The Tithe War: Civil Disobedience or a Guerilla War

A Short and Unhappy Courtship takes place during the Tithe War.  The Irish, angry over a new, mandatory tithe, revolt against the British.

The Irish paid a tithe to the Catholic Church; they were Catholic and it made sense.  But the Anglican Church was not their church and they resented paying their potatoes, and crops, to a London church that did not represent them or their beliefs.

The 1830’s offered the Irish a small reprieve; Britain’s ascendancy in Ireland was complete at that point and the War of Independence not yet started.  Irish Catholics had gained back some rights under Daniel O’Connor’s Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829.  It’s the eve of the potato famine and the subsequent mass emigration to Canada and the United States, predating Ireland’s War of Independence and the later Irish Troubles.

Initially the Irish simply refused to pay the new tithe.  Anti-tithe meetings, held during hurling matches, threatened those that paid and the process servers that collected tithes.  It worked; little was paid to the Anglican clergy.  But the British were not ones to give up easily.  Instead they confiscated property in lieu of payment.

This led to violent clashes between the Irish and British.  It culminated in County Kilkenny in 1831 as British soldiers, protecting the process-server charged to collect the tithes, found themselves attacked on a narrow lane outside Carrickshock.

A large crowd had followed the thirty soldiers, demanding the process-server be turned over to them.  The constables refused.  The crowd didn’t care.  One of the Irish grabbed at the process-server; they would not tolerate traitors and the process-server was most certainly that.  But the constables were not giving up one of their own.  They pulled him back into rank and bayoneted the impetuous young man.

The Irish surrounded the British.  With blood spilled, the crowd attacked, throwing rocks from the high walls along the road, killing fourteen soldiers and the process-server.

The deaths, in addition to the cost of collecting the tithe, forced the Anglican Church to recant their tithe.  The British government assumed the church’s arrears.  They too attempted to collect but gave up, it was too hard to make everyone pay.  So London passed a  law that made the tithe payments the landlords’ responsibility; Irish ambushes and mobs too costly for the British government.

The tithe was forgotten; Ireland’s civil disobedience had won.

Below’s the URL to a RTÉ Radio 1 Documentary on One called the ‘Battle of Carrickshock.’  It gives a great, indepth look into the Tithe War’s origins and events.  No link, but you can copy and paste the address below. Enjoy!

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone/2011/0705/646747-radio-documentary-battle-of-carrickshock/