ex-soldier James McAlorum

Reading up on the various death of ex-soldiers in Ireland during the period 1919-1923, one ex-soldier appears to have been subjected to a whipping/flogging under the term of the "Flogging Act".

James McAlorum (there appear to be various spellings of the surname) served with the Royal Irish Rifles through WW1. The following is part of a letter he sent to his wife having been arrested and imprisoned on trumped up charges.



Dear Wife,

After consideration, I feel absolutely compelled to place before you a truthful account of the degradation which I was subjected to in this prison on Thursday night, the 22nd June, by order of the Northern Parliament.

On the night in question I had just finished my supper when four warders entered my cell and took
me to an underground dungeon where the officials had erected what they call a flogging triangle.

Gathered in a cluster around this instrument of torture were the prison doctor, governor, a dozen or
so of prison warders and a number of Special Constabulary, all eager to witness the savagery that was
to be enacted there, and of which myself and a few other unfortunate prisoners, some of them mere
children in their early 'teens, were to be the victims.

I was stripped to the skin and the warders tied me hand and foot to the triangle, and when they had
me secured, the Englishman, who was sent over here specially to administer torture, commenced the barbarity.

When I had received the fifteen lashes, and while the officials were bandaging my back, I had a look at
the man who had flogged me and the sweat was running down his face.

This man, who was almost six feet in height, had exerted all his strength and energy in inflicting
this savage operation and left my back in such a state that a whole piece of my skin could not have
been touched from my waist to my neck with the point of a needle. One of the victims who was led
to the chamber of torture after I had received my flogging was a mere boy of seventeen years of age,
named Edward O'Neill, and when they had this boy stripped and tied up, and when the administerer of
the torture commenced his foul work, the agonising cry of this child-prisoner pleading to the prison
doctor to intervene and save him from the cruel and unmerciful punishment could be heard all over the
prison. It was the yelling of the boy which was the first warning to the other prisoners located in the
prison that some of the prison inmates were being maltreated and they gave vent to their feelings by an
outburst of protest, shouting and kicking their cell doors, which could have been heard a great distance
from the prison and sent consternation into the hearts of the officials, who, for the moment, thought that
the civilian populace had broken into the prison.