side.

The rest was all of a piece. The coroner's inquest was held in due course.
The proceedings were not more happily conducted than was to be expected
where each side followed the counsels of ferocious exasperation. The jury,
after some seventeen days of it, returned a verdict of wilful murder
against the chief police officer and five of his men. This inquisition was
afterwards quashed (February 10, 1888) in the Queen's bench, on the ground
that the coroner had perpetrated certain irregularities of form. Nobody
has doubted that the Queen's bench was right; it seemed as if there had
been a conspiracy of all the demons of human stupidity in this tragic
bungle, from the first forcing of the reporter through the crowd, down to
the inquest on the three slain men and onwards. The coroner's inquest
having broken down, reasonable opinion demanded that some other public
inquiry should be held. Even supporters of the government demanded it. If
three men had been killed by the police in connection with a public
meeting in England or Scotland, no home secretary would have dreamed for
five minutes of resisting such a demand. Instead of a public inquiry, what
the chief secretary did was to appoint a (M138) confidential departmental
committee of policemen privately to examine, not whether the firing was
justified by the circumstances, but how it came about that the police were
so handled by their officers that a large force was put to flight by a
disorderly mob. The three deaths were treated as mere accident and
irrelevance. The committee was appointed to correct the discipline of the
force, said the Irish minister, and in no sense to seek justification for
actions which, in his opinion, required no justification.(239) Endless
speeches were made in the House and out of it; members went over to
Mitchelstown to measure distances, calculate angles, and fire imaginary
rifles out of the barrack window; all sorts of theories of ricochet shots
were invented, photographs and diagrams were taken. Some held the police
to be justified, others held them to be wholly unjustified. But without a
judicial inquiry, such as had been set up in the case of Belfast in 1886,
all these doings were futile. The government remained stubborn. The
slaughter of the three men was finally left just as if it had been the
slaughter of three dogs. No other incident of Irish administration stirred
deeper feelings of disgust in Ireland, or of misgiving and indignation