Clodagh Finn: Words matter, so let’s reclaim the true meaning of the term witch hunt

Perhaps this will be the year when we dispense with the season’s familiar witch kitsch and recall the violence, torture, and murder that was inflicted on some 60,000 people — 80% of them women — in the early modern period.

News that a memorial to the eight women accused during the Islandmagee witch trials in Antrim in 1711 is to go ahead, could not come at a better time. Last Friday, Maeve Donnelly, councillor for Larne Lough on Mid and East Antrim Council, tweeted: 

I’m delighted that the memorial to commemorate the Islandmagee witch trials of 1711 (the last witch trials in Ireland) is finally being progressed after being agreed back in 2015 by the then Larne Borough Council. 

She thanked author and journalist Martina Devlin who, since the publication of her evocative novel based on the trial ( The House Where It Happened), has been campaigning for justice for these women convicted of witchcraft on flimsy evidence.

Ireland's last witch hunt 

Eight women were convicted of witchcraft in 1711 after Mary Dunbar reported being tormented by witches in the locality. 

She spoke of apparitions of demons, fits and convulsions, levitating household items, and the vomiting of pins and feathers; the kind of ‘evidence’ that was used in Europe and parts of America to send thousands of innocent women, and some men, to their deaths.

In the book Possessed by the Devil, Dr Andrew Sneddon, an expert on Irish witch trials, offers a real-life account of the trial, putting it into the context of a wider European society that truly believed that the devil could take over a person and walk among them.

While the women of Islandmagee were convicted, they were not executed. Indeed, in Ireland, unlike neighbouring Scotland, witch trials were rare. As a recent TG4 documentary An Diabhal Inti (The Devil’s in Her) reminded us, the death toll was low, though that is not to ignore the fate of Alice Kyteler’s servant, Petronella de Midia in 14th-century Kilkenny, or Florence Newton in Kinsale in the 17th century, and others.

Our experience, however, contrasts sharply with that of Scotland, where women were regularly blamed for anything from harvest failures to unexplained deaths. I was shocked when Gill Ryan, a tireless pursuer of women’s histories and one of the curators of the fascinating wildgees.com blog, sent me a digitised map putting names to the thousands of women murdered as ‘witches’.

Scotland, she says, “has the dubious honour of having executed more witches than any other country. More than 2,500 of them in fact. Inverkeithing, a small town in Fife, managed to murder 51 of its women. Many of the women were condemned for healing, brewing, nagging, scolding, or not conforming to traditional gender roles and restrictions in their puritan communities.” At least now, we have a map of that cruelty. The Wikidata witch finder internship, hosted by the University of Edinburgh and their Wikimedian-in-residence Ewan McAndrew, has mapped and named all the women tried as witches in Scotland.

It lays bare the true horror of a society with an enthusiastic witch-hunter at its head. James Vl (later James l of England) even wrote a treatise on the subject and truly believed that people — mostly women — were capable of practising malicious magic after entering into a pact with the devil. In Germany, the Malleus Maleficarum, a European guide to identifying, hunting and punishing witches, was outsold only by the bible.

Now, at least, there is widespread recognition of the hideous crimes of the past. On International Women’s Day this year, Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, issued an apology to “all those who were accused, convicted, vilified or executed under the Witchcraft Act of 1563”. 

It followed a campaign by Witches of Scotland for justice for all the women — and men — convicted of witchcraft. They wanted a legal pardon, an apology, and a national memorial.

In other countries, that has been happening slowly. There are memorials in Germany, the French and Spanish Basque Country and, soon, there will be one here too.

A throwaway phrase

Given the welcome focus on this bloody past, why then do politicians still use the term when they are under pressure?

Former US president Donald Trump is one of the foremost offenders. He uses the words “witch hunt” an average 1.3 times a day, according to one journalistic tally. 

He did so again last week when issued with a subpoena to testify under oath on the January 6 riots at the US Capitol. But like the boy who cried wolf, he is not taken seriously. Or so one might hope.

The term gets bandied about much closer to home too. In April, for instance, Taoiseach Micheál Martin described a bid to get Robert Watt, secretary general of the Department of Health, to appear before an Oireachtas committee as a “witch hunt”.

John McGuiness, chairman of the Oireachtas Committee on Finance, took him to task, saying the committee was interested only in transparency and accountability.

That’s a familiar ding-dong in the cut and thrust of public life where everyone from politicians of all stripes and any number of interest groups shout “witch hunt” when the piercing gaze of inquiry is upon them.

When the term was first used in a metaphorical sense, it described the pervasive fear and mass hysteria that characterised McCarthyism, the US government’s 1950s campaign to seek out alleged communists and blacklist them.

That, however, was a fitting representation of the kind of insidious belief systems that informed the infamous Salem witch trials in Massachusetts many centuries before, a point made very forcibly by Arthur Miller in his play The Crucible.

Since then, however, it has been used in thoughtless throw-away remarks by groups ranging from vintners and taxi drivers to bookies and, of course, the politicians who are quick to play the victim when they are, all too often, the aggressor.

Isn’t it time it stopped? Their casual — and, I think, cynical — use of the term belittles the violence meted out during the very real witch trials which continue in some parts of the world to this day.

It also masks the fact that metaphorical witch hunts are still very much with us; those whipped-up, social-media-inflamed moral panics that are very often based on disinformation, and aimed at ‘othering’ vulnerable groups.

Words matter, so let’s reclaim the true meaning of the term witch hunt. Maybe in years to come, we will even set aside Halloween as a day of memorial for all those who died because of whispering campaigns and the malice in ill-informed words.