Book Review: Ribbon Societies in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and its Diaspora by Kyle Hughes and Donald M. MacRaild

Abstract

grouping, the Invincibles. The assassins themselves gained notoriety but, at the same time, according to O’Donnell in her analysis of broadside ballads surrounding the event, were exalted as ‘self-sacrificing heroes’ (p. 258). O’Donnell’s study of the ballads, as with the above-mentioned investigation of the threatening letters by Dunne, offers a useful popular corrective to analyses of crime and violence that are overly reliant on the perceptions of the administration and middle-class journalists. Indeed, in the final chapter, Crossman’s focus is the subjective nature of perceptions and responses to vagrancy throughout the long nineteenth century. The result of the vagrant act, she argues, was to rubber-stamp the categorisations of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. In the process, a section of the poor was criminalised, thus ‘penalising the victim rather than addressing the larger economic and social forces that left so many Irish people without regular paid employment or a settled home’ (p. 279). All told, this is a significant contribution to the study of crime and violence in Ireland during the nineteenth century; indeed it deploys methodologies and routes of inquiry that could easily be applied to other centuries. It is, therefore, a highly recommended compendium for those interested in the social history of modern Ireland.