Bastard Ribbonism

‘Molly Maguire’ was a sobriquet of the Ribbon Society, an oath-bound combination that, from about 1810, had built a lodge network across much of the northern half of Ireland, physically confronting the Orange Order and articulating Catholic nationalist ambition. The adoption of the moniker in 1844–5 was associated with the expansion of the society into areas where it had not hitherto been active, and also with a shift in its social composition and the character of its activities, both of which now became more agrarian. In the communities around Ardara and Glenties that are the focus of this book, the initial emergence of the Molly Maguires owed much to an organizational drive by the Ribbon leadership, while debts incurred in the Famine to usurious mealmongers contributed to its recalcitrance in the early to mid-1850s.