Because they levelled fences at night, they were usually called "Levellers" by the authorities, and by themselves "Queen Sive Oultagh's children" ("Sive" or "Sieve Oultagh" being anglicised from the Irish Sadhbh Amhaltach, or Ghostly Sally),[1] "fairies", or followers of "Johanna Meskill" or "Sheila Meskill" (symbolic figures supposed to lead the movement).
The events of March 1761, however, prompted a more determined response, and a considerable military force under the Marquess of Drogheda was sent to Munster to crush the Whiteboys.
On 2 April 1761, a force of 50 militiamen and 40 soldiers set out for Tallow, County Waterford, "where they took (mostly in their beds) eleven Levellers, against whom Information on Oath was given".
Sheehy was unsuccessfully indicted for sedition several times before eventually being found guilty of a charge of accessory to murder, and hanged in Clonmel in March 1766.
However, Lord Halifax was soon expressing concern that the repression was going too far: "so many People are directly or indirectly concerned in these illegal Practices and so many have been seized on Information or Suspicion, that in several Places, the Majority of the Inhabitants have been struck with the utmost Consternation, and have fled to the Mountains, insomuch that at this Season, from the almost general Flight of the labouring Hands, a Famine is, not without Reason, apprehended."
Similarly, the Dublin Journal reported at the same time that the south-east part of Tipperary "is almost waste, and the Houses of many locked up, or inhabited by Women and old Men only; such has been the Terror the Approach of the Light Dragoons has thrown them into."
In Thomas Flanagan's 1979 work The Year of the French, a group of Whiteboys in Killala are featured prominently throughout the novel, with many of them being major characters within the narrative.
One of the novel's main protagonists is Malachi Duggan, a Whiteboy who attempts to reverse the domination of the Protestant Ascendancy through guerilla warfare in County Mayo.
When a French expeditionary force commanded by Jean Joseph Amable Humbert lands in Ireland in 1798, Duggan joins him in the ultimately successful rebellion.
[15] In the 2016 young adult novel, Assassin's Creed: Last Descendants – Tomb of the Khan by Matthew J. Kirby, the Whiteboys attack on Mr. Bolster's estate is featured.