-Caveat Lector-
Father Murphy and the Million Mom March
by David DietemanThere is an Irish folk song named "Boulavogue,"
which tells the story of a Catholic priest, Father John Murphy.
Ultimately, the story of Boulavogue is the story of a priest who
convinced his flock to surrender their arms to their government, but upon
seeing the slaughter of his flock by that government, came to lead his
sheep in rebellion, and was executed in the end.
At first, as the United Irish (founded by Wolfe Tone, a Protestant)
struggled to start the Rebellion of 1798, Father Murphy convinced
his parishioners to sign an oath of allegiance to the government.
The county of Wexford, as Robert Kee writes in the first volume
of The Green Flag, was "feebly organized" for rebellion.
The plan of the United Irish was for all of Ireland to rise against
the English simultaneously. This was only four years after the revolution
in Poland led by Tadeusz Kosciuscko (a veteran of the American
Revolution), nine years after the French Revolution, and 22 years after
the beginning of the American Revolution.
Thespark which set Wexford on fire (quite literally) was the search
for illegal weapons (sound familiar?). The English used the local
yeomanry to scour the county for weapons and, predictably, the local
volunteers were a bit too enthusiastic in their searches and seizures.
The North Cork militia, which searched Wexford for illegal arms, was
mostly Catholic. Despite this fact, they were no easier on the mostly
Catholic locals than the Protestant militias were in other parts
of Catholic Ireland. As Kee observes, the North Cork militia "were
the very troops popularly credited with the invention of the pitch-cap
method of torture. One of their sergeants named Heppenstal had
acquired the nickname of ‘the walking gallows’ for his peculiar skill in
half-hanging men over his shoulder."
By May of 1798, men and women in Wexford slept in the fields so as
not to die in their houses, should their houses be put to the torch
in the middle of the night. News of massacres and uprisings from
all over Ireland had tensions running high.
In this atmosphere, Father John Murphy encouraged his parishioners
to surrender their arms in exchange for the promise of protection
by the English government.
His parishioners did so.
Unsurprisingly, the English did not abide by the rules of their alleged
protections.
As Kee reports, "The Arms Proclamation in Wexford had allowed
a period of fourteen days for the surrender of arms. But the local
magistrates and troops had shown no inclination to wait that long
but had begun floggings and other tortures immediately."
Troops who encountered peasants, after demanding the surrender of
arms,simply opened fire without waiting for compliance.
This disregard for the rule of law outraged the Irish, as it had outraged
the American colonists twenty-two years earlier: "A portion
of the men...had now become spiritless. They saw that a Proclamation
issued with all the formality and apparent binding of an Act of
Parliament was despised and made no account of...Their arms in a
great measure surrendered, they became silent, sullen and resolved
to meet their fate with such arms as they were in possession of."
In other words, after the Irish had dutifully turned over their weapons,
they quickly realized that they were sheep for the slaughter. Having
voluntarily deprived themselves of their most effective means of self-
defense, they now stood at the mercy of their English oppressors.
The English set fire to one farm after shooting into a crowd of men
working the fields. The lieutenant in charge of the torching, a
man named Bookey, is remembered to this day in the song
Boulavogue.
Bookey died that day, stabbed in the throat by a pike.
The next day, Bookey’s regiment rampaged across the countryside in a
feat of vengeance that would have pleased Abe Lincoln and General
Sherman. Over 170 homes were burned, as well as Father Murphy’s
chapel at Boulavogue.
As a result of this destruction, Father Murphy and roughly 1,000 men
gathered on Oulart Hill, with perhaps fifty guns and no military
leadership.
The group was attacked by 110 members of the North Cork militia, but
drove the militia from the hill.
After an encouraging string of early victories, the rebels were soundly
defeated. Massacres of Protestants alienated the few Protestants,
such as Beauchamp Bagenal Harvey, who had provided a semblance of
military leadership. At Vinegar Hill, cannon fire and determined
assaults drove the rebels from their base while "mowing them
down like grass."
The English, who would come to fight the Germans in two world wars in
the twentieth century, relied not only upon local militias, but
upon imported German mercenaries – Hessians, as in the American
Revolution – to put down the rebellion. The Hessians were ruthless
in their depredations.
As Kee reports, one English officer later wrote that the crown’s forces
never gave quarter in the rebellion...hundreds and thousands of wretches
were butchered while unarmed on their knees begging mercy; and
it is difficult to say whether [regular] soldiers, yeomen or militia
men took most delight in their bloody work. In such actions as
he saw, all the male inhabitants of any house in which the rebels
took refuge were put to death and the German contingent in the
king’s army, Hessians commanded by a Count Hompech, won fame for
their rape and slaughter of women. The same officer reckons that
altogether 25,000 rebels and peaceable inhabitants were killed
in this way, ‘by the lowest calculation,’ and the Protestant historian,
Gordon, in trying to assess the total number of people killed
on both sides in the whole rebellion and reaching the tentative
figure of 50,000, says he ‘has reason to think that more men than
fell in battle were killed in cold blood.’
The Rising of 1798 at an inglorious end, the English hung Father John
Murphy, burned his body in a barrel of tar, and placed his head
on a spike on a main street.
Of course, there was tragedy in the deaths of those loyal to the English
occupiers as well. Among those killed fighting for English domination
of Ireland was Lord Mountjoy, "who, as Luke Gardiner twenty
years before, had carried through the Irish House of Commons the
first Catholic Relief Bill, permitting Catholics once again to own
land."
After the rebellion of 1798, the Irish would wait 150 years to gain their
independence. Many more would die during those 150 years, either
in war, rebellion, or An Gorta Mor (the Famine).
Only after the Easter Rebellion of 1916, a civil war in the 1920s, and
the willingness of Eamon DeValera to declare Irish independence
in 1948, did Ireland regain the independence it had lost nearly
700 years earlier.
The story of Father Murphy has rather obvious implications for America
today.
Rather than blindly surrender our freedoms and firearms in exchange for
paper promises of "protection," Americans are better served to rely upon
themselves.
There are an abundance of fools today – Rosie O’Donnell, Pulitzer Prize
winning cartoonist Don Wright of the Palm Beach Post, the Million
Mom March, and most Democratic politicians – who would have
Americans willingly surrender their firearms. The argument is that if only
regular citizens would give up the means of self-defense, enjoyment,
and hunting, then there would be no crime, no murder.
How utterly stupid.
Crime is caused by criminals – persons with evil hearts and evil
intentions. Although it is fashionable today to "understand" why a
criminal turned to a life of crime, this should not excuse what
the criminal does, nor should it cause one to leave one’s doors
unlocked at night, or to leave oneself unarmed within a home. The
murdered man or woman, or the rape victim, is not made whole again
because we realize that a felon did what he did after having been
abused as a child, or because of a chemical imbalance in his brain.
To leave oneself defenseless, at the mercy of criminals and dependent
upon someone answering a call of 911, is sheer foolishness.
In the event that an NFL-linebacker sized man (or, the way the NFL
is going these days, an NFL linebacker) breaks into your home with
the intent of raping, killing, and robbing, do you really wish to
rely on your luck to a) get to the phone, b) dial it, c) wait for
them to pick up, d) describe to the person on the phone how you
are about to die, and then e) wait for the police to arrive?
Your loved ones may get the joy of hearing your screams played over
and over on the nightly news while a transcription of "Oh my God!
Please stop!" runs across the screen. (The media is so sensitive,
especially where the feelings of victims are concerned).
Far better to have the means of your own protection quick at hand. As
the old saying goes "God created men, but Sam Colt made them
equal." For the very slow, Sam Colt invented the Colt revolver.
It’s a gun.
What does this have to do with Father Murphy, aside from the obvious
connection to surrendering guns?
Aside from Rosie and the gang of twits mentioned above, the churches
have gotten into the gun-banning game.
How many people have to die, how many girls must be raped, before the
churches snap out of their latest fad?
The church teaches that one has a moral duty of self-defense. Just as
suicide – actively causing harm to oneself – is immoral, so too
is the failure to resist when resistance is possible (passively
allowing harm to be done to yourself). If you are in mortal danger,
respect for yourself requires you to fight back.
Exactly how are faithful Christians supposed to fulfill their duty of self-
defense without the means to do so? How are they to protect their
children without the means to do so? If there is a better means of
defending one’s self than a gun, please tell me and I will buy it in large
quantities.
If you are a 100-pound woman facing a 250 pound, 6’2" man – roughly,
an NFL linebacker – would you rather have a) a baseball bat, b)
a kitchen knife, or c) a pistol or shotgun?
Hopefully, the answer is c every time. If guns are no good for self-
defense, one wonders why muscular male police officers feel the need
to carry them. Surely, in hand-to-hand combat with knives, clubs, or
fists, a tough cop might stand a chance where a housewife stands none.
Americans, learn a lesson from Father Murphy. Don’t trust your
government to protect you, and don’t hand over your most effective
means of self-defense.
For those of you still foolish enough to listen to anything said by
Rosie O’Donnell, or any Democratic politician, such that you might
be worried that your kids will find your guns and injure themselves,
take a look at the cold, hard facts: guns save lives, and they save
the lives of children.
John Lott’s book More Guns, Less Crime and Robert Waters’ The
Best Defense: True Stories of Intended Victims who Defended
Themselves with a Firearm provide all the data to satisfy the most
die-hard ammophobes (gun-o-phobes just doesn't have a ring to it).
Your toddler is more likely to drown in a bathtub than be shot.
Those statistics you hear so often on the nightly news about kids being
shot include 17, 18 and 19 year old murder victims, i.e. persons
involved in gangs and drugs.
If you want to truly teach your children to understand the importance
of gun safety, buy a gun, learn to use it safely, and teach your
children as well. The NRA’s Eddie the Eagle program is a model of
gun safety – endorsed by the FBI, no less.
[Quotations taken from Robert Kee, The Green Flag, vol. 1. The Most
Distressful Country. New York: Penguin, 1972. Part Two, Chs. 10 and
11.]
February 14, 2001
Mr. Dieteman is an attorney in Erie, Pennsylvania, and a PhD candidate
in philosophy at The Catholic University of America.
--
It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and
everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one
apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is
to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for
proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment
they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his
right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for
withholding it from him.
--H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Sixth Series [1927]: "Life under
Bureaucracy",
pp.241-2
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