much pearl-clutching in the press. Unionists and Conservatives decried the horror of violence in a place of worship. Nationalists defended the priest’s denial of the seats to the Boyles and Gallaghers who, they smugly pointed out, were not parishioners at all, being from the other side of bridge at the foot of the main street: the bridge was the border between two parishes.
The row got wide attention until eclipsed in early February by the killing of District Inspector William Martin, when after Mass in Derrybeg he attempted to arrest James MacFadden, parish priest of Gaoth Dobhair, for inciting people to support militant land activists’ Plan of Campaign. Mass-goers battering a policeman to death with paling posts and stones in Derrybeg was more shocking than Mrs Gallagher whacking a priest with her umbrella in the gallery of Dungloe chapel.
But the incident in Dungloe is instructive. The irony of Condy being boycotted for assisting a man who had supported the Constabulary that killed his father passed unnoticed in the press and, indeed, it may even have been lost on people around Dungloe. The killing of Charlie Boyle was then a long time ago, and Condy Boyle – process server, cess collector, court crier, court interpreter, relieving officer – was as much an agent of the State as the boycotted Constabulary. If it was the post of bailiff, involved in the management of the Marquess of Conyngham’s estate, that secured Condy his many public appointments, power had been ebbing from the landlords from before his father was shot, and it was those public posts more than the position on the estate that came to define him in his neighbours’ eyes.
First, in 1870 and then, with more effect, from 1881, Westminster had passed a series of land acts which strengthened tenants’ rights and ultimately, with the Wyndham Land Act of 1903, incentivised landlords to sell their estates and assisted tenants to purchase their holdings. Suddenly, after decades of rancour, the landlords were as good as gone. And as good as gone too were bailiffs and agents and what one Conyngham tenant described as “dog-men and keepers” who “trampled” upon the people.
Across Ireland, the landlord’s bailiff belonged to the past. And so, paradoxically, when Condy died, aged 90, in January 1909, he was remembered in the regional press more for his long service as a bailiff than as a man who held a multiplicity of public posts. Indeed, so remarkable was that length of service that newspapers across Ireland reprinted news of his death, some under the headline “Three Quarters of a Century a Bailiff”.
But nowhere was there any mention of the circumstances that had likely made a bailiff of Condy in the first place: a rash Constabulary Sergeant’s shooting dead of his father in a riot provoked by the rash act of a priest with drink taken in the Bridge End of Dungloe.
Kevin Boyle, a descendant of the man killed by the Constabulary in Dungloe in 1835, is a historian of modern United States at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. He will give a talk on “Donald Trump and the Remaking of United States” in Ionad Theampal Chróine, Dungloe, at 7pm on Saturday, August 31st, when it is hoped he may learn a little more of his forebears. And he will talk too on Trump in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop, Galway, at 6pm on Tuesday, September 3rd. Both events have been organised by the University of Galway.