The Pinkerton detective agency drew much of its income from industrialists keen to disrupt organised labour
James McParland: the Pinkerton detective agency sleuth became became, in the words of one reporter, “one of the world’s most famous detectives”Among the late raconteur, publican and memoirist Malachy McCourt’s acting credits was a minor role, as a barkeep, aptly enough, in The Molly Maguires, starring Sean Connery and Richard Harris.
The real McParland seems to have had no such regrets. Born into a Catholic family in Mullaghbrack in Co Armagh in 1844, James McParland emigrated first to England and then, in 1863, to the United States. When Franklin B Gowen, the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, which had been secretly buying up coalfields in eastern Pennsylvania, asked Pinkerton to infiltrate the mining communities of Schuylkill County, the Scot turned to McParland.
In his reports to Pinkerton, McParland speciously connected the Molly Maguires directly to agrarian unrest in Ireland. Growing up in Armagh in the 1840s and 1850s, McParland would have been familiar with Ribbonism and claimed that the Pennsylvania Molly Maguires were directly linked to an agrarian organisation of the same name in Ireland. He further affirmed that the Molly Maguires had existed among the mining communities of Tyneside where he had worked as a boy in the 1850s.
Curiously, however, in the same interview McParland acknowledged the inequities that had given rise to the appearance of agrarian secret societies in Ireland. “The Molly Maguires of Ireland crept into being to contest the rights, or so-called rights, of the non-resident landlords of Ireland,” he asserted, adding that the land agents who were attacked by the Irish Molly Maguires were collecting “unjust taxes”.
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