Crime and punishment: Whiteboyism and the law in late nineteenth-century Ireland

This chapter examines agrarian activism and violence in the south-west of Ireland, one of the country’s most disturbed regions, between 1879 and 1882. These were the years of the land war, the first of three phases of agrarian agitation that stretched from the late 1870s through to the early years of the twentieth century. Our treatment focuses on a number of Whiteboy cases—the designation employed in the official record. Most of the individuals concerned were arrested for agrarian infractions, which were invariably classified as outrages; they were subsequently tried, convicted, and given disproportionately harsh sentences compared with those handed down to persons convicted of ordinary crimes.