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12 November 1998 Edition

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Remembering the Past: The United Men and the Maiden City (part 2)

By Michael O'Riain

In June 1797, when French support failed to arrive, the Ulster Executive of the United Irishmen resolved to rise. But all came to naught. Some Antrim colonels refused to rise, arguing that `it was imprudent to act ... without foreign aid'. A provincial meeting at Randalstown failed to bring them back on board. The moment passed. At the end of June unrelated circumstances threatened the arrest of Antrim, Down and Armagh leaders and they fled to England.

In Derry, the Tipperary Militia proved the weak link. In the confusion that followed the abandonment of the rising, several militia men informed their officers of the role they were to have played in the regional rising. They were to have mutinied, executed their officers, opened the gates and made the city a `fortress for the rebels'.

An investigation led to Corporal Thomas Patterson. Patterson revealed that Christopher Hardy, a wealthy saddler and machine-inventor, had sworn him into the United Irishmen. Hill was stunned. He had always considered Hardy a friend and he had no hint of his politics. Indeed, Hardy was then in Dublin collecting £1,200 for government saddle contracts. He was arrested there on 2 July.

Back in Derry, Joe Orr got word of Hardy's arrest before Hill. He went to Hardy's house and burned his papers before escaping with a `number of others'. By the end of the summer, he was in France and soon lobbying Thomas Paine to help him persuade the Directory to send an invasion fleet to Ireland.

Within weeks of Orr's flight, the Crown moved against the leaders left in the city and arrested Robert Moore of Molenan, a wealthy ironmonger, and William McClintock, the city's leading haberdasher. Both were men of the highest respectability who had been involved in regional politics for over a generation; Moore, for example, had been a Volunteer officer in the 1780s; a founding member of the chamber of commerce and a governor of the city poor house and infirmary.

The evidence against Moore was thin. Indeed, the `Democrats' alleged he was kept in jail to prevent him standing against Hill in the general election that August. Still, when released in September he was cautious, perhaps even disillusioned. Approached to resume his role as county delegate to the provincial committee, he refused, saying that he would not act `until they were in the field'.

The movement in Derry was now in tatters. Following the arrest of the city leadership, high-placed men had turned informer in the south of the county. Derry was not represented at provincial meetings from June 1797 to March 1798.

Donegal and Tyrone continued to send delegates to the monthly provincial meetings yet they were of a lower social bracket than the delegates of the previous winter. For example, Andrew Stilley was the owner of a large mill at Guystown outside Ballindrait; George Buchanan was `a countryman' from Raphoe; John Marshall was a grocer from Manorcunningham.

The old political hands were drawing back. Alexander Montgomery of Convoy, Donegal's Patriot MP since 1768, was widely known to be a supporter of the movement. Acting as a magistrate he had released James Kincaid, a man suspected of involvement in the Hamilton assassination, from Lifford jail; he had ordered a `general gaol delivery' - a mass release of prisoners - that August so that United Irishmen would vote for him in the general election and escorted by a large crowd of United Irishmen from the Laggan he fought and won a duel with Sir Samuel Hayes of Stranorlar, the captain of an active yeomanry corps, in the Bishop's Garden in Derry a few months later. However, it was subsequently alleged that Lord Edward Fitzgerald asked him to lead the United Irish army in the north and that he declined, telling him he had none on his side he could trust.

Ultimately, when push came to shove in late May 1798, Lord Cavan, the British commander at Derry, feared local outbreaks in Donemana, Fánaid and Inis Eoghain but remained confident that there would be no regional rising.

Once the initial danger had passed, the military set to dismantling the United Irish organisation. Counter-insurgency spiralled into a terror over the summer months. The jails of Lifford, Omagh and Derry filled with croppies. Men were brought up on old charges, tried before courts martial at Derry, Limavady, Dungiven, Strabane and Lifford.

The first man tried by court martial in Derry was Dan McCarron of Carrigans, then a republican prisoner in Derry jail. Convicted after a short trial in the Mayor's office on 2 June he was sentenced to 1,000 lashes, marched down to the quay where the troops of the garrison and the yeomanry cavalry had drawn up, tied and lashed 345 times. Just before he was lashed, the mate of an American ship docked at the quay was heard to utter `some words of a treasonable nature', `outrageous expressions against his Britannic Majesty and the Government of his kingdoms'. He was taken from his ship, marched into the circle, tried at the drum head and sentenced to 500 lashes. However, as he was an American, Cavan forgave the offence on condition he remained on his ship during her stay in port.

Court-martials continued through the summer, those convicted being lashed or transported: a full ship-load of convicts sailed for America in September. Others were `encouraged' to `trot off'. The Roman Catholic clergy issued a pamphlet that was read in every chapel in the diocese warning Catholics that those who `engaged in the horrid act of Rebellion' would be deprived of `the holy Sacraments, instituted by your DIVINE REDEEMER for your salvation' and `die without consolation'.

That autumn two French expeditions sailed for Lough Swilly; neither, however, reached it. In September Napper Tandy, the leader of the first expedition, landed with a small force on Rutland Island off the Rosses, read the newspapers, decided the game was up, drank himself silly and sailed for the continent. In October British cruisers intercepted and destroyed the much larger fleet carrying Theobald Wolfe Tone off Tory. Tone was brought ashore at Buncrana and taken to Dublin for trial; he committed suicide before he could be executed.

In the northwest, the rebel movement was now in tatters. On 2 November - two hundred years ago last week - the corporation of Derry ordered that Henry Grattan, the Patriot MP, `be disenfranchised from all the priveleges of this city' as he had been `concerned in bringing about the Rebellion'. On the same grounds, the meeting also disenfranchised Robert Moore, William McClintock, Joseph Orr and Christopher Hardy. Hardy had been transported in summer 1797. Moore had been forced to `banish himself' in summer 1798; so too had McClintock. Orr was in France; he would die in Motter in the Vendée the following year.

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