The Lilliput Press

tween fiction and commentary

He also echoed Hay on Scullabogue, and quoted a letter from Cloney, to him in 1843 on that Massacre. His interviews with survivors and relatives, including eyewitnesses of the mass burials after the battle of New Ross, are particularly valuable.12

Thus fetishized, the true meaning of the pike, whether as instrument of death and torture, or symbo

of the resistance and bravery of ordinary people, is lost

New Ross was described as a defeat for ‘The United Irish Army’, and the account of the battle featured the ‘fact’ that ‘about 70 wounded rebels died when their temporary hospital was burned down by militia’

The non-combatants, men, women and children, mainly poor Protestants, burnt to death at Scullabogue, were reduced, unforgivably, to ‘100 loyalists … Brutally murdered’

The linkage of the Scullabogue atrocity to that of a prior, similar one in Ross was, instead, elaborated and refined, as part of a detailed, and in many respects useful, article, which silently acknowledged the force of some of the points I raised; it was now only ‘possible’ that some of the rebels burned in the four-storey house were ‘wounded and helpless’, while it appeared ‘logical’ that, as Alexander claimed, others were using the house to fire on the troops. But in different, wholly speculative ways, his original claim was not only repeated, but reinforced

While contemporaries agreed that the battle of New Ross was ‘doubtless the most bloody battle of the Croppy War’, and probably the most decisive, they also recognized the difficulty of giving a clear account of the events of that day

They needed to summon what courage they could, having no experience of fighting beyond a few skirmishes. Their Commander-in-Chief could do little to prepare them, being no soldier, and having little stomach for the business. New Ross was his first and last engagement. He clearly hoped that the town might fall bloodlessly, given the rebels’ overwhelming numbers and their victorious progress to date, and had he attacked on the 2nd this might well have happened.

The battle for New Ross had two focal points apart from the Three Bullet Gate.