Robert Hughes in his book The Fatal Shore, states, " The Irish [prisoners], on arriving in Australia were treated as as a special class.

As bearers of Jacobin contagion, as idealogically and physically dangerous traitors, they were opressed with special vigilance and unusually hard punisments.

They formed Australia`s first white minority. From the outset, the Irish in Australia saw themselves as a doubly colonised people".

A descripition of the type of punishment meted out to the Irish prisoners was described by Joseph Holt an Irish political prisoner, "They were tied to a tree and squeezed tightly to the trunk,
There were two floggers, Richard Rice and John Johnson [the hangman from Sydney], Rice was left-handed and Johnson right handed, so they stood at each side, and I never saw two threshers in a barn move their strokes more handier than those two man-killers did.

Maurice Fitzgerald the recipient of the two butchers handi-work stood up manfully as pieces of his flesh blew in my face as it flew of the cats".

Fitzgerald was being made an example of on the whim of a protestant clergyman Marsden who suspected, wrongly, that Fitzgerald along with other Irish prisoners was making Pikes in readiness for a revolt, an earlier version of the non-exsistence of WMD`s.

Hughes goes on decribe the opression and cruelty handed out to the Irish prisoners on Van Diemans land, this was nothing in comparsion to the native inhabitants who were wiped out by 1836, Eichmann could have taken lessons in genocide from the colonists. Ard Mhacha.