In Ireland, politics and religion have been intimately connected with law and (dis)order for centuries. I found it impossible to pigeonhole certain events under just one heading, so I have merged it all together in this section, in roughly chronological order, as I feel that gives a rather better arc to the overall story.
My researches have been almost exclusively conducted through the digitised content of the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) and so the eras I can cover are determined by both the existence of local newspapers, their survival in collections, and which have been digitised so far.
We are lucky that the Belfast News Letter has the distinction of being the oldest continuously newspaper in the world, and what is available online through the BNA goes right back to 1738.
However, this history is mainly concerned with events after the proper foundation of the village of Poyntzpass, as distinct from Acton, and as we have seen elsewhere this probably happened in the final third of the 18th century.
Next: The Late 1700s