Malachy McCourt, the renowned storyteller, pub owner, and writer, is acknowledged for his small role as a bartender in the film The Molly Maguires. The film, which debuted in 1970, starred Sean Connery and Richard Harris and was set during a time when Harris and the McCourt brothers were known to be drinking partners in New York. The film’s storyline depicts the real-life struggles of a group of Irish miners, called the Molly Maguires, who opposed the dominant coal mining companies in 19th-century Pennsylvania.
Notwithstanding the star-studded cast featuring Connery as Jack Kehoe, the leader of the Molly Maguires, and Harris as James McParlan, a detective from the Pinkerton agency hired to spy on the Molly Maguires, the movie failed to impress in the box office. This might have been linked to the unclear moral positioning central to the tale.
Interestingly, the character played by Harris, an Irish immigrant in America, started questioning the miners’ violent approach against the oppressive mineowners and their supports in the local police. On the other hand, the actual James McParland, born in Mullaghbrack, Co Armagh in 1844, seemed to express no misgivings regarding his actions. Initially an emigrant to England, McParland moved to the United States in 1863 where he established himself in Chicago running a liquor store by the late 1860s.
However, following his business’s loss in the notorious Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which ironically kicked off in the barn of Irish immigrants Patrick and Catherine O’Leary, McParland was recruited by the Pinkerton detective agency. Founded in 1850 by Allan Pinkerton from Glasgow, the agency made much of its earnings from industrialists aiming to hinder organised labour and it gladly hired immigrants ready to spy on their countrymen.
Allan Pinkerton was approached by Franklin B Gowen, chief of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad—a company surreptitiously amassing coalfields in eastern Pennsylvania—to infiltrate the mining communities of Schuylkill County. And so, the mission was handed to McParland.
In the 1870s, the dispute between Irish miners and mine proprietors over salaries and work conditions in Schuylkill County turned violent, with killings perpetrated by opposing sides. Nonetheless, the alleged existence of a covert organisation named the Molly Maguires remains a contentious topic. McParland claimed that this society was real, and insisted on being a member since 1874. He asserted that it had a considerable presence of 30,000 spread across the coal regions of Pennsylvania, with their enigma safeguarded through confidential passwords and secret handshakes and signals.
In his Pinkerton submissions, McParland intriguingly attributed the Molly Maguires directly to Irish rural turbulence. Having grown up in Armagh during the 1840s and 1850s, McParland was familiar with Ribbonism, and attributed a direct connection between the Pennsylvania Molly Maguires and an agrarian outfit bearing the same name in Ireland. He also testified that the Molly Maguires were a part of the mining communities in Tyneside where he’d worked as a lad in the 1850s.
It was advantageous for the mine magnates to portray the miners campaigning for improved wages and working conditions as menacing revolutionaries. In a 1911 interaction with the Washington Herald, McParland referred to the Molly Maguires as the “most audacious group of criminals and threatening individuals the country has ever experienced”. Owing to McParland’s evidence, eleven suspected masterminds were declared guilty of murder and sentenced to death.
Curiously enough, in that same conversation, McParland conceded the injustices that led to the emergence of agricultural secret societies in Ireland. He maintained, “The Mollies were created in Ireland as a response to challenge the rights, or alleged rights, of the absentee landlords”, adding that the land agents, the targets of the Irish Molly Maguires, were collecting “exorbitant levies”.
In the years following the trials, McParland gained a reputation and was referred to by one journalist as “among the planet’s greatest investigators”.
In a period wherein Arthur Conan Doyle was making the image of the detective as a scientist popular, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s earlier Dupin tales, the ideal fit was the affable McParland, always clad in a suit, sporting a mustache and glasses. It must be noted though that McParland and his fellow Pinkerton agents were more preoccupied with quelling strikes and undermining unions than cracking the usual murder mysteries of high society.
McParland was well-known as a detective from Armagh in the early 20th century, such that Conan Doyle used him as the basis for the storyline of his final Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear. It chronicled McParland’s struggle against the Molly Maguires and was published in 1915, four years before McParland’s passing.
He was not one to assign the success of investigative work to extraordinary feats of deduction. As he once informed a journalist, “The public perceives the typical detective as some sort of peculiar sorcerer. However, in reality, he should possess ample common sense – more than enough of it.”