Confluences of Law and History, Irish Legal History Society Discourses and Other Papers, 2011-2021 contains 16 essays covering the early modern period to the twentieth century. University College Dublin Associate Professor Niamh Howlin and Dublin historian Felix M. Larkin are co-editors and contributors to the volume. Larkin is a scholar of the press in Ireland and an occasional contributor to this site. Below are highlights of his essay, “The asinine law: Irish legal cartoons.” Confluences is set for September release by Four Courts Press, Dublin. MH

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Satire, whether in literary form or in cartoons, is generally associated with anti-establishment sentiment. It usually ‘punches up’, a weapon of the powerless against dominant groups and people.^[1]See F.M. Larkin, ‘Satirical journalism’ in M. Conboy and A. Bingham (eds), The Edinburgh history of the British and Irish press, vol. 3: competition and disruption, 1900–2017 (Edinburgh, 2020), … Continue reading Accordingly, lawyers and the law are obvious targets. The arcane and archaic rituals of the law invite ridicule, and so too does the showy – sometimes bombastic – style of many of its successful practitioners. Moreover, the fact that the law often has what seems – at least to an outsider – perverse outcomes makes it fair game for satire, laughter being a way of bridging the gap between common sense and the peculiar logic of the law. My purpose in the Confluences essay is to examine how the law and lawyers have been depicted in a representative selection of Irish cartoons over more than two centuries.

Fig. 1

The oldest of the cartoons that I consider resulted in the imprisonment of the editor of the newspaper in which it appeared, the Volunteer’s Journal. The editor was Mathew Carey, and he published the offending cartoon (Fig. 1, left) on 5 April 1784. Entitled ‘Thus perish all traitors to their country’, the target of the cartoon was John Foster, chancellor of the exchequer in the Irish parliament at College Green, Dublin, which is seen in the background. He was later the last speaker of the Irish parliament before the Union of 1801. Carey was arraigned before the Irish House of Commons on account of this cartoon and held for a time in Newgate prison in Dublin. On his release, but with a libel case still pending against him, he fled to America and had a highly successful career as a publisher in Philadelphia.

Daniel O’Connell is acknowledged as the greatest Irish lawyer of the early nineteenth century. He was the focus of innumerable cartoons produced in Dublin and London, most of them hostile and savagely anti-Catholic. Many were by John Doyle, the most notable caricaturist of the early nineteenth century. He was a Catholic Irishman, but plied his trade exclusively in London. One of Doyle’s cleverest cartoons about O’Connell, published in London in March 1833, borrowed an image from Swift’s Gulliver’s travels. It shows O’Connell as Gulliver brandishing a scroll bearing the word REPEAL – shorthand for his demand for repeal of the Union – and being restrained and attacked ineffectively by his political opponents, who are dismissed as Lilliputians (Fig. 2, below).

Fig. 2

Cartoons in the Weekly Freeman, United Ireland and satirical magazines such as Pat document the land war of the 1880s, and are still often reproduced today in studies of that period.^[2]See L.P. Curtis Jr, Apes and angels: the Irishman in Victorian caricatures (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp 38, 43. This was a truly pioneering study: nobody before Curtis had made use of cartoons as a … Continue reading Gladstone’s second land act – Land Law (Ireland) Act, 1881 – was a modest attempt to respond to the agitation. It gave power to civil bill courts to fix rents, with provision for referral to a land commission to appeal the rents. The act was seen as creating endless possibilities for legal wrangling – a ‘cash cow’ for lawyers. Accordingly, Pat in January 1882 looked into the future with a cartoon of Ireland a hundred years later, with the lawyers so rich that they have displaced the old landlords as proprietors of the land and are sitting comfortably on their rents (Fig. 3, below).

Fig. 3

Some areas, such as the law and religion, were out-of-bounds – not fair game for satire – in the early days of the newly-independent Irish state. This reticence about lampooning the law was largely because of the danger of being held in contempt of court. As Mary Kotsonouris has written, contempt of court issues were particularly sensitive at this time. Given the distrust of the legal system under the old regime, it was all the more important that the administration of justice in the new dispensation should be accorded obedience and respect. The courts insisted on that, and this influenced press coverage.^[3]M. Kotsonouris, ‘Criticising judges in Ireland’, Irish Judicial Studies Journal, 2:1 (2002), pp 79–97.

Fig. 4

Nevertheless, Dublin Opinion magazine – arguably Ireland’s most celebrated satirical magazine, published between 1922 and 1968 – did publish from time to time some brilliant cartoons on constitutional questions drawn by C.E. Kelly, its principal cartoonist and joint-editor. One such reflected the widespread criticism of the position of women posited in de Valera’s 1937 constitution – the emphasis on a woman’s ‘life within the home’. A cover cartoon depicted de Valera asleep in bed and dreaming of being attacked by the iconic figures of Queen Maeve and Granuaile, carrying a spear and a sword respectively. The caption reads: ‘Say, big boy, about those articles in the new constitution’ (Fig. 4, right).

Without question, the most impactful Irish cartoon in recent times is that by Martin  Turner published on the front page of the Irish Times on 17 February 1992, in response to the government’s efforts to prevent a pregnant 14-year-old girl, Miss ‘X’, travelling to England for an abortion (Fig. 5, below). This cartoon linked the young girl’s predicament with the outrage of internment without trial in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. The depiction of the girl, her hair in a pigtail and carrying a teddy bear, standing on a map of Ireland surrounded by a fence topped with razor wire helped define the subsequent debate in Ireland on the law on abortion. Sometimes cartoons can do more than just make us laugh.

Fig. 5