By Anne Frehill

Recently, while doing research I stumbled across some fascinating court reports that appeared in various local and national newspapers during the period 1923 to 1939. As I delved further into the newspaper archives, I soon discovered that a constant stream of people lived by their wits and were involved with other shady characters.

Of course, it is difficult to quantify the extent of this practice as we only know about those who were caught and brought before the bench. We will never know how many others got off scot-free without suffering any punishment for similar crimes and misdemeanours.

Yet, as I combed through the court reports I was reminded of my father, who was born in 1915. He was a seanchaí and every year, a small group of local men came to our farm to help at haymaking time and harvest time.

My mother, ably assisted by my older siblings, always provided a hearty dinner for the men at 1p.m. sharp. The meal over, they usually took another thirty minutes to relax. It was at that point that I would listen at the door as my father regaled the others with tales about a motley assortment of knaves, and rogues that he had heard about as he grew up in a rural parish in Galway.

His stories were always met with loud belly laughs as clouds of cigarette smoke swirled around the kitchen. In my naivety at that time, I presumed that they were just good yarns spun by the master storyteller. So, it was with a combination of sadness and nostalgia that I decided to read the court reports in depth.

The petty crimes seem to have fallen into four categories.

Larceny was defined as the unlawful taking or theft of the personal property of another person, was quite common. Opportunistic cat burglars were those who stole anything that caught their eye when they entered a house, shed or farmyard. There were cases of stolen bikes, tools including shovels and plastering trowels, buckets, clocks, wrist watches, and other jewellery.

Then there were amateur pickpockets who made the most of race meetings and other crowded events like football matches and busy streets or shops at Christmas time.

One case seemed particularly sad, a woman who was desperate for food to feed her large family.

She instructed her teenage son to hang around the local butcher’s shop to steal strings of sausages and offal meats like hearts and tongue whenever the butcher’s back was turned. And of course, there was a list of apprentices and maids who came before the bench for stealing tawdry items.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own