Unsuspecting readers should be warned about this book. There is much more to it than meets the eye. Niamh Howlin has given us a work of legal history of the highest standard, but she actually offers far more. Juries in Ireland portrays an Irish society in an era at once quite close to us in time, yet so very distant in its attitudes, values, and perspectives on the law, and even the contingencies of life and death. Nineteenth-century Ireland was a changing but still highly stratified society, divided by political allegiance, land ownership, wealth, gender, and religion. Howlin portrays all these features with the needle-sharp accuracy of a sixteenth-century miniaturist, revealing so much more about her subject than many historical pictures painted on a broader canvas.
The nineteenth-century jury system lay at the center of that society. Grand juries dealt with a broad range of local government issues, as well as with the criminal process itself. The jury system was not only one of the main organs of local administration, but was also seen as a bulwark of the established order. In criminal cases, jurors were often called upon to determine guilt or innocence in trials with strong political, religious, social, or agrarian overtones. In some instances, the prosecution case was deeply flawed; in others, the defense was hindered by arcane rules of procedure and evidence. During this era in which religious adherence and political allegiance were often linked, but when, as a result of legislative reforms, Roman Catholics, Protestant dissenters, and smaller farmers were increasingly permitted to act as jurors, even the very process of jury selection on the basis of religion in criminal cases became highly charged.
Nineteenth-century social unrest often manifested itself in agrarian crime. Many tenant-farmers eked out a subsistence on estates owned by absentee landlords, many of whom prioritized the extraction of rent from tenants unable to afford payment. To put this in historical perspective, from the year 1690 onwards, Ireland was finally subdued and then governed, until independence in 1921, by a British-controlled Dublin administration supported by what was termed the “Ascendancy,” a small group of landed estate owners and their supporters. Almost throughout the entirety of the eighteenth century, the penal laws, which almost constituted a form of political, social, and religious apartheid, had excluded Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, other Protestant dissenters, and other minorities, from the levers of power and professional opportunity.
In the last two decades of the eighteenth century there were attempts at reform. But in 1800, the liberal-leaning Irish Parliament, sitting in Dublin, was abolished. The Westminster Parliament enacted the long-promised Catholic emancipation legislation only in 1829. Other reforms followed throughout the nineteenth century; the hitherto highly rigid Irish society experienced change and reaction. The administration lurched between conflicting policies of coercion and conciliation, sometimes simultaneously pursued. On broad legal questions, the administration vacillated: should the rights and privileges of the rule of law be extended to all classes of society with the political and social risks that entailed? Or should the law be preserved as a protection for the administration and its supporters?
The great famine of 1845–48 cast its shadow over the remainder of that century and beyond. There were political insurrections in 1848 and 1867. Agrarian agitation, coupled with the campaign for a restored Dublin Parliament, reached a high point during the 1880s. Criminal prosecutions became even more fraught, leading the administration to consider abolishing trial by jury in criminal cases with a political-agrarian aspect. To their credit, the judges of the time opposed that proposal.
This book reveals a great deal about interactions within this society between rich and poor, unionists and nationalists, and—perhaps most markedly—between men and women. Women were excluded from juries, with the exception of “matrons,” sometimes called upon to serve as “special jurors” to determine whether or not an accused woman was pregnant, thereby possibly deferring a sentence of imprisonment, transportation, or even execution. The book also explores the wide range of jury functions, including the determination of property issues, such as street planning and identifying land and harbor boundaries. On one level, the extent of public participation in questions such as these might be portrayed as a significant reform. However, it is possible to pay too much regard to that surface-veneer, rather than to the substance of justice for all.
Indeed, the system created enduring grievances. As recently as 2017, the Irish government called upon Howlin herself to review the 1882 trial of one Myles Joyce, a native Irish language speaker from Connemara. Although aided by an interpreter, Joyce was tried by a jury of English speakers and unjustly convicted. His innocence was proclaimed even by his co-accused—Patrick Joyce and Patrick Casey—on the gallows prior to their execution. More than a century after the trial, Joyce was exonerated by the president of an independent Ireland.
Juries in Ireland contains many vignettes of rebellious jurors, cantankerous—and humane—judges, and eccentric litigants. It is a salutary reminder that, to be sustainable, all legal systems must seek to reflect the composition of the societies in which they function. Ultimately, Howlin's work shows, yet again, how legal history can be a powerful source of social history, affording the reader a rare opportunity of seeing “history from below” as well as from above. I heartily recommend it.
