Dungannon (, ) is a town in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. It is the second-largest town in the historic county (after Omagh) and had a population of 16,282 at the 2021 census. Since 2015, the town shares local government with Magherafelt and Cookstown in the Mid-Ulster District Council.
For centuries, Dungannon was the chief seat of the O'Neill dynasty of Tír Eoghain, who dominated most of Ulster and built a castle on the hill. After the O'Neills' defeat in the Nine Years' War, the English founded a plantation town on the site. A linen centre in the 19th century, it attracted an extensive food processing industry in the late 20th. Moy Park, a leading poultry producer, is today the town's largest employer. As a result of Moy Park and other processors sourcing immigrant labour, Dungannon currently has the highest percentage of residents born outside of the British Isles of any town in Northern Ireland.
History
17th Century
The O'Neills
For centuries, Dungannon's fortunes were closely tied to that of the O'Neill dynasty which ruled a large part of Ulster until the 17th century. The traditional site of inauguration for The O'Neill's was Tullyhogue Fort, an Iron Age mound some four miles northeast of Dungannon. The clan O'Hagan were the stewards of this site for the O'Neills. In the 14th century the O'Neills built a castle on what is today known as Castle Hill (from which, on clear day, seven of the nine counties of Ulster are visible).
This castle was burned in 1602 by Hugh O'Neill, 2nd Earl of Tyrone, as Crown forces under Lord Mountjoy closed in on the Gaelic lords towards the end of the Nine Years' War. In 1607, ninety-nine Irish chieftains and their followers, including Hugh O'Neill, set sail from Rathmullan, bound for the continent, in an event known as the Flight of the Earls. In what became known as the Plantation of Ulster, their lands were confiscated and awarded to Protestant English and Scots settlers. Dungannon and its castle were granted to Sir Arthur Chichester, the Lord Deputy of Ireland.
Plantation town
As part of the Plantation, in 1608 James I chartered a number of '"free schools" for the sons of local merchants and farmers. This included the Royal School Dungannon, established in the town in 1636, and from 1789 occupying its present site, south-east of Castle Hill, with the erection of a building known locally as the "Old Grey Mother" by the Archbishop of Armagh, Richard Robinson.
Sir Phelim O'Neill seized the town in the opening stages of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, and issued the Proclamation of Dungannon, in which the rebels set out their aims and proclaimed their loyalty to Charles I. O'Neill claimed they had been ordered to rise by the King, and later produced a forged commission in support of this.
During the course of the Irish Confederate Wars, Dungannon changed hands several times; Scots Covenanter forces under Alexander Leslie captured it in September 1642, before O'Neill took it back in spring 1643.
In 1689, during the Williamite War, Castle Hill, with still extant fortifications, was occupied by a Jacobite force, and hosted King James II as he passed en route to the Siege of Derry. In 2007, the castle was partially excavated by the Channel 4 archaeological show Time Team, uncovering part of the moat and walls of the castle.
18th Century
Volunteer conventions In 1782, as the "most central town of Ulster",Paterson, T. G. F.; A Relic of 1782, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, Third Series, Vol. 3 (1940) Dungannon was chosen as the site for a convention of the Volunteers. Initially formed for defence against the French in the American War of Independence, the Volunteers had increasingly been agitated by the same kinds of grievances driving rebellion among their kinsmen in America (among them, local emigrants who, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, had established the township of Dungannon, Virginia).
Delegates from 147 Volunteer corps assembled at the Presbyterian church on Scotch Street, previously favoured as a meeting place for the Presbyterian Synod of Ulster.W. T. Latimer; Church of the Volunteers, Dungannon, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, Second Series, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Sep. 1894). Taking on "the substance of a national assembly",Brendan Clifford (1974), "Notes on the political framework of Ireland 1780-1800", Belfast Politics by Henry Joy, United Irish Reprints: no. 4, B&ICO, Belfast, p. 82 the Convention resolved that the right asserted by the British Crown to overrule the Irish Parliament in Dublin, and to legislate for Ireland from Westminster, was "unconstitutional" and "illegal".
Two further Volunteer conventions were held in Dungannon, in 1783 and 1793. In the context, of debating reform of the Irish parliament, the Volunteers divided over the question of Catholic emancipation, Protestants alone having the right to vote, to assume office and to carry arms. They also divided on the question of parliamentary reform. The Protestants of Dungannon had no elected representation as the town was one of Ireland's many pocket boroughs. Its MP was the nominee of its proprietor, Thomas Knox, 1st Viscount Northland.
Orangemen and United men Local veterans of Volunteer movement broke into two camps; those who joined the new-formed Orangemen, sworn to uphold the Protestant Ascendancy, in forming a loyal yeomanry, and those who, having taken the United Irish oath "to obtain an equal, full and adequate representation of all the people of Ireland", began raiding the homesteads of these yeomen to procure arms and gunpowder.
Martial law imposed on the area from January 1797, broke the local United Irish organisation. The rebellion in the summer of 1798, which saw risings in counties Antrim and Down, was chiefly marked in Dungannon by courts martial in which United Irishmen were sentenced to floggings and to penal transportation.
19th century
Linen The town in which the Volunteers had gathered, was still largely a settlement of thatched houses. But by 1802, a surveyor for the Dublin Society was able to describe it as "one of the most prosperous towns in the North of Ireland in the linen trade," and as "inferior" to no other "for its rapid progress in building". In the 1820s and 30s, buyers for the bleachers would come from Belfast every Thursday and take their places on the "standings" on the east side of Market Square where the farmers brought their "webs" of raw, unbleached linen woven by their families and servants.
The Workhouse In 1842, following the application to Ireland of the new English Poor Law system of Workhouses (an alternative to outdoor relief, that made it easier for landlords to clear their estates in favour of larger English-export-oriented farms), a Workhouse was built in Dungannon. Until its closure in 1948, about 1000 people passed through its doors. A memorial on the former site, now the grounds of the South Tyrone Hospital, commemorates "all those who sought shelter" within its walls. This includes the victims of the Great Famine and the attendant cholera and typhus. Among these were the "Irish Famine Orphan Girls", a group of young women sent from the workhouse to Australia between 1848 and 1850.
Tenant agitation In 1834, Dungannon had again been the venue for a regional convention: upwards of 75,000 people attended a "Great Protestant Meeting" called by the sometime Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, Henry Cooke and by Tory grandees. Landlords and their retinues were joined by parading Orangemen. Locally, the call for Protestant unity was not well heeded. Tithes levied atop rents on behalf of the established Church of Ireland, failure to respect the protections of the Ulster Custom, and rack renting, set tenant farmers, Protestant and Catholic alike, at odds with the landed gentry.They were drawn to the Tenant Right League, and subsequently the direct-action Irish National Land League.Kirkpatrick, R. W. (1980), "Origins and development of the land war in mid-Ulster, 1879–85" in F. S. Lyons and R. A. J. Hawkins (eds.) Ireland under the Union: varieties of tension: Essays in honour of T. W. Moody, Oxford University Press, pp. 201–35.
With the introduction in 1872 of the secret ballot, landlords and their agents who, in the traditional hustings, had been able to monitor how their tenants voted, could no longer secure the election of Conservative candidates for Parliament. In 1874, Dungannon elected Thomas Alexander Dickson (of Milltown House), an independent Liberal who offered himself as an opponent of "rack renting and serfdom", and in 1880 his son James Dickson.Walker, B.M., ed. (1978). Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland, 1801-1922. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. pp. 213–214, 276–277. .
From 1886, the Dickson legacy was sustained in an enlarged South Tyrone constituency by Thomas Russell, champion of the Ulster Farmers and Labourers Union, MP until 1910 when, after being addressed in a series of land acts, agrarian issues were overshadowed by the return to the political agenda of Irish home rule. The town, meanwhile, had not been free of sectarian tensions. In 1880, police had used buckshot, killing one and wounding several, to quell rioting in the town after Orangemen had sacked houses in Listamlet.
Twentieth Century
Unionist-Nationalist division In 1913, 1,200 Ulster Volunteers paraded before Sir Edward Carson, leader of the unionist, almost exclusively Protestant, opposition to Irish self-government. The nationalist response, was the formation of the Irish Volunteers, whose membership in Tyrone, standing at 8,600 on the eve of the Great War in July 1914, was double that of Carson's Volunteers in the county. In the town itself (now the Dungannon District Electoral Area) unionists continued to dominate electorally until the end of the century (nationalists--Sinn Féin, the SDLP and a Republican independent—won their first majority, four of six councillors, in 2023).
Housing and civil rights protest Dungannon in early 1960s was described as "an average country town" with a population of around seven thousand, "half Protestant, half Catholic". The "best, and largest, firms", including the town's two textile factories, were Protestant owned, and "the upper echelons of the workforce were virtually all Protestant". For working-class Catholics the most "crushing problem" was the housing shortage, as the one ward in which Nationalist (Catholic) councillors could assign tenancies had seen no new houses built by the Unionist-controlled council.
In a reference to the black American civil-rights struggle, women and children protesting housing policy outside a meeting of the Dungannon Urban District Council in May 1963 held a placard with the slogan "If Our Religion Is Against Us Ship Us to Little Rock".Prince, Simon (2018). Northern Ireland’s ’68: Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, p. 70. Three months later, 17 families squatted an estate of pre-fabricated bungalows at Fairmount Park in protest, the beginning of a campaign for an independent points-based system of housing allocation.
On 24 August 1968, the Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ), launched in the town by Councillor Patricia McCluskey and her husband Conn, a local GP, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), and other groups organised Northern Ireland's first civil rights march from Coalisland to Dungannon in solidarity. The rally was officially banned, but took place and passed off without incident. Many more marches were held over the following year. In the build-up toward the sustained political violence of the Troubles, loyalists attacked some of the marches and held counter-demonstrations in a bid to get the marches banned.Chronology of the Conflict: 1968 , cain.ulst.ac.uk. Retrieved 12 June 2013.
The Troubles