At the minute, I’m slowly but surely working on a brief article looking at a riot that broke out in Dublin in 1759. A rumour of an impending ‘Act of Union’ with Britain was enough to bring a mob of hundreds to the Irish Parliament, where scenes of madness broke out, with claims that the mob had first assembled in the Liberties and that the infamous ‘Liberty Boys’ were in their midst.

In the course of it all, I stumbled across a great account of the Liberty Boys and the Ormond Boys, which was in J.D Herbert’s exciting Irish Varieties, for the Last Fifty Years: Written from Recollections. Published in 1836, it’s an interesting if slightly over the top account of Irish characters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Below is his account of the faction fighting that occurred between the Liberty Boys and the Ormond Boys…