Eclipsing all other runners
incident during the 1798 rebellion when a lot of gunpowder and guns got soaked.
Once, in the earlier 19th century, Carlow was known as a great area to grow onions. The 1824 edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica went so far as to say that Carlow was the main growing area in Ireland or Britain for onions and that Carlow-grown onions were as much prized for their quality in London as they were in Dublin.
The secrets of Carlow’s onion growers were revealed in a book by Michael Doyle, published in 1836. Carlow may be the second smallest county in Ireland, after Co. Louth, but in the earlier 19th century, its reputation for the widespread cultivation of topclass onions was well deserved.
But sadly, with the onset of the great famine in the 1840s, that reputation for onion growing in Co. Carlow began to fade.
However, the nickname of the ‘scallion eaters’ has lived on ever since, together with the other nickname for Carlow people, the fighting cocks, which derived from all the cock fighting that took place there up to the early 19th century.
As for Kilkenny’s appellation, it dates back to the rebellion of 1798. Rebels were active in Co. Kilkenny and among the many people who joined their ranks were the coal miners who worked in the mines at Castlecomer.
But at one stage during the latter days of the rebellion, the Castlecomer miners, who had joined in the rebel movement, were in retreat from Graiguecullen to Castlecomer. When they were close to the town, a very wet spell not only spoiled all their gunpowder, but the rain got into their guns as well and rendered them useless.
The final stand of the Castlecomer rebel miners was at Kilcumney, close to Goresbridge, which is on the eastern border of Co. Kilkenny. The Wexford rebels didn’t take kindly to the fact that the Kilkenny miners had let their gunpowder and guns get wet and felt that they had been sabotaged by the Kilkenny miners.
To this day, Kilkenny people deny that they had deliberately let down their comrades in arms from Co. Wexford, while Wexford people continue to take the opposite view. Wexford rebels began to talk of the Kilkenny miners urinating on the gunpowder while the other phrase that stuck to Kilkenny people was ‘wet-the-guns’.
Kilkenny people are also known for fighting like Kilkenny cats. Some sources say that during the Cromwellian era, Cromwellian troops in Kilkenny city tied together the tails of two cats and then threw them over a line to fight it out.
Other sources say that this incident happened when troops from the Hesse region of Germany were stationed in Kilkenny city, alongside British troops, during the 1798 rebellion.
Co. Kilkenny was also renowned, during the early 19th century, for its faction fights, which were mostly in the southern part of the county. Kilkenny people were also notorious for turning up to watch public hangings at Kilkenny Jail and during the 1820s and 1830s, hangings there attracted crowds of over 25,000.