Land Questions in Modern Ireland [illustrated, reprint] 1784993530, 9781784993535

Citation preview

Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

LAND QUESTIONS IN MODERN IRELAND

Edited by

Fergus Campbell • Tony Varley

Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

MUP FINAL PROOF – , 07/17/2013, SPi

Land questions in modern Ireland

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For Lucy Campbell, and for Kate and Hugh Varley

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Land questions in modern Ireland Edited by Fergus Campbell and Tony Varley

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2013 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 07190 7880 4 hardback First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

This publication was grant-aided by the Publications Fund of National University of Ireland Galway/ Rinneadh maoiniú ar an bhfoilseachán seo trí Chiste Foilseachán Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

MUP FINAL PROOF – , 07/17/2013, SPi

Contents

Notes on contributors Abbreviations Introduction and acknowledgements Fergus Campbell I: Surveys 1 Irish land questions in the state of the Union Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh 2 Gaining ground, losing ground: the politics of land reform in twentieth-century Ireland Tony Varley 3 4

5 6

7

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II: Reflections The Irish land question in a wider context Barbara L. Solow Writing about Irish land against the background of Northern Ireland Philip Bull Strange bedfellows? The Land League alliances Samuel Clark The issue of land distribution: revisiting Graziers, Land Reform and Political Conflict in Ireland David Jones Land and Revolution revisited Fergus Campbell

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CONTENTS

III: New research 8 Decentring the Irish Land War: women, politics and the private sphere Heather Laird 9 The transcendent role of Catholic discourse in the Irish Land War Anne Kane 10 Matthew Harris, Fenianism and land agitation in the west of Ireland Gerard Moran 11 The politics of ‘holding the balance’: Irish farmers’ parties and land redistribution in the twentieth century Tony Varley Index

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

MUP FINAL PROOF – , 07/17/2013, SPi

Notes on contributors

Philip Bull is an Honorary Associate in History at La Trobe University in Melbourne, where he has taught since 1975. He is the author of Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin, 1996) and of articles on late nineteenth and early twentieth century Irish history. Fergus Campbell is Reader in Social and Cultural History at Newcastle University and author of Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland, 1891–1921 (Oxford, 2005) and The Irish Establishment, 1879–1914 (Oxford, 2009). Samuel Clark is Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario. His publications include Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, 1979) and Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780– 1914, co-edited with James S. Donnelly, Jr. (Madison and Manchester, 1983). He is now completing a monograph on the making of modern state honours in Western Europe. David Jones is currently a member of staff of the Public Policy Program, Faculty of Business, Economics and Policy Studies, University of Brunei. His research covers land policy and land reform, governance reform and public finance and government procurement, in which areas he has published widely. Anne Kane is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Houston-Downtown. She has published numerous articles and chapters analysing the Irish Land War from a cultural theoretical perspective and her book, Constructing Irish National Identity: Ritual and Discourse during the Land War, 1879–1882, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. Heather Laird is a Lecturer in the School of English, University College Cork. She is the author of Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879–1920 (Dublin, 2005) and editor of Daniel Corkery’s Cultural Criticism: Selected Writings (Cork, 2012).

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Gerard Moran lectures in the Department of History at NUI Maynooth. He has published extensively on nineteenth-century Ireland and is the author of Sending Out Ireland’s Poor: Assisted Emigration from Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin, 2004) and Sir Robert Gore Booth and His Landed Estates in Co. Sligo: Land, Famine, Emigration and Politics, 1825–1876 (Dublin, 2006). Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, F.R.Hist.S., is Professor Emeritus in Modern History at NUI, Galway. Educated at NUI, Galway, and at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he has held visiting appointments at universities on both sides of the Atlantic. His numerous historical publications relate mainly to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish and British history. He was the Academic Director of the Irish Landed Estates database project (www.landedestates.ie). Barbara Lewis Solow is a graduate of Radcliffe College and received her MA and PhD from Harvard University. She is a retired Associate Professor of Economics at Boston University and retired Research Associate at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. Among her publications are The Land Question and the Irish Economy, 1870–1903 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) and ‘A New Look at the Irish Land Question,’ Economic and Social Review (Ireland) (1981). She also has many publications on the history of plantation slavery in the Caribbean. Tony Varley lectures in Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He has recently co-edited A Living Countryside? The Politics of Sustainable Development in Rural Ireland (Farnham, 2009) and Integration through Subordination: The Politics of Agricultural Modernisation in Industrial Europe (Turnhout, 2013).

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

MUP FINAL PROOF – , 07/17/2013, SPi

Abbreviations

BTDA CDB ICC IDCSM IFF IFU IHS INLL IPP IRA IRB LLL NAI NFRL NLB NLI RIC RTÉ TD UCDAD UIL

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Ballinasloe Tenants’ Defence Association Congested Districts Board Irish Catholic Church Inter-Departmental Committee on Seasonal Migration Irish Farmers’ Federation Irish Farmers’ Union Irish Historical Studies Irish National Land League Irish Parliamentary Party Irish Republican Army Irish Republican Brotherhood Ladies’ Land League National Archives of Ireland National Farmers’ and Ratepayers’ League National Land Bank National Library of Ireland Royal Irish Constabulary Raidió Telefís Éireann Teachta Dála University College Dublin Archives Department United Irish League

7/17/2013 5:47:28 PM

Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

MUP FINAL PROOF – , 08/01/2013, SPi

Fergus Campbell: Introduction and acknowledgements

The long gestation I first had the idea for this book of essays almost ten years ago when I was asked to organize a conference on an aspect of modern Irish history by my then mentor Vincent Comerford. At that time, I was beginning a twoyear postdoctoral fellowship at NUI Maynooth, and it was customary for postdoctoral fellows to organize a conference at the college during their tenure. Later, sitting in The Roost with two PhD students at Maynooth (Conor McCabe and Thomas Byrne), I thought that it might be a good time to organize a conference on the Irish land question. Much of the key work on this subject had been done in the 1960s and the 1970s (even if some of it had been published later than that), and I thought that it would be interesting to revisit that work and to reflect on its continued influence and value in the early twenty-first century. During the consumption of the second pint of Guinness, a piece of paper was identified, and quickly a list of the names of eminent historians of Ireland who had written on the Irish land question was drawn up. This included Paul Bew, Philip Bull, Sam Clark, Vincent Comerford, Perry Curtis, James Donnelly, David Jones, Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, Barbara Solow and William Vaughan. A decision was made to approach each of these historians and to ask them if they would like to come to Maynooth and present a paper on their ideas on the Irish land question. One of the first historians I invited to speak at the conference was Paul Bew who immediately accepted the invitation and decided to undertake the novel task of reflecting on his first book.1 In an original presentation at the conference, he candidly outlined aspects of the land question that he had not included in his book and that he now felt were vitally important, and he sketched some thoughts as to why he had omitted material then that he would include now (in particular he felt that he had not properly considered the role played by the Catholic Church and religion

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during the Land War). This presentation inspired the editors of this volume to expand on his idea and to invite a number of historians to reflect on their earlier work on the Irish land question, to explore their influences and to consider the ways in which they would approach that work differently now (and in the second part of this book five historians take on this challenge). Although Bew has been unable to contribute to this book of essays due to his commitments in the House of Lords, his spirit has remained present in the book. Indeed, one of the preoccupations of this collection is with the writing of the history of the Irish land question (and of history more generally) and with exploring the process whereby historians develop an interpretation and how and why this evolves and changes over time. We hope that this book, then, might contribute to the ethnographic study of historians and historical writing and add to the short shelf of books that explores how historians work and think.2 During that unusually creative evening in The Roost, a second key idea emerged that would dictate the organization of the conference and, to some extent, this book of essays too. Since the early 1990s, a number of new historians had started to work on (or completed work on) aspects of the Irish land question that had not been exhaustively examined by the earlier generation. These included Terry Dooley, who had just published a social history of the Big House in Ireland during the twentieth century (and which looked for the first time at the experience of the Irish landlord class after the ‘long’ Irish revolution of 1879–1923); Tony Varley, whose doctoral dissertation of 1994 examined the development of smallholder activism in Ireland in the twentieth century; my own work on ‘ordinary’ agrarian radicals in the west of Ireland during the revolutionary era; Anne Kane, who was adopting a cultural history approach to her study of the Irish Land War of 1879–81; and Heather Laird, who was using literary sources to reflect on ideas of law and order in rural Ireland between 1879 and 1920, among others. A decision was made not only to invite established historians to speak but to also invite some of these new historians to speak at the conference. This younger (or still – at least then – ‘youngish’) generation of historians had accepted the baton from the previous generation and were taking studies of the Irish land question in new directions. Dooley and Varley were looking at developments during the post-1923 period which had not been much examined at that point (although an important and pioneering article by Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh had prospected this ground),3 and other historians were adopting novel approaches derived from history from below, cultural history, gender history and post-colonial theory. In the event, Campbell and Varley were

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the only historians from this emerging group who spoke at the conference, but other historians were commissioned to write essays for this book, and part III presents four essays that reveal some of the new approaches and new directions that have been adopted by historians of the Irish land question since the 1990s. A third inspiring idea emerged during those discussions in The Roost that did inspire some excellent conference papers but then fell by the wayside on the long path to the publication of this volume. My doctoral thesis on Irish agrarian agitation between 1898 and 1909 had been jointly supervised by the well-known Irish historian Roy Foster and also by William Beinart, an expert on South African history who had published on the land question in South Africa and had been personally involved in public debates about land redistribution there during the 1990s. It occurred to me that a novel way of thinking about the Irish land question would be to adopt a comparative approach that reflected on developments in Ireland alongside developments in Africa, Latin America and other parts of Europe. It seemed possible that such comparative studies might provide new questions and new ways of thinking about Ireland that could be valuable in terms of pushing the history of the Irish land question in new directions. I contacted William Beinart to see if he might be interested in coming to Maynooth to deliver a paper, and – as well as agreeing to come – he also suggested two other historians who might be interested in speaking to a conference on the Irish land question in Maynooth. In the event, three fine historians came to NUI Maynooth to deliver papers on the land questions in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mexico, and this generated valuable debate – expertly chaired by the late Peter Hart – but as plans for publication developed, it was felt that these essays were insufficiently focused on Ireland to allow them to be coherently included in this volume. It may be that the development of a comparative approach to Irish history – which probably requires the emergence of a historian with equivalent expertise in the histories of two places – has to wait for another day notwithstanding the great potential value that this approach has (and the emerging work of Niall Whelehan comparing agrarian violence in nineteenth-century Italy and Ireland looks likely to make an important contribution). It is with great regret that we have been unable to publish the essays by William Beinart, Jocelyn Alexander, Alan Knight and also Andrew Newby (who we commissioned to write a comparative essay on Ireland and Scotland). Following discussions with Vincent Comerford at NUI Maynooth in the summer and autumn of 2002, it was decided to host a conference on the

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Irish land question in May 2003 with the generous financial and administrative support of the history department. Vincent also suggested that I might co-organize the conference with Terry Dooley who was then also working at NUI Maynooth, and following a number of meetings, this was agreed upon. The conference was addressed by seven speakers who presented papers (Paul Bew, Fergus Campbell, David Jones, Tony Varley, Alan Knight, Jocelyn Alexander and William Beinart), attended by 60–70 delegates, and fulfilled our aim of reflecting on earlier work, presenting the findings of new research and applying a comparative approach to the Irish case. Initially, it had been my intention to co-edit a book of essays arising from the conference with Terry Dooley. In the event, I felt that Terry and I were not sufficiently in agreement about some critical developments of the Irish land question to enable us to co-edit a volume successfully, and so I allowed this idea to drop, and I regret not discussing this more carefully with Terry at the time. Some months later, I discussed the possibility of an edited collection – not based on the conference papers but emerging from some of the ideas of the conference – with Tony Varley, and we made a decision to proceed with editing a collection of essays which we then began to commission from early 2004 onwards (none of the essays published in this book are based on papers delivered at the Maynooth conference). Tony and I have been discussing the Irish land question since the mid1990s when we were both researching agrarian radicalism in east Galway during the early years of the twentieth century. We were both reading the papers of Martin Finnerty of Gurteen – IRB leader, United Irish Leaguer, Sinn Féiner, Fianna Fáiler, Clann na Talmhaner and county councillor – then in the possession of his son, Mattie, who was himself an inspirational source of lore about his native east Galway. Through Mattie, Tony and I met and became friends and began a dialogue about the Irish land question, agrarian agitation and the writing of Irish history that has shaped the contents of this volume. I have been trained as a historian, but Tony’s background is in sociology, and the gestation of this book has benefitted from the complementary ideas derived from these two disciplines. Tony and I discussed and developed ideas for this book often over mugs of herbal tea and black coffee in (the now regrettably closed) Banana Phoblacht or in one of the snugs of Neachtain’s in Galway and most recently in the Galway museum cafe, and the idea of commissioning a number of prominent historians to reflect on their earlier work and to write surveys of the literature on the land question, among many others, were his. This book of essays then derives from two currents. On the one hand, the set of ideas that emerged one evening in Maynooth in the late spring

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of 2002 and, on the other, a series of conversations that Tony Varley and I have been having since the mid-1990s. Having said that, the ideas of the community of scholars working on the Irish land question have undoubtedly fed into this book, and we are grateful particularly to Paul Bew, Vincent Comerford and Terry Dooley (all of whom were invited to contribute to this book but were either unable or declined to do so) whose thought-provoking works on the Irish land question and involvement in the Maynooth conference have contributed to the evolution of this book of essays. Indeed, since we acknowledge that any book such as this is based not only on the work of the editors but also on a wide group of scholars who have helped along the way, contributed thoughts and ideas and played their part in putting methodologies and perspectives into the air that we all breathe, we ask the reader to bear in mind this wider communal contribution to these essays notwithstanding the two names that appear on the title page. We would also like to thank our publisher and especially Emma Brennan at Manchester University Press for her patience and support over a long period. Róisín Nic Cóil compiled the index, and we are grateful to the NUI Galway Publication Fund. As this book has taken shape, Tony and I have also been mindful of the influence of an earlier book of essays on the Irish land question, also published by Manchester University Press. In 1983, Samuel Clark and James Donnelly published Irish Peasants, an unusually influential and excellent book of essays that applied some of the theoretical material on peasant studies to Ireland, and included contributions on Irish agrarian history by a number of extremely talented historians (including David Jones (and obviously Sam Clark) both of whom contribute to this volume).4 Among its many virtues, Irish Peasants provided a snapshot of the state of the literature on the Irish land question in the early 1980s, and in a thoughtprovoking section on ‘the unreaped harvest’, it suggested some less travelled roads not yet taken by Irish historians. Although this volume is not as ambitious as that earlier, exceptional book, we hope that this book provides an updated review of the state of the literature on the Irish land question in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book, then, is divided into three parts. In the first part, we have two surveys of the current literature on the Irish land question in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh surveys the literature on Ireland under the Union (1801–1921), and Tony Varley surveys the topics of land-centred collective action and state policy in the first half of the twentieth century after which – with the exception of a number of small and localized episodes – we can see that the era of

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widespread collective action mobilized by land-related issues has come to an end. In the second part, a number of historians who have written influential books on the Irish land question reflect on their earlier work and on the way in which they would approach it differently now if they were to take it on again. Barbara Solow, Samuel Clark, Philip Bull, David Jones and Fergus Campbell have written reflective pieces for this part (because of the more subjective nature of these essays, we have not asked these authors to provide a bibliography). In the third part, we have commissioned historians to write essays that reflect on the new directions in which research on the Irish land question is heading. Anne Kane reflects on the Catholic Church and the Irish Land War (1879–81) using methods derived from cultural history; Heather Laird explores the role played by women in Irish agrarian conflict; Gerard Moran writes about one of the less well-known Land League leaders (Matthew Harris) and attempts to apply history from below to the Irish case; and Tony Varley looks at how the Irish farmers’ parties dealt with land redistribution during the still relatively under-researched period between the early 1920s and the late 1950s. We have endeavoured to ensure that most of the essays in this collection are of approximately the same length (of about 8,000 words), but we gave those historians reflecting on their earlier work a free hand to revisit their earlier work in whatever manner they wished to do so. In the event, two historians (Bull and Solow) chose to reflect more conceptually on what they had written and wrote shorter pieces, while two others (Clark and Jones) decided to include lengthy discussions of what they would have liked to have included first time round and their essays are a little longer than the rest. We have also given authors a free hand to decide whether to use sub-headings or numbered sections to divide up their chapters, and both approaches are adopted in this book. The underlying approach to this volume has been greatly influenced by the work of one of the finest historians of modern Ireland, Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, who also contributes an essay to this volume. Among many of his influential books and articles, his essay on ‘Ireland’s Land Questions: A Historical Perspective’ has been particularly important to the intellectual gestation of this book.5 In the essay, Ó Tuathaigh suggests that land questions in modern Ireland are many and complex. Rather than conceiving of the land as simply an economic or a political issue, Ó Tuathaigh reveals its potency in the Irish imagination – past and present – and considers the rich cultural history of the Irish land question. Ó Tuathaigh’s essay lays down a challenge to us and to future students of land questions in modern Ireland to consider the full breadth of issues – political, economic,

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social, cultural, ethnographic and symbolic – that land evoked and continues to evoke in modern and post-modern Ireland. This book, then, defines ‘land questions’ as economic (what economic significance has land had in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland to the state, to landowners and to tenants), political (how has the desire to acquire land motivated collective action of an agrarian or a political character, and how has agitation for land overlapped with nationalist politics, and have states legislated on the land question for broader political reasons) and cultural (how have ideas about land been absorbed in nationalist discourse and in the life of the family, and how have ideas about land shaped the broader values of various sections of Irish society, including the Catholic Church). Although the book does look at land questions in all of Ireland before 1921, the emphasis is on independent Ireland in the post-1921 period because land remained an extremely important aspect of political and economic life in the Irish Free State/Republic of Ireland in a way that it did not in Northern Ireland. Broadly speaking, the essays in this book focus on five phases of agrarian conflict in Ireland: the great Land War of 1879–81 (or phase one) which marked the beginning of almost a century of extensive agrarian conflict in Ireland; the Plan of Campaign agitation organized by the National League between 1886 and 1891 (phase two); the various agrarian agitations of the 1898–1914 period mainly carried out by the United Irish League (UIL) (the campaign for compulsory land purchase of 1901–03 and the Ranch War of 1904–10 or phase three); agrarian conflict during the Irish revolution (1916–23) and especially during 1917–18, the spring of 1920, and during the Irish Civil War of 1922–23 which we might call phase four; and agrarian conflict in independent Ireland between the 1920s and the 1950s (phase five). Individual authors will elaborate further on these episodes and provide signposts for the new reader as well as food for thought for those who have been initiated in these debates. In the remainder of this introduction, I will attempt to sketch out two of the key contexts in which the essays in this book have been written and can be read. First, I will talk about the way in which the history of the Irish land question has been written and how this has changed over the last 50 or so years and locate the essays in this book in their wider historiographical context. And second, I want to reflect on what land has meant in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland, on what it means to us today at the beginning of the twenty-first century and on how the declining importance of land in Irish society has influenced the way we think about Irish land questions. Finally, I will suggest some avenues of research that future students of the land question in Ireland might consider pursuing.

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Land and history Irish historical revisionism dates from the founding of Irish Historical Studies by Theo Moody and Robin Dudley Edwards in 1937. As is well known, Moody and Edwards imported ideas about empirical historical research from the Institute of Historical Research in London to Ireland. The result was the development of a new school of historical writing in Ireland that was firmly embedded in rigorous study of the evidence and that served to debunk much of the more mythological historical writing that had been done (and that was either very pro- or very anti-Irish nationalism) since the partition of Ireland in 1920–22. Moody and Edwards’s revisionism, then, constituted an attempt to interrogate the Irish past using archival material in a scholarly manner. However, they were also censorious of the legitimate subject matter for Irish historians and imposed an unofficial ban on articles that looked at the post-1900 period, and – in practice – this meant that there was very little work done on the development of agrarian conflict during the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the second phase of Irish historical revisionism beginning in the late 1960s. The second phase of Irish historical revisionism arguably dates from the late 1960s and the beginning of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ of 1968–98. Perhaps because of the decades of repression that characterized the early history of revisionism, this second phase of revisionist historical writing was particularly robust. From the late 1960s onwards, historians of Ireland began to tackle the Land War of 1879–81 and the post-1900 period, and to do so in a challenging manner. Four of the historians who reflect on their earlier work in this book carried out much of their research during the 1960s or the 1970s and completed their doctorates or published their findings during the 1970s.6 Barbara Solow began her Irish research at Harvard in 1961; Philip Bull began studying William O’Brien and the UIL at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1968, and carried out research in Cork in 1969–70; Samuel Clark started working on the social origins of the Irish Land War (1879–81) in the early 1970s and participated in Theo Moody’s famous Irish history seminar at Trinity College, Dublin, at that time; and David Jones worked with John Whyte and Rodney Green at Queen’s University, Belfast, in the 1970s. Although Barbara began work – as she suggests – before (the second phase of) revisionism, Sam notes that revisionism was very popular among postgraduate students when he was researching in Dublin, and Philip acknowledges the profound effect of the Northern Irish Troubles on his doctoral research.

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It is generally accepted that this second phase of revisionism that built on the Moody and Edwards revolution of 1937, and began work on the post-1900 period, was more critical and ambitious than the earlier phase. Perhaps inspired by the unfolding trauma of the Northern Irish Troubles (which arguably began with the violent response to the civil rights movement in Derry/Londonderry in October 1968), the second phase of Irish historical revisionism gave short shrift to critical episodes in the nationalist version of Irish history. It is possible that there was a sense among historians of Ireland that the nationalist history of Ireland – on which the Provisional IRA appeared to base its legitimacy – needed to be reassessed for both academic and political reasons. Following this phase of historical writing, the Great Famine of 1845–49 was depicted as less of a turning point in modern Irish history than had been previously supposed; the Easter Rising was depicted as an anti-democratic conspiracy of fools rather than a mass uprising of the Irish people; and various aspects of the Irish land question were fundamentally reassessed.7 The nationalist historiography of the land question – and notably that published by Pomfret – suggested that the Irish landlord class behaved in an oppressive and exploitative manner towards their tenants by charging them very high rates of rent (rack-renting) and by carrying out large-scale evictions of their tenants.8 Using the techniques of the economist, Solow (and later Vaughan) revealed that the nationalist stereotype of the cruel and predatory landlord did not hold up against the evidence. Rents fell behind inflation, and evictions were comparatively rare, and in her essay, Solow explains how she arrived at these innovative and influential conclusions. Philip Bull explored the political implications of this rethinking of landlord–tenant relations and revealed that landlord and tenant (and nationalist and unionist) were able to co-operate in an extremely helpful manner during the early years of the twentieth century, and he showed that the stereotype of two classes constantly at loggerheads with one another was much too simplistic. Similarly, the nationalist reading of the Irish Land War of 1879–81 that saw it as ‘a mass uprising of the Irish people’ against British rule in Ireland was also found to be wanting by the empirical research conducted by Samuel Clark, Paul Bew and others. As Clark explains in his chapter, the Land War was carried out by an unlikely alliance of groups – small farmers, large farmers (also known as ‘graziers’) and rural and urban shopkeepers – that actually had very different interests to one another but managed to ally for a short period as each benefitted in different ways from the agitation. In other words, Clark and Bew found that there were significant divisions and tensions in rural Irish society and

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that – broadly speaking – Irish nationalist and agrarian movements from the late nineteenth century onwards were riven by internal conflicts. David Jones took this discussion even further by exploring for the first time the economic circumstances that gave rise to the Irish grazier (or large farmer) and by describing the political and cultural identity of this class in rural Irish society. In this respect, the four (allegedly) revisionist historians who conducted their research in the 1960s and 1970s, and who look back on their earlier work in this book, fundamentally transformed our understanding of the Irish land question, and all subsequent historians have been in their debt. Perhaps the most seismic shift in our understanding of the Irish land question implemented by this phase of revisionism was the identification of the Irish Land War of 1879–81 as the critical development in modern Irish history rather than the allegedly revolutionary events of 1916–23. Arguably, the challenging collectivity of various interest groups and the alliance of the movement for independence with the campaign for land reform that emerged in 1879–81 established the social and political circumstances that enabled the revolution of 1916–23 to take place a generation later. The revision of our understanding of key aspects of the Irish land question was therefore an integral element of the revisionist project of c. 1968–98, and Solow, Bull, Clark and Jones were all pioneers and producers of that profound historiographical revolution. Having said that, it is worth bearing in mind the diversity of these historians who are now regarded as ‘revisionist’. Of the four historians who reflect on their earlier work in this book, Solow is an American economist who began working in isolation from other Irish historians in 1961 and before revisionism as she suggests herself; Philip Bull is an Australian historian who felt that his early research was not generally understood when he began working on William O’Brien in Cambridge and later Cork in 1968–69; Samuel Clark is a Canadian sociologist who had studied collective action with Charles Tilly in Toronto before arriving in Dublin in the 1970s; and David Jones is an Englishman who trained as a political scientist and researched Bolivian peasants before taking up Irish research at the Queen’s University of Belfast in the 1970s.9 Both Clark and Jones acknowledge the influence of revisionism in their accounts, but both Bull and Solow appear to have reached their conclusions about Irish history independently of the wider group of Irish historians working at that time (although both acknowledge the support of Oliver MacDonagh who was then based at Cambridge).10 Indeed, it may be that we think of historiographical schools in an overly simplistic manner and that – in reality – historians may be influenced in similar ways by

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the times in which they live but they also develop according to a distinctly original and individual compass (that they may not necessarily understand completely themselves). Many historians would now openly acknowledge the influence of the Northern Irish conflict on the writing of Irish history. However, it is instructive that Philip Bull regards the influence of the Troubles on Irish historians as more complex and subtle than is usually supposed. It is often assumed that Irish historians were keen to debunk the nationalist story of Ireland in the 1970s because they regarded it as a possible source for republican activism. However, the influence of the Troubles on the historical imagination may have been more complicated than this. As Bull explains in his essay, he had begun working on the movement for conciliation between landlords and tenants, and between nationalists and unionists, in Ireland during the first decade of the twentieth century before the beginning of the Northern Irish conflict. In that pre-Troubles world, Bull found that there was very little comprehension of the value of his work on conciliation and co-operation in early twentieth-century Ireland among the community of scholars. Once the Troubles began, on the other hand, his identification of a historical precedent for conciliation between nationalism and unionism took on renewed value and – in a sense – the Troubles assisted his work by starkly revealing how valuable and important earlier Irish attempts at reconciliation were. In this sense, Bull was both projecting a hopeful perspective from the 1970s back onto the early 1900s and – at the same time – projecting a real attempt at reconciliation c. 1904 forward onto the undeniably bleak moments of 1969–72 (and it is worth noting that his emphasis on the real potential for conciliation in 1902–04 has been contested by Campbell in his essay in this book). Bull’s essay, then, suggests that historians interested in exploring the influence of the Troubles on the writing of Irish history might do so in more subtle and complex ways than they have hitherto attempted and that it might be valuable to think about what we decide to project forward from the past (‘the historian’s basket of idealistic lost causes’ as Bull calls it) as well as what we decide to project backwards from the present.11 Even so, there is a widespread feeling among Irish historians that the end of the Troubles (dating from the Good Friday Agreement of 1998) has opened up new possibilities for Irish historians. It is now felt that we have entered the third phase of Irish historical revisionism (or are we all now post-revisionists?) during which Irish nationalist movements in the past are sometimes positively regarded and – more importantly – the legitimate subjects of revisionist history have been broadened out beyond the

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political history of nationalism and unionism. It is perhaps in this light that we can view what Sam Clark and David Jones have to say about the kinds of subjects that they would include in their books now if they were to re-embark on their research projects again. Clark notes the absence of proper discussion of women’s involvement in the Irish Land War of 1879–81 and notably in the Ladies’ Land League, and this reflects perhaps the widening out of the Irish historical imagination beyond the political conflicts that so preoccupied Irish historians who wrote during the Troubles. Similarly, Jones provides a valuable account of land redistribution in independent Ireland between the 1920s and the 1970s that adds to the work of Dooley and Varley and opens up the social history of twentieth-century Ireland in helpful and illuminating ways. Although neither Clark nor Jones alludes to this in their essays, it is possible that their reasons for wanting to include this material now (and for omitting it then) reflect the changing landscape of historical writing since the 1970s (which is now much more preoccupied with culture than politics), the changing context in which Irish historians work in a post-Troubles world and also their response to work done by younger historians in the intervening period. My essay in part II of the book perhaps also reflects the changing environment in which historians of Ireland have been working since the apparent conclusion of the Northern Irish conflict c. 1998. I suggest that the mood of postgraduate students in the 1990s in Dublin tended to be critical of revisionism, and that there was an openness to a more sympathetic depiction of nationalist movements than seemed possible in the 1970s and the 1980s. This is – arguably – evident in the work of Diarmaid Ferriter, the most well-known historian of the third phase of Irish historical revisionism (or the first phase of post-revisionism as some historians prefer), which tends to adopt a more sympathetic tone to Irish nationalism than is evident in the work of, say, Roy Foster or David Fitzpatrick.12 The publication of L. P. Curtis’s The Depiction of Eviction in Ireland, 1845–1910 (Dublin, 2011) is a landmark book in this respect because it does not shy away from considering the impact that eviction had on families and acknowledges the very real trauma that eviction caused (and threatened to cause) in nineteenthand twentieth-century Ireland in a manner that historians of the land question writing in the 1970s and 1980s generally did not do. The essays in the third part of this book also reveal some of the innovative new work being done by historians who began researching the Irish land question during the 1980s and 1990s and whose work has (largely) been published since the end of the Troubles (with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998). In this part, we have selected some of

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the new research being done at the moment to indicate some of the work that is currently being undertaken rather than trying to provide an exhaustive survey of all of the research projects now underway. As Samuel Clark points out in his essay in the second part of the book, the question of gender was insufficiently addressed in much of the revisionist writing on the Irish land question. This situation is in the process of being remedied, and Heather Laird’s contribution to the third part of this book reveals the roles that women played in the Ladies’ Land League but also in more informal forms of agrarian agitation, and her essay shows the way in which subjects neglected in the earlier literature are being taken up by the next generation. Similarly, Anne Kane’s chapter in part III – which examines the role of the Catholic Church during the Land War of 1879–81 – takes up the baton from Paul Bew’s paper delivered at the Maynooth conference in 2003. In that paper, Bew acknowledged that he had neglected proper consideration of the Catholic Church in Land and the National Question. In her chapter, Kane uses the innovative methods of the cultural historian to explore the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Land War of 1879–81, thereby filling a gap in the earlier literature. It could be argued that the canonical texts about the Irish land question that were researched and published in the 1960s and 1970s tended to focus on the leading figures of the nationalist and agrarian movements rather than on the less prominent and rank-and-file activists. In his chapter in part III, Gerard Moran rectifies this deficiency and uses the approach of history from below to sketch the career of a less well-known but still vitally important leader of the Land League at the local level, Matthew Harris of Ballinasloe. Both Kane and Moran’s chapters, then, demonstrate the ways in which more novel historiographical methods (cultural history and history from below) have been employed by the current generation. The question as to whether Irish agrarian movements during the long Land War of 1879–1923 were characterized by class alliance or by class division was central to the work of Bew and Clark (as he discusses in his chapter in part II). Tony Varley’s chapter in part III builds on this work by considering the way farmer’s movements attempted to build alliances between different classes in independent Ireland. His chapter explores farmer’s parties in twentieth-century Ireland, including the Farmers’ Party (1922–32), the National Centre Party (1932–33) and Clann na Talmhan (1938/39–1965), and his work examines in particular how land redistribution contributed to their appearance and demise. Varley’s chapter also shows that one of the key developments of the last two decades in terms of the writing of Irish history (and of the history of the Irish land question) is a

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new tendency to write about developments in independent Ireland, whereas the previous generation tended to focus on the 1879–1923 period (and particularly the Land War of 1879–81). We hope that part III of this book shows some of the new research that has been done since the publication of Irish Peasants and reveals that there have been new subjects explored, utilizing new methods and also an attempt to look at the neglected periods of more recent Irish history. It is also striking that there are some strong continuities between the earlier texts and the new research notably in terms of a preoccupation with thinking about land redistribution and class relationships in rural Ireland (evident in Clark, Campbell and Varley’s chapters). If history-writing during the second phase of revisionism tended to be politicized by the debates about the Northern Irish conflict, then the new work seems to be open to wider perspectives including those of class, gender, ethnicity, culture and so on. Arguably, the first and second phases of revisionism tended to be overly preoccupied with political history, and it has taken until the post-1998 generation for a wider and more innovative revisionism to arrive, and these essays are a sample of some of the new kinds of work being done. A final critical development in the history of the Irish land question since the 1990s has been the development of much greater interest in the history of the Big House both before and after the Irish revolution (1916–23). To some extent, this interest builds on the earlier work of Philip Bull (who was concerned with episodes of co-operation and conciliation between landlord and tenant) and with the research on Irish landlordism conducted by James Donnelly, Barbara Solow and William Vaughan during the 1960s and 1970s (although some of it was not published until the 1990s). The key figure in this development is undoubtedly Terry Dooley who has published important work on this subject, established the Centre for the Study of Irish Historic Houses and Estates at NUI Maynooth and hosted an annual conference at NUI Maynooth on the history of the Big House in Ireland since 2004.13 A parallel and equally important development is the compilation of a Landed Estates Database of all the estates in Connacht and Munster under the leadership of Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh at NUI Galway. All of these developments are valuable and have contributed to an enriched social history as well as to the opening up of conciliatory dialogue between various sections of contemporary Irish society. It may be that the official nationalist story of Irish landlords tended to cast them as twodimensional villains – even if a more complex history of landlordism often developed in the localities – and a new history that includes all perspectives,

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as well as encouraging a more plural and tolerant relationship between the descendants of landlord and tenant today is to be warmly welcomed. Indeed, the end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland has opened up an opportunity in Ireland – north and south – for a real attempt to understand and acknowledge the points of view of former enemies, and this has had (and continues to have) a transformative effect on the way in which Irish history is now being written. On a more cautious note, it is also possible that renewed state funding for the preservation of the history, heritage and architecture of the Big House represents an attempt by the state and private benefactors to enhance the tourist potential of Big (and biggish) Houses in early twentyfirst century Ireland. The concern that this raises for academic historians is that critical faculties might be blunted when state and private money is involved in attempting to create a story of the Big House that homegrown and foreign tourists will want to consume (although there are obviously strings attached to research funding from any source). It is also important that the attempt to include perspectives that were ignored during the high point of narrow Irish nationalism in the Republic of Ireland (between the 1920s and the 1950s) – like those of the Irish landlords and their descendants – does not deny and repress the voices of those who were (and are) critical of the record of Irish landlordism whether those views are deemed to be justifiable or not. Land matters Land was vitally important to the entire population of Ireland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The majority of the Irish population lived in the countryside, and most of them worked on farms or estates as landlords, tenants (later owner-occupiers) or agricultural labourers, and as their wives, children, brothers, sisters and so on. The main component of the Irish economy during this period was the product of the land in terms of the animals that were reared on it and the vegetables and crops that were grown on it. Economic and social conflict in rural Ireland – whether this was between landlords and tenants, between large farmers and small farmers, or between farmers and labourers – was dominated by the question as to how land should best be used by the various members of Irish society. Irish politics was closely interwoven with land-related issues from at least the Great Famine of 1845–49 onwards. Nationalism in Ireland could not have developed into a mass movement without connecting itself to

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the question of land reform (as Home Rule did under the guidance of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1879–80). Indeed, such was the connection between Irish nationalism and land agitation that Irish Home Rulers and British Conservatives both thought that sufficient acts of land reform might kill off Irish nationalism altogether (this point of view was held by both John Dillon and George Wyndham). Even after political independence, it was arguably policies on the land question that led to the demise of Cumann na nGaedheal and to the rise of Fianna Fáil, and still later to the temporary decline of Fianna Fáil and the rise of Clann na Talmhan during the early 1940s. However, since the late 1950s and the economic reforms introduced by Seán Lemass, land has been declining in importance in the Republic of Ireland. The small farm economy that the Irish revolution of 1916–23 arguably created remained the dominant element of the Irish economy and politics perhaps up to the early 1970s, but since then it has been in steep decline, and in 2012 (at the time of writing), land in Ireland no longer dominates the Irish economy or seriously influences political developments.Those men and women who continue to work the land do so – broadly speaking – either as big commercial farmers or as part-time farmers on small farms. The possibility of inheriting the family farm now casts a shadow over farmer’s sons who probably regard it as a burden when once it offered them an opportunity of getting married and having children. Yet, notwithstanding the demise of the small family farm as the dominant political, social and economic unit of Irish life, it does retain some of its cultural potency. Arguably, the culture of the small farm and the symbol of the land in the Irish imagination continue to resonate strongly in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, and it is intriguing that the values and culture of small farm Ireland appear to have ongoing significance even now that the political and economic underpinnings of these values have disappeared. What is still more paradoxical – given the fact that most of the population of the Republic of Ireland are the descendants of men and women who were tenant farmers in the nineteenth century and the fact that we are currently living through a serious recession – is the developing fascination with the culture and the appropriation of the contents of former Big Houses by the new super-rich created by the Celtic Tiger. It would seem that in both Britain and Ireland, the culture and manners of the former landed elite continue to be prized and emulated by the upper middle class and to be watched by the rest of us in hugely popular period dramas like Downton Abbey (popular in Ireland although made for British television) and self-help programmes for the owners of Big Houses like Country House Rescue (broadcast by Channel 4).What this fascination with the Big House says about contemporary Britain

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and Ireland remains to be examined by sociologists and anthropologists. Moreover, it may be that enhanced understanding of what land meant to people in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland – which many of the essays in this book reflect on – might help us to understand some aspects of the culture of twenty-first-century Ireland. The unreaped harvest At the end of their influential book of essays, Sam Clark and James Donnelly suggested a number of avenues of research on the Irish land question that remained to be navigated. Some of the little green fields that they suggested required tilling have been extensively dug up, ploughed and furrowed since then. In particular, a great deal of work has been done on the political and economic aspects of the Irish land question since the end of the great Land War of 1879–81. In particular, the work of Paul Bew, Fergus Campbell, Terry Dooley, David Jones and Tony Varley has explored the development and nature of agrarian conflict in twentieth-century Ireland and the various responses that this elicited from the British and later the independent Irish state.14 In terms of the financial and economic aspects of the land question that undoubtedly influenced state policy on the land question, Patrick Cosgrove and David Jones have both done valuable work on the financing of land purchase and land redistribution during the period between 1903 and the 1970s.15 David Jones and Terry Dooley have further examined the working of the Land Commission during the twentieth century, although a fuller study will be possible when the files of the Land Commission are opened to public access. As we have seen, Dooley has provided a rich study of the social history of Irish landlordism during the twentieth century. L. P. Curtis and Adam Pole have examined landlords’ defence organizations during the period of the long Land War of 1879–1909.16 Campbell has examined the history and consciousness of ‘ordinary’ agrarian agitators in the west of Ireland between 1898 and 1921 and provided an account of the three important episodes of agrarian conflict during the first two decades of the twentieth century: the 1901–03 agitation (that led to the introduction of the Wyndham Land Act), the Ranch War of 1904–10 and the widespread campaign of land seizures that swept across Ireland in the spring of 1920.17 Varley has also provided an account of agrarian conflict during the period between 1914 and 1921 and examined the relationship between nationalism (notably the UIL and Sinn Féin) and land agitation, and he is responsible for publishing one of the first scholarly articles about the land agitation of

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1920 (in 1988). In addition, Varley has examined agrarian conflict and nationalist politics in independent Ireland between the 1920s and the 1950s notably in his work on Clann na Talmhan and other agrarian parties and movements.18 There are also useful essays by a number of authors on collective action and land reform in Victorian Ireland in Carla King and Conor McNamara’s recent edited volume The West of Ireland: New Perspectives on the Nineteenth Century (Stroud, 2011). Many of the areas of research that Clark and Donnelly recommended future historians should undertake have been explored since 1983, and there has been a great blossoming of historical writing on Irish land questions since then.19 I would suggest that the work that remains to be done on the Irish land question is largely in the field of cultural history. In 1999, as we have seen, Ó Tuathaigh sketched the potential for a rich cultural history of the land question, and in this book, Anne Kane and others have used methods derived from cultural history to explore aspects of the Irish land question. However, much of the ongoing research on Irish land questions remains concerned with the economics and the politics of land rather than on its symbolic or cultural meanings for Irish people, past and present. This is – arguably – a characteristic of Irish history-writing more generally which seems to be preoccupied with political history and much less concerned with social and cultural history, notwithstanding the dominance of social and cultural history in the rest of Europe and North America. Indeed, as the decade of revolutionary commemorations gets underway in Britain and Ireland – with conferences on the third Home Rule Bill and the Ulster Covenant held in 2012 – there is a danger that the political history of Ireland will continue to be rehashed for another generation which might jettison the evolution of a more diverse and wide-ranging revisionism. A cultural history of Irish land might be an interesting place to start. Indeed, historians of Ireland have often thought about what the symbolic value of ‘the land of Ireland’ might have been for Irish nationalists, but the penetration of ideas about land into more subtle and complex ways of thinking in rural Ireland has not yet been fully undertaken. Land was integral to the life of the family and in particular to patterns of inheritance, and the implications of primogeniture to sibling relations, to parenting and to family life more generally in post-famine Ireland requires much reflection. Studies of remembering in modern Ireland have begun to emerge in the last decade with important works published by Guy Beiner, Anne Dolan and Ian McBride, but the focus has tended to be on how political events have been remembered.20 Given that the majority of Irish people lived and worked on the land – and often inhabited the same townland for

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many generations – the remembering and forgetting of episodes of agrarian conflict must have constituted an important aspect of rural Irish thought, and this is something that historians of the Irish land question could profitably think about too. Land has been integral to the Irish imagination and to numerous creative writers from Maria Edgeworth to Martin McDonagh, and it continues to exercise a pull on the Irish mind even now that it is no longer of any real political significance. Why this should be the case, and what this tells us about modern and postmodern Ireland is an important question that remains to be explored. Perhaps the extraordinary work of Tim Robinson that explores the landscape of Connemara and the Aran Islands in a multilayered manner, incorporating geology, geography, history, literature and folklore (and walking), suggests some new ways of thinking about Irish land for the next generation who will live and work on it and who will research and write about it.21 It may be that the land of Ireland continues to contain valuable secrets that students of Ireland can continue to dig into for some considerable time yet. Notes 1 Paul Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1978). 2 See, for instance, Maria Pallares-Burke (ed.), The New History: Confessions and Conversations (Cambridge, 2002). We have also been influenced by Alvin Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (London, 1971) in which he suggests the necessity for self-reflection among sociologists. 3 M. A. G. Ó Tuathaigh, ‘The Land Question, Politics and Irish Society, 1922–1960’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land, Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 167–89. 4 S. Clark and J. S. Donnelly (eds), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914 (Manchester and Madison, 1983). We are grateful to James Donnelly for his support of this project. 5 G. Ó Tuathaigh, ‘Ireland’s Land Questions’, in J. Davis (ed.), Rural Change in Ireland (Belfast, 1999), pp. 16–31. 6 B. Solow, The Land Question and the Irish Economy (Boston, 1971); S. Clark, The Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, 1979); D. Jones, ‘Agrarian Capitalism and Rural Social Development in Ireland’ (PhD thesis, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1978); and P. J. Bull, ‘The Reconstruction of the Irish Parliamentary Movement, 1895–1903: An Analysis with Special Reference to William O’Brien’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge, 1972). 7 See C. Brady (ed.), Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism, 1938–94 (Dublin, 1994). 8 J. E. Pomfret, The Struggle for Land in Ireland, 1800–1923 (Princeton, 1930). See also the discussion of Pomfret in W. E. Vaughan, Landlords and Tenants in MidVictorian Ireland (Oxford, 1994), pp. v–x.

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9 Solow writes in her essay: ‘There really was no revisionist school in 1961 when I began.’ 10 According to Clark,‘Revisionism was all the rage’ among postgraduate history students in Dublin in the 1970s. 11 See, for instance, J. Regan, ‘Irish Public Histories as an Historiographical Problem’, Irish Historical Studies, xxxvii, 146 (November 2010), 88–115. 12 D. Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000 (London, 2004). 13 On these developments, see R. V. Comerford, ‘Foreword’, in Terence Dooley and Christopher Ridgeway (eds), The Irish Country House: Its Past, Present and Future (Dublin, 2011). 14 P. Bew, Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland, 1890–1910: Parnellites and Radical Agrarians (Oxford, 1987); F. Campbell, Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland, 1891–1921 (Oxford, 2005); T. Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’: The Land Question in Independent Ireland (Dublin 2004); D. S. Jones, Graziers, Land Reform, and Political Conflict in Ireland (Washington, D.C. 1995); and A. Varley, ‘The Politics of Agrarian Reform: The State, Nationalists and the Agrarian Question in the West of Ireland’ (Ph.D. thesis, Southern Illinois University, 1994). 15 P. Cosgrove, ‘Irish Landlords and the Wyndham Land Act, 1903’, in Dooley and Ridgeway (eds), The Irish Country House, pp. 90–109. 16 L. P. Curtis, ‘Landlord Responses to the Irish Land War, 1879–87’, Eire/Ireland: Journal of Irish Studies, Fall/Winter (2003), 134–88; Adam Pole, ‘Landlord Responses to the Irish Land War, 1879–82 (Ph.D. thesis, University of Dublin, 2006). 17 Campbell, Land and Revolution. 18 T. Varley,‘Agrarian Crime and Social Control: Sinn Féin and the Land Question in the West of Ireland in 1920’, in M. Tomlinson, T. Varley and C. McCullough (eds), Whose Law and Order? Aspects of Crime and Social Control in Ireland (Belfast, 1988), pp. 54–75;T. Varley, ‘Farmers Against Nationalists:The Rise and Fall of Clann na Talmhan in Galway’, in G. Moran and R. Gillespie (eds), Galway: History & Society (Dublin, 1996), pp. 589–622; T. Varley, ‘A Region of Sturdy Smallholders? Western Nationalists and Agrarian Politics during the First World War’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 55 (2003), 127–50; T. Varley, ‘Irish Land Reform and the West Between the Wars’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 56 (2004), 213–32; T. Varley, ‘On the Road to Extinction: Agrarian Parties in Twentieth-Century Ireland’, Irish Political Studies, 25, 4 (December 2010), 581–601. 19 Important work has also been done by non-historians, and it is worth mentioning Charles Orser’s exploration of the archaeology of rural Ireland that includes many insights into the lives of small farmers in mid-Victorian Ireland (C. Orser, Unearthing Hidden Ireland: Historical Archaeology at Ballykilcline, County Roscommon (Dublin, 2006)). Some of Clark and Donnelly’s more ambitious suggestions have not yet been taken up, and we still await a study of the changing nature of collective action in a single locality over a long period.

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Similarly, the nature of agrarian agitation in Ulster has not been given the attention that it deserves. 20 G. Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (Madison, 2007); A. Dolan, Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923–2000 (Cambridge, 2003); and I. McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Ireland (Cambridge, 2001). 21 See, for example, T. Robinson, Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom (Dublin, 2011).

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

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I

Surveys

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Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh: Irish land questions in the state of the Union

In a short but challenging article, published in 1994, the cultural critic Seamus Deane proposed a fundamental distinction between the use of ‘land’ and ‘soil’, as descriptors of territory in Irish history, and between the Irish ‘struggle for the land’ in the nineteenth century and the contest for ‘the soil of Ireland’. According to Deane, ‘soil is what land becomes when it is ideologically constructed as a natal source, that element out of which the Irish originate and to which their past generations have returned. It is a political notion, stripped, by a strategy of sacralisation, of all economic and commercial reference ... The struggle for the land and, indeed, the struggle with the land, is contrastingly marked by an inexhaustible series of references to its economic status – property, rent, productivity, upkeep, leases, encumbrances, improvement, impoverishment, ownership, tenant right, landlord right, buying and selling, state purchase, redistribution etc. ... the distinction [is] between soil as a material-metaphysical possession and land as a politico-legal entity. The nation is of the soil; the State is of the land.1 When Fintan Lalor, in the famine crisis of 1847, denounced the landlords as an alien class rather than an integral element of the Irish people (‘They do not now, and never did belong to this island.Tyrants and traitors have they ever been to us and ours since first they set foot on our soil’) and declared that ‘I hold and maintain that the entire soil of a country belongs of right to the people of that country, and is the rightful property not of any one class, but of the nation at large, in full effective possession, to let to whom they will on whatever terms, rents, services, and conditions they will; one condition, however, being unavoidable, and essential, the condition that the tenant shall bear full, true, and undivided fealty and allegiance to the nation, and the laws of the nation whose lands he holds ...’,2 he was clearly deploying the registers of meaning of both terms, soil and land, as historically constructed in Ireland. A system of laws there must be, governing the ‘holding’ of land, but the existing system (‘Irish

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landlordism’), based upon the root injustice of conquest and confiscation and the imposition of an ‘alien’ landlord class, could never enjoy legitimacy or command general respect: it must be challenged and torn down. Lalor’s was not the first such denunciation of the authority claims of Irish landlordism, resting as they did on an unexpiated historical injustice done to the Irish people: versions of this case had featured earlier in threatening public notices of such agrarian secret societies as the Rockites.3 This strongly historicized understanding of legitimacy in the matter of landownership and occupancy would also resonate in the later slogans of Parnell, Davitt and others in the Land War, demanding ‘the land for the people’. Notions of contested legitimacy and the incessant historicizing of debate on the complex issues relating to Irish land (owning it, occupying/ holding it, having access to it, ‘belonging’ in it) were central elements of the land struggle and in political discourse in nineteenth-century Ireland. More recently, within the broad discourse of ‘colonialism’, historical geographers, cultural critics and ethnographers have offered new readings of the conquest and colonization of not only the physical territory of Ireland but of its complex ‘meanings’, through its units, place names, lore and legends of place.4 This more comprehensive ‘appropriation’ of the land of Ireland – walking it, dividing it, mapping it, renaming it, assigning legal ownership of it, dictating the terms of its occupancy, ‘mastering’ it – was a fundamental aspect of the protracted process of colonization.Thus, William J. Smyth, in his major study of the mapping of the decisive episode of conquest and colonization in the early modern period, presents this aspect of the conquest in oppositional terms as ‘the uneven battle between the power to shape and flatten worlds which are defined more by accounting, geometry, mathematics and perspective mapping, on the one hand, and on the other, a gaelicized/Gaelic world, where such maps were either unknown or not formally used and where territories and peoples were ruled and administered mainly by the words and living images associated with manuscripts, memory, local lore and myth’.5 However, even as the task of naming and mastering the Irish landscape was reaching completion in the Ordnance Survey of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the totalizing nationalist project of ‘reclamation’ was well underway.6 Of course, the narrative of Irish history encoded in the Irish language – in its literary, manuscript tradition still functioning into the eighteenth century but increasingly transmitted orally within the Irish-speaking community from late in that century – continued to preserve and transmit the older topography and its mosaic of meanings, as part of a more comprehensive narrative of lost status and legitimacy.7 But with

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the language shift and the development of a nationalist, historicist rhetoric of loss, grievance and restoration, articulated in English (the ‘undoing of the conquest’), the historicization of the Irish landscape itself was evident at various levels of Irish society by the early nineteenth century. Thus, O’Connell not only selected sites of historic significance (Tara, Clontarf) for his repeal ‘monster meetings’, but from the outset of his mass mobilizations, he ‘constantly referred to local landscape to make his audience conscious of current grievance and its imminent redress’.8 Novelists, travel writers and journalists repeatedly historicized the Irish landscape. Predictably, and with considerable effect, the Young Irelanders in their propaganda for a ‘nationalist awakening’ saw the Irish landscape as ‘inescapably scored with historical signs’ and constantly reminded their audience of the significance of these signs.9 Even in popular ballads, as Maura Cronin points out, ‘... where references to landscape served to recall specific local events, the capacity of the ballad to fuel popular grievance was particularly powerful’, and ‘ballads – and the communities for and among whom they were composed – manipulated landscape to reflect the political and social aspirations of the cosmhuintir in an era of change’.10 Contested beliefs regarding the Irish past infected many aspects of cultural and philanthropic endeavour, including scholarship and publications on Irish history and antiquities. The issue of exactly whose past was being celebrated and commemorated was contested, even among dedicated scholars.Who could claim to be the authentic ‘heirs’ of this glorious past, or was it the common inheritance of all who now called themselves Irish, whatever their origins, their ethno-religious identity, or indeed their current political loyalty on the issue of the Union?11 Contested ownership of the Irish past – issues of pedigree, continuity and cultural inheritance – would inevitably be coloured by ethno-religious considerations and identity conflicts, despite the strongly inclusivist refrain that echoed through official nationalist rhetoric from O’Connell to Redmond in the constitutional tradition and from Tone to the Fenians in the republican separatist line. It is in the context of this pervasive contestation on the ‘ownership’ of the Irish landscape and of history itself that we can best understand why the registers of ‘soil’ and of ‘land’ need to be kept under constant review in any examination of the ‘Irish land question’ as it is more commonly understood in commentaries on nineteenth-century Ireland. In recent years, several scholars – notably Beiner and Leerssen – have explored the construction of ‘social memory’ as a factor in Irish popular history.12 However, in the context of the relationship between Irish popular

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sentiment, political mobilization and the dynamics of land agitation in its several, successive phases (popular–constitutional and clandestine–violent) during the nineteenth century, the integrity of social memory is less important than the general popular receptivity to the myth of ‘historical dispossession’, however mediated or manipulated. All significant movements – constitutional or clandestine or hybrid – intent on influencing the terms and conditions under which land was owned, occupied or worked in nineteenth-century Ireland addressed both the politico-legal significance of land and the material–metaphysical dimension of ‘Irish soil’. That is to say, these movements arose out of real, pressing economic grievances and demands: they may well have been triggered by highly local circumstances, sometimes salted by local personal or family feuds and enmities, or by heightened religious or sectarian tensions, but effective mobilization invariably required the lubrication of ‘historical memory’– however selective, imperfect or manipulated – of old, unexpiated wrongs. I The conventional formulation of the Irish land question is as an essentially political question. For the British state, beginning to preside over the first industrial society and the most powerful empire in the world, security was the paramount factor in completing the Union of 1801. Security, stability and law and order remained its priority in Ireland throughout the Union era. The state would work with those social groups in Ireland best able to ensure such stability. Its own security apparatus – the laws, courts, magistrates, military and police – was formidable and capable of enhancement as circumstances demanded.The natural – and, by historical ties and loyalties, the preferred – leading partners in this project of keeping Ireland safe and orderly were the landed elite. But when and where they proved inadequate to the task, the state found alternative allies and agents within Irish society. This, in a nutshell, is the principal reason why the Irish land question was at the centre of the larger ‘Irish question’, in all its complexity, throughout the Union period, and why shifting formulations of the Irish land question reflected changing circumstances and challenges for the rulers of the state in seeking to make Ireland a safe and stable constituent of the United Kingdom.13 At the beginning of the Union era, Ireland’s population, already growing for several decades, was over five million; it would continue to grow until reaching around eight and a half million by 1845.14 Apart from an emerging industrial enclave in the north-east, agriculture was overwhelmingly the

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basis of the economy, with Ireland becoming, in effect, a specialist supplier of food to the emerging industrial Britain. By the early nineteenth century, the land of Ireland was owned by c.10,000 landowners, the majority of plantation and Protestant origin (though Catholic landownership was increasing and would continue to increase throughout the century).There were of the order of 800,000 agricultural ‘holdings’ in Ireland. Tillage (encouraged by the long wartime economy from the 1770s to Waterloo) was a major component of the agricultural economy, facilitated by massive potato cultivation that sustained a huge underclass of agricultural labour (landless, cottiers and smallholders). By 1845, about three million were virtually exclusively subsisting on a potato diet, which was also a major part of the diet of a much larger number.15 By contrast, by the eve of the Great War, as the Union era reached its twilight, the population of Ireland was 4.4 million and had been falling almost continuously since 1845. The famine and emigration had savagely winnowed the ranks of the agricultural labourers, cottiers and smallholders. Irish agriculture was now predominantly based on grassland: by 1914, livestock accounted for three-quarters of the total value of agricultural output.16 A revolution in landownership was well underway, as state-funded schemes (notably the Land Act of 1903, with later amendments) enabled farmers to buy out their holdings from their landlords (and enticed or compelled landlords to sell). Irish landlords were on their way out; farmerowners constituted the new base of Irish landed property. The smallholders (notably in the west) and the diminished army of labourers (in the south and east) were still struggling for a better deal for themselves (land redistribution, better wages and housing; a curtailment of grazing and speculative leasing of land): but the social revolution of the transfer of landownership was well advanced. Communications infrastructure, travel, transport and literacy had advanced. Poverty and hardship were still endured by many – with living conditions in western congested districts the focus of continuing state efforts at relief and improvement.17 Emigration was firmly established as a way of life, a mechanism for ‘shedding’ surplus siblings in struggling farm and town families. But living standards in the countryside were rising, and not only among the more comfortable farmers. The signs of improvement were everywhere. II Of course, this particular reconfiguration of the sociocultural, no less than the economic, structure of rural Ireland in the Union era was not

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preordained nor was its eventual course self-evident to contemporary actors. There was struggle and contestation throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century at every step of the process. The chronology of the working out of ‘solutions’ to the land question is important and merits attention. In the early years of the Union, despite the lingering aftershock of the trauma of 1798, many of the ascendancy landowning class, overwhelmingly Protestant, saw the new Union era as opening a horizon of possibility for ‘improvement’, under the protection of a strong and stable government. Initially, the hope for new beginnings was shared by the leaders of the emerging Catholic bourgeoisie (including the bishops). The failure of government to grant full Catholic emancipation as part of or immediately following the Union settlement, and the tenacity shown by sections of the Protestant ascendancy in holding on to their monopoly of power, privilege and office (civil, judicial and political), resulted in the emergence of the aggressive O’Connellite movement of reform (led by ambitious Catholic middle-class men, but mobilizing the broader mass of their co-religionists as well as a cohort of liberal Protestants). Polarization along religious lines was intensified by heightened religious feeling, stoked on either side by millenarian prophecies and evangelical zeal. Nor was it confined to heady rhetoric: sectarian feelings lurched into violent actions, sporadic and local at times, but also in more collective settings of various clandestine agrarian societies.18 This boisterously polarized political culture was fermenting in a society approaching the climax of a long period of population growth. The end of the French wars saw a fall in agricultural prices and in the long-term attractions of tillage relative to grass. The landlord logic of checking subdivision and moving to grass farming ran counter to the desperate need, for access to land as the means of subsistence, of the rural underclass, whose volatility needed little political rhetoric or excitement to prompt direct action.Through a series of grand enquiries in the second quarter of the century (education, railways, poverty, crime, land tenure), the state sought to ‘anatomize’ Irish society, in the search for solutions and stability. Law and order, and the problem of the vast army of the poor, were the most pressing concerns of the government and ruling classes.The security apparatus of the state was enhanced in stages by the army garrisons and the establishment (by the mid-1830s) of a centralized police force, distributed in a network of barracks throughout the country, with emergency legislation invariably available, as required.The state solution to the muchdebated question of how to deal with the Irish poor was the Poor Law Act of 1838 and the workhouse system, conceived and administered with

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a view to deterring idleness and sloth among the able-bodied and to preventing any hint of welfare opportunism.19 The barracks, coercion law and the workhouse are not, however, the whole story in the search for remedies for Ireland’s pre-famine problems. Law and order was a prerequisite, but there were advocates for sound, Christian, universal elementary education as the most secure long-term basis for improvement. Specifically, on land-related issues, there was no shortage of proposals and prescriptions for improvement: a range of commentators focused on the ‘evils’ of subdivision; absenteeism and general dereliction of duty by a section of the landlords; the advantages of giving legal recognition to some form of ‘tenant-right’, so as to incentivize secure tenants to invest in their holdings; the reclamation of waste ground for cultivation; and the experience elsewhere in Europe of small farms being economically viable, encouraging subsidized emigration.20 By the early 1840s, there was sufficient agreement that landlord–tenant relations constituted one significant source of difficulty and contention in Irish rural society for Peel to establish a special commission under the chair of the Earl of Devon to enquire into the complexity of this issue. It produced a rich body of evidence but made few practical proposals and was quickly overtaken by the famine calamity, but already the focus had been fixed on landlord–tenant relations as the crux of the Irish land question.21 The coming of the potato blight and the calamity of the famine silenced O’Connellite politics and rocked Irish landed society. It brought about a shuddering reversal of the demographic story of the preceding 80 or so years. From about 8.5 million in 1845, the population fell to 6.6 million in 1851. It would continue to fall throughout the following decades, standing at 4.4 million on the eve of the Great War. Excess famine mortality of about one million and an emigration loss of perhaps another one and half million during the famine and immediate post-famine years gave the initial shock: emigration accounted for the continuing loss of population in succeeding decades. The rural underclass of potato eaters was decimated: some 200,000 smallholdings were ‘obliterated’ during the famine. The poorest and most vulnerable elements in the western half of the country suffered the highest mortality, though disease did not recognize boundaries – social or geographical.22 The repeal of the corn laws and the triumph of free trade in 1846 (ensuring that thereafter Irish agriculture would supply a ‘cheap-food’ British market) were quickly followed by measures easing freer sale of encumbered land.23 The emergence, during and in the aftermath of the famine crisis, of an intensified demand for legal protection for tenant right is hardly surprising.

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Anxieties generated by the crisis (evictions, consolidation, absorption of tillage plots into pasture), together with the general tightening up of estate management by many landlords, prompted renewed efforts by farmers, north and south, to agitate for legalized tenant right.The intellectual climate in Britain helped, with the emergence, through J. S. Mill and others, of cultural relativist views on the particularities of Irish circumstances needing to be reflected in distinctive land laws in Ireland.24 However, the long period of prosperity for Irish agriculture – with generally buoyant prices and profits from late 1840s to the mid-1870s – both encouraged tenants to continue to demand tenant right and also took the sting out of that demand: generally, farmers shared at least proportionately (in some cases handsomely) in this prosperity.25 Notwithstanding the persistence of aspects of pre-famine subsistence culture in the western counties, improved communications opened up the countryside to commercial penetration and ideas and facilitated continuing emigration.26 In the fragmented, localist politics of the immediate post-famine decades, the state faced down the Fenian threat and continued – by conciliatory measures – to court the support of the moderate, increasingly confident Catholic middle class. But movement on land reform in favour of the tenant proved difficult and slow. Gladstone’s first attempt to give legal recognition to the custom of tenant-right, the 1870 Land Act, proved a failure and was little availed of. The crisis came in the late 1870s, as Irish agricultural prices slumped, compounded by adverse weather and low yields locally, not least in the potato crop, which was still a vital component of the diet and the economy of many western smallholders. This combination of global and local factors, seized upon by effective political leadership at national and local level, produced the Land League and the Land War. This was the most formidable, popular social movement in modern Irish history, combining the full repertoire of legal–constitutional methods with older methods of moral pressure, including intimidation and the threat and actual use of force.27 The initial response of the state – in addition to the familiar ‘coercion’ acts to deal with the exceptional challenge to law and order – was to grant the long-standing demands of the tenant right campaigns (the three Fs).28 But, as landlords and tenants each sought to extract maximum advantage from the new situation, the state moved forward from tenant right to state-funded land purchase schemes, so that the occupiers (the farmers) could buy out their holdings, under state mortgage. It took several phases and purchase schemes before purchase terms were devised which were sufficiently attractive to both sides – landlords and tenants – to

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result in major transfers (the 1903 Wyndham Act, with later amendments, was the decisive measure).29 But by the close of the Union era, more than two-thirds of Irish farmers were owners – or on the way to becoming owners – of their holdings. The state had finally settled for a society of farmer-proprietors as the solution to the Irish land question, the formula which would create a stable basis for a rural society based on general acceptance of the rights of private property. By this time, however, the constitutional terms of the Union itself seemed on the verge of major revision, with the granting of some measure of Irish Home Rule seemingly imminent. However, while we may accept the consensus view that the Land War and legislation of 1879–82 marks the decisive phase of the land struggle of 1879–1910, resulting ultimately in the triumph of the comfortable farmer, it would be wrong to assume that this outcome was achieved without protracted internal struggle within the Irish landed classes, both between farmers and landlords and at the sub-landlord level. Conflicting objectives on the terms of land purchase generated ongoing conflict between farmers and sections of the landlords. Conflict was also assured by the continuing demands for land redistribution and sporadic, intense anti-grazier agitation and the simple unassuaged ache of land hunger felt by many vulnerable smallholders, who came to realize that the ‘victory’ of the Land War had made little difference to their standard of living or to the prospect of their children being able to settle and make a decent living on the land in Ireland. The nationalist political leadership continuously struggled to hold class conflict in check within the broad nationalist front.30 The smallholder support of the United Irish League (UIL) at the turn of the nineteenth century, the later Ranch War of 1904–08 and the spasms of agrarian violence that erupted in many parts of the country from 1918 (with the ascent of the reconstructed Sinn Féin) through the convulsions (in authority and law ‘enforcement’) of the War of Independence and Civil War era all testify to the unfinished business of the ‘land question’, as desperate smallholders understood it – and their own needs and interests – in the decades between Parnell and the first Free State government of Cumann na nGaedheal. Pressure from below continued to force the agenda in each phase of the struggle.31 Moreover, even the socially and economically conservative Cumann na nGaedheal governments of the 1920s (denounced at the time and ever after as ‘a rancher party’, pursuing a grassland policy of ‘the land for the bullock and the man for the road’) remained committed to land redistribution through the Irish Land Commission. But neither the scale nor the pace of redistribution could

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meet the land hunger and the anger of the large numbers of the disappointed and desperate smallholders.32 That the British state, in seeking a solution of the Irish land question, responded to concerted pressure from organized farmers in moving, by stages, to this final solution to the Irish land question is incontestable. The political leadership of nationalist Ireland – from the Tithe War of the 1830s to the later Land War in all its stages from Parnell to Redmond – was repeatedly faced with the challenge of riding the tiger of popular agitation while constantly adjusting its advocacy of land reform so as to hold pan-nationalist cohesion and prevent competing interests at sub-landlord level from erupting into uncontainable class conflict. Land purchase schemes and the interventions of the Congested Districts Board (CDB) did not answer all questions or meet everybody’s demands. These tensions would continue during the revolutionary period and long into the Free State era. III The state’s continuing search for order and stability, the working out of the market logic of free trade in an increasingly integrated global capitalism and the repeated waves of popular ‘politics’ for land reform had a combined impact on the principal elements of the class structure of landed society in nineteenth-century Ireland that is worth closer consideration. After all, different classes and social groups had quite distinctive ‘land questions’ to wrestle with during this century of change. For the landless agricultural labourers, the nineteenth-century answer to their particular land question was a brutal, unambiguous ‘exit’. In the teeming rural society of pre-famine Ireland, the gradations between utterly landless labourers, cottiers and the smallest subsistence ‘holdings’ (especially on marginal land) may have needed close inspection, such was the general condition of vulnerability of the potato-dependent classes at the base of the rural pyramid. The famine decimated this rural underclass. In the post-famine decades, changing land use (the decline of tillage, even in a tardily mechanizing agricultural economy), and tighter estate management and farmer cost control, rendered them increasingly surplus to requirements. Emigration saw them out in their thousands.33 Of course, the process extended over decades. Tillage still required labour, especially on a seasonal basis. But, in the post-famine decades, emigration became the option for thousands of labourers who no longer had a place or function within Irish agriculture. Their exit did not take place in utter silence.Their predicament and demands were voiced, mostly

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by others on their behalf, in evidence to official enquiries. Several efforts at organizing labourers into trade unions foundered. Among the national political leaders, the steadfast advocates of the labourers’ cause were the exceptions. But, in general, in the major movements of mobilization for land reform – from the Tenant League of the 1850s and 1860s through the various phases of the land struggle from the late 1870s to the eve of the Great War – it is fair to state that the predicament of the landless labourers was invariably ‘an chloch is fuide siar ar an bpáidrín’ for the leaders of these successive movements.34 Direct state intervention on behalf of this vanishing army of rural labourers came late, but, though limited in scope, it was ameliorative in intention and in impact. In housing and allotments, the reform wave of the 1880s to the early 1900s sought to improve the living conditions of the labourers. Within the overall policy framework for relieving ‘congestion’, in the western counties, subsidized emigration remained the preferred solution, but in the wave of concession and conciliation that marked the final decades of the Union, the agricultural labourers were to benefit more from the state’s initiatives than from any new, more solicitous attitudes among the triumphant nationalist bourgeoisie.35 General conditions improved for the labourers in the decade before the Great War, but well into the twentieth century, toil and tarcaisne was still the lot of the more casual rural labourers, as Peadar O’Donnell’s later portrait of the ‘rabble’ at the hiring fairs of Donegal would poignantly record.36 There is a sense in which the fate of the class at the apex of the rural pyramid has strong similarities with the labouring underclass at its base. Both were destined to pass out of Irish history, though the prolonged retreat of the landlord class has, partly because it is richly documented, attracted a great deal more attention, scholarly and otherwise, than the fate of the agricultural labourer. Indeed, recent decades have witnessed a thriving research industry on Irish landed estates and the world of the Big House and its past occupants. For many commentators, their fate excites a certain nostalgia. But for the historical geographer Willie Nolan, the conclusion is more dispassionate: ‘... in the long term it was, as in most colonial situations, the inexorable weight of numbers that sealed [their fate]’.37 Weight of numbers undoubtedly mattered, but opportunity, agency and leadership needed to be brought into alignment at various phases of the nineteenth century to incrementally dismantle the ‘edifice’ of Irish landlord power, in all its manifestations. With the background noise in British public opinion critical of the shortcomings of landlords (in maintaining law and order and running their estates properly) in the pre-famine decades,

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the 1830s saw the establishment of a centralized police force and the introduction of a paid cohort of ‘stipendiary’ magistrates and the trenchant reminder to the landlords, from Dublin Castle, that property had its duties as well as its rights. The stripping of the leadership and power functions of the Irish landed class was underway.38 The failure of the landlord class to deal with Irish poverty, culminating in the calamity of the famine, fatally undermined support and sympathy for them across a broad swathe of influential British public opinion. More immediately pertinent, the famine crisis (of poor rates and lost rents) proved the final straw for many landlords already heavily encumbered with debt: the establishment (in 1849) and operations of the Encumbered Estates Court began the process of ‘releasing’ Irish land onto the land market. The almost one-seventh of Irish land that changed hands in the Encumbered Estates Court within a decade of its establishment also introduced a cohort of new landowners, at least some of whom were intent on running their newly acquired property along commercial lines and extracting maximum profit from it.39 Disestablishment in 1869 not only removed a pillar of the Union but also weakened the morale and self-assurance of Protestant landed society. The Land War, and the land acts that followed it, proved the coup de grace for the Irish landlord class as a whole. The creation of, in effect, dual ownership in law, the breaking of contracts (on rents and leases) by state intervention in response to popular agitation, underlined the impossibility of confident forward planning of rental income from Irish land. Renewed agitation, if conducted ruthlessly and at a politically propitious time, might well lead to a succession of further rent reductions through judicial review.40 The conclusion was clear: there could be no further security of income in Irish land, better for landlords to seek good terms for getting out of it and investing the funds thereby realized in more secure assets. This ‘logic’ – to which many landlords were only reluctantly reconciled and to which a minority resisted tooth and nail until an evertightening noose of compulsion was applied to them – chimed with the ultimate desire of tenant farmers to become owners of their holdings and to become ‘independent’. The introduction of elected county councils and the establishment of a Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction at the turn of the century were further landmarks in the ‘passing’ of the political and social influence of landlords.41 The losses suffered by many Irish landed families during the Great War, their political and cultural alienation from the dominant interests and ethos of the nationalist state emerging, from 1919, under Sinn Féin auspices and the hostility to which resident landlord families were often

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exposed (the Big House, as the most visible symbol of the British garrison in retreat, excited predictable hostility, vengeful vandalism and, in too many cases, wanton destruction by various republican guerilla groups, during the War of Independence and the Civil War) hastened the departure into exile or commercial life of a major segment of the last generation of Big House Irish landed families. Compulsory acquisition of remaining estates for redistribution under the 1923–33 Land Acts of the Free State left only a small residuum still in residence in their big houses, farming comfortable holdings, of farm, domain and park land.42 The shock of the 1929 Crash on their investment portfolios, rising costs and rising damp, the burden of maintenance and the sheer exhaustion of stamina and of old attachments eventually resulted in the sale of many of these houses and surrounding lands, successively, to religious orders, hospital trusts, hoteliers, golf and leisure entrepreneurs, nursing home owners and wealthy celebrities from the world of business, sports and entertainment. In a sense, these houses were ‘saved’, though their historical reference on the Irish landscape would become increasingly blurred over time. Those not saved were abandoned and died.43 The story of the classes at the top and at the very bottom of Irish landed society in the Union era is more easily told than that of the great middle wedge of that society, the tenantry or tenant farmers. The various gradations of tenant, signified by size and quality of farm holding, by legal status and customary rights and by residence and disposable income, family prospects and connections, were closely calibrated in the social hierarchy of the countryside and the country towns. Not only were tenant farmers decidedly not a homogenous class or status group, they were frequently sharply divided and in conflict, competing for access to land and the control of its use. The more obvious distinctions are those that divided subsistence (or ‘struggling’) smallholders from more commercially viable farmers with surplus produce to sell and the ambition and prospect of profitable use of their farms. The tillage/grass conflict, either in the hectic pre-famine decades or in later decades in the western districts, was not only about responding to market forces and calculating the optimum return (allowing for total factor input) on investment. For the smallholder, it was about access to the basic means of survival and the struggle to ensure continuing employment and a living (however fitful or harsh) in the tillage or mixed farming sector. The concentration, by contemporary statesmen concerned with establishing a socially stable and orderly base of popular support for the Union in nineteenth-century Ireland, on the issue of landlord–tenant relations

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(predominantly in legal terms of ownership and occupancy) as the core of the Irish land question, largely ignored other sources of tension and conflict within the complex hierarchies of Irish rural society. For a time, historians likewise concentrated on this core issue of landlord–tenant relations. The emergence from the 1960s of new waves of economic and social history and, in the case of Irish history, an increased number of professional historians (many of them born, trained and working in countries other than Ireland), produced, over time, a richer historiography on virtually every aspect and period of Irish history.44 Specifically, the new historiography demonstrated the complexity of the issues relating to all aspects of Irish land – its ownership, occupancy and use – down through the centuries.There never was a single ‘Irish land question’, but a dense matrix of interlocking issues and questions relating to the story of land in Ireland.45 A fundamental criticism of the earlier concentration – in Westminster and by the commentariat of the nineteenth century – on the legal aspects of landowner occupancy was that it gave insufficient attention to the strictly economic aspects of the use, productivity and profitability of Irish land. How best to use the land occupied pamphleteers, agricultural experts and a host of activists for ‘improvement’ throughout the course of the nineteenth century, and ever since. However, for contemporaries, this debate could never be strictly technical or dispassionately ‘scientific’ in tone or in its use of evidence: any prescription for the optimum ‘use’ of Irish land had to be embedded in its historico-social setting. The collaboration of landlord and commercial farmer in promoting ‘progressive’ farming may have seemed sensible, and no doubt it was achieved on individual estates. But throughout nationalist Ireland in the post-famine decades, the historical forces and political leadership that determined that the ‘challenging collectivity’ of the Land War would be configured along the fault line of ‘the people’ vs. ‘landlordism’ proved in the end too strong for ‘conciliationists’ in the closing years of the Union.46 National statistics, and the generalizations and conclusions that they permit, obscure significant regional variations. Thus, the congestion of smallholders on indifferent land in the post-famine decades was heavily a western problem, as the map of the territory covered by the CDB’s operations clearly demonstrates. In contrast, the ‘waged’ farm labourers by the end of the century were most numerous in southern and eastern counties. Most significant of all, however, the circumstances of land occupancy and social relations in the heavily Protestant – and from early in the nineteenth century largely Unionist – areas of Ulster are strikingly

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distinctive.This was not because the pattern of landowning and occupancy there differed markedly from the rest of Ireland (Ulster agriculture was predominantly mixed farming on farms of modest size – some 80 per cent of Ulster farms were below 30 acres). Ulster was distinctive because the historical and political consciousness shared by descendants of planter settlers that provided the background to the working out of land issues there was very different to the dominant sentiment elsewhere. Class tensions and competing interests made Ulster Protestant farmers as ready as farmers elsewhere to demand and to agitate for best terms, and the confessional element was not lacking in tensions between Anglican landowners and Presbyterian farmers. Indeed, the protracted campaign (from the 1850s to the 1880s) for legal recognition of the ‘Ulster custom’ of tenant right found its strongest advocates, not surprisingly, in Ulster. But the absence of an ethno-religious version of a history of confiscation, displacement and injustice that underpinned the popular politics of the Catholic and nationalist majority resulted in a fundamental difference between the dynamics of land conflict (its intensity and the methods employed) in most of Ulster compared to the other provinces.This would also determine a different story for the landlord class in most of Ulster in the years on either side of partition: landlords would continue to exercise political and social leadership within Ulster Unionism.47 IV It may seem paradoxical that the outcome of the most effective sociopolitical movement of collective action in modern Irish history should have been the entrenchment of a decidedly individualist system of farm ownership. Indeed, the individualist instinct for exclusive ownership, strongly evident in the drive for peasant-proprietorship, would be underlined in later decades in the reluctance of farmers to surrender or in any way share the ‘family farm’. Even the mildest versions of collectivized agriculture found few takers in Ireland in recent centuries.The few brief, isolated, nineteenth-century Owenite experiments are historical curiosities; land nationalization as a solution proved a non-starter, even when advocated by the revered Davitt. The cooperative movement, from the later nineteenth century, particularly among dairy farmers in the decades when the creamery was the vital commercial gateway for their produce, certainly constituted a form of communal action, though it was based on demonstrable economic advantage (in terms of costs, prices, product development and marketing) for each individual farmer.48

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The statistics – the uninterrupted fall in the number of holdings and in the numbers employed in working the land – would seem to constitute incontrovertible proof that, in the long term, perhaps since the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the calculus of economic advantage, social ease and opportunity elsewhere has been the key determinant of choice for those born on the land in Ireland. The market, rather than the map, has trumped the siren of historical memory and the Irish attachment to ‘place’; the ‘flight from the land’ provides a more enduring narrative than ‘the struggle for the land’. Homo economicus would not be thwarted or betrayed by history and the heart. But the story of that struggle in the ‘long’ nineteenth century (and indeed its aftershocks to the midtwentieth) – its dynamics and ultimate victors – cannot be properly understood without constant and close attention to what exactly the continuing force of ‘historical memory’, and its invocation by successive nationalist leaders, contributed to the materials for victory. Notes 1 S. Deane, ‘Land and Soil: A Territorial Rhetoric’, History Ireland, 2, 1 (1994), 31–4. 2 Cited in A. C. Hepburn (ed.), The Conflict of Nationality in Modern Ireland (London, 1980), pp. 16–17. 3 The most recent and definitive account is J. S. Donnelly, Jr., Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824 (Cork, 2009). 4 See, for example, the assured overview of K. Whelan, ‘The Modern Landscape’, in F. H. A. Aalen, K. Whelan and M. Stout (eds), Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (Cork, 1997), pp. 67–103. 5 W. J. Smyth, Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c.1530–1750 (Cork, 2006), p. 58. 6 For a colonialist reading, see S. Ó Cadhla, Civilizing Ireland: Ordnance Survey 1824–1842. Ethnography, Cartography, Translation (Dublin and Portland, 2007); also, see H. Laird, Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879–1920: From ‘Unwritten Law’ to the Dáil Courts (Dublin, 2005), for a colonialist/subaltern reading of collective peasant action against ‘alien’ law. 7 For the Gaelic mentalité of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, see B. Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar (Baile Átha Cliath, 1996). 8 M. Cronin, ‘Claiming the Landscape: Popular Balladry in Pre-famine Ireland’, in Ú. Ní Bhroiméil and G. Hooper (eds), Land and Landscape in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2008), p. 32. 9 S. Ryder, ‘The Politics of Landscape and Region in Nineteenth-Century Poetry’, in G. Hooper and L. Litvack (eds), Ireland in the Nineteenth Century: Regional Identity (Dublin, 2000), pp. 169–84.

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10 Cronin, ‘Claiming the Landscape’, p. 39. 11 For examples, see C. O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800 (Cork, 2004); D. Murray, Romanticism, Nationalism and Irish Antiquarian Societies (Maynooth, 2000); G. Ó Dúill, Samuel Ferguson: Beatha agus Saothar (Baile Átha Cliath, 1993), especially pp. 68–90. 12 G. Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (Madison, Wis., 2007); J. Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996). 13 A sustained commentary on the land question ‘as a political issue’ is P. Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin, 1996). 14 The rate of increase was falling from the 1820s, mainly due to rising emigration. See C. Ó Gráda, Ireland Before and After the Famine: Explorations in Irish Economic History 1800–1925 (2nd edn., Manchester, 1993), and Ó Gráda, The Great Irish Famine (Cambridge, for the Economic History Society, 1995), pp. 5–12. 15 Ó Gráda, The Great Irish Famine, pp. 15–20. 16 J. Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848–1918 (Dublin, 1973), pp. 1–38 and passim, for an incisive analysis of post-famine development. 17 For the general appraisal of the measures of ‘constructive unionism’, see A. Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness: The Experience of Constructive Unionism 1890–1905 (Cork, 1987). The novel agency established to deal with the problems of congestion in the west was the Congested Districts Board, for which, see C. Breathnach, The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891–1923: Poverty and Development in the West of Ireland (Dublin, 2005). 18 Donnelly, Jr., Captain Rock, the bibliography of which lists all relevant material on agrarian secret societies; also, S. Clark and J. S. Donnelly, Jr. (eds), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest 1780–1914 (Madison, Wis. and Manchester, 1983), and I.Whelan, The Bible War in Ireland: The “Second Reformation” and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800–1840 (Dublin and Madison, 2005); but, with less emphasis on the sectarian dimension, see M. Huggins, Social Conflict in Prefamine Ireland: The Case of County Roscommon (Dublin, 2007). 19 P. Gray, The Making of the Irish Poor Law, 1815–1843 (Manchester, 2009). 20 R. D. C. Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 1817–1870 (Cambridge and New York, 1960); and T. A. Boylan and T. P. Foley, Political Economy and Colonial Ireland (London and New York, 1992). 21 P. Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843–50 (Dublin and Portland, 1999), pp. 41–94. The Commission’s findings revealed that a quarter of Irish landholdings were between one and five acres – see J. S. Donnelly, Jr., The Great Irish Potato Famine (Stroud, 2002), p. 8; also, on tenant-right, M. Dowling, Tenant Right and Agrarian Society in Ulster, 1600–1870 (Dublin and Portland, 1999).

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22 Of the several excellent studies of the famine and its impact, the economic dimension is particularly well considered in Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine; C. Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton, 1999); J. Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800–1850 (London and Boston, 1983). On the interplay between politics, the famine crisis and land issues, Gray, Famine, Land and Politics, is the definitive account. See also, with excellent cartographic evidence, John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (eds), Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (Cork, 2012). 23 Gray, Famine, Land and Politics, pp.196–226. 24 Ibid., pp. 142–226, for the changing intellectual and political climate; also E. D. Steele, Irish Land and British Politics: Tenant-right and Nationality 1865–1870 (Cambridge, 1974), especially pp. 48–68 for a consideration of J. S. Mill’s influence. 25 W. E. Vaughan, Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1994), is the authoritative study; see, also, K. T. Hoppen, Ireland Since 1800: Conflict and Conformity (Harlow and New York, 1989), pp. 83–109. 26 T. Guinnane, The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in Ireland, 1850–1914 (Princeton and London, 1997); M. Turner, After the Famine: Irish Agriculture 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1996); C. Ó Gráda, A New Economic History 1780–1939 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 213–73. 27 P. Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1978); S. Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, 1979); T. W. Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846–82 (Oxford, 1981). 28 These were fair rent, freedom of sale and fixity of tenure. 29 An excellent summary of Irish Land Legislation, 1848–1992, is provided in the Appendix to Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism, pp. 193–207. 30 For the later phases of the Land War, see P. Bew, Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland 1890–1910 (Oxford, 1987); P. Maume, The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 (Dublin, 1999); F. Campbell, Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland, 1891–1921 (Oxford, 2005). 31 Campbell, Land and Revolution is a compelling case study; see, also, D. S. Jones, Graziers, Land Reform, and Political Conflict in Ireland (Washington, 1995). For a challenging alternative view that locates the ‘definition’ of the Irish land question within the domain of British high politics, see M. O’Callaghan, British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland (Cork, 1994). 32 For continuing tensions post-1920, see T. Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’: The Land Question in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 2004); also, the author’s, ‘The Land Question, Politics and Irish Society, 1922–1960’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 167–89. 33 D. Fitzpatrick, ‘The Disappearance of the Irish Agricultural Labourer, 1841–1914’, Irish Economic and Social History, vii (1980), 66–92; P. G. Lane, ‘Agricultural Labourers and the Land Question’, in C. King (ed.), Famine, Land

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36 37 38

39 40 41

42 43

44

45 46

47

48

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and Culture in Ireland (Dublin, 2000), pp. 101–15; D. Bradley, Farm Labourers: Irish Struggle 1900–1976 (Belfast, 1998). Literally, ‘the last bead on their rosary’, i.e. the lowest priority. Davitt may count as an exception. For the continuing difficulties of the agricultural labourers under Irish selfgovernment, see Bradley, Farm Labourers, and C. S. Curtis, ‘The Agricultural Labourer and the State in Independent Ireland, 1922–1976’, Irish Economic and Social History, 35 (2008), 92–3 (thesis abstract). See, for example, the novel Adrigoole (1929), or the autobiographical writings of Patrick McGill. William Nolan, reviewing D. J. Butler, ‘South Tipperary 1570–1841: Religion, Land and Rivalry’, Irish Economic and Social History, xxxiii (2006), 95. Arguably, their terror in 1798 and the surrender of ‘their’ parliament in 1800 was the dramatic first act of their long retreat. For the state’s evolving apparatus of law and order, see V. Crossman, Politics, Law and Order in 19th Century Ireland (Dublin, 1996). The estimate is provided by Lee, Modernisation, p. 37. As indeed happened during the agitation of 1886–87, see L. M. Geary, The Plan of Campaign, 1886–1891 (Cork, 1986). Gailey, Death of Kindness, pp. 40–50; P. Maume, Long Gestation, pp. 27–33; T. West, Horace Plunkett: Co-operation and Politics. An Irish Biography (Gerrards Cross, 1986). T. A. M. Dooley, ‘Landlords and the Land Question, 1879–1909’, in C. King (ed.), Famine, Land and Culture in Ireland (Dublin, 2000), pp.116–39. T. Dooley, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland: A Study of Irish Landed Families, 1860–1960 (Dublin, 2001); Dooley, The Big Houses and Landed Estates of Ireland: A Research Guide (Dublin, 2007); See, also, the website www. landedestates.ie and T. Blake, Abandoned Mansions of Ireland (Cork, 2010). It is customary to date the change, in economic history, from B. L. Solow, The Land Question and the Irish Economy, 1870–1903 (Cambridge, MA, 1971); for a discussion of the new historiography on land, see Campbell, Land and Revolution, pp. 286–304. Some of these are explored in the author’s ‘Ireland’s Land Questions: A Historical Perspective’, in J. Davis (ed.), Rural Change in Ireland (Belfast, 1999), pp. 16–31. For the concept of the ‘challenging collectivity’, see Clark, Social Origins. For the fate of the conciliationist initiatives, see the works by Bew, Maume and Campbell cited in note 30 above; also Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism, passim. F. Thompson, The End of Liberal Ulster: Land Agitation and Land Reform, 1868–1886 (Belfast, 2001); O. Purdue, The Big House in the North of Ireland: Land, Power and Social Elites, 1870–1960 (Dublin, 2009). For a more resilient model of communal action in Irish agriculture and land use, see A. O’Dowd, Meitheal: A Study of Co-operative Labour in Rural Ireland (Dublin, 1981).

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Bibliography Beiner, G. Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (Madison, 2007). Bew, P. Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1978). ——. Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland 1890–1910 (Oxford, 1987). Black, R. D. C. Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 1817–1870 (Cambridge and New York, 1960). Blake, T. Abandoned Mansions of Ireland (Cork, 2010). Boylan, T. A. and T. P. Foley. Political Economy and Colonial Ireland (London and New York, 1992). Bradley, D. Farm Labourers: Irish Struggle 1900–1976 (Belfast, 1998). Breathnach, C. The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891–1923: Poverty and Development in the West of Ireland (Dublin, 2005). Bull, P. Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin, 1996). Campbell, F. Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland, 1891–1921 (Oxford, 2005). Clark, S. Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, 1979). Clark, S. and J. S. Donnelly, Jr. (eds). Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest 1780–1914 (Madison and Manchester, 1983). Cronin, M. ‘Claiming the Landscape: Popular Balladry in Pre-famine Ireland’, in Ú. Ní Bhroiméil and G. Hooper (eds), Land and Landscape in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2008), pp. 25–39. Crossman,V. Politics, Law and Order in 19th Century Ireland (Dublin, 1996). Crowley, J., W. J. Smyth and M. Murphy (eds). Atlas of Great Irish Famine (Cork, 2012). Curtis, C. S. ‘The Agricultural Labourer and the State in Independent Ireland, 1922–1976’, Irish Economic and Social History, 35 (2008), 92–3 (thesis abstract). Deane, S. ‘Land and Soil: A Territorial Rhetoric’, History Ireland, 2, 1 (1994), 31–4. Donnelly, Jr., J. S. The Great Irish Potato Famine (Stroud, 2002). ——. Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824 (Cork, 2009). Dooley, T. A. M. ‘Landlords and the Land Question, 1879–1909’, in C. King (ed.), Famine, Land and Culture in Ireland (Dublin, 2000), pp. 116–39. Dooley, T. The Decline of the Big House in Ireland: A Study of Irish Landed Families, 1860–1960 (Dublin, 2001). ——. ‘The Land for the People’: The Land Question in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 2004). ——. The Big Houses and Landed Estates of Ireland: A Research Guide (Dublin, 2007). Dowling, M. Tenant Right and Agrarian Society in Ulster, 1600–1870 (Dublin and Portland, 1999).

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Fitzpatrick, D. ‘The Disappearance of the Irish Agricultural Labourer, 1841–1914’, Irish Economic and Social History, vii (1980), 66–92. Gailey, A. Ireland and the Death of Kindness: The Experience of Constructive Unionism 1890–1905 (Cork, 1987). Geary, L. M. The Plan of Campaign, 1886–1891 (Cork, 1986). Gray, P. Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843–50 (Dublin and Portland, 1999). ——. The Making of the Irish Poor Law, 1815–1843 (Manchester, 2009). Guinnane, T. The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in Ireland, 1850–1914 (Princeton and London, 1997). Hepburn, A. C. (ed.). The Conflict of Nationality in Modern Ireland (London, 1980). Hoppen, K. T. Ireland Since 1800: Conflict and Conformity (Harlow and New York, 1989). Huggins, M. Social Conflict in Pre-famine Ireland: The Case of County Roscommon (Dublin, 2007). Jones, D. S. Graziers, Land Reform, and Political Conflict in Ireland (Washington, 1995). Laird, H. Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879–1920: From ‘Unwritten Law’ to the Dáil Courts (Dublin, 2005). Lane, P. G. ‘Agricultural Labourers and the Land Question’, in C. King (ed.), Famine, Land and Culture in Ireland (Dublin, 2000), pp. 101–15. Lee, J. The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848–1918 (Dublin, 1973). Leerssen, J. Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996). Maume, P. The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 (Dublin, 1999). Mokyr, J. Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800–1850 (London and Boston, 1983). Moody, T. W. Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846–82 (Oxford, 1981). Murray, D. Romanticism, Nationalism and Irish Antiquarian Societies (Maynooth, 2000). Ó Buachalla, B. Aisling Ghéar (Baile Átha Cliath, 1996). Ó Cadhla, S. Civilizing Ireland: Ordnance Survey 1824–1842. Ethnography, Cartography,Translation (Dublin and Portland, 2007). O’Callaghan, M. British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland (Cork, 1994). O’Dowd, A. Meitheal: A Study of Co-operative Labour in Rural Ireland (Dublin, 1981). Ó Dúill, G. Samuel Ferguson: Beatha agus Saothar (Baile Átha Cliath, 1993). Ó Gráda, C. Ireland Before and After the Famine: Explorations in Irish Economic History 1800–1925 (2nd edn., Manchester, 1993). ——. A New Economic History 1780–1939 (Oxford, 1994). ——. The Great Irish Famine (Cambridge, for the Economic History Society, 1995). ——. Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton, 1999).

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O’Halloran, C. Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800 (Cork, 2004). Ó Tuathaigh, M. A. G. ‘The Land Question, Politics and Irish Society, 1922–1960’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 167–89. Ó Tuathaigh, G. ‘Ireland’s Land Questions: A Historical Perspective’, in J. Davis (ed.), Rural Change in Ireland (Belfast, 1999), pp. 16–31. Purdue, O. The Big House in the North of Ireland: Land, Power and Social Elites, 1870–1960 (Dublin, 2009). Ryder, S. ‘The Politics of Landscape and Region in Nineteenth-Century Poetry’, in G. Hooper and L. Litvack (eds), Ireland in the Nineteenth Century: Regional Identity (Dublin, 2000), pp.169–84. Smyth, W. J. Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c.1530–1750 (Cork, 2006). Solow, B. L. The Land Question and the Irish Economy, 1870–1903 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). Steele, E. D. Irish Land and British Politics: Tenant-right and Nationality 1865–1870 (Cambridge, 1974). Thompson, F. The End of Liberal Ulster: Land Agitation and Land Reform, 1868–1886 (Belfast, 2001). Turner, M. After the Famine: Irish Agriculture 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1996). Vaughan, W. E. Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1994). West, T. Horace Plunkett: Co-operation and Politics. An Irish Biography (Gerrards Cross, 1986). Whelan, I. The Bible War in Ireland: The “Second Reformation” and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800–1840 (Dublin and Madison, 2005). Whelan, K. ‘The Modern Landscape’, in F. H. A. Aalen, Kevin Whelan and Matthew Stout (eds), Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (Cork, 1997), pp. 67–103.

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

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2

Tony Varley: Gaining ground, losing ground: the politics of land reform in twentieth-century Ireland Introduction Broadly speaking, state elites and organized political and class forces can be viewed as the central actors in the politics of land reform in liberal democracies.The centrality of state elites (governing politicians and senior officials) reflects the assumptions that land reform proposals must be devised and enacted into law to have any real impact and that state power must be deployed to implement land legislation. Of course, the state seldom functions in a vacuum, and the pressure organized political and class forces can bring to bear may prove to be highly consequential, if not decisive, in determining what state elites are willing to concede by way of land reform and how expeditiously they move to give effect to their concessions.The two broad demands that dominated the politics of Irish land reform in the twentieth century – tenant purchase and a redistribution of land in favour of uneconomic smallholders and landless men – emanated in the first instance from organized political and class forces in the post1860 period. But do we give priority to state elites, to political or to class forces (whether subordinate or dominant) in organizing our discussion? To start from ‘above’ with state elites would involve asking certain questions. Which state elites favoured specific land reform proposals? Under what circumstances were proposals brought forward and enacted? What efforts were made to implement new land law and with what consequences? Alternatively, to start from ‘below’ with popular political and class forces would mean posing some other questions.Who was behind the making of land reform demands? To whom were these demands addressed? What tactics were relied on in their pursuit and with what effects? Obviously, these ‘above’ and ‘below’ starting points, while equally legitimate and to some degree overlapping, come at the study of the politics of land reform from different directions.

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Combining the ‘above’ and ‘below’ approaches here we will consider what state elites were prepared to concede by way of land reform, the circumstances in which concessions were made and implemented and some of the effects that followed. The question throughout will be to assess the relative contributions of state elites and of political and class forces to what was conceded, implemented and achieved by way of land reform. With this question in hand, we will now set the scene by looking briefly at some of the central trends characterizing Irish land politics in the late nineteenth century. Setting the scene A number of developments in the closing decades of the nineteenth century would profoundly influence the politics of Irish land reform in the twentieth century. We can identify these as: the consolidation of pastoral farming as the mainstay of Irish agriculture; the Land War of 1879–82; the Liberal concession of the ‘three Fs’ (fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale) in the 1881 Land Act; the Conservative concession of ‘peasant proprietorship’ in 1885; the partial concession of redistributive land reform shortly after the Congested Districts Board’s appearance in 1891;1 the resulting association of redistributive land reform with the ‘congested’ west of Ireland; the manner peasant proprietorship trumped land redistribution as the leading agrarian demand of Irish nationalists taken as a group; and the emergence of the ‘strong farmer’ tenants as the main winners from agrarian agitation and land reform. The three Fs, peasant proprietorship and the acceptance of limited land redistribution all qualify as breakthrough concessions, but were they the product of ‘high’ or ‘popular’ politics or some combination of the two? There is a wide consensus that it was the Land League that succeeded in mobilizing the different tenant farming classes in a movement that combined constitutional and physical force tactics in delivering what proved to be a mortal blow to the Irish landed estate system.2 Even if agrarian crime surged massively in the course of the Land War, it was under the cloak of New Departure nationalism rather than autonomously that the tenant farmers were mobilized during the conflict. That is not to say of course that the tenants – the strong farmers especially – did not exercise a decisive influence as the protest developed.The manner in which the class balance in the Land League tipped in favour of large farmers nationally, in 1880 and 1881, is reflected in a pushing aside of the western Fenian and struggling smallholder demand for land redistribution as well as in a telling

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tactical shift.3 For their part, state elites opted to mix coercion and concession – the 1881 land legislation in particular – in responding to the Land War crisis. Land redistribution had surfaced as a Fenian demand both before and during the Land War, but the CDB’s creation, soon to be followed by its acceptance of land redistribution and resettlement as a major means of tackling ‘congestion’ or rural poverty, has been seen as stemming not from direct nationalist or popular pressure but variously from the Conservative administration’s project of ‘killing Home Rule by kindness’,4 the Conservative’s desire ‘to keep Ireland quiet’,5 the state’s reaction to a significant failure of the western potato crop in 1890,6 Arthur Balfour’s realization during his western tour of 1890 that the poverty he had witnessed warranted special remedial measures,7 and Balfour’s recognition that the use of coercion in response to the Plan of Campaign was ‘insufficient in itself’.8 For all its early limitations (in aims, powers, funding and spatial reach), the CDB’s concession of land redistribution was one that would later be built on (as in the Wyndham, Birrell and subsequent post-independence land legislation) or seized on by nationalists (such as William O’Brien in 1898 and western Fenian agrarian activists more generally), intent on exploiting its inadequacies for their own purposes.9 Who emerged as the early ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ from the Land War and later agrarian agitation and land reform? However much Conservative land purchase initiatives may have desired to secure ‘the rescue of landlords as a class’,10 the policy of advancing purchase loans to achieve peasant proprietorship, coming hard upon the heels of the three Fs, served to undermine the landlords’ class dominance in the longer term, even if their involvement in the ranching economy, and their use of the 11-month system, threw many of them a lifeline in the nearer term.11 Class differentiation within the tenantry would leave the strong farmers, in possession of the bigger farms and the better land, as always objectively standing to do best under tenancy reform and land purchase.12 Thus, Joseph Lee sees ‘peasant proprietorship’ as ‘... simultaneously a social revolution and a social counter-revolution. It crowned the strong farmer as the cock of the country walk’.13 Donald Jordan’s suggestion is that, already by the 1870s, ‘the large-scale cattle graziers’ had emerged as ‘the dominant economic force in Ireland with an increasingly powerful voice in politics’.14 Subsequently, matters were complicated by the way all tenant farmers came to be projected in the Land War as an impoverished, subordinate class vis-à-vis the landlords.15

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That it was a case not just of the strong farmers winning but of the small western farmers losing is something Donald Jordan brings out: When during 1880 the League opted for an offensive war against landlordism in alliance with the strong farmer, the small western farmers were doomed to become the victims, not the victors, of the ‘Land League revolution’.16

Landless labourers, whose part in the Land League ‘was on the whole passive rather than active’,17 present us with another losing agrarian class. Concessions When George Wyndham came to engage with the Irish land question upon becoming Chief Secretary in November 1900, some 70,000 tenant farmers had already purchased their holdings, leaving a balance of 400,000 to be still dealt with.18 The challenge Wyndham set himself was to legislate to accelerate land purchase and to bring it to completion. His 1903 Land Act, which sought to restart land purchase and facilitate its completion, has been widely credited as the single most crucial legislative measure that delivered peasant proprietorship to Ireland’s tenant farmers.19 But did its concession reflect the superior power of state elites (Wyndham in particular), political or class forces? For many observers, the Wyndham breakthrough was the result of the December land settlement conference of 1902 at which the tenants were represented by politicians – three nationalists (John Redmond, T. C. Harrington and William O’Brien) and a Unionist (T. W. Russell) – and of the Chief Secretary’s commitment and political skills in supporting a settlement acceptable to both sides.20 Some recent research has suggested that popular land agitation centred on compulsory purchase – and led by William O’Brien in the south and the Unionist MP, T. W. Russell, in the north – was in fact the decisive determinant of the Wyndham legislation.21 Fergus Campbell’s suggestion is that what ‘fundamentally influenced both the timing and the substance of the 1903 Land Act’ was the United Irish League’s campaign of land agitation to force the state to concede compulsory purchase.22 Not alone did William O’Brien lead a new UIL campaign of agitation in September 1901, but renewed agitation forced Wyndham to contemplate further concessions once the Irish Party had rejected his land bill in March 1902.23 This agitation, Campbell maintains, influenced the circumstances that culminated in the holding of the landlord–tenant round-table talks of December 1902.24 Besides being

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forced to concede more to the tenants by the failure of his first land bill, Wyndham came under intense pressure from the two concurrent southern and northern land agitations.25 Campbell and Cosgrove make a persuasive case for land agitation being the critical influence on the timing and content of Wyndham’s 1903 measure. Crucially, however, the tenants’ representatives did drop their demand for compulsory purchase at the land settlement conference.26 In light of this, both the agrarian protest and the land settlement conference unanimity can equally be read as strengthening Wyndham’s hand in pursuing with his cabinet and treasury colleagues what he had wanted all along – a workable purchase scheme that avoided compulsion and that both landlord and tenant would find attractive. Given Wyndham’s prominence, and that he got what he wanted in the end, it would therefore be hard to attribute the full substance of the 1903 Land Act to land agitation. Ultimately, Wyndham’s Land Act sought to offer something to all the relevant interests, even to the poorest tenants. Landlords would receive a generous selling price for their tenanted estates, paid in cash along with a generous 12 per cent cash bonus on the selling price. Another sweetener allowed for the sale and repurchase of demesne land and buildings at a maximum of £20,000 or one-third the sale price.27 Tenants would pay an annuity at least 10 per cent lower than their rent, even though repayment periods (at 68.5 years) would be somewhat longer. The CDB’s income was to be increased so as to allow it expand its land reform activities.28 Some commentators have seen ‘the most revolutionary aspect of the 1903 Act’ to lie in its empowering of the Estates Commission (a body created within the Land Commission to administer the new legislation) to purchase entire estates, ‘including any untenanted land thereon suitable for division’, for the relief of congestion.29 Not alone did the state extend its remit for relieving rural congestion beyond the scheduled congested districts with this measure, but provision was even made ‘... for the sons of smallholders to receive advances for parcels of untenanted land that come up for sale on an estate’.30 Thus was legal provision made for one segment of the landless men to join the uneconomic smallholders (with valuations of less than £5) as an eligible category of claimant when untenanted land came to be redistributed. Why, if the 1903 Land Act promised so much, was new land legislation needed by 1909? A number of considerations – the experience of land purchase under the 1903 legislation, renewed land agitation, a change of government in 1906 and the Dudley Commission on western congestion31 – come into play here, even if their relative importance as precipitants of the

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Birrell Land Act remains a matter of debate. Before long, members of the Liberal governing elite that came to power in 1906 were tending to agree with the anti-Wyndham nationalist analysis that landlords were being grossly overpaid for their tenanted estates and that fresh legislation was needed that would ‘significantly alter the terms of the Wyndham Act’.32 Furthermore, the financing of tenant purchase under the 1903 Act had proved to be seriously deficient, something that threatened to burden the Irish ratepayer with considerable debt.33 In the ‘Ranch War’ agitation that preceded the 1909 Act – and that would pioneer the new tactic of ‘cattle driving’ – pressure was applied to landlords to sell their tenanted estates and their untenanted land on more favourable terms to their tenants and to 11-month graziers or ranchers to relinquish their short-term letting agreements. One reason the Chief Secretary, Augustine Birrell, moved to prepare a land bill in 1907–08 was ‘to defuse the cattle-driving movement’.34 Another influence on Birrell was the Dudley Commission report’s recommendation that the CDB be conferred with compulsory purchase power and given increased funding to expedite its work. In the event, the Birrell Land Act did grant the CDB compulsory power, provide it with increased funding, double its territory (to about one-third of the entire country) and opt to pay landlords for their land ‘not in cash but in a new guaranteed 3 per cent stock’.35 A new land purchase bill, promised for 1913 in consequence of the ‘unimpressive’ impact on land purchase of its predecessor,36 never materialized. Subsequently, wartime conditions, with the Treasury withholding advances and land stock depreciating, were hardly favourable to making progress, as the big fall-off in the purchased acreage indicates.37 In 1918, the sub-committee on land purchase of the Irish Convention, which had landlord and tenant members, unanimously agreed a set of proposals aimed at restarting and completing land purchase.38 These proposals, at a time of rising agrarian as well as civil and political unrest, became the basis of the 1920 Land Bill. As in 1903 and 1918, the authorities thought in terms of proceeding with prior landlord–tenant agreement in 1920. Round-table talks (with the tenants represented by the Irish Farmers’ Union (IFU)) did produce an agreement, but war conditions in Ireland deterred the authorities from proceeding further.39 In the spring and early summer of 1920, a mainly western and midlands bout of land agitation, partly instigated by local Sinn Féin activists,40 presented the central Sinn Féin authorities, then embarked on their own state-building project under the authority of the First Dáil, with the challenge of restoring public order over large stretches of countryside. While

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in principle committing itself to land redistribution in favour of uneconomic smallholders and landless men, central Sinn Féin’s position came to reject any suggestion that land agitation in the circumstances of 1920 might contribute positively to the nationalist revolution. And as much as Arthur O’Connor, the Substitute Director of Agriculture, advocated the idea of land being bought and worked on a co-operative basis, individualizing the land conflict around notions of private property, and proclaiming ‘equal justice under law’, became foundational principles of Sinn Féin’s land policy in 1920. Central Sinn Féin further insisted on a centralizing principle that was not content to delegate law and order to local Sinn Féin clubs in the longer term or to countenance purely local attempts at land reform. Only a centrally conceived and controlled national programme of land reform (with its own land settlement commission and land courts) was acceptable.41 Another politicization of land hunger occurred in the civil war when some anti-Treaty elements attempted to use the promise of land to mobilize support against the provisional Free State government. While the 1920 and Civil War land agitations gave a certain urgency to the 1923 Land Bill, Patrick Hogan (Minister for Agriculture) and his colleagues were anxious to deal resolutely with the Civil War agrarian challenge and not to be seen as being forced to legislate by their anti-Treaty enemies.42 Using new land legislation to show that the Treaty settlement had conferred sufficient capacity on the new state to advance land reform was also a consideration. As with the 1920 Land Bill, the 1923 Land Act had been preceded by a process of consultation with representatives of the landlords and tenants, though no agreement was achieved on this occasion.43 Patrick Hogan, in introducing his land bill, outlined the government’s highly ambitious land reform project: It is our policy to complete land purchase; it is our policy to make every tenant in the Saorstát the owner of his holding. It is our policy to make every holding in the Saorstát economic. It is our policy to buy up the congested areas and to buy up the ranch lands outside the congested areas.44

Where the 1923 Act advanced critically on its predecessors was in the provision it made for the use of compulsion to complete land purchase and to advance redistributive land reform.45 Rationalizing the machinery of land reform, by abolishing the CDB and the Estates Commission and integrating their functions into a restructured Land Commission, was another of Hogan’s notable innovations. To some extent, the 1933 Land Act is comparable with its 1903, 1909 and 1923 precursors in having been preceded by a popular agrarian agitation.

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The anti-land annuities campaign, which tactically represented a variation on the earlier rent strikes, succeeded in having Fianna Fáil partly accept its demands. More important to the 1933 Land Act’s focus on land redistribution was the popular pressure channelled through the dense web of Fianna Fáil’s rural cumainn. For their part, many strong farmers were alarmed at Fianna Fáil’s declared aims of speeding up land redistribution, providing the landless with farms and installing tillage as a central feature of a restructured agricultural economy.46 The 1933 Land Act bestowed additional powers on the Land Commission that strengthened its capacity to acquire land compulsorily for land redistribution purposes.47 To hasten the acquisition of untenanted land and its division among congested smallholders and landless men, the ‘suitable alternative lands of not less value’ provision of the 1923 Land Act,48 which had become a major constraint on the Land Commission’s resettlement work, was relaxed. And, in a major concession to the anti-annuity campaigners and to large and small tenant farmer purchasers, the 1933 Land Act reduced all land purchase annuities by 50 per cent (55 per cent in special cases). By the time Fianna Fáil introduced its land bill in 1933, a distinctive class politics, closely aligned with the Treaty/Civil War split, had come to typify the competition between nationalists on land resettlement issues.Typically, Fianna Fáil’s rural spokesmen presented their movement as representing the ‘small men’, those with little or no land to their names, and presented their Cumann na nGaedheal rivals as defenders of well-heeled strong farmer and rancher interests, with Patrick Hogan regularly cast as the ‘Minister for Grass’.49 Some academic writing has echoed and elaborated on this analysis.50 Brian Girvin is exceptional in emphasizing the primacy of the state over class-based agrarian interests. Cumann na nGaedheal state support for ‘commercial agriculture’ he sees as deriving more from ‘pragmatic reasons’ than as ‘a reflection of the dominant influence of the graziers over the government’.51 Rising unemployment and falling emigration assisted Fianna Fáil in first challenging Cumann na nGaedheal’s economic policies (including, prominently, those relating to agriculture and land) and then inflicting defeat on its pro-Treaty rival at the polls in 1932 and (more emphatically) in January 1933. Patrick Hogan expressed the Cumann na nGaedheal party’s reaction to the 1933 Land Bill when he suggested that what he took to be the new policy of giving land to the landless, and of making land settlement farms so small as to be hopelessly uneconomic, might be ‘good politics’ but it was ‘rotten economics and rotten national administration’.52 Hogan’s stance clearly implied that Cumann na nGaedheal was not intent on playing Fianna

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Fáil at its own game. Although Fine Gael was set to languish on the opposition benches for 16 years, its parliamentary party members warmly welcomed Joseph Blowick’s 1949 Land Bill for its desire to purge the Land Commission and land redistribution policy of perceived Fianna Fáil influence. There were, of course, limits to what was achievable by way of undoing the past. At a meeting of the Fine Gael parliamentary party on 23 March 1949, Minister Blowick declared ‘... that this Government was not bound to make good the injuries done during the Fianna Fáil or the previous regimes’.53 It did intend to ensure however that the claims of the landless for Land Commission farms be not entertained and that persons losing land to the Land Commission would in future get the ‘market value’ of their property. The Land Commission was even to be empowered to ‘bid on a cash basis for the purchase of holdings offered for sale in the open market’.54 An important influence here on the timing and content of Blowick’s 1949 Land Bill was Patrick Cogan’s (an ex-Clann na Talmhan deputy) private member’s Land Bill of 1948, which sought to establish market value as the basis of the compensation paid to the owners of land acquired for land resettlement purposes.55 Implementing land reform Typically, once a land reform measure has been conceded, the focus shifts to the adequacy of what has been conceded and to how seriously the new policy is implemented. By effectively disposing of the land purchase issue, the Wyndham Act has been viewed as clearing the way for land redistribution to take centre stage in the anti-grazier agitation that evolved into a ‘Ranch War’ in the west and in some midland counties between 1904 and 1908.56 Why agrarian conflict should now be directed at untenanted land has been ascribed to the manner the Wyndham Act brought home to many western smallholders that ‘peasant proprietorship was not the answer to their problems’.57 A perverse consequence of Wyndham’s Act, in landlord eyes, was the stimulation its acceptance of land redistribution as a means of relieving congestion (or even settling the landless sons of congested farmers on the land) was giving to anti-grazier agitation across the country.58 Paul Bew has contended that the Wyndham Act, by encouraging the politicization of the landless in an anti-grazier agitation aimed at land resettlement inside but especially outside the scheduled congested districts, had a decisive impact on both the Ranch War’s social composition and aims. A key figure here was Laurence Ginnell, MP for Westmeath North, who ‘called for large-scale land redistribution to benefit the landless’.59 One

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effect of Ginnell’s championing of the cause of the landless was to make for competition for land between landless labourers and congested smallholders (including long-distance migrants). Apparently, Ginnell was worried in 1907 at the prospect of western migrants being ‘planted’ in the rich lands of Meath at the expense of local claimants.60 That the post-Wyndham land agitation had partly moved east of the Shannon, and taken anti-grazier and pro-labourer land redistribution as a central aim, appears to mark quite a shift in the class character of Irish land politics. Among Land League leaders outside Connacht, Joseph Lee has suggested that the tendency had been for ‘demands for redistribution of graziers’ land’ to be viewed as too ‘subversive of the social order’ to be countenanced.61 Similarly, the view taken of the immediate pre-Wyndham Act agitation has been that the western demand for land redistribution was overtaken in practice ‘by the national and politically manageable aim of comprehensive land purchase’.62 The Irish Party’s ‘left of centre agrarian radicalism’ in the Ranch War years, one that nonetheless ‘stopped short of a full blown “Ginnellism”’, has been seen as papering over the often highly ambiguous reality of several prominent Irish Party/UIL activists involving themselves, if not personally then through their families, in the large-scale grazing economy.63 But had anti-grazier land redistribution really displaced land purchase as the main aim of post-Wyndham agrarian agitation? Fergus Campbell’s recent reassessment of the agitation that evolved into the Ranch War contends that fundamentally the agitation aimed to pressurize landlords into selling their tenanted and their untenanted land at prices deemed to be fair by the tenants. In this respect, the Ranch War was primarily a conflict between landlord and tenant, and the intratenant hostility between smallholder and grazier was a subsidiary aspect of this broader struggle.64

The numerous post-Wyndham Land Act rent strikes, recorded in ten counties between November 1904 and April 1905, attest to the continuing centrality of land purchase and tenant/landlord disputes.65 Nor had land purchase lost its primacy as an issue in nationalist politics. From the outset, John Dillon and Michael Davitt had predicted that landlords would be paid excessively for their tenanted land,66 that tenants would face longer repayment times and that some of the cost of buying out the landlords would fall unjustly on the Irish taxpayer. Broadly acknowledging the validity of the anti-Wyndham nationalist analysis, and of the energy of grassroots anti-Wyndham opposition, Campbell sees the landlords’ desire to secure ‘inflated prices for both

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their tenanted and untenanted land’ as ensuring that the Wyndham Act’s implementation would be both slow and contentious.67 With the nationalist leadership standing aloof, it fell to the UIL’s rank-and-file membership to initiate and keep alive the post-Wyndham agitation, and the early success of western rent strikes (on the Wills-Sandford and Dunsandle estates) helped inspire a more general no-rent campaign aimed at forcing landlords to sell to the tenants at more acceptable prices.68 The peaking of the Ranch War coincided with a speeding up of purchase agreements; some 36 per cent of agreements completed between 1903 and 1908 were signed in 1908.69 Assessing the influence of agrarian agitation on the pace of estate sales is however complicated by the big rush by landlords to sell so as to avail of the guaranteed – and time limited to 1 November 1908 – 12 per cent cash bonus.70 As the Ranch War, energized by the tactical innovation of cattle driving and the convening of the Dudley Commission on congestion, peaked between 1906 and 1908, more attention came to centre on the necessity to redistribute untenanted land. Yet, in the end, Ginnell’s, J. P. Farrell’s and John Fitzgibbon’s Ranch War campaigning on behalf of the landless failed to get Birrell’s land legislation to build on the Wyndham legislation’s recognition of the claims of certain landless men.71 Did the post-Wyndham land agitation succeed in pushing down the purchase price to the tenant’s advantage? Notwithstanding the police belief that the no-rent campaigns often resulted in purchase prices being ‘fixed by the tenants’, landlords in general still managed to achieve better prices for their estates between 1903 and 1908 as compared to 1902, thus highlighting the general failure of the post-1903 agitation to keep prices ‘at the desired level of eighteen years’ purchase’.72 The campaign hostile to the 1903 Land Act also took up the cause of the poor western tenants for whom peasant proprietorship without land redistribution would often make little material difference. The Dudley Commission of inquiry into the CDB’s operations, convened after the Liberals took office in 1906, came about in response to the nationalist demand for more expeditious redistributive land reform in the west but also because the Under Secretary for Ireland, Anthony MacDonnell, had become convinced that the CDB was seriously unfit for purpose. In scathing terms, MacDonnell had come to regard the CDB as badly organised and out of control. Its miscellany of activities, its slipshod administration, its financial profligacy and its acute belligerence towards every other government institution were an affront to anyone concerned with the overall functioning of the government machine.73

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By granting it compulsory purchase powers, substantially increasing its budget and extending its jurisdiction to cover roughly one-third the national territory, the 1909 Land Act was intended to enable the CDB to get to serious grips with land redistribution. Up to 31 March 1914, it had made accepted offers on 1,181,858 acres at a price of £4,549,763. These figures compare with a mere 497,484 acres acquired at a price of £2,260,551, purchased prior to the 1909 Act under land legislation stretching back to 1891.74 The war, however, would bring this post-1909 burst of accelerated CDB activity to a close. Powerless to have the authorities resume land redistribution, UIL activists in the west turned in frustration to castigating the CDB for a whole litany of alleged inadequacies. We find it being accused of ineffectuality in dislodging the large-scale ranching system, carrying out its work in a class-biased manner, allowing landlords to claim as demesne land (exempt from acquisition) what rightfully should have been acquired for redistribution, reselling untenanted land back to the vendor, being too slow in redistributing land once estates were acquired, stocking acquired lands itself or setting them on the 11-month system to large graziers, charging its short-term grazing tenants ‘exorbitant prices’, allowing land (once acquired for allocation) to get into the wrong hands, and of providing uneconomic smallholders with land of inferior quality.75 Once, however, Sinn Féin emerged as a formidable threat in 1917, Irish Party/UIL activists found themselves obliged to turn from attacking the CDB to defending the Irish Party’s record in forcing the pace of land reform ever since the days of the Land War.76 Central Sinn Féin was not slow to claim credit for bringing the 1920 bout of land agitation under control, but how well did its own land settlement efforts fare during the Anglo-Irish War? Reflecting on the outcome over 40 years later, Kevin O’Shiel, a land settlement commissioner during the revolutionary years and later a land commissioner, remarked that his activities and those of his colleagues ‘hardly touched the fringe of the great agrarian problem’.77 A great deal remained to be done, but many pre-split republicans were optimistic about what would be achieved under native rule. How well did the Cumann na nGaedheal administration get on in implementing the 1923 Land Act? Later in the 1920s, Patrick Hogan, Minister for Agriculture, was – as we have seen – dubbed the ‘Minister for Grass’ by his political enemies who saw his first loyalty to the large-scale grazier interest. Speaking at Kilbegnet, Creggs, in 1929, Gerry Boland TD, for instance, suggested that the policy of the government was to turn the

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countryside into ‘one big grazing ranch’.78 But how valid an assessment is this of Hogan’s and of the Land Commission’s activities? Although Hogan was wont to stress the difficulties and limitations, it is clear that a good deal of progress was made during his period in office. A sum of £4,324,582 was spent in acquiring 392,704 acres of untenanted land between 1923 and March 1932.79 This compares with the £3,249,771 spent under Fianna Fáil between 1932 and March 1940 in acquiring 435,067 acres of untenanted land.80 Looking back at the amount of land allotted in the 1920s from the vantage point of the early 1940s, Kevin O’Shiel offered a generally positive assessment: During the first five years that followed the reconstitution of the Land Commission in 1923, unquestionably difficult years, it has to be admitted owing to the scarcity of staff, reorganisation, and the implementing of the Land Act, 1923, some 250,000 acres were allotted (approximately 50,000 acres per annum) and 33,000 holdings were revested (approximately 6,600 holdings per annum). At no time over that period did our staff exceed a total of 758 persons, inclusive of a total of 162 inspectors and surveyors. In the following year, 1928–29, with a total staff of 704 (153 inspectors and surveyors) some 60,000 acres were distributed and 9,700 holdings revested. The next year, 1929–30, with a total staff of 680 (131 inspectors and surveyors) some 52,000 acres were distributed and 9,100 holdings revested.81

What say did the Land Commission in the 1920s have as to where to concentrate its efforts at land reform, who to give land to, who to take it from, the size of the allotted holdings and the pace and volume of land resettlement? The official view was that while the general lines of land policy were contained in the new land legislation and in government eligibility guidelines and funding priorities, the Land Commission, while ultimately responsible to the Minister for Agriculture and Lands, did have considerable autonomy in the 1920s in its day-to-day operations. In deciding the relative claims of those eligible to purchase resettlement land, priority was accorded to congested or uneconomic smallholders who were followed in descending order on the official (and confidential) allocation list by migrants, ex-employees, evictees, landless men and IRA veterans. That it was often a matter of deciding within as well as between categories of claimants made for considerable complexity in following the ranked eligibility guidelines in individual cases. Allegations that political interference was widespread, and that it deprived the Land Commission of much of its autonomy, were common.82

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Any assessment of the pressures brought to bear on inspectors and the land commissioners in individual cases, and with what effect, must await the release of the Land Commission records. Some little light on the actual practice adopted in individual cases is shed in an account of the procedure the minister claims to have followed in relation to migration schemes. Writing in 1926 to Martin Egan, a small east Galway landlord who was about to become a Land Commission migrant himself, Patrick Hogan expressed himself as follows: I do not interfere in the day to day administration of the Land Commission. I assume the Commissioners are capable of doing the work which they are paid for and that my function is to direct general policy. When I am asked by somebody I know to take a personal interest in a particular case I confine myself to doing what I did in your case. I never over-rule the Commissioners for personal reasons. If I am particularly interested in a specific case I examine the merits of the proposals for dealing with it made by the Commissioners, and if their proposals meet the equities of the case I do not over-rule merely because I am personally interested in the case. The original intention was to deal with your tenants, not by giving them additions on your land, but, by migrating them to another estate. I directed that your lands should be acquired and your tenants dealt with on those lands and that you should get an exchange, and I left it to the Commissioners to effect that. I understand that you have been offered an exchange but I do not know at present exactly what this exchange is and I will not know until it comes up to me in the ordinary way.83

One obvious reason why Hogan’s land settlement policy attracted the criticism that it favoured large farmers stemmed from the Land Commission’s practice (followed in Egan’s case above) of attempting to persuade larger farmers to move so as to free up their land for the relief of local congestion. As an inducement to move, favourable terms had to be offered to these larger farmers. Another criticism made of Hogan’s implementation policy was that it was neglecting the west of Ireland. From early on some western local notables had reason to lament the CDB’s abolition in 1923. And subsequently, on the basis of their experience, some senior Land Commission field staff (such as district inspectors Gallagher and Gamble) came to regard land reform in the west as suffering under the policy of extending land redistribution to the country as a whole.84 O’Shiel’s upbeat account of the headway that the Land Commission was making with land settlement in the 1920s contrasts with the pessimism of many western government supporters at the slow pace of

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progress in implementing the 1923 Land Act. As early as 1924, we find a western TD pinning the blame for perceived inaction on an influential ‘“old gang” running the Land Commission and in league with the old gang left in the country’.85 With the 1933 Land Act conferring new powers on the Land Commission and closing off some loopholes in earlier legislation, the Fianna Fáil administration set out to deliver on its agrarian promises. And over a number of years, 1934–35 and 1935–36, the allocation figures soared to 102,000 and 104,000 acres, respectively. Several reasons have been given to explain why this accelerated phase of Land Commission resettlement activity could not be sustained: a realization that an overly vigorous pursuit of land redistribution would endanger the cattle economy and export agriculture,86 the dwindling supply of redistributable land, the cost of building houses and the realization that many of the landless beneficiaries had neither the means nor the experience to make competent farmers. A wartime Department of Lands memorandum deemed the administrative capacity of the Land Commission to handle its greatly expanded workload in the mid-1930s, along with legal challenges that slowed or halted progress, to have been the most critical constraints: As regards the Acquisition and Resales Division the record achievements in the acquisition and division of land during the years 1934/5 and 1935/6 could not be maintained and there was a progressive decrease in subsequent years. This was partially due to several adverse judicial decisions on matters of legal procedure which held up compulsory acquisition and resumption pending the enactment in 1939 of remedial legislation. The 100,000 acres marks were in any case only reached by a tremendous effort and by recourse to extemporised methods the adoption of which, though successful for the time being, was administratively disastrous, as the machine buckled under the strain. The staff of the Acquisition and Resales Division are still struggling with the aftermath of the division during the years 1934 to 1936 and there is more than sufficient work on hands in the office to keep even the full authorised staff, if it were available, employed for years without undertaking any fresh commitments. It is important to bear this in mind when estimating the results likely to be achieved by a staff restored to full authorised strength.87

That the administrative capacity of the Land Commission was tested severely in the big push to accelerate land division after the 1933 Land Act is understandable, but was there more to it than this? The conviction that a serious blockage existed on the very top of the Land Commission persisted after Fianna Fáil won office in 1932. The memoirs of Senator

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Joseph Connolly (Minister for Lands and Fisheries, 1933–36) draw attention to serious factional struggle among the land commissioners: It is not a pleasant survey that I have to make and it is no less unpleasant for some of those, including the three commissioners I have mentioned [Browne, O’Shiel and Mansfield], who worked so whole-heartedly to complete the work of land resettlement in Ireland. All their efforts were of no avail. They were practically sterilised in their work. They did not always know why and the mystery has not, so far as I am aware, been solved.88

The answer proffered by Connolly to this ‘mystery’ implicated the ‘ministers in charge’.89 Connolly further believed that de Valera had lost interest in land resettlement policy in the course of the 1930s.90 The factionalism within the Land Commission Connolly alludes to substantially stemmed from differences over whether or not to focus the resettlement policy primarily on the west. Those commissioners who favoured taking a broader approach, O’Shiel and Mansfield in particular, took the excessive concentration on the west as unduly limiting as well as inequitable, unnecessarily expensive and largely futile. Commissioner Mansfield, the most vociferous critic of the old CDB policy, claimed that the land reform effort had historically been concentrated far too heavily on the congested districts. ‘Of all the land so far divided’, he pointed out in 1942, ‘56% lies in Connaught, though the province has only 23% of the total area of Éire, 16% of its PLV [Poor Law Valuation] and 16% of its population’.91 More fundamentally, Mansfield argued that the original decision to concentrate on the west had been made for the wrong reasons and that the effort had been largely a waste of effort and public resources. The early CDB policy of confining redistributive land reform exclusively to the west Mansfield further interpreted as a cynical ploy by the British to preserve the ranching economy intact. It was for this reason that the boundaries of the congested districts had been drawn in such a way as to ensure that in the pretence of undoing the clearances and re-settling the people on the land, the fertile plains of the flocks and herds would not be touched.92

The land reform effort in the west Mansfield dismissed as being of little or no consequence; its operations, as he saw it usually consisted in adding to each poor holding a further area of poor or mediocre land, usually the least desirable even where there was little that was fertile or attractive. The residential estates, demesnes and fertile bits

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were generally treated as sacrosanct. Expenditure was fairly liberal in arranging and re-arranging parcels often of almost worthless stuff, making drains and fencing with mathematical precision and providing what in most cases could hardly be regarded, despite the good houses created as other than agricultural slums.93

Another of Mansfield’s strictures was that the whole effort served the interests of the large landowners: Owners got rid of worthless stuff. Traders and gombeen men got their rake-off the grants which political pressure had wrung from the ancient enemy. So all united in ‘spoiling the Egyptians’, and the tendency to spoil lingers even though the Egyptians have gone. Acres, – not value or fertility, – counted, as they bulked large in the returns.The Landowners’ Convention and Dublin Castle worried little so long as British political activities were able to steer our agitators and politicians clear of the fertile plains and divert their energies to this puerile pastime of manufacturing muck-pies.94

As we have seen, the 1923 Land Act sought to move the land settlement project beyond the old congested districts. It took a chance occurrence – the Kirchintilloch bothy fire that claimed the lives of a group of young Achill Island potato pickers in 1937 – to tilt the balance in land policy back in favour of the west. The initial political response to the Scottish bothy fire tragedy was to convene an Inter-Departmental Committee on Seasonal Migration (IDCSM) whose major conclusion was that the Land Commission should devote itself in future to a programme of land resettlement designed to relieve congestion in the old congested districts. For this to happen, a sizeable quantity of land would have to be found outside the congested districts for the resettlement of uneconomic western smallholders.95 On 18 November 1938, the IDCSM’s central proposal was adopted as government policy. The Department of Lands believed that 40,000 farming families in the congested districts could benefit under the new policy of long-distance migration over a 25- to 30-year period. Although the Department of Finance questioned these proposals on feasibility and cost grounds, it eventually agreed to a five-year pilot scheme that the Land Commission estimated would provide 1,500 migrants’ holdings at an additional cost of £130,000 in free grants.96 Winning and losing: the effects of land reform Who emerged as winning or losing from Irish land reform? This question may be asked of pre- and post-independence governing elites, nationalist

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politicians and the different agrarian classes – the landlords, the farmers (large and small) and the landless men. If land reform was partly motivated by a desire of English statesmen to undermine Irish nationalism, then it can hardly be said to have succeeded in this aim. Fenianism’s relevance to local conditions in the west was heavily based on a contentious engagement with land issues. And over large areas of rural Ireland, the Irish Party (and especially the UIL after 1898) continued to sustain itself and the Home Rule cause, substantially on the basis of its pursuit of land issues.97 Of course, not everyone agreed as to the wisdom of land-centred politics after the enactment of the Wyndham Act. William O’Brien was not alone in seeing the anti-Wyndham nationalist reaction as a disastrous setback for the Irish Party that made for a ‘rejection of conciliation, and a return to residual issues arising out of the land question’.98 Competition between nationalists around land-related issues was set to endure. Sinn Féin’s tillage land agitation in the spring of 1918, for instance, would help it outflank the Irish Party in parts of the west.99 And a decade later, land redistribution became important in Fianna Fáil’s push to displace Cumann na nGaedheal as the ruling party. By the late 1920s, however, the days of the old nationalist agrarian leagues, with their characteristic combination of constitutional and direct action tactics, were as good as over.100 The transition to native rule and events during the revolutionary years, when many leading nationalists came to regard land agitation as a serious threat to their own political project, greatly encouraged this development. Land claims were still being advanced collectively (via party branches, local land clubs and Old IRA associations)101 and much localized direct action campaigning persisted, but the desire to gain or to retain land increasingly became the focus of a personalized or collective clientelist politics that helped serve to tie individuals, families, localities and IRA veterans to either pro- or anti-Treaty ruling parties. With land division commanding high levels of popular appeal in the early decades of native rule, some of both Cumann na nGaedheal’s and Fianna Fáil’s early political support rested on expectations that nationalist ruling parties had both the will and the capacity to deliver significant land reform to their own supporters.102 Typically, at interwar elections, the outgoing ruling party drew attention to its record of achievement in dividing and redistributing land during its tenure of office. Reflecting the continuing high public demand for land, the Land Commission’s Purchase Division was receiving about 20,000 letters annually in the 1930s (about 25,000 during the war years), and it was reported that ‘repeated appeals to deputies and the public to refrain from writing

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unnecessarily to the Land Commission have brought small measure of relief’.103 Of course, the tendency for the demand for redistributable land to massively outstrip its supply, the consequent pressure to keep land settlement farms small, and the favouring of some claimants over others were all variables that could diminish the asset value of land redistribution for vote-seeking ruling politicians.104 How did land reform affect the landlords as a class? Wyndham had hoped (as Parnell before him) that once the land question was settled, there would be nothing to stop landlords assuming a leadership role and becoming a positive force in a post-land reform Ireland.105 As time passed, however, the southern estate owners (with some notable exceptions) found themselves progressively marginalized politically and economically.106 For many of them, matters came to a head during the revolutionary years when they found themselves targeted as loyalists and ethnic enemies.107 Land reform signified not just a transfer of economic power but, as the new owner-occupying farmers were overwhelmingly Catholic in religion, the end of landlordism had the effect of adding to Catholic clerical power in Ireland as well.108 Can the demise of Irish landlordism be explicated comparatively? If W. E. Vaughan’s contention that agricultural crisis conditions were as important as the Land War in precipitating landlordism’s decline is accepted,109 then the fate of the Irish landlords is broadly consistent with that wider trend that saw commercial family farmers surviving the severe and prolonged commercial crisis of the late nineteenth century better than larger capitalist farms.110 If landlords were the big losers, the strong farmers have been seen by some as the big winners. From the mid-1880s when the power of the Irish landlords ‘as a class had been broken’, Emmet Larkin sees it as ‘inevitable’ that much of their economic power should pass to the larger tenant farmers in a ‘social revolution’ and that ‘the new nation-state ... would be run in the interests of the larger farmers as a class’.111 These larger or ‘strong’ farmers would remain ‘the dominant social, economic and political class in Ireland almost to the present day’.112 A crucial consequence of Irish land reform for some commentators was its ‘creation of an increasingly conservative peasant proprietorship’ that effectively ruled out ‘any chance of real social revolution’.113 Strong farmer power has been viewed as partly based on the hold it could exert on Irish nationalist parties (the early Fianna Fáil excepted) and on the state before and after independence. One reason why the Department of Finance disagreed with land redistribution being pursued

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vigorously was that it threatened to diminish the more progressive class of large farmers that was capable of being an important role model for the others.114 In his statement to the Banking Commission in the 1930s, Daniel Twomey, the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, was anxious to allay establishment and strong farmer fears that the ongoing resettlement project was about to restructure Irish agriculture and the pattern of landholding radically.The 13,676 new holdings the Land Commission had created since 1923, as Twomey saw it, were insignificant compared with the existing 190,000 holdings under 30 acres. ‘The work of the Land Commission in regard to creating new holdings’,Twomey concluded, ‘is not going to bring about any economic revolution in agriculture’.115 If the strong farmers emerge for some as a dominant class, where does this leave the smallholders? Fergus Campbell’s recent suggestion is that western small farmers were able over a prolonged period to use direct action, and to rely on the support of sympathetic nationalists, to push redistributive land reform to their own advantage and thereby provide themselves with a ‘reasonable’ and ‘decent’ standard of living by 1923.116 In Campbell’s assessment, a ‘social revolution’ (based on the series of land reforms between 1881 and 1933) and a sympathetic political revolution (1916–23) had the combined effect of creating ‘... a class of sturdy smallholders who would dominate Irish society for most of the twentieth century’.117 One thing the smallholders had going for them, in Philip Bull’s assessment, was the historical association of Irish nationalism with the land struggle and the ‘longstanding nexus between national identity and the interests of the small farmer’.118 Certainly, the early Fianna Fáil, a party that achieved a virtual stranglehold on state power after 1932, saw itself very much as championing the smallholder cause. Once in office, Fianna Fáil sought to expand the land resettlement policy it inherited from Cumann na nGaedheal and British rule in Ireland. Within the Land Commission, Kevin O’Shiel stands out as a strong and articulate defender of the ideal of the state intervening to nourish and expand a numerous class of sturdy smallholders known for resilience and a capacity for hard work. The benefit to the nation of the tillage/smallholder policy, he contended in 1942, would be in citizens, in stock and food supplies, to say nothing of increased internal markets. Each little rural homestead that we create is a permanent factory for producing human and animal stock, turning out its valuable quotas of the former every generation, and of the latter every year.119

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Given the resources expended on it, the scale of the activity and the length of time it endured,120 it would be remarkable if the resettlement work of the Land Commission did not make some positive difference to the circumstances of its beneficiaries. Yet, there were always contemporary well-placed officials and politicians who pessimistically viewed its newly created farms as so small as to be marginally economic at best and as destined to become hopelessly uneconomic with the passage of time. This was by no means the only difficulty the Land Commission had to contend with, but it was this feature, aggravated by the tendency for what passed as a viable economic farm to move upwards over time,121 that gave its resettlement work its Sisyphean character and left it exposed to contemporary and later criticism.122 What is also very clear is that small farm society, living in the shadow of two of the world’s major industrial powers, increasingly slipped into decline, as is evident in the progressive marginalization and emigration of small farm women and youth, the steep rise in post-war bachelor households and the heavy reliance on social welfare payments.123 Adverse market forces can be detected at work here, along with the increasing cultural influence of urban life on the young. In addition, land resettlement policy had always had its political critics. We find the Department of Finance in 1945, relying on a modernization argument that equated big with progressive and small with backward, dismissing the sort of small-scale agriculture the Land Commission was propagating as no better than ‘subsistence’ farming that was sure to disappear in the longer term but not before acting as a drag on the onward march of progressive farming.124 To a considerable extent, the persisting tension in land policy between the aims of combating poverty (especially in the west) and building a class of sturdy smallholders played into the hands of the Land Commission’s political enemies,125 both inside and outside the state sphere. That the decline of the smallholder communities was not inevitable, but could have been prevented had left republicanism triumphed politically, is a theme Peadar O’Donnell pursues. ‘Had the rural masses’, he wrote in 1933: been released in the midst of the ‘Tan struggle; had ranches been handed over and landlordism smashed, the basis mobilised to force the Treaty of ‘22 would have been, instead, an impregnable fortress for the defence of the Republic.126

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Thirty years later, in his account of the interwar anti-land annuities agitation, he returned to the same topic: There is little left to-day of the townlands in which this agitation was cradled. They were a remnant of the Irish of history with little or no place in Irish life; its economy bypassed them.The Republic might have brought them back into it. Its defeat sealed their fate. So they left, following well-beaten paths into strange lands, a firm, gay people who blamed nobody for their lot.127

How did agricultural labourers, as an agrarian class historically in steep decline, fare under land reform? At no point was the central CDB prepared to entertain their claims to land. After securing a foothold of sorts on the eligibility ladder under the Wyndham Act, the landless men, despite the part they had played in the Ranch War, found themselves denied by Birrell’s 1909 Land Act. Subsequently, Sinn Féin and, after independence, Fianna Fáil would champion their cause to some degree up to the 1940s.128 Yet, it appears that landless men, even when their ranking in the official Land Commission eligibility lists was unfavourable, still had sufficient local muscle to sometimes exert bargaining power in local land settlement schemes. In 1943, the Secretary of the Department of Lands wrote that experience shows that local approval for land division work can be secured in many cases only by the allocation of some holdings to suitable landless applicants.

He went on to say that of recent years some 13 per cent of the land divided has been given out in new complete holdings to landless men, including ex-employees, and the area of the average standard holding works out at 30 acres.129

The amount of land the landless secured in some schemes could be appreciable. Seemingly to placate local opposition to the settlement of Gaeltacht colonists in County Meath, ‘4,000 acres for the 600 acres they gave the migrants’ had to be distributed among local landless men.130 Conclusion What then can we say of the relative contributions of state elites and political and class forces to what was conceded, implemented and achieved by way of Irish land reform in the last century? When and how concessions were made, the history of attempts at implementing land reform and the resulting outcomes offer clues as to where power to achieve change resided.

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Popular agitations, under nationalist guidance for the most part, were of importance to the timing and content of the land legislation conceded in 1903, 1909, 1923 and 1933. Of course, the concessions granted in these years also owed much to changes in administrations – the advent of the Liberals in 1906, what became Cumann na nGaedheal in 1923 and Fianna Fáil in 1932–33 – as well as to changes that brought key individuals (such as Wyndham, Birrell, Hogan, Aiken and Blowick) to office.131 Under native rule – and with farming classes still normally represented by nationalists – the intensity of the competitive rivalry between the main pro- and anti-Treaty parties, as the 1933 and 1950 land legislation illustrates, gave the politics of land reform concessions much of their dynamism and character. A number of developments further reveal a learning process at work that saw state elites building cumulatively on earlier concessions as well as striking out in new directions. Evidence for such a learning process can be gleaned from changes to the amount of compulsion the state was prepared to apply, to the spatial reach of resettlement policy, to its ranked eligibility lists as well as to the sourcing of supplies of resettlement land. Wyndham may have got his way on the issue in 1903, but the trend thereafter was for more state compulsion to be applied to the completion of land purchase and to the acquisition of new resettlement land. Another significant development saw land resettlement policy move beyond the scheduled congested districts, even to the point (in the opinion of some) of decisively tipping the balance against the congested districts in the interwar years. Ginnell’s Ranch War campaigning on behalf of landless men in the midlands may have ended in failure, but Sinn Féin and the early Fianna Fáil, swayed by notions of equity and a desire to maximize popular support, did for a time look more favourably on the claims of landless men.Yet, from very early on within the CDB, and again much later when conceptions of efficiency came to trump notions of equity, a counter-development of excluding the landless from formal consideration strongly asserted itself. A major development in the sourcing of redistributable land in the interwar period involved throwing the net wider than untenanted land to bring in land occupied by tenants and tenant purchasers, especially when such individuals held large non-residential holdings, farms deemed to be providing insufficient employment or specialized grazing farms.132 For all the importance of concessions, it is at the level of implementation that land reforms often stand or fall. The politics of implementation tended to revolve around a number of recurring issues: how seriously the

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state took its own concessions and resourced their implementation, how adequate new law proved to be in practice, how vulnerable to legal challenges it became and how much pressure organized political and civil society interests could apply to their own advantage. In assessing the amount of power to achieve change exercised by organized interests, the timing of land agitations, their spatial extent, the tactics deployed and the amount of intimidation generated and converted into political pressure are all of relevance. The mixing of nationalist constitutional pressure and direct action was common in pre-independence Ireland and made for considerable tactical complexity. As the pre-independence UIL and secret society-based land agitation campaigns, aimed at speeding up implementation or perhaps inducing fresh concessions, faded away, the resulting vacuum was largely filled by a party-centred clientelist politics organized around the Treaty/Civil War split and the class appeals of the main pro- and anti-Treaty nationalist parties. Contentious competition between claimants or sets of claimants, as for instance between locals and migrants for local land, tended to persist to some degree after League and secret society had disappeared. Where implementation is concerned much also depended on whether state elites chose to resist popular direct action or to yield to it. Highly instructive here is the case of the landless groups very active at times in the interwar period and quite effective on occasion despite being unfavourably placed vis-à-vis others on the official eligibility lists. That the state in Ireland was anything but a single institutional entity could also impact on the politics of implementation. The CDB, as we have seen, attracted criticism from within the state sphere, and frequently the post-1922 Department of Finance could see little point in spending relatively large sums of scarce public money on land resettlement. Divisions opened up within Fianna Fáil ruling circles over the scale and pace of land reform,133 and factionalism within the Land Commission brought its own difficulties. Inadequate administrative capacity and delaying legal challenges proved to be major obstacles when attempts to speed up implementation were made after the passing of the 1933 Land Act. As might be expected, new implementation challenges arrived as redistributable land became scarcer. But as the supply contracted, so too did the massive rural exodus of the 1950s, and the subsequent wave of industrialization in the 1960s, cause the aggregate demand for resettlement land to gradually decline. Who won and who lost, and why, are all questions relevant in exploring the political, economic and social outcomes of Irish land reform.

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Are ruling political elites to be regarded as winners or losers here? Many would accept that two purported political aims of early land policy – to weaken the demand for Home Rule and to use land reform as a platform for increasing agricultural productivity – failed to achieve their intended effects.134 For some commentators, the absence of a radical social revolution during the 1917–21 period, and the achievement of relative political stability in post-1922 Ireland, owed much to the way land reform had converted a numerous tenantry into a sizeable owner-occupying farmer class inclined to economic and social conservatism. Of course, to the minds of left republicans like Peadar O’Donnell, the triumph of rural social and political conservatism was contingent rather than inevitable, as well as something to be lamented rather than celebrated. Depending on circumstances, ruling politicians after 1922 could perceive land reform to be either a political asset or a liability. While there is much agreement that the landlords and the landless were, in very different ways, the major long-term losers under Irish land reform, views tend to divide thereafter. Contemporary advocates of the resettlement policy (such as de Valera and O’Shiel) saw the creation of new smallholdings and the enlargement of old ones as adding to a class of sturdy smallholders and as having immense nation-building value. Yet, there was never anything like a contemporary consensus among the relevant state elites – within the interwar and wartime Land Commission, for instance, or between it and the Department of Finance – as to the capacity of redistributive land reform to improve the efficiency of Irish agriculture, add a new dynamic segment to the smallholder class, enhance the survival chances of existing smallholders or even counter rural poverty. Some have seen the strong farmer tenants as the big winners in the transition to peasant proprietorship by virtue of their larger farms, generally better land and their possession of sufficient political power to control ruling politicians and so avoid becoming victims of radical land redistribution. Such a view has its strengths, but it has to contend with the reality that c. 20 per cent of the country’s total agricultural acreage changed hands via redistributive land reform during the twentieth century.135 That many big as well as small Irish farms came to face testing ‘viability’ challenges in the longer term, and declined greatly in number in the most recent period, reveals not only the power of wider market and political forces to shape outcomes but also that winning and losing were not in the end always class specific.

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Notes 1 The 1891 Land Act had not expressly provided for land redistribution (C. King, “Our Destitute Countrymen on the Western Coast”: Relief and Development Strategies in the Congested Districts in the 1880s and ‘90s’, in C. King and C. McNamara (eds), The West of Ireland (Dublin, 2011), pp. 175–6. 2 P. Bew, Charles Stewart Parnell (Dublin, 1980), p. 143; J. Lee, ‘The Land War’, in L. de Paor (ed.), Milestones in Irish History (Cork, 1986), p. 115. W. E. Vaughan’s different contention is that ‘it was the changing fortunes of agriculture as much as the Land War, that undermined landlordism, for land ceased to be an attractive investment, and land purchase offered the prospect of exchanging land for money’ (Landlords and Tenants in Ireland 1848–1904 (Dublin, 1984), p. 38). 3 P. Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1978), pp. 115–44, 188–9; J. S. Donnelly, Jr., ‘The Land Question in Nationalist Politics’, in T. E. Hachey and L. J. McCaffrey (eds), Perspectives on Irish Nationalism (Lexington, 1989), p. 90. 4 J. Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848–1918 (Dublin, 1973), p. 123. 5 A. Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness: The Experience of Constructive Unionism1890–1905 (Cork, 1987), p. 310. 6 Lee, Modernisation, p. 26. 7 C. Breathnach, The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891–1923: Poverty and Development in the West of Ireland (Dublin, 2005), pp. 27–9. 8 King, ‘Our Destitute Countrymen’, p. 170. 9 F. Campbell, Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland, 1891–1921 (Oxford, 2005), p. 28; M. D. Higgins, and J. P. Gibbons, ‘Shopkeeper-Graziers and Land Agitation in Ireland, 1895–1900’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land, Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 93–118. However, CDB officials at the outset in 1898 in Mayo let it be known, in response to William O’Brien’s criticisms, that they would refuse to purchase estates for resettlement purposes ‘in any locality where the UIL was established’ (P. Bew, Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland 1890–1910: Parnellites and Radical Agrarians (Oxford, 1987), p. 44). 10 M. O’Callaghan, British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland (Cork, 1994), p. 145. 11 D. S. Jones, Graziers, Land Reform, and Political Conflict in Ireland (Washington, 1995), pp. 99, 103, 112–29; Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, p. 137. 12 Kevin Whelan suggests that a ‘new big-farm group’, whose members ‘constructed themselves not as a peasant class but as proprietors-in-waiting’, had already emerged by early in the nineteenth century (The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity (Cork, 1996), p. 54). 13 Lee, ‘The Land War’, p. 115. 14 D. Jordan, ‘Merchants, “Strong Farmers” and Fenians: The Post-Famine Political Élite and the Irish Land War’, in C. H. E. Philpin (ed.), Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland (Cambridge, 1987), p. 321.

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15 O’Callaghan, British High Politics, pp. 3, 20. 16 D. E. Jordan, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge, 1994), p. 312. 17 J. W. Boyle, ‘A Marginal Figure: The Irish Rural Laborer’, in S. Clark and J. S. Donnelly, Jr. (eds), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest 1780–1914 (Dublin, 1983), p. 330. Emmet O’Connor suggests, though, that the refusal of labourers ‘... to work as “emergencymen” for boycotted landlords was vital to the farmers’ success’ (A Labour History of Ireland 1824–2000 (Dublin, 2011), p. 44). 18 F. Campbell, ‘Irish Popular Politics and the Making of the Wyndham Land Act, 1901–1903’, The Historical Journal, 45, 4 (2002), 771. 19 P. Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin, 1996), p. 3. 20 See P. Cosgrove, ‘Irish Landlords and the Wyndham Act, 1903’, in T. Dooley and C. Ridgway (eds), The Irish Country House: Its Past, Present and Future (Dublin, 2011), pp. 90–109. 21 Campbell, ‘Irish Popular Politics’, pp. 755–73; P. Cosgrove, ‘T. W. Russell and the Compulsory-Land-Purchase Campaign in Ulster, 1900–3’, Irish Historical Studies, 37, 146 (November 2010), 221–40. 22 Campbell, ‘Irish Popular Politics’, p. 757. 23 Ibid., pp. 767–70. 24 John Fitzgibbon’s claim was that the ‘fight on the de Freyne estate ... brought on the Land Conference and the Land Act of 1903’ (Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, p. 165). 25 The anti-grazier dimension of the southern agitation was absent in the north. ‘Russell’s appeal’, Bew observes in this regard, ‘was to a substantial tenantry as opposed to the impoverished small holders of the west’ (Ibid., p. 88). 26 Apparently, Russell saw what had been agreed as implying ‘compulsion by inducement as opposed to compulsion by force’ (Cosgrove, ‘T. W. Russell’, p. 239). 27 Some 316 demesnes covering 112,158 acres had come under this provision by 31 March 1920 (Cosgrove, ‘Irish Landlords’, p. 99). 28 E. Hooker, Readjustments of Agricultural Tenure in Ireland (Chapel Hill, 1938), pp. 129, 136–7. 29 Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, p. 99; C. F. Kolbert and T. O’Brien, Land Reform in Ireland: A Legal History of the Irish Land Problem and Its Settlement (Cambridge, 1975), p. 41. 30 Cosgrove, ‘Irish Landlords’, p. 104. 31 It seems ‘... the Wyndham Act’s failure in the west was a major theme of nationalist orators’ (Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, p. 136). 32 Cosgrove, ‘Irish Landlords’, p. 101. 33 Ibid., pp. 107–8. 34 R. G. Mullan, ‘The Origins and Passing of the Irish Land Act of 1909’ (MA thesis, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1978), p. 79; Campbell, Land and

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35 36 37 38 39

40

41

42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

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Revolution, p. 286. On the other hand, Bew points out how Birrell was ‘capable of adopting a firm “law and order” position’, threatening in a Southampton speech of 12 November 1907 ‘to suspend the policy of land reform unless cattle driving ceased’ (Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, pp. 163, 183). Kolbert, and O’Brien, Land Reform, p. 42; Hooker, Readjustments, p. 136. Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, p. 192. Hooker, Readjustments, pp. 90–2; Campbell, Land and Revolution, p. 91. Hooker, Readjustments, pp. 92–3. For an IFU insider and ex-landlord account of these events, see O’CallaghanWestrop to G. de L. Willis, 11 June 1926 (O’Callaghan-Westropp papers, UCDAD, P38/4). T. Varley, ‘Agrarian Crime and Social Control: Sinn Féin and the Land Question in the West of Ireland in 1920’, in M. Tomlinson, T. Varley and C. McCullagh (eds), Whose Law and Order? Aspects of Crime and Social Control in Ireland (Belfast, 1988), pp. 56–9. Varley, ‘Agrarian Crime’, pp. 54–75; P. Bew, ‘Sinn Féin, Agrarian Radicalism and the War of Independence, 1919–1921’, in D. G. Boyce (ed.), The Revolution in Ireland 1879–1923 (Dublin, 1988), 217–34;T. Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’: The Land Question in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 2004), pp. 39–49; Campbell, Land and Revolution, pp. 246–57. Hogan to the President, 7 April 1923 (National Archives, Land Act 1923, S 3192). Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, p. 53. Dáil Debates, vol. 2., col. 607, 5 January 1923. Kolbert and O’Brien, Land Reform, p. 45. Strong farmer fear of Fianna Fáil was by no means universal; Leinster tillage farmers, for instance, an important segment of the initially pro-Fianna Fáil United Farmers’ Protection Association, stood to gain under the protected tillage agriculture much favoured by the early Fianna Fáil party. Dáil Debates, vol. 48, cols. 2380–3, 13 July 1933. See Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, p. 140. J. Johnston, Irish Agriculture in Transition (Dublin, 1951), p. 105. See P. Bew, E. Hazelkorn and H. Patterson, The Dynamics of Irish Politics (London, 1989), p. 26; E. O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, pp. 128–9; D. S. Jones, ‘Land Reform Legislation and Security of Tenure in Ireland after Independence’, Éire-Ireland, 32–3, 4, 1 & 2 (1997–98), 121; Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, p. 62. B. Girvin, Between Two Worlds: Politics and Economy in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 1989), pp. 15–16. Hooker, Readjustments, pp. 166–7; Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, p. 107. Minutes of Fine Gael parliamentary party meeting, 23 March 1949 (UCDAD, P39/MIN/5). Kolbert and O’Brien, Land Reform, p. 52.

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55 Minutes of Fine Gael parliamentary party meeting, 9–10 December 1948 (UCDAD), P39/MIN/5). 56 Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, pp. 133–66; Jones, Graziers, pp. 184–95; Campbell, Land and Revolution, pp. 85–123. 57 Donnelly, Jr., ‘The Land Question’, p. 95. 58 Cosgrove, ‘Irish Landlords’, pp. 104–5; Campbell, Land and Revolution, p. 99. 59 Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, pp. 205, 101–2, 139, 140. 60 J. Gilligan, Graziers and Grasslands: Portrait of a Rural Meath Community 1854– 1914 (Dublin, 1998), p. 58; see Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, p. 176. 61 Lee, ‘The Land War’, p. 112. 62 Donnelly, Jr., ‘The Land Question’, p. 95; Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, pp. 54–5; Campbell, Land and Revolution, pp. 45–6. 63 Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, pp. 206–8; P. Maume, The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 (Dublin, 1999), pp. 168, 228. 64 Campbell, Land and Revolution, p. 86. 65 Ibid., p. 95. 66 Laurence Ginnell described the Wyndham legislation as the ‘Landlord Relief Act’ (M.Wheatley, Nationalism and the Irish Party: Provincial Ireland 1910–1916 (Oxford, 2005), p. 118). 67 Campbell, Land and Revolution, pp. 87, 90. 68 Ibid., pp. 93–6. 69 Ibid., p. 103. 70 Cosgrove, ‘Irish Landlords’, p. 97. 71 Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, pp. 190–2. 72 Campbell, Land and Revolution, pp. 103–4. 73 E. O’Halpin, The Decline of the Union: British Government in Ireland 1892–1920 (Dublin, 1987), p. 70; Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, pp. 174–5. 74 Congested Districts Board for Ireland. Twenty-Second Report 1913–1914 (Dublin, 1914), pp. 51, 6; see also Hooker, Readjustments, pp. 136–7. 75 T. Varley, ‘A Region of Sturdy Smallholders? Western Nationalists and Agrarian Politics during the First World War’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 55 (2003), 133–5. 76 Ibid., p. 135. 77 ‘Fellow Travellers’, Irish Times, 17 November 1966. 78 T. Varley, ‘Irish Land Reform and the West Between the Wars’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 56 (2004), 216. 79 Report of the Irish Land Commissioners for the Year from 1 April 1931 to 3 March 1932 (Dublin, 1932), pp. 23, 45. 80 Report of the Irish Land Commissioners for theYear from 1 April 1939 to 31 March 1940 (Dublin, 1940), pp. 16, 33 81 Kevin O’Shiel to the Minister for Lands, 18 December 1942. National Archives, Forestry: General File, S 11555. 82 See Jones, ‘Land Reform Legislation’, pp. 133–4; Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, p. 10; chap. 7.

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83 Patrick Hogan to M. M. Egan, 12 March 1926 (Martin M. Egan papers). 84 Varley, ‘Irish Land Reform’, p. 218. 85 J. M. Regan, The Irish Counter-Revolution 1921–1936: Treatyite Politics and Settlement in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 1999), p. 214; see M. Ó Fathartaigh, ‘Cumann na nGaedheal,The Land Issue and West Galway 1923–1932’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 60 (2008), 156–62. 86 Bew et al., Dynamics of Irish Politics, p. 74; Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, p. 121. 87 Department of Lands. Cabinet Committee on Economic Planning: Land Division, n.d., p. 5. S 11555. 88 J. A. Gaughan (ed.), Memoirs of Senator Joseph Connolly (1885–1961): A Founder of Modern Ireland (Dublin, 1996), p. 364. 89 Ibid., p. 362. 90 Ibid., pp. 365, 416. 91 Eamonn Mainséal (Mansfield), Land Division – Its Past and its Present, 18 August 1942, p. 4. S 11555. Commissioner Waddell pointed out that a drop of approximately 60% in larger holdings (£100 PLV and over) had occurred in Connacht between 1901 and 1941.This decline compared starkly with the provinces of Leinster and Munster where the fall in the same sized holdings was approximately 2% and 9% respectively (S. J. Waddell, Post Emergency Programme – Land Commission, 1 September, 1942, pp. 2, 6. S 11555). 92 Eamonn Mainséal, Land Division – Its Past and its Present, 18 August 1942, p. 1. S 11555. 93 Ibid., p. 1. 94 Ibid., p. 2. 95 Report of Inter-Departmental Committee on Seasonal Migration to Great Britain, 1937–8 (Dublin, n.d.). 96 Memorandum for the Government. Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Seasonal Migration to Great Britain, Department of Finance, 19 August 1939. National Archives, Land Policy: General File, S 6490. 97 C. Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford, 1983), p. 318; D. Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life 1913–21: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution (Cork, 1998 (1977)), p. 81; Campbell, Land and Revolution, chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5; Bull, Land, p. 4. 98 P. Bull, ‘The Significance of the Nationalist Response to the Irish Land Act of 1903’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1993), 303. 99 Varley, ‘A Region of Sturdy Smallholders?’, pp. 136–40. 100 The anti-annuities campaign was the nearest thing to an agrarian league in the 1920s. And Lia Fáil’s localized and short-lived attempt to revive direct action agrarianism in the 1950s serves as the exception that proves the rule (see B. S. Murphy, ‘The Stone of Destiny: Father John Fahy (1894–1969), Lia Fáil and Smallholder Radicalism in Modern Irish Society’, in G. Moran (ed.), Radical Irish Priests, 1660–1970 (Dublin, 1998), pp. 185–218). 101 Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, pp. 70–1, 86–8, 108–13.

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102 See Regan, The Irish Counter-Revolution (Dublin, 1999), pp. 203–4; Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, pp. 56, 87–8, 103. 103 Department of Lands. Cabinet Committee on Economic Planning. Land Division, n.d., pp. 4, 2. S 11555. 104 See M. A. G. Ó Tuathaigh, ‘The Land Question, Politics and Irish Society, 1922–1960’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 185–6. 105 See Bew, Charles Stewart Parnell, p. 15; Cosgrove, ‘Irish Landlords’, pp. 91–2. 106 See T. Dooley, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland: A Study of Irish Landed Families (Dublin, 2001).There is a strong contrast here with the landed families in what became Northern Ireland who were able to retain ‘thousands of acres’ of untenanted land ‘to use as they wished’ after the passage of the 1925 Northern Ireland Land Act (O. Purdue, The Big House in the North of Ireland: Land, Power and Social Elites 1878–1960 (Dublin, 2009), p. 121). 107 A theme explored in recent writings has been the mixing of sectarian, ethnic and agrarian dimensions of intimidation in the revolutionary years. See P. Hart, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork 1916–1923 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 273–92; M. Farry, The Aftermath of Revolution: Sligo 1921–28 (Dublin, 2000), pp. 192–201; P. O’Connor (ed.), Coolacrease: The True Story of the Pearson Executions (Cork, 2008). 108 D. Thornley, ‘Ireland: The End of an Era?’, Studies, 53, 209 (1964), 6–7. Sometimes Land Commission inspectors relied on the recommendations of the local clergy in vetting applicants for land (Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, p. 70). 109 Vaughan, Landlords and Tenants, p. 38. 110 See N. Koning, The Failure of Agrarian Capitalism: Agrarian Politics in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA 1846–1919 (London, 1994). 111 E. Larkin, ‘Foreword’ to W. L. Feingold, The Revolt of the Tenantry: The Transformation of Local Government in Ireland 1872–1886 (Boston, 1984), pp. xiv–xv. 112 Ibid., p. xv; P. Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 (Oxford, 2007), p. 568. 113 Regan, The Irish Counter-Revolution, p. 377; C. B. Shannon, ‘The Legacy of Arthur Balfour to Twentieth-Century Ireland’, in P. Collins (ed.), Nationalism and Unionism: Conflict in Ireland, 1885–1921 (Belfast, 1994), pp. 24–5. 114 Roinn Airgeadais. Memorandum for Cabinet Committee on Economic Planning. Land Division Policy, 29 March 1945, p. 6. National Archives, Land Division: Government Policy, S6490 B/1. 115 Commission of Inquiry into Banking, Currency and Credit. Memoranda and Minutes of Evidence, vol. 2 (Dublin,1938), p. 1233. 116 Campbell, Land and Revolution, pp. 284, 286–7. 117 Ibid., pp. 303–4. 118 Bull, Land, p. 3. 119 Kevin O’Shiel, Post War Policy and Programme for Land Commission, 21 August 1942, p. 20. S 11555.

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120 Up to 1987 2.34 million acres (840,000 acres carried over in 1922), out of ‘at most 11.6 million acres of agricultural land in the 26 counties’, had been acquired and redistributed. Thus as much as ‘20% of land [was] affected by acquisition and division’ (Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, p. 20; Jones, Graziers, p. 219; P. Commins, ‘Land Policies and Agricultural Development’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land, Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), p. 219). 121 Patrick Commins gives the thresholds as 22 acres (1920s), 25 acres (1930s) and 33 acres (1950s) (‘Land Policies’, p. 219). 122 Kevin Whelan’s judgement is that, by creating what became ‘inefficient farm units’, ‘instead of solving the structural problem in Irish agriculture, the Land Commission exacerbated it’ (K. Whelan, ‘The Modern Landscape: From Plantation to Present’, in F. H. A. Aalen, Kevin Whelan and Matthew Stout (eds), Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (Cork, 1997), p. 97. 123 P. Moser, ‘Rural Economy and Female Emigration in the West of Ireland, 1936–1956’, UCG Women’s Studies Review, 2 (1993), 41–51; Ó Tuathaigh, ‘The Land Question’, p. 181; D. F. Hannon, ‘Peasant Models and the Understanding of Social and Cultural Change in Rural Ireland’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land, Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 141–65; C. Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History 1780–1939 (Oxford, 1994), p. 396. 124 Roinn Airgeadais. Memorandum for Cabinet Committee on Economic Planning. Land Division Policy, 29 March 1945, p. 3. S6490 B/1. 125 Rather than opting to create a limited number of solidly economic farms and disappoint most applicants, the practice of allocating in ‘a fair and reasonable manner amongst as many ... qualified smallholders as is practicable’ had become well established by the early 1940s (Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, pp. 69–70). 126 P. O’Donnell, ‘Introduction’, in B. O’Neill, The War for the Land in Ireland (London, 1933), p. 17. 127 P. O’Donnell, There Will Be Another Day (Dublin, 1963), p. ii. 128 Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, p. 210. 129 M. Deegan, How Many Additional Families, Approximately, Can be Placed on the Land?, 9 November 1943. National Archives, Land Division: Government Policy, 1933–43, S 6490A. 130 T. A. Smiddy, Land Division and Enlargement of Holdings, 19 February 1942, p. 2. S 6490A 131 Behind Patrick Hogan, we find a civil servant, Frank Duff, who apparently had a major hand in drafting the 1923 Land Bill (F. Kennedy, Frank Duff: A Life Story (London, 2011), pp. 71–3). 132 Jones, ‘Land Reform Legislation’, pp. 138–42. An intriguing question for the future, when the Land Commission records eventually become accessible, is how many women occupiers lost land via such compulsory acquisition. 133 See D. S. Jones, ‘Divisions Within the Irish Government over LandDistribution Policy, 1940–70’, Éire-Ireland, 36, 3 & 4 (2001), 86–91.

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134 On the productivity issue, see J. J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 390–2; M. Turner, After the Famine: Irish Agriculture, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 204–15; T. W. Guinnane and R. L. Miller, ‘The Limits to Land Reform: The Land Acts in Ireland, 1870–1909’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 45, 3 (1997), 599; M. E. Daly, The First Department: A History of the Department of Agriculture (Dublin, 2002), p. 549. 135 See Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, p. 20.

Select bibliography Contemporary sources Manuscript material National Archives of Ireland Department of the Taoiseach Land Act 1923, S 3192. Land Division: Government Policy, 1933–43, S 6490A. Land Division: Government Policy, S 6490 B/1. Land Policy: General Policy, S 6490 B/2 Forestry: General File, S 11555. University College Dublin Archives Department (UCDAD) Papers of Col. George O’Callaghan-Westropp (Letterbooks, December 1918–January 1928, P38/4). Fine Gael Parliamentary Party Minute Books, P39/MIN/5.

Private papers Martin M. Egan Papers (in possession of the estate of Rev. Dr. P. K. Egan, Portumna, Co. Galway).

Contemporary publications Parliamentary and other official publications Parliamentary Debates Dáil Éireann, 1922–55. Congested Districts Board for Ireland. Twenty-Second Report 1913–1914 (Dublin: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1914). Cd. 7865. Reports of the Commission on Agriculture (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 1924). R. 25. Commission of Inquiry into Banking, Currency and Credit. Memoranda and Minutes of Evidence, vol. 2 (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 1938). R 63/2. Report of Inter-Departmental Committee on Seasonal Migration to Great Britain, 1937–8 (Dublin: The Stationery Office, n.d.). R 65/1. Report of the Irish Land Commissioners for the Year from 1 April 1931 to 3 March 1932 (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 1932). P. No. 764.

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Report of the Irish Land Commissioners for the Year from 1 April 1939 to 31 March 1940 (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 1940). P. No. 4596.

Later works Bew, P. Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1978). ——. Charles Stewart Parnell (Dublin, 1980). ——. Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland 1890–1910: Parnellites and Radical Agrarians (Oxford, 1987). ——. ‘Sinn Féin, Agrarian Radicalism and the War of Independence, 1919–1921’, in D. G. Boyce (ed.), The Revolution in Ireland 1879–1923 (Dublin, 1988). ——. Ireland:The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 (Oxford, 2007). Bew, P., E. Hazelkorn and H. Patterson. The Dynamics of Irish Politics (London, 1989). Boyle, J. W. ‘A Marginal Figure: The Irish Rural Laborer’, in S. Clark and J. S. Donnelly, Jr. (eds), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest 1780–1914 (Dublin, 1983). Breathnach, C. The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891–1923: Poverty and Development in the West of Ireland (Dublin, 2005). Bull, P. ‘The Significance of the Nationalist Response to the Irish Land Act of 1903’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1993), 283–305. ——. Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin, 1996). Campbell, F. ‘Irish Popular Politics and the Making of the Wyndham Land Act, 1901–1903’, The Historical Journal, 45, 4 (2002), 755–73. ——. Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland, 1891–1921 (Oxford, 2005). Commins, P. ‘Land Policies and Agricultural Development’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land, Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 217–40. Cosgrove, P. ‘T. W. Russell and the Compulsory-Land-Purchase Campaign in Ulster, 1900–3’, Irish Historical Studies, 37, 146 (November 2010), 221–40. ——. ‘Irish Landlords and the Wyndham Act, 1903’, in T. Dooley and C. Ridgway (eds), The Irish Country House: Its Past, Present and Future (Dublin, 2011), pp. 90–109. Daly, M. E. The First Department: A History of the Department of Agriculture (Dublin, 2002). Donnelly, J. S. Jr. ‘The Land Question in Nationalist Politics’, in T. E. Hachey and L. J. McCaffrey (eds), Perspectives on Irish Nationalism (Lexington, 1989), pp. 79–98. Dooley, T. The Decline of the Big House in Ireland: A Study of Irish Landed Families (Dublin, 2001). ——. ‘The Land for the People’: The Land Question in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 2004). Farry, M. The Aftermath of Revolution: Sligo 1921–28 (Dublin, 2000). Fitzpatrick, D. Politics and Irish Life 1913–21: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution (Cork, 1998 [1977]). Gailey, A. Ireland and the Death of Kindness: The Experience of Constructive Unionism 1890–1905 (Cork, 1987).

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Gaughan, J. A. (ed.), Memoirs of Senator Joseph Connolly (1885–1961): A Founder of Modern Ireland (Dublin, 1996). Gilligan, J. Graziers and Grasslands: Portrait of a Rural Meath Community 1854–1914 (Dublin, 1998). Girvin, B. Between Two Worlds: Politics and Economy in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 1989). Guinnane, T. W. and R. L. Miller. ‘The Limits to Land Reform: The Land Acts in Ireland, 1870–1909’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 45, 3 (1997), 591–612. Hannon, D. F. ‘Peasant Models and the Understanding of Social and Cultural Change in Rural Ireland’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land, Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 141–65. Hart, P. The I.R.A. and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork 1916–1923 (Oxford, 1998). Higgins, M. D. and J. P. Gibbons. ‘Shopkeeper-Graziers and Land Agitation in Ireland, 1895–1900’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land, Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 93–118. Hooker, E. Readjustments of Agricultural Tenure in Ireland (Chapel Hill, 1938). Johnston, J. Irish Agriculture in Transition (Dublin, 1951). Jones, D. S. Graziers, Land Reform, and Political Conflict in Ireland (Washington, 1995). ——. ‘Land Reform Legislation and Security of Tenure in Ireland after Independence’, Éire-Ireland, 32–3, 4, 1 & 2 (1997–98), 116–43. ——. ‘Divisions Within the Irish Government over Land-Distribution Policy, 1940–70’, Éire-Ireland, 36, 3 & 4 (2001), 83–110. Jordan, D. ‘Merchants, “Strong Farmers” and Fenians: The Post-Famine Political Élite and the Irish Land War’, in C. H. E. Philpin (ed.), Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 320–48. Jordan, D. E. Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge, 1994). Kennedy, F. Frank Duff: A Life Story (London, 2011). King, C. ‘Our Destitute Countrymen on the Western Coast’: Relief and Development Strategies in the Congested Districts in the 1880s and ‘90s’, in C. King and C. McNamara (eds), The West of Ireland: New Perspectives on the Nineteenth Century (Dublin, 2011), pp. 161–83. Kolbert, C. F. and T. O’Brien, Land Reform in Ireland: A Legal History of the Irish Land Problem and Its Settlement (Cambridge, 1975). Koning, K. The Failure of Agrarian Capitalism: Agrarian Politics in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA 1846–1919 (London, 1994). Larkin, E. ‘Foreword’ to W. L. Feingold, The Revolt of the Tenantry: The Transformation of Local Government in Ireland 1872–1886 (Boston, 1984), pp. xi–xvii. Lee, J. The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848–1918 (Dublin, 1973). ——. ‘The Land War’, in L. de Paor (ed.), Milestones in Irish History (Cork, 1986), pp. 106–16. Lee, J. J. Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1989). Maume, P. The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 (Dublin, 1999).

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Moser, P. ‘Rural Economy and Female Emigration in the West of Ireland, 1936–1956’, UCG Women’s Studies Review, 2 (1993), 41–51. Murphy, B. S. ‘The Stone of Destiny: Father John Fahy (1894–1969), Lia Fáil and Smallholder Radicalism in Modern Irish Society’, in G. Moran (ed.), Radical Irish Priests, 1660–1970 (Dublin, 1998), pp. 185–218. O’Callaghan, M. British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland (Cork, 1994). O’Connor, E. A Labour History of Ireland 1824–2000 (Dublin, 2011). O’Connor, P. (ed.), Coolacrease: The True Story of the Pearson Executions (Cork, 2008). O’Donnell, P. ‘Introduction’, in B. O’Neill, The War for the Land in Ireland (London, 1933), pp. 11–18. ——. There Will Be Another Day (Dublin, 1963). Ó Fathartaigh, M. ‘Cumann na nGaedheal, The Land Issue and West Galway 1923–1932’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 60 (2008), 154–77. Ó Gráda, C. Ireland: A New Economic History 1780–1939 (Oxford, 1994). O’Halpin, E. The Decline of the Union: British Government in Ireland 1892–1920 (Dublin, 1987). Ó Tuathaigh, M. A. G. ‘The Land Question, Politics and Irish Society, 1922–1960’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 167–89. Purdue, O. The Big House in the North of Ireland: Land, Power and Social Elites 1878–1960 (Dublin, 2009). Regan, J. M. The Irish Counter-Revolution 1921–1936: Treatyite Politics and Settlement in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 1999). Shannon, C. B. ‘The Legacy of Arthur Balfour to Twentieth-Century Ireland’, in P. Collins (ed.), Nationalism and Unionism: Conflict in Ireland, 1885–1921 (Belfast, 1994), pp. 17–33. Thornley, D. ‘Ireland: The End of an Era?’, Studies, 53, 209 (1964), 1–17. Townshend, C. Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford, 1983). Turner M. After the Famine: Irish Agriculture, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1996). Varley T. ‘Agrarian Crime and Social Control: Sinn Féin and the Land Question in the West of Ireland in 1920’, in M.Tomlinson, T. Varley and C. McCullagh (eds), Whose Law and Order? Aspects of Crime and Social Control in Ireland (Belfast, 1988), pp. 54–75. ——. ‘A Region of Sturdy Smallholders? Western Nationalists and Agrarian Politics during the First World War’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 55 (2003), 127–50. ——. ‘Irish Land Reform and the West Between the Wars’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 56 (2004), 213–32. Vaughan, W. E. Landlords and Tenants in Ireland 1848–1904 (Dublin, 1984). Wheatley, M. Nationalism and the Irish Party: Provincial Ireland 1910–1916 (Oxford, 2005).

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Whelan, K. The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity 1760–1830 (Cork, 1996). ——. ‘The Modern Landscape: From Plantation to Present’, in F. H. A. Aalen, Kevin Whelan and Mathew Stout (eds), Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (Cork, 1997), pp. 67–103.

Unpublished thesis Mullan, R. G. ‘The Origins and Passing of the Irish Land Act of 1909’ (MA thesis, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1978).

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

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II

Reflections

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3

Barbara L. Solow: The Irish land question in a wider context

The meaning of property is not constant.The actual institution, and the way people see it, and hence the meaning they give to the word, all change over time. The changes are related to changes in the purpose which society or the dominant classes in society expect the institution of property to serve... . When these expectations change, property becomes a controversial subject: there is not only argument about what the institution of property ought to be, there is also dispute about what it is... . The facts about a man-made institution which creates and maintains certain relations between people – and that is what property is – are never simple... . How people see the thing ... is both effect and cause of what it is at any time ... property is both an institution and a concept ... overtime the institution and the concept influence each other. C. B. Macpherson, Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions [T]he Market, as a form of organization, is the creation of traders and subsequently of financiers, not (or not at all to the same extent) of farmers or of artisans.The commodity markets and the financial markets are the places where the market system is at home; when it proceeds to the formation of factor markets, land and labour markets, it is penetrating, or ‘colonizing,’ relatively refractory territory. This was territory where its principles did not fit. Thus there was a struggle, which begins very early, and continues (though in forms which are undergoing significant changes) into our own day. John R. Hicks, A Theory of Economic History

I The Land Question and the Irish Economy 1870–1903 was written nearly 40 years ago, without the benefit of the flowering of scholarship in Irish history that has appeared since then. It was written before the computer age: the calculations were performed on a Marchand desk calculator. It is likely that today an industrious undergraduate would do better statistical work, and a mediocre student of Alfred Marshall’s would have done more rigorous analysis.The case could be made much better today: I still believe

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it is essentially correct. I cannot believe that many contemporary readers are familiar with the book, so I will summarize it below. If I were to rewrite it today, I would put the Irish story in a broader context, conceptually and historically. I came to work on the Irish land question on my own, with the analytic equipment of an economist: I am not a historian. I had no professors at Harvard who were familiar with Irish history and had no contact with anyone in Ireland. The director of my dissertation, on which the book is based, was Alexander Gerschenkron, a specialist in German, Austrian, Italian and Russian economic history. There really was no revisionist school in 1961 when I began. I read Louis Cullen and Kenneth Connell and found them stimulating, but they were not particularly interested in the land question. I came to admire the work of Vaughan and Beames, but that came much later. I must acknowledge the encouragement I received from Oliver MacDonagh, then at Cambridge where I was also spending a year. Without it, I would hardly have dared to venture into the field. His understanding of English and Irish history was both deep and wide, and he encouraged me to embark upon my project with the scholarly apparatus I had. Although quite innocent of economic analysis himself, he thought it would be a useful research tool. The prevailing orthodoxy when I began my work was that an English economic model had been imposed on Ireland and brought misery to its inhabitants. Landlords frequently evicted tenants and raised rents at will, engrossing the value of the improvements tenants had made. According to the conventional wisdom, this tenure system was responsible for Irish economic retardation. The fatal disincentives to invest were thought to have been overcome in Ulster by the custom of tenant right. By extending tenant right legislatively to all of Ireland in the Land Act of 1870, Gladstone hoped to solve the Irish question. My work presented data on rents and eviction in the post-famine era that challenged that orthodoxy. Instead of a universally rackrented tenantry, where rents are determined on a market by the forces of supply and demand, I argued that in much (but not all) of rural Ireland, there was a struggle over property rights where tenants were able by coercive action to keep rents below market value, by misallocating resources and perpetuating social unrest. The story is not a drama with English villains and Irish victims nor of exploiting landlords and exploited tenants. Instead, it is a story of two contending conceptions of property rights – communal versus private – a contention with social and religious aspects and economic and political consequences.

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The book comes to this conclusion by a circuitous route. It begins by asking whether defects in the land tenure system restrained Irish economic growth. The land tenure explanation had a long history, going back to Elizabethan times, but did not dominate until the middle of the nineteenth century. Other explanations of Irish retardation after the Union include the Malthusian population theory, legal barriers to free trade in land and lack of social overhead capital.The famine put an end to Malthus, the Encumbered Estates Acts and other land acts addressed the second issue, and a serious programme of economic development was never feasible for Victorian England. Liberals could be got to care but not to spend, while Tories could be got to spend but not to care. The tenure explanation was left. Eighteenth-century English common law was viewed as a body of fixed doctrine to achieve an equitable result between litigants. Aiming at a concept of fairness, the law contained protective and regulative elements.The idea that two parties could enter into an enforceable agreement independently of social criteria of fairness is a nineteenth-century idea. It reflects a concern with economic development and the efficient allocation of productive factors by a market system. There is a separation between law and morality: there is no equity in agreements apart from what the two parties assent to. The nineteenth century saw the transformation of the law, in England, Ireland and America, to conform to these prevailing economic doctrines. It is noteworthy in our case that the Roman Catholic Church did not subscribe to the remodelling. I began by comparing English land law with French. The English law which governed Ireland was encumbered with remnants of feudal institutions and notions of natural law. In feudal law, the landlord had no right of ownership (dominium) but only of occupation (seisin). Relations between landlord and tenant were regulated by a network of mutual rights and obligations. The landlord had most of the rights and the tenants the obligations, but if the tenant performed the customary services, the lord could not disturb him: he or she had a prescriptive right to his or her holding. When these feudal services were monetized, the question arose, ‘What happens if the tenant fails to pay the rent?’ Here I followed Alexander Richey’s 1880 book on Irish Land Law.1 Under French law, Richey explains, the landlord undertakes to provide the holding in useful condition; the tenant must leave it in useful condition; the rent must not exceed the product of the holding; and failure to pay rent results in eviction. If the tenant has failed to maintain the holding, the landlord is entitled to compensation for damages.

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The English law stands in contrast. Tenant improvements are governed by the doctrine of waste: whatever is left on vacated land belongs to the landlord. Eviction also differs in the two traditions. In France, failure to pay rent determines the tenancy, while in English law it does not.The landlord must serve a notice to quit upon the tenant. This is not a notice to evict but an action for debt. It gives the tenant time to pay arrears and retain his holding, or he could be reinstated as a caretaker. There is a clear disincentive for tenant investment in Ireland in this situation. It is related to what economists call principal agent problems. When part of the investment in productive factors is made by persons other than the owner of these factors, a divergence between the private and social net product is liable to occur. Whether this matters will depend on the terms of the agreement (and its enforceability) between the lessor and the lessee, and on empirical facts about rents and evictions. It commonly happens that if this divergence is not remedied by legal or legislative means that customary arrangements evolve to solve the problem. Ulster Custom was believed to be one of these arrangements. On the very eve of the famine, the report of the Devon Commission concluded that no simple measure could promote improvement in Ireland more than legislation for compensation for improvements. In the parliamentary debates on the report, Lord Stanley agreed that nothing ‘went so much to the root of the social condition of the people of Ireland as the providing greater security to the industrious tenant of some compensation for the permanent, or almost permanent, improvements effected by him during the occupation of his land’.2 The establishment of tenant right was believed to be the solution of this problem. Tenant right, giving the outgoing tenant the right to charge the incoming tenant for succeeding to the holding, presumably to reserve to the seller the value of the improvements she had left on the land, re-established her incentive to invest. As an article of Ulster Custom, tenant right was presumed to have solved the problem in the north. The custom comprised two other stipulations: first, fixity of tenure, that there be no eviction of a rent-paying tenant. Since this right would be meaningless without a restraint on rent, a third article stipulated that rent should be ‘fair’, tailored to what the sitting tenant could afford to pay. It was from testing the idea that the adoption of Ulster Custom would solve Ireland’s economic problems that I developed my ideas about the Irish land question.This was a roundabout route. I found general agreement that the custom was commonly observed outside of Ulster; that in postfamine Ireland (1849–80), evictions were rare, between 2 and 3 per cent of

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total holdings; and that increases in post-famine Irish rents (1865–80) were in line with rents elsewhere in the United Kingdom, in accordance with the rise in agricultural incomes. Most increases were on grazing lands. That left no convincing case that landlords were evicting tenants and engrossing their improvements or threatening to do so and deterring tenant investment. It is a weakness of the book that I did not do more empirical work on Ulster Custom and depended on secondary sources for my conclusions. I have been charged by Martin W. Dowling in his book Tenant Right and Agrarian Society in Ulster 1600–1870 with failing to understand ‘the recognition of the artificiality of property rights, the recognition of the plantation as a human project, not a natural order, and the nature of the historical weakness of Irish landlordism’. I was deterred because it would lead me into ‘forbidden ideological waters’. For this reason, I failed to understand that tenant right ‘disturbed prevailing ... presupposed conceptions of property rights’. W. E. Vaughan is associated with me in these derelictions. I thought I was precisely engaged in seeing the Irish land question as a controversy over property rights. The epigraph from Macpherson that begins this article was cited in my book as evidence of ‘the artificiality of property rights’. Another epigraph quoted John Kaposey (‘I have always been for the underdog. I was for the English in the Boer War’) to point out my view of ‘the historical weakness of Irish landlordism’. Far from being narrowly concerned with the capitalized value of uncollected rent, as Dowling charges, I put the Irish land question in the context of the Marxian theory of capital accumulation and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. I do not think that is an excessively limited view of the question. This is my story. Taken together, the elements of Ulster Custom represent a view of property as communal, related to feudal concepts. The landlord has a right to his rent, and a tenant has a right to his holding. Property rights are shared jointly: this is what is meant by the Irish slogan of co-proprietorship. It is equivalent to saying that the rent-setting mechanism must be tailored to what the sitting tenant can afford and not by auction in a market system: two concepts of property and two methods of allocation of the factors of production. Obviously, nineteenth-century Ireland was not a feudal economy: trade and monetization had long since penetrated the economy, and markets were well developed. But not all markets and not everywhere. The picture of post-famine Ireland that emerges is one of an underrented rural economy. Land is underpriced. Clearly, this was not true everywhere. In the grazing lands of the midlands or the arable farms of the south-east, market forces set rents. But even in such areas, pockets of

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poverty-stricken smallholders managed to hold on in the face of potential bidders. Agricultural authorities and economists all the way up to John Stuart Mill agreed that Ireland was underrented; some estimates go as high as 500,000 such holdings. Two questions immediately arise: what are the consequences of such underrenting? How is it enforced in the face of a reformed legal system that is based on private property rights in land? In the first instance, there is a distribution of income from landlord to tenant, but there are other effects. The landlord is prevented from evicting inefficient tenants, from taking land into his own hands when it is efficient to do so and from throwing two or more holdings together when there are economies of scale. Backward technologies are encouraged.The market system ensures that factors will be allocated to their most productive use. Equity or morality is not claimed for the system, only efficiency in productivity. The officious boor, Senator Gotobed, in Trollope’s novel The American Senator, put it this way: ‘A landlord who lets his land at less than full value does more harm than good, though he may enjoy the popularity which he is rich enough to buy’. The senator apparently absorbed this doctrine in his native state of Mickewa, but Trollope was familiar with the issue from his years in Ireland. How was underrenting enforced in the face of a reformed legal code and higher potential profits? Landlords must refrain or be restrained from raising rents to market levels, or, what amounts to the same thing, evicting tenants and charging market rent to the incoming tenant. Equally, tenants must refrain or be restrained from bidding against one another. In the first instance, social norms enforced the custom.‘Rackrenter’ and ‘landgrabber’ were terms of opprobrium. Some landlords continued to behave paternalistically, granting what Sam Clark has called non-contractual privileges, preserving old families on the land and generally viewing tenants as more than a source of income. Tenants respected the prescriptive property rights of their neighbours as they defended their own.Their solidarity was bound by ties of blood, religion, locality and ethnicity. As social norms weakened over time, tenants and organized secret societies restrained landlord behaviour by violence and threats of violence. So the results of conflicting concepts of property were investment disincentives, misallocation of resources, gridlock in a large sector of the rural economy and continual ferment in the society. Where rents are not set by market forces, there is no equilibrium. Some landlords are more permissive than others, some more susceptible to threats. Some tenants are willing to resort to violence; some are less activist.The ingredients are

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there for a stew of continuing unrest, one more disincentive to investment. This was my story. I end with the tenant victory after the Land War in finally wresting rent setting on small tenants from any market elements and putting it in the hands of the judiciary, leading to the subsequent buying out of compensated landlords by subsidized tenants at the expense of the British taxpayer. The book makes clear that not all of Ireland fits this description and that the relevant legislation was carried by the coalition of the small tenantry and the nationalist cause represented in parliament. II No one understood the Irish land question better than a 28-year-old Englishman attempting his first novel in 1843. Banished to a position as a postal inspector in a poor western district, Anthony Trollope used his exceptional powers of observation to dramatize the conflict between a landlord and a tenant secret society. In The Macdermots of Ballycloran, he portrayed a landlord squeezed between the contractual obligations of the capitalist world and the pre-capitalist conceptions and activism of the tenants. The tenants did not understand why their rent should be raised because the landlord had signed a piece of paper for a mortgage long ago. Trollope describes in detail how rents were actually set. The landlord’s agent ‘was expected to know who could, and who could not, make out the money; to have obtained, and always have ready, that secret knowledge of the affairs of the estate, which is thought to be, and is so, necessary to the managing of the Irish peasantry in the way they are managed’.3 If the landlord persists in seeking to charge the market rent, the agent tells him he will have more receipts in his carcass than in his pocket.This is an accurate picture of rent setting in Leitrim in the nineteenth century. Maria Edgeworth’s earlier novel takes its name, Castle Rackrent, from the conflict over property rights. She illustrates the issue beautifully: the old-style landlord and the new-style landlord and the difficulties encountered by the latter. The Rackrent family has both kinds, in succeeding generations. (But there is an absentee in Edgeworth: the tenantry.) The old landlord’s lifestyles are of ostentatious consumption and lavish hospitality. He treats tenants permissively, setting rent according to ability to pay and allowing arrears to accumulate. He is a disaster to his family, his estate, and his tenants.The new-style landlord is the modern profit maximizer of our economics textbooks. But his hands are tied. When he tries to evict tenants to maximize his profits, he has recourse to the legal institutions we have described. Thady, the faithful retainer of such a one, tells us

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proudly what happens when Sir Murtagh tries to exact a competitive rent. At one time, he pursued 16 lawsuits simultaneously. Of a total of 49, he lost only 17, but the rest never paid, and the expense cost him so much that he had to sell off part of the estate. Although Castle Rackrent was written in 1800, we have it on Richey’s authority that eviction remained complex until the end of the century. If the disincentives associated with the laws of land tenure were not the cause of economic retardation, it would be surprising if the legal establishment of Ulster Custom by Gladstone’s Land Act of 1870 had cured the problem. It did little or nothing for the small tenant and had a deleterious effect on landlord investment. In the serious downturn of the 1880s, tenants used the organization and methods which had hitherto ensured their customary rights to take rent setting entirely out of the hands of private actors and put it into the hands of judicial commissioners. The Land Act of 1881 was the end of unrestricted private property in Irish land and the end of the fight for co-proprietorship. Gladstone himself saw this: ‘If you value rents [by fiat] you may as well for every available purpose adopt perpetuity of tenure at once. It is perpetuity only in a certain disguise. It is the first link in the chain, but it draws after it the last’.4 Trollope saw it too: ‘Abated rent soon becomes no rent’.5 It was the Tories who effected land purchase. Why not? The crippled landlords would be willing to relinquish their claims if compensated; agitation would cease; tenants might now be detached from the nationalist cause.The answer to the Irish land question was a victory for the tenants. They now had fixity of tenure and paid rent not to a landlord but to the government to defray loans. The proof of the irrelevance of the tenure explanation – the final irony – is that the small owner-occupiers still farmed the same way and were still mired in poverty. They continued agitation but with new goals. You may if you wish call this a continuation of the Irish land question, but it is not the same question. There is no continuity. No Anglo-Irish (or Irish) landlords oppose native Irish tenants: farmers oppose graziers. There is no ideological battle about property rights.There is no argument about economic development. The policies next advocated are of compulsory land redistribution. Redistributional policies are ordinarily carried out by taxation and subsidization: this is a case of taxation and subsidization in kind. Fergus Campbell has shown that the legacy of antilandlord agitation remained significant until the 1920s.6 The form of the agitation was similar. But this agitation took place in a different setting, with different players and different ideologies. Campbell persuades us

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that the traditional tenant solidarity, based on family, locale, religion and ethnicity, continued to play a role into the 1920s, and this is true, but it is a role in a different drama. The relation between grassroots agitation and parliamentary politics continues as in the days of Parnell and Davitt. But the issues are different. III If I were writing the book today, I would put the Irish case in a wider context both conceptually and historically. I saw the controversy over property rights as an obstacle to a market system, but market systems are not coeval with Adam and Eve. Nor are they universal. They are the product of historical development, and I should have portrayed the Irish land question as a case study in the transformation from traditional peasant economies to a market system. An excellent exposition of this transformation by a modern economist is by John Hicks. In his A Theory of Economic History, he describes the predecessor of the market economy as one governed by command or by custom. As trade and monetization penetrated such societies, markets became the organizing principles. Commodity and financial markets were the first to appear. The last bastion of customary economic determinants were the land and labour markets. ‘This was territory where [market] principles did not fit ... and could only be made with difficulty to fit ...Thus there was a struggle, which begins very early, and continues into our own days’.7 This is the context into which the Irish land question fits. After my book appeared, Professor Martin Weitzman at Harvard informed me that I had written a case study of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation. He was right. Marx’s theory is based on the opposition of two versions of property rights, communal (feudalism) and private (capitalism). I had described an empirical example of his theory. Even more specifically than in Hicks’s formulation, the Irish land question fits into Karl Marx’s theory of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Marx lays it out in Part VIII of Capital in the chapter on ‘The So-called Primitive Accumulation’.8 Primitive accumulation (modern economists would just call it a surplus) arises when ‘masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free or “unattached” proletarians on the labour market’.9 Marx sees the feudal serf as paying customary tribute to the lord but retaining co-proprietorship rights in the estate. Feudal lords were not profit maximizers, he says; instead, they were interested in maximizing the number of their peasants. When an extraneous demand

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for wool appeared in England in the fifteenth century, the lords’ motivation changed to profit-seeking, and they began driving peasants forcibly off the land. The dissolution of church lands in the Reformation hastened the process, and, later, in the eighteenth century, legislative acts finally extinguished communal property rights. Marx calls this process fraudulent, spoliation, robbery, usurpation and reckless terrorism. It was ‘accomplished by merciless Vandalism, and under the passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious’.10 But, he admits, it leads to great things.The feudal mode of production, in his words, ‘presupposes parceling of the soil, and scattering of the means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so it excludes the cooperation, division of labour ... the control over, and the productive forces of Nature by society, and the free development of productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds’.11 Note that this part of Marx can be told without the rigmarole of surplus value. For Marx, the progress would come to a sticky end as the usurper would be expropriated by the proletariat and communism would follow. For Hicks and modern economists, no such doom awaits. Although Ireland fits neatly into the Marxian formulation as a case of failed transition, when Marx himself wrote about Ireland, as he and Engels often did, he missed the point. His view was that England suppressed the Irish; landlords raised rents on improvements; ‘a small caste of robber landlords ... dictate the conditions in which [the Irish] are allowed to hold land’.12 Secret societies provided only a ‘feeble resistance’ and were powerless.13 He thought Ireland was replicating the English case. By the 1880s, Engels knew better. The tenants had won.14 For Marx as for Hicks, the transformation from feudalism to capitalism involves the transition from customary to market principles of economic organization and from communal to private property. Marx would have said that market penetration into commodity trade did not extend to the production process involving land and labour, and Hicks said the same thing. Marx saw the transition both as a source of progress and a source of social conflict. So did Hicks. Shorn of the purple prose, the Marxian theory has been put into the language of modern economic theory by Jon S. Cohen and Martin L. Weitzman.15 Without attempting to summarize the graphs and equations of their model, we can summarize the results. What happens when common rights are converted to private property? In the common property case, where average products are equalized, production is inefficient,

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yielding less than maximum possible output. In the private property case, with profit-maximizing landlords and marginal product set equal to price, output will be at its maximum, and there will be a surplus for the lord. The mechanism that makes market systems efficient is generated in the following way. If every acre of land of given fertility earns the same (market) rent, only those tenants who can pay that rent and earn a surplus will be able to acquire land. If that rent equates supply and demand, then no reallocation can increase total output. That is how a competitive market achieves efficiency. This is elementary economics. The fact that competitive markets are efficient is not an argument for laissez-faire. It cannot be emphasized too much that market systems are efficient only in a very restricted sense. Markets must be competitive; often they are not; externalities may exist; the results of a market system may be intolerable or inhumane and unacceptable to the society. Any market system depends upon the initial distribution of purchasing power in the society.This is why there is nothing optimal in laissez-faire capitalism and a clear case for government intervention in the economy. Still, the market system is a powerful engine for economic growth for society to utilize. Cohen and Weitzman show that the conversion of the land of the feudal village from communal to private will have the following results (among others): peasants will be displaced; the standard of living of the working population falls; the surplus increases and rents rise; less labour-intensive techniques are used on the estate; national income is higher; agricultural income is produced more efficiently. It was against the first two of these tendencies that the Irish tenant fought. To the extent that she prevailed, or slowed the pace of privatization, she retained her holding, prevented a fall in her standard of living, thwarted the spread of grazing and its low level of labour intensity and restrained efficient agricultural production and national income. It goes without saying that economists’ models, like this one, are not expected to replicate historical reality. Cohen and Weitzman are explicit about this, and so is Marx, when he writes that the transition assumes different aspects in different countries at different times.16 These models are intended to abstract from historical reality its essential features and to see what consequences flow from the simplified models. To the extent that they capture that essence there will be a tendency for those consequences to follow. In any historical case, the model will be complicated by all sorts of factors, and it is the task of the historian, the demographer, the sociologist, the anthropologist, the social psychologist, the folklorist, the intellectual historian and the historian of religion to bring them to bear.

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IV If the Irish land question fits into the conceptual framework of Hicksian/ Marxian thought, so do other historical cases, and the Irish case can usefully be compared with them. The Enclosure movement was England’s land question, and the clearances was Scotland’s. The former is a thricesqueezed orange, and there is a good literature comparing Ireland and Scotland. Wales presents a third example. The old myth is familiar: Wales was allegedly affected by defective tenurial relations between Welsh tenants and a religiously alienated landlord class; tenancies were insecure; absenteeism was a common problem. In fact, landlords rarely evicted and were permissive with abatements and accumulation of arrears, and helped with investment. Economic behaviour was influenced by kinship and communal ties, and social norms frowned upon competitive bidding for land. Consolidation and efficient farming practices were thwarted.17 Sound familiar? The disasters of the late 1870s that faced the Irish did not affect the Welsh livestock economy: the agricultural depression of the 1880s did. Incomes fell, tenants were hard hit and landlords were squeezed between fixed charges and lower rent rolls and began to sell out when they could. Tenants did not seek to remain as owners but emigrated to industrial employment in South Wales and England. The old structure of Welsh agriculture was not overturned by tenant militancy: it melted away. The comparison with Ireland is instructive. The centrality of property rights in human history goes far beyond England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. There is a long tradition in anthropology, theorizing about property rights across the full range of human societies.18 They play a role in the contemporary literature on less developed countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Most of the world’s peasantry once lived in villages closed to outsiders, with restrictions on land ownership, and with communal lands. Contemporary scholars of peasant societies have identified this kind of organization as a moral economy, arguing that it ensures the common welfare. The shift from these pre-capitalist villages to market economies is seen as harming peasant welfare through loss of security and subsistence. In their scheme, peasant violence is a defensive reaction against involvement in the market and that the capitalist transition to open villages with contractual obligations to landlords necessarily diminishes peasant welfare by increasing inequality and robbing peasants of the protection of customary rights. The transition from traditional to modern agriculture usually comes about when self-sufficient farming is replaced by trade in one or two

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products, while a substantial part of consumption and crude investment goods continues to be produced on each holding. Participation in the commodity market does not always spill over into the factor market. Such societies produce only small surpluses and are mired in poverty. Peasants here cling to their land by restricting sales on a free market. But when the landlord ‘is bitten by the capitalist bug’ and is able to end these imperfections in the land market, traditional agriculture gives way to modern market systems.19 This is a very widespread pattern. The struggle against this transition, which is the story of the Irish land question, is involved with the peasant wars of the twentieth century. Each case has its own distinctive features, but they exemplify a general case: tenants try to thwart the development of factor markets, so they can assure access to their land, to guarantee subsistence for the family at minimum risk, and to keep the family on the land for social and familial continuity. When the peasantry finds allies with other powerful groups in the society – as the Irish tenant found with the parliamentary party and the nationalist movement – revolutionary situations arise. Nationalism is often an ally of the peasantry since it is frequently colonial powers who try to force traditional agriculture into market systems to generate income they can profit by. Eric R. Wolf in his Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century puts the cases of Mexico, Russia, China,Vietnam, Algeria and Cuba into this framework.20 He could have added a chapter on Ireland.

V In summary, my work aimed to turn orthodoxy on its head. Orthodoxy saw the landlords and English law successfully imposing a capitalist system on Ireland, where rents were raised to competitive levels and evictions were frequent, not even leaving the evicted tenant compensation for the value of his improvements, unless protected by Ulster Custom. Instead, I saw landlords in much of Ireland, but not everywhere, unable to raise rents to market levels and unable to evict even when it was in their economic interest to do so. Social norms and organized tenant coercion ensured this result.The consequent misallocation of factors of production constrained economic development after the famine. But that development would have displaced small tenants and worsened their already desperate plight. The Irish land question turns out to be not a story of rapacious capitalist landlords and their exploited tenant victims but a struggle between two conceptions of property. One is based on feudal notions, where

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property rights are communal and the tenant has a right to his holding; the other is based on capitalism, where property is privately owned and the right to holdings is determined by a market system of supply and demand. The struggle ended when tenant pressure along with nationalist political pressure forced the British government to capitulate and to pass a law setting rents by legislative fiat. Eventually the government subsidized tenant purchase and landlord compensation and turned Ireland into a land of owner-occupiers. My conclusions were based on a reading of the empirical record of post-famine Irish history, and they turned out in retrospect to fit exactly into the context of the Marxian theory of primitive accumulation that Cohen and Weitzman put into the language of modern economic theory. Moreover, my results also fit comfortably into modern neoclassical economic ideas on development, with their emphasis on institutional change from traditional societies with communal property and customary rules of factor allocation to capitalist societies with private property and factor allocation by market systems. Nineteenth-century Ireland is an example of one society among many struggling with this transition. Notes 1 A. G. Richey, The Irish Land Laws (London, 1881). 2 Quoted in Barbara Lewis Solow, The Land Question and the Irish Economy, 1870–1903 (Cambridge, MA, 1971), p. 12. 3 A. Trollope, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, ed. David Skilton (London, 1991), p. 10. 4 William E. Gladstone, quoted in Solow, The Land Question, p. 315. 5 A. Trollope, The Landleaguers, ed. David Skilton (London, 1995), p. 305. 6 F. Campbell, Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland 1891–1921 (Oxford, 2005). 7 J. R. Hicks, A Theory of Economic History (Oxford, 1969). 8 K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Frederick Engels (Chicago, 1906). 9 Marx, Capital, p. 787. 10 Ibid., p. 835. 11 Ibid., p. 835. 12 Marx, New York Daily Tribune, 11 July 1853, quoted in R. Fox, Marx, Engels, and Lenin on Ireland (New York, 1940), p. 17. 13 Marx, New York Daily Tribune, 11 January 1859, quoted in Fox, Marx on Ireland, p. 18. See also Ellen Hazelkorn, ‘Some Problems with Marx’s Theory of

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Capitalist Penetration into Agriculture in the Case of Ireland’, Science and Society, 3:10 (1981), 284–315. Hazelkorn, ‘Some Problems’, pp. 300–5. J. R. Cohen and M. L. Weitzman, ‘A Marxian Model of Enclosures’, Journal of Development Economics, 1 (1975), 287–336. Cohen and Weitzman, ‘A Marxian Model’, p. 316. D. W. Howell, Land and People in Nineteenth-Century Wales (London, 1978). C. Hann, ‘A New Double Movement? Anthropological Perspectives on Property in the Age of Neoliberalism’, Socio-economic Review, 5:2 (2007), 287–318. R. S. Eckaus, ‘The Market Structure and Performance in Traditional Agriculture’ (unpublished). E. R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1969).

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

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4

Philip Bull: Writing about Irish land against the background of Northern Ireland

My interest in the Irish land question originated during the doctoral research that I commenced in 1968. Focusing on the role of the Irish nationalist leader, William O’Brien, in resolving conflict over the land tenure issue in the early twentieth century, I began to realize his importance as a voice that echoed down the years almost as a commentary on contemporary events in the north of Ireland. During the initial stages of my research, I felt a remarkable degree of isolation in the scholarly world. My two principal mentors and supervisors, Oliver MacDonagh and Nicholas Mansergh, understood what I was attempting to achieve, but for nearly all other historians with whom I discussed my project, it seemed I was embarked on a pointless, perhaps even unhistorical, attempt at rescuing a lost cause. In this chapter, I recount how developing what I regarded as an important historiographical objective became ever easier to explain and express as events in Northern Ireland unfolded. In his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes: If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurred only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.1

The development of my ideas must be set in the context of the evolution of the renewed ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland from 1968 through to the end of the century. During the explosive months of July 1969 to April 1970, I was living in Cork, the geographical extremity from the north and historically the area most removed from the kind of sectarianism that dominated northern affairs. The attitude of ‘a plague on both their houses’,

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which I heard expressed on an everyday basis, was also emerging from my research in correspondence from the 1890s and early 1900s. Most striking was the questioning among local people, not just historians, of the received wisdom about the political past of their country. Was that past coming back to haunt them in a new guise? Was what had been taught to them as the foundation narrative of their state, sanctified by their church, becoming unravelled by contemporary events? Was ‘Robespierre’ recurring, were the ‘mere words, theories, and discussions, [that had] become lighter than feathers’ in the hands of historians and the narrators of national rebirth becoming unpalatably bloodied by contemporary events? Between 1879 and 1903, the issue of agricultural land tenure in Ireland was the principal focus of conflict between different classes in Ireland and between the majority of Irish people and British government. Paradoxically in the 1920s, in the aftermath of the bitter partition of the country, there was an almost perfect symmetry between the two newly formed and mutually hostile states on the issue of land, both legislatures carrying through measures to consolidate and wind up the processes of land transfer developed from the 1880s and climaxing with the Wyndham Act of 1903. Thus what had been the casus belli underpinning conflict in nineteenthcentury Ireland had ceased to feature as a major factor in Irish politics and society. What had become the major issue, and remained so throughout the twentieth century, was a division between people on political grounds, a division with strong ethnic and even stronger religious connotations. This division had powerful and destructive consequences. In the first place, through the partition of the country, it stereotyped religious difference into state formations, abandoning moderate opinion. In what became initially the Irish Free State moderate Catholic opinion found itself isolated from the majority of Protestants and thus denied the opportunities of a social and political environment that was rooted in diversity and pluralism. The remnant of Protestants, separated from their co-religionists in the north, enjoyed a largely non-discriminatory environment but with their social and political influence significantly reduced. This affected many of the civil society values that were just as important to many Catholics as they were to Protestants. Conor Cruise O’Brien recounts how in the 1920s his aunt, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, would say that she ‘could not understand why they were called Protestants, since they never protested’, an attitude that he suggests characterized many Catholics who began to find increasing solace in ‘the Protestant paper’, the Irish Times.2 In the north, there was a mirror image, but one in which the religious majority felt more threatened by a minority that was both larger and more strongly

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committed to ending partition. This outcome was far from the ideals that nationalists had held for the future of their country. The explanation of how this had come about needs to be understood, in part at least, in the context of the land question and of its evolution from the conflicts of the second half of the nineteenth century. In particular, the political developments that followed the Wyndham Land Act of 1903 are particularly pertinent to understanding why resolution of what had been the major source of social and political conflict failed to find expression politically in a more socially and religiously cohesive future for Ireland. The attempt to follow through the land act with a policy of conciliation, characterized by William O’Brien as ‘Conference, Conciliation, Consent’, was thwarted by the determination of other leaders of the nationalist movement to hold to a purely parliamentary strategy designed to secure Home Rule through an eventual balance of power in the House of Commons. In Ireland, this strategy was based on a combination of an increasingly thin tissue of land grievances and a system of party machine organization; this bred a growing sense that there was nothing to be gained for nationalists by seeking to conciliate the minority population. Thus, central to my endeavour was a belief, increasingly validated by contemporary events, that the tragedy of Ireland that resulted in partition had its roots in the failure to capitalize on the opportunities for conciliation that had been opened up in the early twentieth century by the ‘peace process’ between landlords and tenants, a process that resolved the conflict over land tenure, a conflict that can be seen as an allegory of communal and religious difference in Ireland. The pattern of conflict evolving in Northern Ireland had sufficient parallels to that over land in the nineteenth century for the solutions that were being laboriously explored in the 1980s and 1990s to give relevance to similar attempts explored unsuccessfully early in the century. Until the 1970s, historians had looked at this era and these developments through the prism of the dramatic conflict over the Third Home Rule Bill. Shaped by the drama of the constitutional issue of House of Lords powers and of the apparent threat of civil war in Ulster, a retrospective view emerged that conceived of these struggles as a battle of good and evil. Such a perspective was fed by dominant liberal views, exemplified in the evocative rendering of George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England.3 But the nature and impact of the conflict itself drew a line across any trajectory that might have spelt out a different course from the one that eventuated. It became a challenge for me to find the basis of analysis on which credibility could be returned to an alternative

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scenario. I was faced by two fixed positions, incompatible with each other but compelling for their adherents and significant layers of public opinion on either side. One of them, what might be seen as derived from a more British perspective, saw the British government of the time confronted by two immovable and implacable forces, and the only logical, practical and politically viable course was the partition of the island. The other, or Republican perspective, was that ultimately only force would prevail in bringing about some form of independence for Ireland. These two historical views reflected exactly the political divide that emerged in Ireland between 1903 and 1921, a divide that ultimately predetermined the partition of the country. In understanding the relevance of the land issue to this historical catastrophe, the period 1898 to 1903 is crucial. The politics of pluralism, often problematic in Irish history, lay below the surface most of the time, but was driven out of contention by the Land League mobilization of 1879–81. From that time, the polarity between the Catholic–nationalist nexus on the one hand and the Protestant supporters of Union on the other was more indelibly drawn than ever before, with the land issue metaphorically marking the divide. Many of those who had been sympathizers with the land demands of the tenants, and sometimes with their self-governing aspirations also, were driven into hostility by what they saw as the violence and communal destructiveness of the Land League’s methods. We see this in the case of Anthony Trollope, whose tone towards Irish issues distinctively changed in response to the League and in W. E. Forster whose liberal instincts were fundamentally transformed into obsessive determination to ‘enforce the law’. More pointed was the hostility to the League of that long-standing champion of Irish radical causes, Archbishop John MacHale of Tuam, who bitterly criticized the methods of the League. In this he was in the company of countless other Irish people, both Catholic and Protestant, who dissented not only from its violent outcomes but also its effect in creating an entrenched cleavage between the two major communities. This constituted an unprecedented antagonism between classes and communities in Ireland such as had rarely been seen since the demise of the penal laws. As the land issue had divided communities, so it was the convoluted course of agitation and legislation around that issue that began to lay a basis for rebuilding accommodation on a national level. Indeed, with the issue of Home Rule largely relegated from British political agendas after the fall of Parnell in 1891, a new opportunity existed for addressing problems of land tenure uncomplicated by nationalist considerations; the metaphoric relationship of the two issues could to some extent be

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unpacked. The fundamental change in context was created as one of the consequences of land legislation, and in particular of the rent control regime introduced by Liberal governments and the subsequent encouragement of tenant purchase by Conservative ones.The dual effect of these was to put landlords on the same side as their tenants in terms of ultimate objective, namely the transfer of ownership from the landlords to the occupiers. What continued to separate them was the method by which this was to be achieved, whether it was to be by compulsory purchase based on official valuations or by some voluntary mechanism that kept a place for the market, even if through a process defined by legislation and bolstered by Treasury assistance. This new convergence of interest opened up new modes of communication across significant community, cultural and religious divides. In the first place, it reactivated the alliance that had existed briefly in the late 1840s, characterized as the ‘League of North and South’; with the demand in the late 1890s for compulsory purchase, the Presbyterian tenant farmers of Ulster, through their organization led by T. W. Russell, joined forces again with their Catholic counterparts, since 1898 organized in the UIL. But the overarching development of seismic importance arose from the initiative of John Shawe-Taylor in September 1902, privately backed by the Chief Secretary, George Wyndham, that set in train the process that resulted in the Land Conference of 1902–03 and led to the Wyndham Land Act of 1903. It was this conference that demonstrated that diverse Irish interests, based on diverse communal identifications, could be brought together to resolve issues in Irish public life. Indeed, no issue had been so fundamentally divisive as that of agrarian land tenure. If interested parties could so transcend the cleavage in Irish life that had been so entrenched by the Land League crisis, then there was hope for dealing with many other issues on a similar basis. There were other auspicious omens from this development.The official landlord leadership had rejected the overture for cooperation, but their opposition had been overturned as a result of a plebiscite of landlords, thus breaching what had hitherto been a monolithic force on one side of the communal divide.This augured well for the politics of the middle ground, where the basis lay for a new cross-communal cooperation.This prospect was clear to participants and to many other contemporaries. The ‘Conciliation Policy’, endorsed by the UIL and the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) in late 1903, was intended to build on these foundations to set up a basis for identifying those issues that were amenable to cross-communal negotiation. On the landlord side, an Irish Reform Association was formed with the object of identifying

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common areas of discussion with nationalists. This working alliance could not include Home Rule, but nor did it impose on nationalists any abandonment of that as an ultimate objective. If Irish people of different religious and communal formations worked together to resolve less controversial issues, then the opposition to some form of independence might diminish, it was predicted, with many existing apprehensions or fears alleviated. At least such experience and achievement would, even short of nationalist aspirations, break down sharp lines of communal division and substitute a discourse culture enriching of national life. The issues that were thought amenable to such a process included the question of university education, the evicted tenants problem and even some form of devolved administration for Ireland, as well as financial questions, including Ireland’s share of taxation. This new potential was lost, moderates and conciliators undermined from both sides. On the nationalist side, the champion of conciliation, William O’Brien, was attacked and progressively undermined by those in his party who could not stomach the idea of cooperation with their ‘hereditary enemy’, leading eventually to his resignation from leadership positions and the triumph of the anti-conciliationists.4 On the other side, the Irish Reform Association’s momentum was destroyed by Ulster Unionist attacks on its sally into the area of possible devolved government. This left the nationalist parliamentary party dominated by those who saw no need to build bridges with minorities, while in the case of the most significant minority, the conciliators were left with nowhere to go politically other than back into the shadow of extremists on their own side. Thus was set in train a sequence of events that climaxed in 1911, created political and social havoc in Ireland during subsequent years, ending with the partition of the country. The philosophy that contributed to these outcomes was one based on the absolute right of majorities even in a society where majorities and minorities did not fluctuate with the changing fortunes of political parties but were largely fixed by birth. The developments in the land question between 1898 and 1904 had moved some small way towards ‘unfixing’ this demographic determinism, but consequent abandonment of any real commitment to a civic polity that allowed for minorities as well as majorities was bound to end in confrontation and violence. The British belief that the resolution of majority–minority conflict could only be achieved by partition was rooted in stereotypes of Ireland and its supposed political dysfunction; this was mirrored in Ireland by the attitude that partition was the disastrous consequence of ‘irrational’

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Ulster intransigence and British pusillanimity. These two interpretations shaped in both historical traditions a framework that treated the conciliation phase of 1902–04, and the mode by which the land tenure issue was settled, as an aberration, outside the parameters of realpolitik, and without relevance to the ‘actual’ course of Irish history. With the unravelling from 1968 of a so-called ‘settlement’ of the Irish question that had been based on attempted segregation of majority and minority by partition of the country, it became possible again to establish that there were significant consequences from the failure of the nationalist movement to sustain a policy of accommodation: indeed, to show that responsibility for partition rested as much with the particularism of nationalists as with the intransigence of Ulster Unionists. The latter-day ‘peace process’ of the 1980s and 1990s, located in the specific circumstances of Northern Ireland, was based on principles not fundamentally different from those that had been aborted in 1904 and largely conformed to the essentials of what had then been described as ‘Conference, Conciliation, Consent’. What had failed at the beginning of the century, and been put into the historian’s basket of idealistic lost causes, had become towards its end a new accepted wisdom of how to resolve problems in Irish governance. This gave new relevance and a more acceptable historical context for understanding the potential importance of the land question and how it was resolved to the evolution of modern Ireland; it was also a demonstration of how fundamentally historical interpretation can be overturned, or even vindicated, by later events.The return of Robespierre can upset the historian’s apple cart and take a society back to an alternative explanation of the past. The initial hypothesis in my research that the resolution of the land question and its legacy held the key to understanding the twentieth-century history of Ireland had now become intellectually sustainable, and much more able to be located in mainstream historiography, as a result of the tragic and in many ways unforeseen unfolding of a new round of Irish ‘Troubles’. Notes 1 M. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim (London, 1985), p. 4. 2 C. C. O’Brien, States of Ireland (London, 1972), p.116. 3 G. Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London, 1935). 4 See P. Bull, ‘The Significance of the Nationalist Response to the Irish Land Act of 1903’, Irish Historical Studies, xxvi, 111 (May 1993), 283–305.

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

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Samuel Clark: Strange bedfellows? The Land League alliances

In this essay, I shall (1) briefly review the principal arguments of Social Origins of the Irish Land War, along with several earlier articles I published on rural unrest in Ireland, (2) reassess and elaborate on these arguments in the light of more recent literature, (3) acknowledge some of the subjects that I did not cover and (4) discuss one of these uncovered subjects in a little detail. Intellectual context of Social Origins First, however, let me respond to a request from the editors to say a few words about the intellectual inspirations that guided this work. I can distinguish two. The first was theoretical. As a graduate student, I was affiliated with a school of sociology that emphasized the contingent nature of collective action (4–16).1 It was Charles Tilly with whom I had enjoyed the most personal as well as intellectual contact. I had become acquainted with Tilly when I did a one-year MA at the University of Toronto.2 The second context that influenced me was the intellectual climate in Ireland in the early 1970s. Shortly after I first arrived, I mustered the courage to call on T. W. Moody, then the central figure in Irish history. Beyond my expectations, he invited me to join his graduate seminar, which included Richard Hawkins, Bill Vaughan and Chris Woods, among others, and to which he also invited Bill Feingold, like me a student from an American university, in Dublin researching for his doctoral dissertation. Among these historians, and others whom I met, there was a lack of respect for the traditional view of the Land War as a mass uprising of the Irish people against alien oppressors. ‘Revision’ was all the rage. When, at Moody’s seminar, I presented a paper which demonstrated empirically the over-representation of certain town occupations among Land League militants, and the under-representation of agricultural labourers, farm

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servants and members of the urban working class, much to my astonishment Moody offered to publish it in IHS because he believed that it challenged the orthodox account.3 One of my thesis supervisors, John V. Kelleher (who, until then, had serious doubts about whether he wanted to supervise a sociology student), liked the paper for the same reason. During that first year, I had frequent contact and shared ideas most of all with Bill Feingold. In addition, I was influenced in subsequent years by a number of other historians, of whom I can mention Don Akenson, Louis Cullen, Theo Hoppen, Emmet Larkin, Joseph Lee, David Miller and especially James Donnelly. It was in this atmosphere that I sought to carve out a space for myself and to turn my doctoral dissertation into a book within the ‘new’ historical writing on nineteenth-century Ireland. Outline of the principal arguments The major objective of the book was to explain the social origins of the Land War of 1879–82. To accomplish this task, I judged it necessary to determine how the Land War differed from earlier agrarian unrest. It was my view that this movement combined certain specific characteristics to a greater extent than did any previous movement in Irish history. More people (1) were mobilized and centrally coordinated, (2) were drawn from diverse regions of the country, (3) came from a larger spectrum of social classes and (4) represented rural and urban populations. The idea was that these differences were relative, but nevertheless significant. I asserted that the manifest goals of the Land League were those that different classes of farmers had in common. Goals on which they would have disagreed, most notably the redistribution of land, were pushed aside by the agitators in order to present a common front. Thus, it was not necessarily the primary interests of each of the different classes to which farmers belonged that led them to support the movement but rather the interests they shared with those in other classes.4 The main evidence used to support this contention was a content analysis of resolutions passed at a randomly selected sample of 153 land meetings from June 1879 through August 1881, among which I did not find one resolution denouncing large landholders or calling for the redistribution of land (297–8). I did stress that land redistribution was in the interests of small farmers. I cited several resolutions passed at land meetings which called for land redistribution but did not fall into my sample; I quoted proposals for land redistribution made by a number of the movement’s militants; and I referred to evidence that in some parts of the country large farmers were being threatened

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(301). I insisted, nonetheless, that what was noteworthy – given the very real divergence in their material interests – was how few efforts of this kind were made during the Land War. In my thinking, the alliance of farmers with holdings of very dissimilar size was one of the aspects of the Land War that distinguished it, again comparatively speaking, from land agitation in Ireland in earlier historical periods. I suggested that an alliance of this kind, though not unique, is unusual. In my essay in the British Journal of Sociology, I criticized students of peasant collective action for ignoring conflicts within peasant populations, and I used nineteenth-century Ireland to illustrate the point. The objective of this paper was to advance our knowledge of the conditions under which agrarian classes oppose one another or join forces.5 Another alliance I thought was decisive for the Land War was between farmers and certain groups in the urban population. The IHS article demonstrating that various town occupations were over-represented among militants was based on the records of those interned under the Protection of Person and Property Act of 1881. The foremost town occupations were shopkeepers and publicans, teachers and newspaper editors and correspondents. Other sources indicated that members of these occupational groups were active as leaders and organizers of the movement. Like the alliance of larger and smaller farmers, this alliance was unprecedented in Irish history, at least on the scale it reached during the Land War. And it too required explanation. In all agricultural societies, basic differences in interests exist between town and rural populations, differences that frequently give rise to anti-urban sentiments, most often complaints about high interest rates or exorbitant prices on products that farmers require. Complaints of this kind were definitely made in nineteenth-century Ireland. Yet, none of the resolutions in my sample raised them (300). Why? The short answer is that townsmen in the Land League were able to prevent such complaints from coming to the fore. Similarly, large farmers could make it difficult for resolutions calling for land redistribution to be introduced at land meetings (300–1). It seemed to me, however, that this only begged the question of how alliances of farmers and townsmen, and of farmers in contrasting economic circumstances, came into being, despite these antagonisms. I was gradually persuaded that, while the causes of the Land War were numerous, the conditions that were responsible for differences between it and earlier movements were mainly social conditions. It was only by examining the social changes that had taken place in Ireland during the preceding half century that we would understand

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the Irish Land War. I decided that, in any case, my contribution to explaining the Land War would be to do so in these terms and to leave it to other writers to provide complementary or alternative explanations. My thesis was not that these social changes created the common material interests that became the goals of the movement. The major common interests that determined the goals of the Land League – principally security of tenure and lower rents – had existed well before these social changes occurred; they were the interests that ‘had the longest and most continuous place in the collective consciousness of the rural population’ (302). And the selection of these common interests as the goals of the movement was more a consequence of its social composition than a cause (152, 219, 302–4). The same was true of peasant proprietorship, though it was not a pre-existing objective but rather an emergent goal of the rebellion, a radicalization of tenant demands during the Land War (302). In my explanation of the Land War, two sets of social changes were identified. First, a decline in subletting and a massive decrease in the size of the cottier population served to lessen conflicts of interest between larger and smaller landholders. The reduction in subletting actually began before the Famine, as an outcome of efforts of landowners in the 1830s and 1840s to augment the income they received from their estates (30). The fall in the size of the cottier population came primarily as a result of the Famine and clearances during and after the Famine. In addition, the expansion of livestock farming to include medium-sized and even small farmers mitigated conflicts of interest between large and small farmers because there was now less pressure from the latter to have pasture converted to tillage (38). To repeat, these changes did not increase the material interests that larger and smaller farmers had in common nor provide the common interests on which the Land War was based, but they did diminish, to some degree, the interests that divided them. Second, the social origins of the Land War lay in the greater supra-local social integration of agrarian Ireland. By ‘social integration’, I did not mean social harmonization or assimilation but rather greater social interaction, communication, interdependence and social and economic exchange. My contention was that social integration made possible the political mobilization of the majority of the farming population by local elites and nationalist politicians. Once again, I was suggesting only a relative change; rural Ireland was still less supra-locally integrated than it would become in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the post-Famine years were decisive. The growing hegemony of the English language, higher rates of literacy, improved communications (most notably, the creation of a large

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number of provincial newspapers) and greater social and economic intercourse between town and country broadened the networks in which large and small tenant farmers took part. Supra-local integration was also enhanced by the expansion of the livestock economy to include smaller farmers. Without denying the economic significance of this expansion, I came to believe that for my purposes what was more important was its effect on social intercourse among farmers of different classes (137–8). Wisely or not, I used the term ‘social group’ to refer to segments in the population that are drawn together by social relationships and also have shared characteristics and interests (15). It was the development of a ‘social group’ in this sense that constituted the ‘social origins’ of the Irish Land War (17). In the present essay, I am giving as much attention to interests as to social relationships, but this was not the case in Social Origins, which differed from other works on the Land War by devoting far more attention to the evolution of social structure (patterns of social relationships) than to the interests of tenants. As just noted, in addition to the intellectual environment provided by Irish historians, I was influenced in the 1970s by the collective-action approach to the study of social movements. Those who adopted this approach did not deny that common discontents, grievances or aspirations are necessary conditions for social protest, but they did reject the implicit or explicit assumption in previous literature that factors of this kind constituted the most important conditions. Members of the collective-action school were of the view that, on the contrary, conditions for collective mobilization are usually less prevalent than those that give rise to common discontents, grievances or aspirations. Thus, variation in protest over time and space, broadly speaking, can be better understood by paying more attention to the former than to the latter. This theoretical position was outlined most fully in an article I published in 1975 in the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology.6 Reassessment and elaboration of the arguments The alliances There has been a general acceptance in subsequent literature that many townsmen took part in the Land War.Vincent Comerford agreed that ‘the support of farmers, priests, bishops and shopkeepers was the essence of the success of Parnellism.’7 Donald Jordan recognized the role of townsmen in leading the movement in County Mayo.8 And J.W. H. Carter has brought to light the variety of occupations held by the committee members of a number of Land League branches in Queen’s County.9 One particular piece

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of evidence was published shortly after Social Origins by Feingold. In his study of voting in the Tralee poor law election of 1881, he found that shopkeepers voted for League candidates to a greater extent than did any other occupational group that he classifies, even slightly more than farmers.10 Similarly, the claim that a critical feature of the agitation of 1879–82 lay in the alliance of agrarian classes has been largely endorsed in subsequent literature. Hoppen concurred that what was remarkable about the Land War was not the struggle but the cooperation among agriculturalists in different classes. He analysed the social composition of two League branches – one in Cork and the other in Queen’s County – and found that the League attracted a cross section of farmers.11 Even those writers who have written the most about class conflicts within the movement accept that it was an alliance of farmers of different social classes. Paul Bew and Jordan repeatedly said so, though Jordan maintained that the alliance was short-lived.12 Jordan’s research challenges the view that large farmers became involved in the protest only when the farmers’ clubs in Leinster and Munster took up the cause; the alliance of large and small farmers had already been forged in Connaught.13 Jordan also did a content analysis of resolutions passed at land meetings during the Land War. Since his data were restricted to County Mayo, it is not surprising that, in contrast with my sample, in his sample, some resolutions calling for land redistribution did turn up, but as a percentage of all resolutions they did not amount to much: 2.9 per cent of the resolutions passed in the period from April to September 1879, none from October 1879 to April 1880, 2.9 per cent from May 1880 to December 1880 and 4.5 per cent in 1881.14 David Jones has shown that graziers were over-represented among those interned under the Protection of Person and Property Act; only later did they (as a group) become separated from the land agitation, and eventually one of its targets.15 Of course, one could acknowledge that the Land War mobilized both large and small farmers but claim that the former dominated the latter and that small farmers were the victims not the victors. As just mentioned, I argued in Social Origins that the involvement of larger farmers in the leadership made it less likely that resolutions would be passed at land meetings calling for land redistribution. We should not, however, allow this to lead us to some false conclusions. First, we should not suppose that all large farmers – certainly not all of those active in the League – were against land redistribution.Whether out of genuine sympathy for smaller farmers, with whom most had kinship ties, or because they were aspiring local politicians who needed the support of smaller farmers, many large farmers were not opposed to land redistribution. I shall return to this point later.

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Second, we should not assume that the involvement of large farmers meant that they were in charge of the movement. It is true, as I put forth in two of the articles published before Social Origins, that very small farmers in Ireland lacked the resources necessary to organize large-scale collective action on their own and that large farmers and townsmen provided leadership during the Land War.16 Yet, it defies belief that smaller farmers were so weak and naive that they could be persuaded to join League branches and attend land meetings that offered little to them. Although very large farmers were over-represented in local branches of the League, and were certainly over-represented in branch leadership positions, they were in a considerable minority among all members, as shown in my analysis of seven branches in Connaught (259–60), in the analysis by Hoppen of the two branches in Cork and Queen’s County and in Carter’s analysis of the social composition of a number of branches in Queen’s County.17 Consequently, as Bew demonstrated so clearly, the Land League oscillated between policies that were better for larger farmers and those that were better for smaller ones. And it cannot be claimed that the Land Act of 1881 benefitted large farmers appreciably more than small farmers; there is certainly little evidence that they took advantage of it more than the latter. An unfortunate tendency can be found in some historical works on Irish land agitation to divide the farming population into two classes: on the one side, the voracious grazier with hundreds of acres and on the other side, the struggling small landholder with little more than ten acres, often less. In reality, there was a range of farm sizes from small to large, and distinctions within the farming population were far less binary than the distinction between landowners and tenants. The usage of the term ‘grazier’ was inconsistent. Terence Dooley observes that in County Monaghan in the early twentieth century, the label was assigned to any farmer who had more land than was necessary for a family to live in relative comfort.18 Usually, however, it meant a large landholder with more than a hundred acres of mostly pasture and meadow. It was especially common to use this term to refer to non-resident landholders of this kind, but not exclusively so. It was also more likely to be applied to those who obtained land for grazing on an eleven-month basis. Yet, it could instead or in addition refer to the role a tenant played in the Irish cattle industry, that is, to denote farmers who fattened cattle that they had purchased from smaller farmers.19 In any event, farmers with more than a hundred acres did not constitute a large segment of the tenant population. In 1881, only 6 per cent of Irish landholders (3.8 in Connaught) held more than a hundred acres of

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land, and only 2 per cent (1.8 in Connaught) more than two hundred.20 Of course, the proportion of agricultural land in Ireland taken up by these exceptionally large farmers was much greater, and that is why they could become the target of demands for land redistribution. Yet, as a collective political force, they were numerically weak. The land agitation increased their power, or at least the power of the large farmers who joined it, only in so far as they could mobilize the majority of farmers behind them. Even this alliance was not what made the Land War such a formidable challenge to the land system. Rather, it was the alliance of the great number of farmers with roughly 5 to 75 acres that was crucial. Only this could have generated a mass movement on the scale of the Land War. Explanations for the alliances Explaining the Land War If we turn to explanations that have explicitly or implicitly been offered for these alliances, we are necessarily drawn into debates over the causes of the Land War. In taking this step, we need to sort out how various writers have tried to explain the movement. I shall divide them into three categories: (1) those who focus primarily on its short-term timing in the post-Famine period, (2) those who focus primarily on spatial variations in its intensity and (3) those who focus primarily on differences between the mobilization of rural people in earlier periods of Irish history and their mobilization in the Land War. We can begin with the view that the Land War resulted from ‘rising expectations’ in the post-Famine period. Although this idea has been taken up by a number of writers, it originates in Donnelly’s Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork, where he suggested that the agricultural depression of the late 1870s provoked the Land War because the expectations raised by the post-Famine prosperity were suddenly disappointed by the economic turn of events. The ‘accumulated gains’ of the preceding years were now threatened.21 In his critique of this argument, Bill Vaughan questioned whether the prosperity during the 13 years between the end of the depression of the early 1860s and the beginning of that of the late 1870s could have raised expectations so much more than the years of prosperity between the early 1850s and the downturn of 1860s,22 the severity of which Donnelly himself was the first to demonstrate in a paper published only a year after his book on Cork.23 Yet, I now think that it is perfectly reasonable for Donnelly to assert that the expectations held in the late 1870s were a function of

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the entire period from the early 1850s to the late 1870s, the severe interruption of this prosperity in the early 1860s notwithstanding. One of three explanations for the timing of the Land War offered by Vaughan as alternatives is the increasing indebtedness of the rural population in the 1870s.24 But this explanation is actually an extension of Donnelly’s explanation. We understand better now how the ‘accumulated gains’ reached by the late 1870s were made possible by the expansion of credit and how the expectations of the rural population were embedded in the credit system. Vaughan’s second explanation is that the Land Act of 1870 strengthened tenants’ security without providing remedies for landlord–tenant discord.25 And his third is that the New Departure (the agreement of Fenians to join forces with C. S. Parnell to take up the land question) negotiated in June 1879 offered Irish tenants singularly better leadership than had been available in the preceding decades; Parnell and Michael Davitt were ‘a formidable combination’ compared with earlier leaders, such as Gavan Duffy.26 Be that as it may, the above arguments contribute primarily to explaining the short-term timing of the Land War: why it occurred when it did rather than, say, ten years earlier or later. Essentially, this literature merely qualifies and supplements the explanation we have always had for the short-term timing of the Land War: the economic depression of the late 1870s, which no one doubts is what triggered the movement. If we turn from the issue of short-term timing to that of spatial variation in the intensity of the agitation, the most thorough analysis we have is a paper published in 1981 by Andrew Orridge.27 He calculated correlation and regression coefficients using a variety of social and economic characteristics of counties as the independent variables and the number of agrarian outrages and land meetings in counties as the dependent variables. These computations were made separately for the three years of the Land War. He found that his dependent variables were best explained, not by large structural changes in the post-Famine period but rather by the ‘immediate environment’, though the only direct measure he had of immediate causes was the eviction rate in the counties, and it has a solid relationship with the intensity of the agitation only in 1882.28 He got a strong relationship in different years for two other variables, which were generated by factor analysis: (1) smallholding peasantry that relied on subsistence agriculture and (2) family farms not employing wage labourers.29 The first of these he considered an indirect measure of the ‘immediate environment’, distinguishing, he believed, those counties that were most vulnerable to the effects of the economic downturn and the

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potato failure. In Social Origins, I did a similar analysis, for all three years of the Land War combined, and found that spatial variation in the intensity of the agitation (as measured by land meetings, agrarian crimes and arrests under the PPP Act) was related to two variables generated by factor analysis that are similar, though not identical, to his: (1) the coexistence of pasture and subsistence tillage and (2) relatively small farms.30 Finally, we can turn to long-term timing. Do any of these studies help us understand why the Land War occurred in the latter part of the nineteenth century rather than before the Famine? Do they help to explain differences in the character of agrarian collective action between the two periods? The answer is that, for the most part, analyses of the short-term timing and spatial variation do not provide evidence one way or the other for why the Land War erupted during a post-Famine economic depression rather than during one of the many periods of adversity before the Famine. Nor do they explain the transformation in the character of collective action over time, a limitation that Orridge himself acknowledged.31 Although Vaughan does not actually do so, he could argue that the leadership that was available in the 1870s was superior to the leadership available before the Famine. Such a claim would be strengthened by Comerford’s groundbreaking research, which Vaughan cites, on the establishment during the 1870s of a formidable Fenian network in the west of Ireland.32 To this can be added Feingold’s research, which made us aware that, in the years leading up to the Land War, substantial numbers of large farmers acquired considerable experience in politics as elected members of the Poor Law Boards.33 Most important of all, Hoppen has outlined the effects after the Famine of electoral-franchise legislation, chiefly the Act of 1850, which boosted the Irish electorate from 45,000 to 164,000 and standardized the criteria for inclusion. The post-Famine electorate now included a large number of relatively well-off (adult male) farmers. This was the electorate that was eventually responsible for the great Parnellite election victories.34 Whether this literature contributes to a greater understanding of the alliances in which we are interested is another matter. Not even a positive or negative correlation between spatial variation in the intensity of the agitation and county differences in the post-Famine increase in the number of shopkeepers and publicans per capita would support or refute any given explanation for the alliance between farmers and townsmen in the Land War. Orridge sums up his analysis with the conclusion that hypotheses that relate the Land War to major changes in rural society during the second half of the nineteenth century are not supported by his data. We should not expect, however, that areas that were less commercially developed in

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the pre-Famine period would undergo greater economic and social change in the post-Famine period than parts of the country that were, in relative terms, already more commercially developed before the Famine. Indeed, I specifically argued in Social Origins that what was significant about the former was that, even as their inhabitants became more integrated into supra-local social and economic networks, many of them remained much less commercialized than most tenants in other parts of the country and thus dangerously dependent on the potato (139–47). Nonetheless, there is more than a little to be gained for the present purposes from these studies. First, if one examines Donnelly’s ‘risingexpectations’ thesis carefully, one finds that it was more complex than it has been rendered since then, especially by critics. While it serves primarily to explain the short-term rather than the long-term timing of the Land War, Donnelly does provide a reason why small farmers, large farmers and townsmen were drawn together at the same time. This combination, he believed, was made more likely in the late 1870s because the threat of destitution and eviction faced by small farmers and labourers coincided with anxiety among larger farmers and townsmen that they would lose the gains they had made during the previous decades of economic prosperity.35 Second, while the cross-county data analysis in Orridge’s paper and in Social Origins helps primarily to explain spatial variation in the intensity of the agitation, the finding that the movement was relatively intense in areas that combined livestock rearing with small farms and subsistence tillage is consistent with the explanation given in Social Origins for the alliances.This is where the social intercourse brought about by the expanding livestock trade coexisted with a tenantry struggling desperately to make ends meet, and where, as I have already pointed out, the alliance of large and small farmers was initially forged. Town and country Explanations offered by subsequent writers for the rural–urban alliance are consistent with the explanation offered in Social Origins. Feingold too believed that higher rates of literacy, the post-Famine growth of provincial towns, more trade between these towns and those living in the countryside, the greater commercialization of agriculture and advances in communications and transportation – all these changes – broadened social networks, deepened social interaction and increased interdependency among the segments of the population whose members eventually came together in the Land War. While in varying degrees all members of these groups

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shared directly in this greater social integration, Feingold concurred that certain people – shopkeepers, publicans and newspaper editors in the provincial towns – acted as intermediaries between rural Ireland and the outside world. They had larger social networks than did farmers as a result of regular contact with rural people located at diverse social levels and with people in other counties and even in Dublin.36 Like the agrarian class structure, the class structure of towns has been oversimplified. Some sources would lead us to suppose that the majority of the shopkeepers were rapacious moneylenders, who used their merchandise trade to lure farmers into debt and then manipulated the debt to shackle them to their shops and to drive them further into debt by charging outrageous rates of interest. There were no doubt shopkeepers who could be described in this way. The term ‘gombeen man’ was frequently used to label them, along with other usurious lenders. Yet, the reality was that, like farmers, the shopkeepers and publicans in the towns ranged from those who ran substantial enterprises to those with very small businesses. The majority of those with whom rural people traded were mediumsized operators, who were not creditors by choice. They preferred to be paid in cash, which is why they offered large discounts for cash purchases. The problem they faced was, of course, that most of them were in debt as well and they badly needed cash to make their own payments. They depended for their trade, however, on a population of consumers whose cash incomes were small and seasonal at best and precarious or vanishing at worst. The terms of credit could be heavy, and a large debt to a shopkeeper made it difficult for a farmer to take his business elsewhere (130–1).37 Yet, the terms were usually better than those offered by others who were willing to lend money to small farmers, and there were precious few of them. Even critics of the credit system can be found admitting that ‘neither the shopkeeper nor the farmer saw anything amiss with it’.38 While this is certainly an oversimplification, it is true that if customers were bound to their shopkeepers, so too were shopkeepers bound to their customers. To refuse credit, demand payment or foreclose could mean losing not only that customer but perhaps many of his kin, friends and sympathizers as well (129–32). And the number of shops competing for the custom of farmers was not small by any standard, except in relatively remote regions. (At least 236 shopkeepers were in the electorate of the Tralee poor law union according to Feingold’s figures.39) It was a difficult balancing act and became more difficult as the depression set in during the late 1870s.40 When things turned bad, debts piled up,

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bank loans mostly dried up and shopkeepers were caught between their own creditors and a farming population that increasingly could not pay. No small number of shopkeepers took farmers to court; others joined the Land League; still others were skilful enough to do both. They were obviously concerned that the depression was reducing the purchasing power of farmers, a situation made worse by the fact that agricultural rents, so they thought, went out of the country to the benefit of English rather than Irish commercial interests. Rent reductions would help shopkeepers with their cash-flow problems in so far as they enabled farmers to keep buying and to make payments on their debts (266).41 Most of all, shopkeepers had an interest in preventing evictions. Unless a farmer had substantial liquid assets of which a shopkeeper could get a reasonable share – rarely the case, especially since the claims of landlords to arrears enjoyed legal priority over other debts42 – the bankruptcy and eviction of a tenant may have been a satisfactory outcome for the landlord, but certainly was not for the shopkeeper. The social and economic ties between townspeople and farmers not only made the town–country alliance of the Land War possible; these ties also shaped the character of the agitation. Naturally shopkeepers made every effort they could to promote the idea that agricultural rents lacked the legitimacy of other kinds of debts.43 The leaders of the land movement, especially the central executive of the League, encouraged this idea. At land meetings, Davitt repeatedly told tenants not to pay any rent until they had met their necessities and paid their debts to the small shopkeepers whose credit had enabled them to feed their families.44 This policy was pursued not because the central executive favoured the interests of shopkeepers over those of farmers but because they knew that the movement they were directing was built on the relationship between townspeople and farmers, and they wanted nothing that would undermine this relationship. These relationships also inspired the most notorious of the tactics employed by the Land League. The effectiveness of a boycott varies with the social and economic interaction of a community, in this case an interaction in which townspeople were as much involved as farmers (312). It was not just landlords, land agents and landgrabbers who could become the targets of formal or informal boycotting. Anyone who opposed the land agitation could find it more difficult to run a business, sell their produce at fairs, get credit in shops or hire cars. Although farmers who were heavily in debt to a shopkeeper would have difficulty supporting a boycott of this particular shopkeeper,45 there is ample evidence that shopkeeping and operating public houses were, as occupations, highly vulnerable to

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boycotting. Indeed, shopkeepers and publicans often feared their business would suffer if they were not seen as sufficiently behind the protest.46 On the other hand, it was generally agreed that supporting the movement was good for business, especially if you were a publican. Agrarian classes Subsequent research has also supported my explanation for the alliance between larger and smaller farmers. Jones’s study of graziers is particularly instructive. His thesis is that the conflict between the graziers and other farmers was not due solely to opposition over the distribution of land. The total acreage of land occupied by holdings of more than 200 acres and the percentage of the national herd grazed on holdings of more than 200 acres did not change significantly from 1861 to 1912.47 These figures do not include untenanted land, that is, land that was held directly by the landowner as occupant, some of which was let to graziers on a temporary basis, typically for 11 months. Jones maintains, however, that we cannot assume that the conversion of a holding from tenanted to untenanted always entailed a transfer from a small farmer to a large one, and he provides some evidence to corroborate his position.48 The people who controlled the quantity of land available, and by what method of letting, were not the large farmers but rather the landowners, who, in so far as they preferred eleven-month letting, did so because there were then no tenants on the land asking for rent reductions or claiming prescriptive rights and because land let on this basis was not subject to the land acts.49 It was the landowning class, not large farmers, who later presented the most serious obstacle to the CDB in the 1890s.50 The way in which farmers in a wide range of economic circumstances participated in the livestock economy was examined by Jones in greater depth than I did in Social Origins. He stressed that ranching is functionally necessary in a predominantly livestock economy. Short-term letting allowed farmers – and not just very large farmers – to adjust the amount of pasture they were renting according to the fluctuating size of their stock. Jones does not dispute the genuine divergence in interests between smaller farmers and graziers. In the competition for land, there was inevitably resentment towards those who had the most.51 He insists, nevertheless, that conflicts in interest, whatever they be, provide only part of the explanation for the role that graziers came to play in Irish politics and society. Equally consequential was that many graziers were more detached from agrarian communities. Many of them associated with professionals, Anglican clergymen, estate agents and even landowners. They affected higher status,

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lived in large homes, engaged in conspicuous consumption and sought to educate their children at a level well above that of the majority of their neighbours. A significant number of them were Protestants. Many were from outside the counties in which they rented land, some from England or Scotland. (Indeed, as noted above, large farmers were more often called ‘graziers’ if this was the case.) In my terms, they were less a part of the emerging community of larger and smaller farmers, and townspeople, that I considered the critical social base for the Irish Land War. This point should not be overstated. I argued above that no small measure of social and economic interaction could be found between graziers and smaller farmers because the former bought livestock from the latter. Haggling over the price of store cattle may not have made them friends (and obviously did not erase differences in their standards of living, economic power and material interests), but it did help create the kinds of networks that facilitate large-scale collective action. Furthermore, if most graziers with hundreds of acres of land were socially separated as Jones claims, many others were less so. This is what Feingold had in mind when he said that graziers were not socially isolated, despite their social and economic advantages. And he too believed that ‘the binding agent was sheep or cattle’.52 We have to be careful not to see oppositions within the land movement always in class terms. Religious dissimilarities were also, of course, important, and one of the criticisms that can be made of Social Origins is that insufficient attention was given to religion, perhaps because it seemed to me that sectarian divisions had been accorded enough emphasis in the study of Irish history.53 There were also ideological disagreements that shaped the Land War. While these disagreements had some correlation with socio-economic inequalities, we cannot reduce ideological differences to class differences. Almost all social movements have more and less radical wings, even if no class differences exist among supporters. By the same token, not all the violence against larger farmers during the Land War should be interpreted as class struggle within the farming population. While many instances of violence can be understood in these terms, violence against farmers – large and small – was most often intended, not to divide the rural population but rather to increase its solidarity (pour encourager les autres) by punishing the faint-hearted, deserters, free riders and scabs of one kind or another. Although very small Irish landholders were likely spared this kind of discipline, any farmer who might reasonably be expected to support the cause could be attacked for not doing so.

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As a way of summing up, in pre-Famine Ireland, larger and smaller tenant farmers had important common interests vis-à-vis landowners. The explanation I gave for their failure to unite at that time in the way they did during the Land War was that (1) the majority of the rural population was poorly integrated at supra-local levels and (2) as a result of the conacre system and the high rate of subletting, their common interests were partially offset by differences in interests. By the late 1870s, the proportion of common interests to opposing interests had shifted to some degree towards the former, though significant differences still existed between the interests of smaller and larger tenants. More fundamentally, at least in my mind, there was greater social integration of the bulk of the rural population into larger regional and national networks. I was not suggesting that in 1879 farmers with five or ten acres were being invited into the homes of farmers with hundreds of acres nor that small farmers were putting up relatives in the best local inn. What was being suggested was that smaller farmers were coming to town more often to sell a calf or two at fairs, were buying more at local shops and were perhaps having a pint at public houses that were also frequented by larger farmers. Furthermore, these changes had taken place not only in Munster and Leinster but also, though to a lesser extent, in Connaught. Alliances after the Land War of 1879–82 During the four decades that followed the Land War, the class alliance of Irish farmers gradually broke down. A number of factors require further investigation in order to explain this breakdown. Table 5.1 provides a list of some of them. The first – the social isolation of graziers – has already been introduced. I would add now that this social isolation may have increased over time as those who could maintain their upward mobility were differentiated from those who could not, as the status was passed from one generation to another and as the graziers and members of their families were able to use their wealth and social/cultural capital to integrate, if not always easily, into the larger upper middle class of the British Isles. Although there continued to be some graziers who, for political or other reasons, kept close ties with many people in the communities in which they lived, they may have become victims of their own success. As large farmers and wealthier townsmen became the new elite in provincial Ireland, the resentment, sense of grievance and blame for economic hardships formerly directed at the landowning elite likely became gradually directed at the new elite instead.

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Table 5.1 Summary of changes that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries affecting the political alignment of farming classes Social position of graziers Elite displacement

Interests

Eleven-month lettings Expectations

Legitimation of land redistribution

Political mobilization

Nationalist leadership

European context

Social isolation of graziers may have become solidified over time. As a new provincial elite emerged composed of the wealthiest landholders and townsmen, the hostility and blame formerly directed at landowners may have shifted to the new elite. The common cause against landowners constituted a declining share of the interests of tenant farmers. Landowners increasingly sought to let land on an eleven-month basis. The Land War and the land acts enacted by the British government raised expectations of material improvement that the legislation did not meet. Government efforts to deal with the problem of uneconomic holdings may have raised the legitimacy of land redistribution as the next step in land reform. The political mobilization of smaller farmers generated by the Land War and the extension of the electoral franchise to small farmers and labourers made them politically more powerful. Growth of the Irish nationalist movement and competition among factions provided support and leadership for the demands of small farmers. The urban and rural working classes were being mobilized in other parts of Europe, including the British Isles. More politicians were taking up their causes.

Even if these social and political changes had not occurred, the balance of common and opposing interests among farmers would certainly have shifted again, now in a different direction and for reasons that differed from those that account for the shift that had occurred during and after

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the Famine. As the land acts progressively undermined landlordism in Ireland, the common cause against landowners constituted a declining share of the interests of tenant farmers. In addition, as mentioned already, the land acts gave Irish landowners a greater incentive to let land for less than a year in order to avoid its provisions, an unintended effect of the acts that added to the opposition in interests between large farmers and those with small holdings.54 The land acts also created expectations that were not fulfilled. As Donnelly noted some years ago, with every legislative enactment designed to advance the interests of tenants vis-à-vis landlords, it became more obvious that legislation of this kind was not going to remedy the major economic problem faced by small landholders.55 At the same time, the establishment of the CDB under the Land Act of 1891, as well as subsequent efforts by the British government and the Irish Free State to assist farmers with non-economic holdings, only raised the legitimacy of land redistribution as the next step in land reform. Meanwhile, these discontented small farmers had become more politically powerful in Ireland than they had been before the Land War. The political mobilization of smaller farmers in 1879–82 facilitated their mobilization in the following decades, all the more after the Reform Act of 1884 extended the electoral franchise to include most (adult male) small farmers and labourers, a group that had been largely excluded from the electoral act of 1850.56 Small farmers also found more people willing to take up their cause, primarily as a result of the growth of the nationalist movement. The expansion of extremist factions may have been the most consequential. Militant calls for land redistribution increasingly came from Sinn Féin and the IRA, perhaps as a result of the social composition of these movements, perhaps also because it was a radical demand and served to differentiate them from less radical nationalists. Thus, Fenians were over-represented among those who took up the cause of land redistribution during the Land War. The IRA encouraged demands for land redistribution when it was competing with other nationalists for power. And so did the anti-Treaty faction.57 We should also remind ourselves of the European context. Since the French Revolution new ideological currents had been shaping political forces in Europe, with the result that public acquiescence to traditional class and status structures was being undermined. More to the point, during the last two or three decades of the nineteenth century, and in the early decades of the twentieth, the urban and rural working classes in Europe were being politically mobilized on an unprecedented scale, though, as I shall indicate in a moment, not always with the same consequences that their mobilization had in Ireland.

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In any case, we should not exaggerate the pace at which opposition between landlords and tenants was displaced by opposition between larger and smaller farmers, or between farmers and labourers. It was well into the twentieth century before one could say that the shift was completed. Given the coexistence of grazing and exceptionally small holdings in Connaught, the realignment was no doubt earlier there. When the UIL was initially established by William O’Brien in 1898, land redistribution was central to its programme, but Campbell has argued that the UIL was not seriously split between large and small farmers, even in Galway.58 Nor was the Ranch War of 1907–08 exclusively a war of farmer against farmer. It was also a war of tenants against landowners, specifically a campaign to force them to sell their estates at prices determined by the occupiers.59 Ultimately, in the years before and after Independence, the struggle over the land in Ireland became a struggle among occupiers and would-be occupiers.This was indeed class conflict within the agrarian population; in some parts of the country, it could be described as class warfare. Still, it was not just class conflict.There was plenty of contention among farmers of the same class, including not only large farmers versus large farmers but also, as recent writers on the subject have taken care to point out, small farmers versus small farmers.60 These battles were often personal and particularistic, but they could also be collective, typically pitting local claimants to land against those from other districts. Post-independence Ireland had a land question just as much as did preindependence Ireland.The issue became one of the differences between the two major political parties – Cumann na nGaedheal/Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil – the latter promising more land redistribution than the former. When Fianna Fáil came into power, however, it did not carry out what it had advocated. A number of reasons can be given: (1) the dependence of the country’s economy on livestock exports, (2) the need for the party to widen its electoral base in order to form a government, (3) sharp differences in policy within Fianna Fáil and among those administering land reform, (4) legal and administrative obstacles to significant transfers of landownership and (5) the fact that there was simply not enough good agricultural land to turn all rural families into autonomous and sustainable small agricultural proprietors.61 Nonetheless, when it was all over, Ireland was left with a rural social structure that contrasted sharply with that found in other parts of the British Isles. In the early 1960s, the mean size of agricultural holdings in Ireland was about 17 hectares, as compared with around 30 hectares in Scotland, Wales and England, taken individually or separately. The relative persistence of small farms in Ireland was the product of a large number of

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forces operating over three centuries of history, but one of them was clearly the Land War and the political mobilization of smaller farmers that the Land War initiated. If, in the end, many Irish small farmers and labourers have been left unsatisfied by the land-redistribution programmes, the fact that there has been any land redistribution at all requires explanation. The benefits that smaller farmers in Ireland derived from allying with townsmen and larger farmers were not huge, but they did better than they would have done if there had never been a Land War. What I did not do There were, of course, many things that I did not do in my book. Since my principal objective was to investigate the social origins of the Land War, I was less concerned with how the Land League worked and with interactions and conflicts among those who participated in the movement. I also made only brief references to relationships between local branches and the central branch in Dublin. Although these subjects are touched upon in Social Origins, other works, beginning with Bew’s monograph published in the same year, have treated them in greater depth than I did, or intended to do. I also did not give much consideration to changes in political forces in the British Isles. I did not doubt the importance of these forces, but I saw British politics and British perceptions of the Irish Land War as outside the scope of a book on its social origins. Less justifiably, I said little about culture and ideology. Fortunately again, this aspect of the Irish land question has been dealt with by others, most notably Bill Feingold, Philip Bull and Anne Kane. Feingold helps us appreciate the decline in deference towards the landed elite, at least on the Boards of Guardians. Bull examines the decline in the cultural hegemony and legitimacy of the landed elite.62 And Kane examines the discursive struggles that occurred during the Land War and traces the making of Irish national identity as an emergent and contingent outcome of these struggles.63 The Ladies’ Land League I did not give much attention to the Ladies’ Land League (LLL), only a couple of pages. My excuse – it’s what I told my wife – is that the LLL was not relevant to the questions that I was trying to answer. It would have been difficult to claim that the role of women in the Land War was a major difference between it and earlier land agitation in Ireland. This was one alliance that long predated the agitation of 1879–82. Women were often active participants in agrarian collective action before the Famine as

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well as during the Land War, pre-eminently in resisting evictions and enforcing boycotts.64 Just as boycotting was strengthened by social and economic intercourse between rural people and townspeople, it was also dependent on the collective action of men and women, since women were important in local social networks, trade and services.65 Of course, Irish women had also been involved in other forms of collective action before the Land War, forms that were much more centrally organized. These included the movement for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the Women’s Suffrage Movement; the last mentioned began in Ireland in the late 1860s and early 1870s and was marked by the formation of the Northern Ireland Society for Women’s Suffrage in 1871 and the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association in 1876.66 Yet, it was well known, and I knew it too that there was something different about the collective action of women in the Land War, though I am not sure I really understood what it was when Social Origins was being written. As I now see it, the LLL combined two characteristics that were found separately in previous collective action in which women had been engaged. In contrast with the earlier collaboration of women in resisting evictions and in agrarian violence, the LLL was a national organization with branches and a centralized leadership. At the same time, the LLL was larger and less elitist than the earlier centralized organizations to which women had belonged. Admittedly, the women who joined the LLL were more middle class than the majority of women who resisted evictions and engaged in agrarian violence; indeed, the social composition of the LLL was more middle class than the social composition of the Land League itself (339). However, class bias of this kind was much less pronounced in the LLL than in the earlier centrally organized campaigns in which women had been active. The philanthropic activity of women, the movement for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the Women’s Suffrage Movement were the work of a small number of middle-class women, many of them Protestants.67 In Social Origins, I said hardly anything about these characteristics of the LLL, much less explained them.To be honest, I still do not have an explanation with which I am satisfied, nor have I encountered one in the more recent literature. Scholars are divided on the experiences of Irish women in the post-Famine period. Some take it for granted that the decline in their traditional employment as spinners and agricultural labourers during this period undermined the former power they had enjoyed in Irish society; increasingly, they were ‘confined’ to housework in the private sphere.68 Joanna Bourke, on the other hand, has argued that the movement of women from paid work into the private sphere was not involuntary and that in

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many ways it increased their power.69 In so far as the post-Famine social changes discussed in Social Origins were experienced by women as well as men – and I certainly thought that the social, if not the political, changes were experienced by both – I may have provided something of an explanation for the fact that a large number of Irish women organized themselves in the Land War in a way they had never done before.Yet, I am convinced, as are most of my readers I am sure, that this is not all there was to it. Clearly, more research is needed on the social origins of the LLL. In any event, if the alliance of larger and smaller farmers entailed serious conflicts, the alliance of men and women in the Land War generated even more, at least among the leaders of the two organizations. A number of historical works have treated this subject, some of which have put considerable emphasis on the gender aspect of it, while others less so.70 How much conflict characterized local branches we do not know, though we do know that these branches were composed largely of the wives and daughters of members of the Land League.71 In any case, the leaders of the LLL, and in particular the president, Anna Parnell, adopted a relatively radical approach, very different from the contribution that had been envisaged for them by the men who had been behind the creation of this new body and who had thought it would devote itself to relieving distress and maintaining the organizational structure of the movement. The leaders of the LLL were opposed to the Land Act of 1881 and to the Kilmainham Treaty of 1882, the latter of which Charles Parnell negotiated with Gladstone to bring the agitation to an end. When he was released from prison, Charles forced the LLL to disband by threatening not to cover their overdraft.72 He did so because the LLL had spent too much money on relief and had taken the movement out of his hands.73 His strained relations with his sister and his lack of confidence in her no doubt also played a part. By then the leaders of the LLL had themselves become fed up with the Land League and its tactics, and even with the expectations (for assistance) of many Irish tenants.74 The LLL was also undermined by the death of Anna’s sister, Fanny, which occurred when Anna was in poor health and which she took hard. She left Ireland never to return and never spoke to her brother again. Several other members of the LLL moved to America after the demise of the organization, where they took part in Irish American politics.75 Subsequently, women were active in the National League and in local Irish politics in the 1880s and 1890s, but their numbers were small.76 Anna Parnell avoided politics until the publication of Davitt’s history of the Land War in 1904, which infuriated her for a number of reasons, but primarily because he credited the LLL with encouraging anarchy and outrages.77 In response, she

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wrote her own history of the Land War, but repeated attempts to find a publisher were unsuccessful and she died in 1911, still frustrated in the belief that her version of the movement had been denied a hearing.78 This does not mean that the LLL had little consequence. First, as just noted, it represented the largest centralized movement to date of Catholic women in Ireland. Although Jennie Wyse Power was exaggerating when she later claimed that a branch of the LLL ‘was established in almost every town’,79 by contemporary standards, the number of branches was large for a women’s organization, likely several hundred. (Carter has counted 16 in Queen’s County.80) Second, the LLL preserved the organization of the Land League when most of its leaders were incarcerated under the Protection of Person and Property Act. Third, some women involved in the LLL were later active in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, in the nationalist movement or in other varieties of political action. The best known is Wyse Power, who was a member of the central executive of the LLL and later a poor law guardian, an active member of the Gaelic League, a founding vice president of Inghinidhe na hÉireann and a member of the executives of Sinn Féin and Cumann na mBan, the latter of which included her daughter, Nancy Wyse Power.81 And fourth, the LLL served as an inspiration and a precedent for women involved in later political activities. Maud Gonne, who founded Inghinidhe na hEireann, had no direct connection with the LLL, but was much inspired by it, and used it as a precedent to push for a greater acceptance of women in the National League.82 In comparison with nationalist conflicts in other countries then or before, women were relatively active in the Irish independence movement. The LLL must be included in any effort to explain why this was the case. We do, however, need to be careful about what conclusions we draw. I argued above that smaller farmers in Ireland, as a result of their alliance with larger farmers, fared better in the twentieth century than did smaller farmers in most other countries. The same cannot be said of women and their alliance with men during the Land War, at least not from a feminist standpoint. Several reasons for this have been provided in the literature.The first lies in the contradictory pressures on and aspirations of politically engaged women in Ireland. Obviously, most of the Protestant women who had been active in the opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts and in the Women’s Suffrage Movement became disconnected from their Catholic counterparts in the land agitation and in the nationalist cause. In addition, what female nationalists could do to advance the rights of women was constrained because most men and even many women in the nationalist crusade were unwilling to permit any sacrifice of the nationalist for the feminist struggle.

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The second reason lies in the ‘gender conservatism’ of the great majority of Irish men and women. Female religious participation increased considerably in Ireland during the last half of the nineteenth century, as it did in other countries in Europe and North America. The number of nuns rose from about 120 in 1800 to about 8,000 in 1900; in 1851, there were some 2,500 priests to 1,500 nuns, but in 1901, the latter were more than double the former.83 In addition, Ireland was less urbanized than were most other countries in Western Europe. For these and other reasons, Irish people, including women, were generally more conservative in their attitudes towards gender roles. We do not find many women in the Dáil during the first half of the twentieth century, and those we do find did not provide a lot of opposition to the conservatism of the political elite on gender issues.84 The women in the Senate put up more of a fight, but their numbers were not large enough to obstruct what the Irish state did to keep married women in the home.85 We have here a paradox in the striking contrast between this gender conservatism and the role Irish women played in the LLL and in Irish nationalism. If we are going to understand it, we have to take into account the contribution of women to the development of Irish Catholicism during the nineteenth century and thus to shaping Irish gender conservatism.86 We also need to take into account the personal convictions of a broad range of Irish women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including nationalists like Mary E. L. Butler, Sinéad Bean de Valera (née Jennie Flanagan) and Helena Concannon, all of whom believed that the mission of women was to raise future citizens. Concannon was a popular author of female hagiography and didactic history and later one of the most successful female politicians in Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century. Her father was a member of the Land League and her mother of the LLL. She associated with feminists, but, as a conservative Catholic, she did not share their opinions on gender roles. Although not opposed to women getting the vote, she also supported much of the legal apparatus institutionalized in post-independence Ireland designed to preserve a traditional gender division of labour.87 Final thoughts I want to conclude by making two assertions that run counter to assumptions that I have found in some of the literature on social movements, including the Irish Land War. First, in so far as conflicts within a movement can be explained by class, gender or other social dissimilarities, these

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conflicts can be a result of alliances between classes or genders, not evidence that there were really no such alliances. I was quite surprised that some Irish historians regarded my book and Bew’s Land and the National Question as representing opposing viewpoints on the Land War. I read Paul’s book, or at least his doctoral dissertation, while I was still working on my book and I perceived it as complementary to my work; indeed, I can remember writing him a letter to this effect. In Social Origins, I fully recognized the sharp differences in interests within the tenant population, and in his book, he fully recognized that the Land War was an alliance based on those interests they had in common. Nevertheless, a false opposition between us was created in the literature and still persists to this day.88 What Paul did show was that the alliance between larger and smaller tenants created disputes within the movement and complex struggles over tactics and strategy. This is not surprising and does not mean there was no alliance. Similarly, discord between the leaders of the Land League and those of the LLL would never have occurred if there had been little connection between the two organizations, if they had not been claiming to represent the same cause and speak for the same people. Second, it is often taken for granted, in and outside academia, that conflict within social movements is evidence of weakness, of a failure to unite in a common endeavour. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between cause and effect. While factionalism can weaken a collective effort and prevent it from achieving its goals, factionalism itself is often the consequence of the strength of a movement and, to this extent, a measure of its power – power that can become a resource over which activists struggle with one another, as they also struggle against a common enemy. The social, economic and political changes that took place in postFamine Ireland created a new collective resource consisting of a larger supra-locally mobilized public, available to those who could steer it in a particular direction. This potential was manifested in the more effective organization of the Catholic Church after 1850, and in a noticeable, if erratic, increase in contentious collective action during the late 1860s and over the course of the 1870s: the Amnesty campaign, the escalation in aggressive electoral contests, the organization of the Home Rule movement, the formation of three to four dozen farmers’ clubs, the growth of Fenianism even in less urbanized parts of the country and the expanding land agitation during years leading up to the Land War (219, 246–7).89 It was in response to this emerging collective resource that Fenians undertook the ‘New Departure’, that Parnell assumed the leadership of the land agitation and that this movement became bitterly

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factionalized in 1882. This finale is often characterized as a pathetic degeneration of the movement, but could arguably be seen as a competition over its spoils – not just the benefits of the Land Act of 1881, but also the new collective power that the Land League had galvanized, enlarged and exploited. It was a recognition that a new collective resource had emerged that encouraged agrarian demands that went beyond those of the farmers’ clubs of the 1870s and encouraged the women who were asked to organize the LLL to go beyond what the men had intended they do. And it was as a consequence of these new political opportunities that countless local battles – many of a personal nature, others a mixture of personal, ideological and factional – were fuelled in the provincial towns, which had become the centres of Irish life, socially and politically, to an extent that was not true in earlier historical periods. Indeed, much of the political history of Ireland during the half century after the Land War can be seen as a struggle among Irish men and women over the collective political power generated in 1879–82, a struggle that was only gradually, in some years painfully, institutionalized in the Irish Free State and Republic. Notes 1 Page numbers in parentheses refer to Samuel Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, 1979). 2 The publications that influenced me the most at that time were Charles Tilly, ‘Collective Violence in European Perspective’, in H. D. Graham and T. R. Gurr (eds), The History of Violence in America (New York, 1969); Tilly, ‘The Changing Place of Collective Violence’, in Melvin Richter (ed.), Essays in Theory and History: An Approach to the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass., 1970); and David Snyder and Tilly, ‘Hardship and Collective Violence’, American Sociological Review, 37:5 (1972). 3 Samuel Clark, ‘The Social Composition of the Land League’, Irish Historical Studies, 17:68 (1971). 4 Samuel Clark, ‘The Importance of Agrarian Classes: Agrarian Class Structure and Collective Action in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, British Journal of Sociology, 29:1 (1978), 33. 5 Ibid. 6 Samuel Clark, ‘The Political Mobilization of Irish Farmers’, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 22:4 (1975). 7 R. V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context (Dublin, 1985), pp. 238, 248. 8 Donald Jordan, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 194–6. 9 J. W. H. Carter, The Land War and Its Leaders in Queen’s County (Portlaoise, 1994), p. 77.

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10 W. L. Feingold, ‘Land League Power: The Tralee Poor-Law Election of 1881’, in Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly, Jr. (eds), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest 1780–1914 (Madison and Manchester, 1983), p. 301; and his The Revolt of the Tenantry: The Transformation of Local Government in Ireland, 1872–1886 (Boston, 1984), p. 131. Each voter had four votes. Those who did not vote, spoiled their ballot or cast only one or two votes were not included. League candidates obtained 63 per cent of the votes cast by shopkeepers and 61 per cent of those cast by farmers. 11 K. T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 1832–1885 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 473–8. 12 P. Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1979), pp. 179, 189, 190; Jordan, Land and Popular Politics, pp. 193–6. 13 Jordan, Land and Popular Politics, pp. 208–9, 218–19. 14 Ibid., pp. 230–2. 15 D. S. Jones, Graziers, Land Reform, and Political Conflict in Ireland (Washington, 1995), pp. 159–63. 16 Clark, ‘Social Composition of the Land League’ and ‘Political Mobilization of Irish Farmers’. The same point has been made more recently in Carter, Land War in Queen’s County, p. 21. 17 Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society, p. 478; Carter, Land War in Queen’s County, pp. 76–7, and note 4. 18 Terence Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’: The Land Question in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 2004), p. 30. 19 F. Campbell, Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland, 1891–1921 (Oxford, 2005), p. 18. 20 The Agricultural Statistics of Ireland for the Year 1881 [C 3332]. H. C. 1882, lxxiv, 93. 21 J. S. Donnelly, Jr., The Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork: The Rural Economy and the Land Question (London, 1975), pp. 251–2. 22 W. E. Vaughan, Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1994), p. 211. 23 J. S. Donnelly, Jr., ‘The Agricultural Depression of 1859–64’, Irish Economic and Social History, 3 (1976). 24 Vaughan, Landlords and Tenants, p. 213. 25 Ibid., pp. 213–14. 26 Ibid., pp. 214–15. 27 A. W. Orridge, ‘Who Supported the Land War? An Aggregate Data Analysis of Irish Agrarian Discontent, 1879–82’, Economic and Social Review, 12:3 (1981). 28 Ibid., 224–6. 29 See ibid., pp. 215–18 for a more precise description of these variables. 30 See Social Origins, pp. 143–7, 252–5 for a more precise description of these variables. 31 Orridge, ‘Who Supported the Land War?’, 227. 32 Comerford, Fenians in Context, pp. 213–16.

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33 Feingold, Revolt of the Tenantry, chapters 1 and 2. See also the preface to this book by Emmet Larkin. 34 Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society, chapter 1, part 1. 35 Donnelly, Cork, p. 252. 36 Feingold, Revolt of the Tenantry, pp. 52 and 56–7. 37 M. D. Higgins and J. P. Gibbon, ‘Shopkeeper-Graziers and Land Agitation in Ireland, 1895–1900’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land, Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 103–4. 38 Ibid., p. 103. The author quoted is the novelist and essayist G. A. Birmingham, pen name for the Rev. J. O. Hannay, Anglican rector of Westport. 39 Feingold, ‘Land League Power’, p. 300; and his Revolt of the Tenantry, p. 130. The occupations of another 150 voters could not be coded, some of whom may have been shopkeepers, though probably not many since shopkeepers are easier to identify than most other occupations. 40 Feingold, Revolt of the Tenantry, pp. 91–2. 41 R. V. Comerford, ‘The Land War and the Politics of Distress, 1877–82’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland VI Ireland Under the Union, II 1870–1921 (Oxford, 1996), p. 43. 42 Adam Pole, ‘Sheriffs’ Sales during the Land War, 1879–82’, Irish Historical Studies, 34:136 (2005), 387–8. 43 Comerford, ‘Land War’, p. 43. 44 T. W. Moody, Davitt and the Irish Revolution, 1846–82 (Oxford, 1981), p. 347. 45 Higgins and Gibbon, ‘Shopkeeper-Graziers and Land Agitation’, pp. 106–7. 46 Ibid., pp. 108–10, 112; Carter, Land War in Queen’s County, pp. 94, 104, 183; Campbell, Land and Revolution, pp. 33, 139. Curiously, Higgins and Gibbon allege that their research undermines my argument. Although they characterize the relationship between shopkeepers and farmers as more exploitative than I do, for the most part they reaffirm my argument and provide considerable evidence to support it. 47 Jones, Graziers, pp. 50–8, 229–38. The data are taken from the Agricultural Statistics of Ireland for different years from 1861 to 1912. 48 Ibid., pp. 110–19. 49 Ibid., pp. 126–9. 50 Campbell, Land and Revolution, p. 27. 51 Jones, Graziers, pp. 254–5. 52 Feingold, Revolt of the Tenantry, p. 61. 53 Religion has been treated well in Carter, Land War in Queen’s County. 54 Campbell, Land and Revolution, pp. 52–3. 55 James S. Donnelly, Jr. ‘The Land Question in Nationalist Politics’, in T. E. Hachey and L. J. McCaffrey (eds), Perspectives on Irish Nationalism (Kentucky, 1989). More recently, this point has been made by Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, pp. 33, 228. 56 Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society, chapter I, section 1. 57 Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, pp. 35, 42. 58 Campbell, Land and Revolution, p. 291.

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59 Ibid., pp. 86, 99, 102–3. 60 Tony Varley, ‘Agrarian Crime and Social Control’, in Mike Tomlinson, Tony Varley and Ciaran McCullagh (eds), Whose Law and Order? Aspects of Crime and Social Control in Irish Society (Belfast, 1988), pp. 59, 63; Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’, pp. 13, 45, 104–5. 61 Tony Varley, ‘A Region of Sturdy Smallholders? Western Nationalists and Agrarian Politics during the First World War’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 55 (2003); and his ‘Irish Land Reform between the Wars’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 56 (2004). 62 P. Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin, 1996). 63 A. E. Kane, ‘Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation: Narratives as Cultural Structure and Practice’, History and Theory 39:3 (2000); ‘The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland: A Guide for Cultural Analysis of the Irish Land War’, New Hibernia Review, 5:1 (2001); and her Constructing Irish National Identity: Discourse and Ritual during the Land War, 1879–1882 (Basingstoke, 2011). 64 J. K. TeBrake, ‘Irish Peasant Women in Revolt: The Land League Years’, Irish Historical Studies, 28:109 (1992); Stephen Ball, ‘Crowd Activity during the Irish Land War, 1879–90’, in P. Jupp and E. Magennis (eds), Crowds in Ireland, c. 1720–1920 (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 225–6. 65 TeBrake, ‘Irish Peasant Women’, 73–4, 77–9. 66 R. C. Owens, Smashing Times: A History of the Irish Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1889–1922 (Dublin, 1984); Maria Luddy, ‘Women and Politics in NineteenthCentury Ireland’, in M. G. Valiulis and M. O’Dowd (eds), Women and Irish History: Essays in Honour of Margaret MacCurtain (Dublin, 1997); R. C. Owens, A Social History of Women in Ireland, 1870–1970 (Dublin, 2005). 67 Owens, Smashing Times, pp.19, 25; Luddy, ‘Women and Politics’; Owens, Social History of Women, pp.11, 18, 58, 74, 77. 68 J. J. Lee, ‘Women and the Church since the Famine’, in M. MacCurtain and D. Ó Corráin (eds), Women in Irish Society: The Historical Dimension (Westport, 1979); TeBrake, ‘Irish Peasant Women’, 64. 69 Joanna Bourke, ‘“The Best of All Home Rulers”: The Economic Power of Women in Ireland, 1880–1914’, Irish Economic and Social History, 18 (1991); and her Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change, and Housework in Ireland, 1890–1914 (Oxford, 1993). 70 Finolla Collins, ‘The Ladies’ Land League’ (MA dissertation, University College Cork, 1974); T. W. Moody, ‘Anna Parnell and the Land League’, Hermathena, 117 (1974); R. F. Foster, Charles Stewart Parnell: The Man and His Family (Brighton, 1976); M. Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London, 1989); and her ‘The Ladies’ Land League and the Irish Land War 1881/1882: Defining the Relationship between Women and Nation’ in I. Bloom, K. Hagemann, and C. Hall (eds), Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (London, 2000); TeBrake, ‘Irish Peasant Women’, 71; J. M. Côté, Fanny and Anna Parnell: Ireland’s Patriot Sisters (New York, 1991).

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71 For example, see E. Kennedy, The Land Movement in Tullaroan, County Kilkenny, 1879–91 (Dublin, 2004), p. 29. 72 Côté, Fanny and Anna Parnell, p. 218. 73 Moody, Davitt, p. 532; Côté, Fanny and Anna Parnell, p. 216. 74 Côté, Fanny and Anna Parnell, p. 216. 75 Ward, ‘Ladies’ Land League’, p. 241. 76 Ibid., 242; TeBrake, ‘Irish Peasant Women’, 70, 77; Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, p. 44; Owens, Social History of Women, pp. 12–14; Kennedy, Land Movement in Tullaroan, p. 48. 77 Côté, Fanny and Anna Parnell, pp. 244–5. See also M. Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland or the Story of the Land League Revolution (London, 1904), p. 341. Davitt’s point on this page was that this anarchy demonstrated to the government that the imprisonment of the leaders of the Land League had only ‘made the country more ungovernable under the sway of their lady successors’. 78 The manuscript was long lost, but found in 1959 and later published: A. Parnell, The Tale of a Great Sham, ed. Dana Hearne (Dublin, 1986). 79 J. Wyse-Power, ‘The Political Influence of Women in Modern Ireland’, in W. G. Fitzgerald (ed.), The Voice of Ireland: A Survey of the Race and Nation from All Angles by the Foremost Leaders at Home and Abroad (Dublin, 1924). 80 Carter, Land War in Queen’s County, p. 113. 81 S. McCoole, No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years 1900–1923 (Dublin, 2003), pp. 20, 26, 65; Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, pp. 15, 126; Mary Cullen, ‘Jane [Jennie] Wyse Power’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004–7). 82 M. Gonne MacBride, A Servant of the Queen: Reminiscences (London, 1974). 83 Owens, Social History of Women, p. 59. 84 Ibid., pp. 253–4, 269, 279, 281. 85 Ibid., pp. 269, 279. 86 M. P. Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900 (Oxford, 1998). 87 N. C. Smith, A ‘Manly Study’? Irish Women Historians, 1868–1949 (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 118–29. 88 Kane, Constructing Irish National Identity, p. 6, and her article in this collection. Her summary of my explanation of the Land War is also very misleading. 89 See also Hoppen’s good discussion of this in his Elections, Politics, and Society, pp. 464–70.

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

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6

David Jones: The issue of land distribution: revisiting Graziers, Land Reform and Political Conflict in Ireland Introduction My book, Graziers, Land Reform and Political Conflict in Ireland, is an analysis of large grazing farmers (commonly called graziers or ranchers) in nineteenthand early twentieth-century Ireland.1 It examines their origins, characteristics and important but controversial role in Irish society, which led to conflict with the surrounding peasantry (what may be termed the ranching question). The first part of this chapter considers the themes of the book, the sources used and the influences in writing it. It also draws points of comparison with two other scholarly works which focused on the graziers. The second part considers what additional themes and perspectives would be adopted if the study was to be done again. Revisiting the study Themes of the book The book is divided into two parts. The first part of my book considered the beginnings of large-scale grazing in the eighteenth century and then its expansion in the nineteenth century especially after the Famine, in response to the increasing profit margins in cattle and sheep farming. The economic characteristics of the ranch enterprise were also examined with emphasis given to its dependence on circulating capital (i.e. cattle grazed for a short period) rather than fixed capital and its low labour requirements, which enabled graziers to readily expand their landholdings as the increasing profit margins dictated. They, therefore, were able to take full advantage of the rising land market in the second half of the nineteenth century to acquire land and so to facilitate their investments in ever larger numbers of cattle and sheep. Much of the land acquired or taken by graziers were leaseholdings, with common terms being 3 lives or

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30 years, and increasingly after 1880, the untenanted land of big landowners let to them under the so-called eleven-month system. The circulating capital of the ranch enterprise was particularly conducive to short-term or eleven-month lettings. Consideration was also given to the social position of the graziers, showing how much they remained aloof from the local community of ordinary farmers and smallholders and how they sought to ape the ways of and fraternize with the landed gentry, earning them the label ‘shoneen’ or upstart. The second part of the book deals with the so-called ranching question, examining why the graziers supported earlier land reform, and then became targets of agitation for further reform. This agitation reached its peak during the Ranch War from 1906 to 1909 and had the aim to achieve the distribution of the extensive ranch holdings among impoverished ‘uneconomic’ smallholders or congests (known as the relief of congestion) and landless persons. The book then considers in brief the resultant programme of land distribution which was initiated by the 1909 Land Act. Various reasons were posited to explain the opposition to the graziers. One was the fact that graziers were land acquisitive and so competed for land at the expense of the peasant class. This was reflected in the acquisition of farms, let under lease at competitive rents, especially during and after the post-Famine clearances, and in the taking of short-term lettings under the eleven-month system. Secondly, they were seen as the beneficiaries and upholders of the landlord system, not least by taking eleven-month land, being referred to as the ‘degenerate offspring’ of landlordism. Thirdly, by remaining aloof from the peasant class, graziers failed to balance their acquisition of land by providing support for it through the networks of aid and cooperation in the rural community. Further undermining the graziers’ legitimacy was the perception that they were not genuine farmers, reflected in their failure to cultivate or invest in the land, in the minimum amount of labour they committed to it and in the numbers who did not even reside on their farms, this being regarded as having land in excess of their needs. Background to writing the book The decision to study the graziers originally stemmed from an interest in peasant society, rural conflict and political change, which developed when I read political science at both the undergraduate and master’s level. As part of my master’s degree, I studied peasant movements in Latin America and wrote a dissertation on the politicization of the Bolivian peasantry. This gave rise to an interest in agrarian conflict in Ireland and

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the subsequent land reforms in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I came to the realization that the graziers played an important role in shaping that conflict, particularly from reading the minutes of the hearings of the Royal Commission on Congestion 1906–08. I thus considered it was a topic worthy of a study in its own right, which then formed the subject of my doctoral thesis at Queen’s University of Belfast. Here valuable guidance was provided by both the late John Whyte and Rodney Green, both of Queen’s University. A particular writing that influenced my understanding of agrarian conflict was the late Barrington Moore’s comparative historical work, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, which among other things examined the role of agrarian classes in pre-modern societies in shaping their political destiny.2 He contended that a landowning class that engaged in or promoted commercial agriculture diminished the chances of peasant uprisings; failure to do so had the opposite effect. This led me to consider the extent to which landowners in Ireland engaged in or promoted commercial agriculture in Ireland. My research indicated that after the Famine landowners did encourage commercial farming through the ranching system. At variance with Moore’s analysis, this created, as I saw it, a more disaffected peasantry by intensifying the competition for land. A further influence was Arthur Stinchcombe’s essay in 1961, ‘Agricultural Enterprise and Rural Class Relations’, which identified different types of class structure in rural societies. Late nineteenth-century Ireland was a hybrid of two of his categories: family-sized tenancies and capitalistextensive agriculture based on ranch farming. With respect to the former, he pointed out that competition for resources from landowners was a major source of disaffection among small tenant farmers. This suggested that if that competition intensified as a result of the introduction of ranch farming, the likelihood of peasant unrest would increase.3 I was also influenced by Raymond Crotty’s economic history of Irish agriculture, Irish Agricultural Production, written in 1966. Crotty identified the different capital and labour demands of grazing and tillage. He pointed out that the dependence of the grazing enterprise on short-term or circulating capital and minimum reliance on long-term capital and labour encouraged graziers to acquire extensive holdings on short-term lettings.4 My analysis was further guided by Arensberg and Kimball’s classic anthropological study, Family and Community in Ireland. First published in 1940, this examined a small farm community in Co. Clare. It highlighted the tightly knit nature of the community and also in one section how far the graziers, occupying a distinct status, remained detached from its everyday

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life and its network of mutual aid, cooperation and sharing.This suggested to me the difficulty graziers faced in legitimizing their role in the face of the desire to acquire large tracts of land.5 Further influencing my work to some extent were the trends in so-called revisionist scholarship in Irish history, dating from the mid-1960s, with its commitment to empirical analysis and its intent to modify stereotypical interpretations, not least of landlord–tenant relations. Source material My study drew upon a diverse range of sources. These included personal papers and business records of graziers and landowners, royal commissions, viceregal, select committee and departmental inquiries, land valuation records, statistical returns, travelogues, Hansard reports and newspapers. However, constraints were encountered in gathering evidence from two of these sources. One was the range of testimony given in a number of royal commissions and select committee inquiries on land reform and agriculture between 1870 and 1910. Most of the witnesses were landowners, extensive leaseholders and big tenant farmers, who in many cases were also graziers. They provided valuable evidence on the graziers’ system of landholding and attitudes to agrarian reform (often supportive of moderate reform), as well as on the development of ranch farming. However, in most of the hearings of these inquiries, even in the 1880s and 1890s, the voice of agrarian radicalism did not figure much, with few testimonies alluding to the need for comprehensive distribution of land. It was, therefore, difficult to determine from these sources the extent of the desire for land distribution among smallholders and landless persons prior to the 1903 Land Act. One of the few exceptions was the Royal Commission on Congestion, referred to above. In this inquiry, quite a number of witnesses forcefully argued for radical schemes of land distribution, graphically describing the privation of the congests and deprecating the ‘evils’ of the ranching system. The other constraint in the source material concerned the businesses records and accounts of graziers. Several were examined which provided detailed insights into the economic structure of the ranch enterprise. However, most of them were kept by those who belonged to the upper tier of graziers such as landowners or substantial leaseholders and tenant farmers. I was able to find in the various archival collections only one or two sets of accounts of shopkeeper-graziers and others who relied almost entirely on eleven-month lettings.This limited my analysis of the structure of these types of ranch enterprise.

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Comparison with other scholarly studies of the graziers My study differs in certain respects from two other scholarly studies which focused on the Irish graziers, namely, Paul Bew’s Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland and Fergus Campbell’s Land and Revolution.6 While my own study examined the economic and social characteristics of ranching, its historical development and the resultant impact on agrarian conflict and land reform, it did not cover in detail the political dimension of the ranching question, except for an analysis of the Ranch War. This both Bew and Campbell did, examining the ranching question in relation to the factions and divisions in the nationalist movement. In Campbell’s study, this included the anti-grazier agitation and attendant divisions in Sinn Féin during the struggle for independence and the social background of those involved in the agitation – neither of which figured in my work. New areas to explore Three aspects of the ranching question, which are not considered in the book or which are covered only to a limited degree, would be explored in detail if the study were done again. These are as follows: • The additional wave of anti-grazier agitation, which occurred during the transition to independence 1919–23, and the extent and nature of land acquisition and distribution during this time • The more radical reforms that were pursued after independence to achieve land distribution, the progress made and the constraints encountered in implementing these reforms and the issues of contention that arose • The various but interrelated ideological influences that shaped the anti-grazier agitation and the ensuing reforms The reason for my interest in these issues stemmed from the dissolution of the Land Commission in the 1990s, drawing a line under the land reform programme. This gave rise to reviews both in the Dáil and in the press of the impact of the reforms and the accomplishments of the Land Commission that was responsible for their implementation. In addition, in examining the government files relating to land reform in the National Archives of Ireland, it was evident that there were several issues of contention relating to land distribution, which warranted further analysis.

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The renewal of anti-grazier agitation during the transition to independence, 1919–23 The book’s coverage of the anti-grazier agitation is largely confined to the period 1906–12, including the Ranch War, with reference to earlier outbreaks of unrest against the graziers. The book does not cover the second wave of anti-grazier agitation during the period of transition to independence 1919–23, although it was more intense than the Ranch War and has been well documented in several studies. In revising the book, this second wave of agitation would be examined. Aspects of the agitation were similar to the Ranch War, namely, cattle driving, boycotting, intimidation and destruction of property. However, unlike the Ranch War, it also included many land seizures (the invasion and illegal occupation of farms), referred to below.7 Studies of the second wave of agitation have consistently identified how divisions were opened up between the Sinn Féin leadership and elected representatives in the Dáil on the one hand and the rank and file of the movement, especially in the western counties, on the other. Sinn Féin leaders were opposed to the land agitation as an unwanted distraction, a source of disunity in the movement and a threat to its credibility to govern effectively. They were thus frequently at odds with branches of Sinn Féin, some of whose members were only too eager to become involved in land agitation.8 Land acquisition and division during the transition to independence During this period, a certain amount of land was acquired for distribution. Questions arise about how much land was so acquired and distributed, and by what means, that would merit analysis in a revised study. Here it is necessary to distinguish between land being acquired by legal and peaceful means and land being acquired though illegal land seizures. Equally important is to distinguish between land being acquired and land being divided. Also evident, meriting further analysis, was the collective nature of land acquisition and distribution during this period. These observations are based upon my examination of the Dáil Éireann files relating to the National Land Bank (NLB) and the Land Settlement Commission and my examination of the files of 14 properties that were transferred, which are found in the early records of the post-independence Land Commission. Seven of the files cover properties under the NLB scheme and seven the so-called committee case properties, which will be explained below.

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Legal acquisition and distribution Despite the turbulence of the period of transition to independence, in many cases, land was acquired for the purpose of distribution on a legal basis involving a formal conveyance of legal title. This was done either through voluntary agreement or through a land court ruling. To purchase land for distribution, local people would band together, forming a small society or association. In some places, the society was formally organized and registered, and in others, it remained an informal association, not governed by written rules and procedures. Where a voluntary transaction occurred, the society, or more usually its leaders or trustees, negotiated with the landowner. If terms were agreed, then title was conveyed to the society or its members, with the landowner receiving cash for the sale. Inevitably, during the process of negotiation, disagreements arose over how much land should be transferred and at what price.With landowners under pressure from would-be purchasers to reach a deal (including in some cases being subject to threats and intimidation), one of the land inspectors urged ‘settlement by compromise’. This, according to him, ‘is the owner’s point of view in all cases so far met with as he has to live with his opponents’.9 Given that payments were made in cash, the sharp rise in the price of land following World War I, and the increasing risk of becoming a further target of agitation, some needed little persuasion to accept a compromise and part with some or all of their property. Those who did so probably made a wise decision, since land fell in value after 1921. Moreover, after independence when land was acquired for distribution by the new Land Commission established after independence, compensation was well below market value, and payment was not in cash but in land bonds. If the landowner did not wish to sell, or demanded a price that the purchasing society could not meet, the alternative was to refer the matter to the land courts. These were first set up in May 1920 to rule in such matters to ensure a fair and orderly transfer of land. They were formalized under a new body created by the Dáil in September 1920 known as the Land Settlement Commission. Even holdings which had been the target of agitation and had been illegally occupied (such as the Creggs estate in Galway) were referred to the land courts for adjudication. If the courts decided the land should be so acquired for distribution, a price was fixed by the chief court valuer (later known as the valuation commissioner) and the owners compensated in cash as with a voluntary agreement, so long as finance could be obtained by the purchasers.10 However, it was by no

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means certain that the courts would authorize a transfer of ownership for distribution. According to figures given to Patrick Hogan, Minister for Agriculture in the first post-independence government, the land courts had dealt with 255 properties up to May 1923, but only 38 per cent were alienated (i.e. transferred to the claimants).11 As pointed out in 1923 by Kevin O’Shiel, one of the key figures involved in the land courts: Alienation was only resorted to when the claimants were able to prove their case up to the hilt on the ground of sheer necessity and were further able to show that the landowner’s property could reasonably bear the proposed partition.12

Whether land was transferred through a voluntary agreement or by a decree of a land court, the purchase money was raised from one of two sources: the NLB or the commercial banks. The NLB was set up in 1920 under the authority of the Dáil to provide, among other things, finance for land distribution. Under the NLB’s purchasing arrangements, it would advance to the local society (which had to be registered as a cooperative society), 100 per cent of the purchase price agreed between the society and the owner of the land. The loan would extend over 30 years with a rate of interest at 7 per cent for the first 7 years, 6 per cent for the next 10 years and 5 per cent for the remaining 13 years, payable every six months. To receive the loan (which was to cover only the interest), the society was required to deposit 25 per cent of the purchase price with the NLB. This was then converted into indemnity shares, with a guaranteed yield of 3 per cent so making each society a shareholder in the bank. The dividend was not paid to the society directly but was used by the bank to repay the principle and so amortize the debt over the period of the loan. This was equivalent to a sinking fund. In addition, each society, as a shareholder, was entitled to an additional dividend from the profits of the bank not allocated to its capital reserves.This was also used to repay the principle, as a result of which the repayment period could be shortened.13 During the transition to independence, land was as well purchased on a collective basis for the purpose of distribution through loans from the commercial banks. These purchases were referred to as committee cases, since the conveyance of the land and the raising of the loan were undertaken by a committee acting as trustees on behalf of local people who had agreed to purchase the land and had formed usually an informal association for this purpose. This was shown in the files of the new Land Commission that covered seven committee cases which I have examined. Committee members were often included among the purchasers and occasionally stepped in as guarantors for the loan raised on the basis of

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their own personal security. When the land was divided, the task of allotment usually fell to them as well. The committee members were normally people of means and standing in the community, who were in a good position to arrange a purchase and raise a loan.The conditions of the loans of the commercial banks were if anything tougher than those of the NLB. Deposits were at a minimum of 25 per cent of the agreed price of the land and could be as high as 50 per cent. Interest rates were about the same, but the repayment of the advance included both capital and interest, with the period of repayment averaging 10 years.14 The transfer of land between 1919 and 1923 coincided at least for part of this period with a property bubble causing local purchasers to pay well over the odds for land. In the words of Kevin O’Shiel, referring to the period 1918–21, ‘the value of land soared to incredible heights in those days, and farms and fields were often sold for 20 times and more their pre-war value’.15 When after independence the new Land Commission stepped in to take over such land, the price it paid, which had to reflect the original purchase value, was £23 per acre, more than twice the price it paid (£11 per acre) for land it had acquired since 1923 for purposes of distribution.16 Many of the societies and allottees experienced serious difficulties repaying their loans as a result of both the onerous interest rates and the premium prices paid for the land during this period. The indebtedness was further exacerbated by the common practice of borrowing from another bank the amount of the deposit on the personal security of the trustees or other local persons of means. Figures provided by the NLB show how much societies and allottees struggled with their repayments. By October 1922, the value of loans to local societies for land distribution which the NLB labelled as ‘bad’ (where there was near certainty of default) and ‘doubtful’ (where there was substantial risk of default) comprised 49 per cent of the total amount lent.The value of loans in the ‘bad’ category was 21 per cent of the total value of its land distribution mortgages. 31 of 49 societies were in arrears, although the loans in most cases were less than two years old.The arrears amounted to £7,030 which was a third of the sum of annual repayments.17 The same pattern of accumulating debt and default was repeated in committee cases. My examination of the records of seven committee cases showed that for five cases, only a small proportion of the loans to purchase the properties was ever repaid – in some committee cases there was hardly any repayment – over the 5–10-year period prior to the new Land Commission taking over these properties. In response to the mounting burden of debt and rising number of defaults, the post-independence government mandated the new Land

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Commission under the 1923 and 1927 Land Acts to purchase the land. Thereby, the NLB and the commercial banks were eventually paid off, the debts of the purchasers were cleared and their deposits were recouped. The land was then resold to them at a substantially lower price, repaid through annuities at a lower rate of interest, in line with those paid by smallholders and landless people allotted land under the post-independence land distribution programme.18 Overall 59,000 acres of land were legally transferred for distribution through loans from the NLB and the commercial banks between 1919 and 1923. The major proportion, totalling 42,000 acres comprising 205 properties, was purchased through the commercial banks, with only 17,200 acres comprising 50 properties purchased through the NLB.19 By no means all of the land which had been transferred by legal means was divided. While some properties were divided, others were not, with the entire acreage or a substantial portion of it used by the society who had purchased the land for common grazing. How many properties remained undivided is difficult to tell. But figures from the NLB in 1922 showed that of 48 properties purchased up to then through its loans, 19 were undivided. In addition, 44 per cent of the total value of the advances had financed the purchase of lands which were not divided, covering over 40 per cent of the total acreage purchased.20 The examination of the files dealing with seven committee case properties, referred to above, showed that three of these properties, which were purchased by loans from the commercial banks, remained undivided as well. That so much land remained undivided is not surprising. It was one thing to acquire the land; it was a quite different matter dividing it on a proper basis that took into account the nature of the land and the needs and demands of the claimants. At the best of times, drawing up a scheme of division was a long, painstaking and specialized task. Moreover, due to the circumstances of the time, there was a limited availability of those professionally qualified and technically competent to do this work. Further hindering division were disputes among members of a purchasing society about how the land should be divided and how the purchase price was apportioned. In addition, in some instances, they purchased the land with no apparent intention of using it except as common grazing land, as reflected in the initial equal apportionment of the advance among them. When properties were divided, the scheme of division was undertaken by the valuers and inspectors of the Land Settlement Commission, who would do so on behalf of and under the instruction of the land courts. In

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addition, the NLB had a small team of land inspectors hired or seconded from the old Land Commission and Congested Districts Board (CDB) to draw up schemes to divide the land. In the committee cases, the committee itself usually took on this responsibility. The results of their efforts were mixed. According to the reports from the inspectors of the postindependence Land Commission, when it took over such lands, there were major shortcomings in the original schemes of division. In one committee case at Coolure, Co. Westmeath, the original scheme drawn up by the trustees had ‘many defects’ and was ‘not equitable or workable’.21 The main problems were that the land allotment was often too far from the farm or residence of the allottee and was too small to make a viable farm (as a result of apportioning the land among numerous claimants belonging to a society). Making matters worse was the absence of farm buildings on the allotment and the difficulties experienced by those allottees who had no capital, few skills and little experience in farming.22 During this period, a frequent enough practice once land had been purchased for distribution was for the purchasers to let it on the elevenmonth system to both graziers and local smallholders and cottier labourers. This was an alternative to being directly engaged in farming the land or rearing stock. The Land Commission files referred to above indicate that the practice was common to both NLB and committee case properties. The letting was undertaken either by the individual allottees when the land was divided or by the purchasing society or its leaders or trustees when it was not. For those struggling to repay the advance, and in some cases without the skills or resources to make enough from the land, income from grazing rents was to be welcomed. It is ironic that at a time of intense hostility to graziers, land distribution should lead to an even greater dependence upon them. Illegal acquisition through land seizures A certain amount of land was taken and occupied by informally organized groups during the renewed agitation without any legal process or conveyance of title and without any payment (these were the so-called land seizures). Numerous instances occurred from 1919 to 1923, although the extent of such illegal occupation cannot be quantified. Land inspectors working for the Land Settlement Commission reported 180 seizures of holdings (some in excess of 1,000 acres) in 1921 and 1922, but many seizures occurred before then especially in the early part of 1920.23 According to the notes of the Land Settlement Commission inspectors,

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nearly all of the landowners were forced to surrender possession under duress as a result of intimidation and violence (including threatening letters and notices, damage to buildings, cattle driving, taking of life and personal assaults). Some of these cases were eventually brought before the land courts and subject to adjudication, but in many other cases, those who seized the land continued to illegally occupy it until eventually evicted by the IRA and Free State forces. Sometimes the illegal occupation continued in defiance of the land courts which had ruled that the land should not be acquired for distribution.24 As with legally acquired land, many of the holdings illegally seized by organized groups were used informally for common grazing, rather than being divided into allotments. This is not surprising since no transfer of title had occurred and no official authority was involved to properly organize an allotment scheme. Kevin O’Higgins, speaking in the Dáil in 1924, recalled that in 1920 ‘in the west practically two whole counties became a common and everyone’s stock was on everyone else’s land’.25 The inspectors’ notes on land seizures from 1921 to 1923 often refer to the land being used for common grazing.26 An example was the 1,000 acres farm belonging to H. V. McNamara at Doolin, Ennis, Co. Clare. On one occasion when it was cleared in 1923, 37 people, without the permission of the owner, were commonly grazing 18 horses, 55 cattle and 101 sheep on the land.27 Likewise, a portion of a 430-acre untenanted farm of Madame de Janasz at Kilmorna, Co. Kerry, according to the Land Commission inspector reporting in 1925, had continued to be ‘more or less a commons’ which was used for grazing without her permission.28 As with legally conveyed land, an alternative was for the group who had seized the land to let it to local graziers or to neighbouring small farmers on the eleven-month system.This was recorded occasionally in the inspectors’ notes.Two groups who did this were the Kilmoon Club and Kilfenora Club near Ennis in northern Clare, who, during 1922, let land for grazing which extended over ‘several hundreds of acres’.29 From such lettings, a tidy profit could be made, since no rents, rates and annuities were paid, and little was done in the way of maintenance and upkeep. It was noted by an inspector for the Land Settlement Commission, Bernard Geoghegan, that members of the Kilmoon Club ‘have done very well out of it (letting of grazing land) for the last 12 months’. Indeed, he and other inspectors looked upon land seizures as little more than money-making enterprises for these groups.30 Of a similar view, Kevin O’Shiel noted that ‘thousands of pounds were realized for the president and the committee by judicious lettings made under their authority’.31

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The pro-treaty wing of Sinn Féin would not brook any illegal seizure of land, being described by Kevin O’Higgins in the Dáil in 1923 as ‘organised robbery’ which involved ‘wanton and deliberate trespass’ and ‘the wholesale and flagrant defiance of the law’.32 In December 1922, Patrick Hogan in a cabinet memo indicated that ‘the Government will take drastic action against people who have seized other people’s land’.33 In stating this, he was also mindful of the possibility that the British government would not provide much needed credit to the new Irish government if lawlessness and the illegal occupation of land continued.34 A series of coercive measures during 1923 and 1924 gave the authorities powers to clear the seized land of stock, restore possession with compensation to the lawful owners or tenants and mete out heavy punishment on the illegal occupants including fines, confiscation of stock and debarment from future land distribution.35 The government saw to it that the problem was effectively dealt with although it sometimes took repeated attempts to force illegal occupants off a farm. An example was the illegal possession of the McNamara farm at Ennis, referred to above. Although the occupants were ‘in very poor circumstances being either fishermen or farmers with 10–20 acres of poor land’, they were evicted by the Special Infantry Corps in July 1923. They again occupied the land, to be evicted once more along with the seizure of their stock in December 1923. Following this, further trespassing recurred which required another order to clear the land in May 1924. When the grazing stock of the illegal occupants was seized, it was only redeemed by them by payment of a fine which was made ‘under great protest’. On being evicted, ‘they fully expected the Land Commission to buy out these lands for division’.36 But it was by no means certain they would be the recipients, given Patrick Hogan’s commitment to bar from future allotment those who had been in illegal occupation. The recipients of land during the transition to independence Among the recipients of land which had been legally transferred during the transition to independence, there was no one dominant occupational group, as indicated from my examination of the files of 14 properties purchased for the purpose of distribution during this period, referred to above. About 40 per cent of the purchasers were low-income landless people such as labourers, cottier labourers, herdsman and farmers’ sons and 30 per cent people with means such as shopkeepers, self-employed

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artisans and commercial famers; the remaining 30 per cent were ‘uneconomic’ smallholders. Bernard Geoghegan also noted the presence of people of means such as ‘wealthy farmers’ and shopkeepers, as well as labourers, in land seizures in Clare and Limerick. It was evident that both people with capital and labourers took advantage of the circumstances of the time to acquire land. Such groups though were not considered or were given lower priority in favour of ‘uneconomic’ smallholders or congests when the new Land Commission chose allottees in the programme of distribution implemented after independence.37 Impact of land acquisition and distribution during the transition to independence Although during the period of transition to independence only a limited amount of land was permanently acquired and distributed, lessons were learnt and consequences arose that paved the way for a far-reaching programme after independence. Firstly, it became evident to the postindependence government, especially Patrick Hogan, that comprehensive legislation and state financial support were needed if land distribution was to be effectively undertaken.38 Secondly, the land agitation and land seizures indicated the extent of the underlying demand for land division which had to be addressed.Thirdly, having witnessed or become the target of land agitation, a number of landowners and large tenants became convinced that the best way forward was to sell their farms to the new Land Commission so long as the price offered was right. Otherwise, the risk was to become a target of hostility again, with little chance of being able to return to normal occupation. Some, whose buildings had been damaged, never returned, leaving their land derelict or letting it as best they could on the eleven-month system, until a sale was arranged with the Land Commission. This obviously provided the Land Commission with a ready supply of land to acquire for distribution. Further land reform and the programme of land distribution after independence After independence, a comprehensive programme of land distribution was undertaken, beginning with the 1923 Land Act, which would be covered more extensively if my book was written again.The reason to embark upon land distribution so soon after independence was the pressing need to alleviate the widespread poverty and land hunger in rural Ireland, and a

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commitment to do so by Sinn Féin during the struggle for independence.This was reinforced by the perception that land distribution would help to secure the legitimacy of the new state at a time when it was under challenge and by a desire to reward the small famers and landless people for their support for the nationalist movement during the struggle for independence. The legislative framework In undertaking the study of the graziers again, I would analyse how the legislation governing the acquisition and distribution of the grazing farms was developed in post-independence Ireland and what was achieved as a result. Land distribution was not undertaken on the basis of one or two reforms but was shaped by a continuing process of reform over a period of more than 60 years after independence. Between 1923 and 1988 when the Land Commission effectively ceased its distributive activities, 13 land acts, all dealing with land acquisition and distribution, together with 10 land bond acts, were implemented. While my book examined key provisions of the 1909 Land Act, which initiated the land distribution programme, it considered only in brief the 1923 and 1933 Land Acts which radically extended the power to acquire and divide land. A revision of the book would examine in detail both these acts and other major pieces of legislation that promoted land distribution such as the land acts of 1939, 1950 and 1965. In addition, a study of some of the minor land acts also deserve analysis, such as those of 1927, 1931, 1936, 1946 and 1953, which in key respects affected how land division was undertaken. As well, the land bond acts merit study as the statutory basis for compensating dispossessed owners and tenants. My research of the files of the new Land Commission has shown that, in acquiring and allotting land and in awarding compensation, it was punctilious in following the letter of the law. Thus, an understanding of the nature and impact of land distribution requires both an examination of the legislation and also several court cases in which complex and ambiguous provisions were interpreted. Such an examination would also entail an analysis of a number of thorny issues which arose out of certain key provisions in the legislation. The types of land appropriated and divided under the land acts Various post-independence land acts (those of 1923, 1933 and 1939) designated the type of land which could be acquired and distributed.

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Land belonging to traditional landowners (untenanted land), tenantpurchasers and unvested tenants, which was used for grazing and little else, or let to graziers on the eleven-month system, was most likely to be appropriated. Further increasing the risk of dispossession was failure to reside on the land.39 An issue of particular concern was the insecurity felt by many landholders. Owners of untenanted land, tenant-purchasers and unvested tenants (those who had not as yet become tenant-purchasers) alike were left not knowing the day when they would be the subject of acquisition or resumption proceedings. As the powers of the Land Commission widened, this gave rise to serious misgivings. Such insecurity violated one of the sacrosanct principles of the land reform movement of the late nineteenth century, namely, fixity of tenure under which the landholder no longer lived under the fear of being dispossessed.40 In examining the issue of security of tenure, a revised study would focus on the uncertain and imprecise meaning of key provisions in the 1923, 1933 and 1939 Land Acts, which were intended to protect the ordinary landholder against dispossession. A degree of protection was provided if the landholder ‘uses [the land] in the same manner as an ordinary farmer in accordance with the proper methods of husbandry’, and, in the case of a tenant-purchaser or unvested tenant, if his/her land ‘is producing an adequate amount of agricultural products and is providing an adequate amount of employment’ (the so-called ‘adequates’ clauses).41 But this raised the questions how was an ‘ordinary’ farmer to be defined, what were ‘proper’ methods of husbandry and what were the standards by which adequacy was assessed? As pointed out by Kevin O’Higgins during the passage of the 1923 Land Bill, ‘there will be various opinions as to the proper methods of husbandry, and the proper methods of husbandry will vary a good deal with the quality of the land and the nature of the soil’.42 Such imprecision allowed the Land Commission wide discretion in deciding which landholders did not fall within the protection offered by the legislation so adding to the uncertainty felt by many. It was, of course, only a matter of time before the meaning of one or other of the protective provisions was contested in the courts. This happened in 1954 when the Roscrea Meat Products Company objected to the order of the Land Commission to acquire the large grazing farm it owned (545 acres) for having not provided ‘adequate’ employment (only a handful of men were employed). The objection was disallowed by the Court of the Land Commission, and the subsequent appeal to the Appeal

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Tribunal was likewise dismissed. The company then successfully appealed to the Supreme Court. Part of their appeal rested on the legal interpretation of the ‘adequates’ clause applied to tenant-purchasers in the 1933 Land Act. One of the judges of the Supreme Court, Justice Kingsmill Moore, drew attention in his judgement upholding the appeal to the statutory obligation of the Land Commission to interpret each of the adequacy requirements by ‘having regard’ for among other things ‘the situation and character of such land’.43 According to Kingsmill Moore, the farm in question, consisting of prime pasture and used as a highly productive ranch enterprise, could not be expected to provide more than minimal employment, given the low labour input needed in cattle grazing. In such a case, where the two ‘adequacy’ requirements (production and employment) were in conflict, only one can and therefore need be satisfied. To show how readily the ‘adequacy’ clauses were open to differences of interpretation, the other Justices of the Supreme Court thought otherwise, insisting that both requirements must be satisfied to exempt a holding from compulsory acquisition, although they still upheld the appeal on grounds of a procedural irregularity on the part of the Land Commission.44 Beneficiaries of land distribution A revised study would, as well, examine the changes in the criteria for choosing allottees. In contrast to the recipients of land during the period 1919–23, the main group who were allotted holdings after independence were ‘uneconomic’ smallholders as mandated by the legislation. Reflecting the priority given to them, the 1923 Land Act enabled the Land Commission in Patrick Hogan’s words ‘to acquire any land of any kind anywhere’ for the relief of congestion.45 Under the post-independence land acts, just under 100,000 ‘uneconomic’ smallholders were allotted land (out of 150,000 farmers in 1926 with less than 30 acres and about 80 per cent of the total number of allottees).46 The allotment of land to ‘uneconomic’ smallholders occurred in three ways. Some 60 per cent were simply given an extra parcel of good land adjoining or near to their own holding. The remaining congests were transplanted from their original holding to a new holding, either within the same county or to an area much farther away, commonly referred to as migrants. Most of these were given new holdings in the rich grazing counties of the east, such as Meath, Westmeath and Kildare.47 A third group were given additional land from the holdings vacated by their neighbours who had been

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resettled elsewhere. In such cases, their holdings, often fragmented into scattered small strips of land, intermixing with other strips, were rearranged, consolidated and enlarged. Thus, the congest ended up as ‘the proprietor of a compact, economic holding or a holding as near an economic standard as possible’.48 Whatever the means of allocating land to ‘uneconomic’ smallholders, the end point was to create ‘viable’ family-based farm enterprises, ‘the standard allotment being based on the labour-quantum of one adult male having the full advantage of modern advisory services and allowing for a reasonable degree of mechanisation’.49 ‘Uneconomic’ smallholders, whose holdings were enlarged under the post-independence land acts, on average received an additional 12½ acres. Migrant or transplanted congests received new holdings averaging 25½ acres.50 While the extent of the allotments was modest by any standard, the extra acres, and more importantly the superior quality of land allotted, gave the ‘uneconomic’ smallholder the opportunity to engage in small-scale commercial production and so upgrade his/her meagre subsistence living to one of ‘frugal comfort’.51 Landless persons were eligible to receive land, the majority being sons of farmers and farm labourers. But unlike the landless groups who acquired land during the transition to independence, they were given low priority, and fewer and fewer were included in allotment schemes. Also eligible were disemployed persons who lost their employment as a result of acquisition (mainly herdsmen), ex-IRA men and evicted tenants or their representatives, who were accorded priority on a par with ‘uneconomic’ smallholders. The question of how allottees were selected raises the dilemma that presents itself in land distribution programmes when the supply of land is limited. One choice is to maximize the number of allottees but in so doing, limiting the amount of land each could receive. The upshot would be that many would benefit from at best a modest improvement in their living standards but hardly any would experience a significant improvement. The other choice was to restrict the number of allottees, thereby allowing each a sufficient amount of land to make a difference to his/her circumstances, but leaving many others who are indigent without any land or additional land. Successive Irish governments chose the former option. In the earlier part of the programme of distribution (1923–50), it was taken for granted that maximizing the number of allottees was essential to meeting the goals of land distribution, restricting the average size of an allotment to 16 acres. In 1963, the size of a new holding or enlarged holding (known as the standard holding) was increased to 40–45 acres of good land and the

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equivalent for land of mixed quality, which according to the then Minister for Lands, Michael Moran,‘in certain instances may mean fewer allotments’.52 As it turned out, the undertaking remained no more than a theoretical commitment that was not translated into practice partly due to political and community pressure. In 1966, Michael Moran stated that the aim was still to distribute land ‘amongst as many of such qualified smallholders as is practicable’ even when the new or enlarged holding was below the standard.53 An official report on the problems of small western farmers in 1961 while asserting the necessity to be more selective highlighted the reaction to doing otherwise and restricting the number of allottees. According to the report, ‘a land distribution policy which gives sizeable allotments to some farmers and none to others is inevitably subject to much criticism. An increase in the size of the standard holding ... would intensify such criticism.’54 In a white paper on land policy in 1980, the continued goal to maximize rather than restrict the number of allottees was further alluded to: Very often social considerations in the division of acquired land operate in such a way as to make it expedient to accommodate the greatest possible number of deserving applicants rather than concentrate on the creation of a smaller number of viable farms.55

However, despite the desire to maximize the number of recipients of land, an order of priority was adopted. This was made necessary by the fact that in nearly all allotment schemes, the list of applicants for land exceeded the number who could be allocated holdings even when the size of each new holding or enlargement was kept to a minimum. From the late 1930s, ‘uneconomic’ smallholders were to take precedence over landless people, with the exception of the disemployed (those such as herds and land stewards who became unemployed as a result of land acquisition), ex-IRA men and evicted tenants. It was recognized that meeting the need for land of both landless people and ‘uneconomic’ smallholders was not possible. Consequently, fewer and fewer landless people figured in allotment schemes, numbering single figures in almost all of the years from 1950. Even among ‘uneconomic’ smallholders, it was necessary to exercise a system of preference. The scheme files in the Land Commission records, laying out the division of the land, indicate that priority was given to married younger farmers with a growing family (at the expense of single or older farmers), who also had a name for farming competence and hard work. The concern about competence and diligence arose from the evidence of Land Commission surveys that many allottees (nearly

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20 per cent in one survey in 1944) did not make the most of their new or enlarged holdings, and as farmers fell below the standards expected. Competence as the basis of selection was given more weight by the desire to ensure that the land distribution programme in meeting social needs did not jeopardize the task of increasing the productive output of the agriculture in the national interest. The 1946 Land Act stipulated the obligation of allottees to maintain ‘proper methods of husbandry’, and in a Dáil debate later in 1946, it was emphasized that diligence and competence in farming should be taken into account in the selection process. 56 Compensation and state funding Landowners, tenant-purchasers and unvested tenants who were dispossessed were compensated in land bonds at a fixed rate of interest, rather than in cash, thus in effect becoming compulsory lenders to the state.The interest was, however, paid in cash. The bonds could be traded on the bond market but were eventually redeemable at their original value. Several issues arose in relation to compensation which merit further analysis. One was the tendency for land bonds to lose their market value, as commercial interest rates and the yield on more recent bond issues rose in the second half of the twentieth century. Those who were dispossessed preferred cash and felt short changed by being awarded bonds. Another issue was that all encumbrances attached to the land had to be redeemed out of the purchase price including superior interests, mortgages, dues owing to public authorities, and, most importantly for tenant-purchasers, the unpaid balance of the advance by the state to enable them to purchase their land in the first place under the Land Purchase Acts. Often, the number of land bonds eventually credited to the landowner, tenant-purchaser or unvested tenant in the allocation schedule was substantially less than the original amount awarded, and occasionally, it was merely a fraction of the purchase price.The hardship caused by the obligation to redeem the balance of the purchase advance was eventually recognized leading to it being rescinded under the 1950 Land Act. A further question was the criterion of compensation. Under the 1923 Land Act, traditional landowners and tenant-purchasers who had been dispossessed were paid a ‘fair’ price, as opposed to the market price. This lasted until market value was introduced under the 1950 Land Act. Fair value was essentially related to a calculation of what the allottees, as people lacking even modest means, could be reasonably expected to pay for the land. Hardly surprisingly, the ‘fair’ value was well below the market values

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and did not reflect the productive worth of the farm. When comparing prices paid for acquired land just before and just after the introduction of market value in 1950, it was evident that ‘fair’ value was about half the market value. Here was another reason why landowners and tenantpurchasers who lost their grazing land felt hard done by and this explains the numerous cases in which appeals were lodged with the Appeal Tribunal. Although it was envisaged at the outset of the post-independence land distribution programme that the chief means of financing land distribution would be through land bonds, this did not happen in practice. The widening disparity between the purchase price paid to the dispossessed owners and the lower resale price paid by the allottees, together with the 45 per cent reduction of the annuity payments of the allottees under the 1933 Land Act, led to major debt and expenditure liabilities for the state. For example, the loss on resale (the resale prices as a proportion of the purchase price) averaged 55 per cent from 1923 to 1981, not including the loss due to the annuity discount. In addition, about 90 per cent of basic improvement expenditure on allotted holdings (for buildings, fences and drainage) was financed through Free State grants. From 1970 to 1979, this averaged £10 million per year.57 Continuing popular pressure and constraints Following independence, the issue of land reform was kept alive by periodic outbursts of popular protest which occurred up to the mid-1970s. Every so often a new association or movement was formed to publicly articulate demands for further reform, with local TDs, councillors and local clergy lending their support. The main ones were the Back to the Land Association, the rival Evicted Tenants and Land Settlement Association both in the 1920s, the United Farmers Association and the Land Settlement Committee in the 1930s, the Land Division League in the 1940s and early 1950s, Lia Fáil at the end of the 1950s and the National Land League in the 1970s. Most of these associations could only enlist a following in three or four counties; few captured nationwide support. With some exceptions, they did not resort to violence, preferring the more peaceful means of protest, such as holding weekly public rallies, forming local branches, publicly naming properties that should be divided, lobbying ministers, civil servants and TDs and articulating their views in the columns of the local press. Such campaigns ensured the momentum for land reform was sustained, and made it more difficult for any government to abandon the policy of land distribution.

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Despite the popular pressure, various constraints were encountered that affected the extent, rate and impact of land distribution. One was the availability of land for distribution. The pool of suitable properties dwindled in the latter part of the land distribution programme, made worse by the increase in the standard size of an allotment to 45 acres. Another constraint was finance. In the later years, with the government taking on more of the funding of land distribution, as mentioned above, and facing (together with new allottees) an increasing burden in servicing land bonds as a result of rising interest rates, the Department of Finance, known for its fiscal conservatism, constantly resisted the expansion of the Land Commission budget, which slowed up land acquisition. Further delay was caused by a complex and protracted administrative process in acquiring and dividing land and the tendency for dispossessed owners, dissatisfied with their compensation, to appeal to the Appeals Tribunal. In addition, land distribution to have a significant impact on living standards of allottees required at the same time the provision of agricultural advice and training and specific plans to upgrade husbandry practices of individual farms in conjunction with capital grants. This was often lacking partly due to the absence of coordination between the Land Commission and the Department of Agriculture. During my research, I came to the view that this was an important limitation which lessened the impact of land distribution. Ideological influences on the anti-grazier agitation and land distribution programme The movement to divide the ranches received much of its impetus from an obvious concern to alleviate land hunger, unemployment and privation in rural areas. But the impetus was further sustained by ideological influences. Although not considered in my book, such influences provide a wider understanding of the anti-grazier movement and the land distribution programme and as such merit examination. Four distinct but interrelated ideological strands can be identified, namely, Irish nationalism, post-independence economic nationalism, Catholic social teaching or distributism and agrarianism. Irish nationalism An important ideological influence in spurring the anti-grazier agitation and the land distribution programme was Irish nationalism especially after 1900. This is attested to by the support for the division of the ranches given by various organizations and institutions involved in the nationalist

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struggle: the UIL, Home Rule Party, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the Sinn Féin Party and the First and Second Dáils. In speeches at rallies across the grazing counties, nationalist leaders drawn from the UIL and Sinn Féin spoke in the same breath about the struggle for national independence and the division of the ranches. Of course, as mentioned above, this support was tempered by the opposition of the nationalist leadership in both the UIL and Sinn Féin to militant forms of anti-grazier agitation and enforced dispossession. The influence of nationalism was threefold. From a nationalist perspective and in the popular imagination, the graziers and those who let land to them were seen as upholders and beneficiaries of the ascendancy and the old landlord system. A particularly sore point was the belief, often exaggerated but not without some credence, that many graziers had gained land and prospered at the expense of the ordinary peasantry as a consequence of the great Famine, the post-Famine clearances and later evictions. Speeches at nationalist rallies constantly invoked the spectre of the Famine, and tearful eviction scenes with reference to the ‘crowbar brigade’ and unscrupulous ‘land-grabbers’ in denouncing both British rule and the ranching system. Thus, graziers and landowners who let land to them were considered as legitimate targets of agitation, who had no rightful claim to the land they possessed.58 Nationalism further fuelled hostility to the graziers through the perception that they played a vital role in meeting the food needs of Britain. The ranches were considered a ready and cheap source of meat for the British population. 59 Furthermore, part of nationalist aspirations was a desire that independence would bring tangible benefits to ordinary rural dwellers who had lent support to the independence struggle. The obvious benefit would be a greater share in the ownership of land. Indeed, granting this was considered by all the main parties after independence, as well as the ordinary rural dwellers, to be the essential duty of any government, in recognition of the role of the rural population in the nationalist struggle.60 For example, in demanding that two large farms owned by James Brannick in Kilcommon, Co. Mayo, be divided and allotted to them, the local small farmers, in a letter to a TD in 1926, justified their claim on the grounds that ‘we have helped the Irish movement for many years past and suffered much’.61 Economic nationalism The land distribution programme was further reinforced by the economic nationalism which was embraced by the new Fianna Fáil government

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when it came to power in 1932 – a policy that was motivated both by its nationalist ideology and also by a pragmatic response to the adverse conditions in the world economy, the Economic War with Britain and later the exigencies of World War II. Accordingly, the government pursued a policy of increased self-sufficiency in a wide range of goods, including food.62 Unlike ranching, which was export oriented and provided a narrow range of food products, tillage was considered as making an essential contribution to food self-sufficiency.63 In view of its labour-intensive nature, it was suitable for small-scale family farming, and smallholders were considered more likely to engage in cultivation alongside cattle rearing and farmyard enterprises in a system of mixed farming. By buttressing the small farm economy, land distribution was considered as playing its part in facilitating the expansion of tillage and achieving self-sufficiency in food. Land Commission inspectors when recommending acquisition of land for distribution often pointed out in their reports that the land was suitable for tillage, an observation which evidently weighed in their recommendation. Catholic social teaching The policy of land distribution may have acquired a further legitimacy by being consistent with Catholic social teaching, as enunciated in the papal encyclicals, Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931), and later Mater et Magistra (1961). As an ideology, Catholic social teaching received the name of distributism, the early exponents of which were the Catholic writers G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc (who was also a strong supporter of Irish land reform).64 It provided foundational principles that helped to shape social and economic policy of successive Irish governments.65 A key tenet of Catholic social teaching was the responsibility of the state and the community to ensure that all individuals were free from privation and could afford the essential necessities of life. Linked to this was the assertion that employers had a duty to pay a decent living wage to their employees and to respect their right to form trade unions and engage in collective bargaining to secure better pay and improved working conditions. Alongside these principles, it was equally contended that private property rights must be carefully safeguarded, but with the onus on distributing ownership as widely as possible. Another strand of Catholic social teaching was the belief in small-scale association, exemplified by the family, local community and small business and craft enterprises, in preference to mass industrialization,

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urbanization and large-scale bureaucratic centralization. In addition, Mater et Magistra contained an explicit statement in favour of small family farming. It is not hard to see how such ideas tallied with land distribution with its objective to alleviate privation, ensure a modest income from the land and preserve the small family farm. Speaking in 1967, Michael Moran, the Minister for Lands, justified the continuation of the land distribution policy as ‘the practical application of Christian social principles as exemplified in the papal encyclicals’.66 Agrarianism Another important ideological influence was that of agrarianism, a set of values which originated in continental Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, upholding the rights of peasant farmers and the preservation of rural traditions. After World War I, it gave rise to small peasant-based political parties in several European countries. Its ideas were also espoused by European fascist movements. The exponents of agrarianism were antipathetic to mass industrialization and big business on the one hand and were vehemently opposed to communism on the other. In Ireland, agrarianism became noticeable from the first decade of the twentieth century. It was articulated in a small weekly newspaper called The Irish Peasant published from 1903 to 1910 with its contributors advocating the virtues of peasant farming and the traditional rural way of life and decrying the invidious influences of extensive commercial farming, especially ranching. Repeatedly contributions and editorials linked the preservation of the traditional rural way of life to the causes of national independence and Gaelic revivalism. 67 Similar sentiments were expressed in travelogues of the time, and in the rhetoric of the UIL and Sinn Féin leaders. After independence, agrarian values were asserted by both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and by various local, regional and national associations devoted to furthering the interests of the family farmer and the rural community. They were asserted not only within a political context, such as in Dáil Debates and at party cumann meetings, but also in newspaper leader columns, Lenten pastorals and public lectures by agriculturalists. The tillage bias in agrarianism also influenced some of the contributions to the Journal of the Department of Agricultural and Technical Instruction for Ireland in the early years of the twentieth century. The essential thrust of agrarianism in Ireland, as indeed in mainland Europe, was conservative, namely, to preserve small-scale family farming

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based on ‘proper methods of husbandry’ (i.e. tillage) and to retain as many people on the land as possible. As stated by Michael Moran, Minister for Lands in 1967, ‘a strong rural population is essential to the well-being of our society. The family farm is and will continue to be the best suited to Irish conditions.’68 This echoed the aspiration set out in the 1937 Constitution (Article 45) ‘that there may be established on the land in economic security as many families as in the circumstances shall be practicable’. This was a salient issue as a result of the ongoing decline of the population in the rural areas of Ireland, which was attributed, not always correctly, to commercial grazing. The conservative outlook of agrarianism was further reflected in a desire to preserve the traditional rural way of life, shaped by an idealistic view of how life was lived in the countryside in times past. Accompanying these sentiments was an antipathy to modern urban culture, technological advance and mass industrialization, as well as large-scale farming and ranching.69 Land distribution was central to the aspirations of agrarianism. It was seen as guaranteeing the survival of the small family-based farm community and the traditional rural way of life, as well as a means to advancing tillage farming. In so doing, it was also perceived as arresting the drift to the towns and emigration overseas and so reducing the depopulation of the countryside. Moreover, the popular desire was met to reduce the opportunities for large-scale commercial grazing which was deemed a threat to the small farm community and the traditional rural culture. Agrarianism together with Catholic social teaching was possibly the most telling ideological influence on land distribution. Rejection of socialism In contrast to Catholic distributism and agrarianism, socialism as an ideology had at best only a marginal influence on the land distribution programme.This was in part related to the strong opposition to socialism at least in its revolutionary form in post-independence Ireland. Moreover, although during the 1920s and 1930s left-wing elements in the republican movement strongly urged a more radical approach to land reform, they regarded with scepticism the course of land distribution. From the Marxist perspective, it did no more than replace one set of private property rights (those of graziers and large landholders) by another (those of small farmers). Brian O’Neill, a Marxist journalist, writing in 1933 articulated this perspective, considering land division as reassertion of private ownership and urging cooperative farming instead.70

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The vision of the agrarian reformers The land distribution policy and the ideological influences shaping it are indicative of the type of society the agrarian reformers and postindependence governments were trying to create. In essence, it was a society governed by democratic principles, imbued by a Catholic ethos, and largely rural, characterized by a lack of large-scale industrialization. At its heart was an independent peasant class based on small-scale family farming, free from privation but attached to a traditional and frugal way of life. In later years, it was modified by an acceptance of the rise of a modern business sector more attuned to a secular urban culture, although the traditional rural society was still to be valued. Indeed, it is surprising how many TDs still asserted the need for the small family farm and the traditional rural way of life in 1980s and 1990s, despite the major changes the Irish economy was undergoing. In the pursuit of this vision, two important dilemmas arose. One was the choice, as mentioned above, between maximizing and restricting the number of allottees, with the consequent impact on living standards in the rural population. As it turned out, Irish governments tended to stick to the first of these options. The second was the need to modernize Irish agriculture and increase output, through extensive technologically efficient farm enterprises, alongside the desire to preserve the small family farm, an integral part of which was land distribution. Conclusion: exploring further themes and issues In a revised study of the graziers, a wider perspective would be adopted that would examine the acquisition and distribution of grazing land during the transition to independence and during the sixty or more years after it and the ideological influences that shaped such a policy. This would contribute to the literature on twentieth-century land distribution in Ireland, by exploring themes and issues that merit further analysis. Terry Dooley’s work, ‘The Land for the People’: The Land Question in Independent Ireland, is an important study of the first part of the land distribution programme, which follows a conventional historical approach. A revised study along the lines indicated in this chapter would complement Dooley’s work by identifying the key questions that shaped and constrained the land distribution programme. These include, among others, the collective but problematic nature of land distribution during the transition to independence; the complex legal questions arising from

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the land reforms; the issues of security of tenure and compensation awarded to those who were dispossessed; the processes, criteria and challenges in allotting land; the ideological influences shaping land policy; the impact of land distribution on those who received land; the economic and financial considerations that imposed constraints on land distribution; and the often sharp divisions over land policy among policymakers. Notes 1 D. S. Jones, Graziers, Land Reform and Political Conflict in Ireland (Washington, 1995). 2 B. Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966). 3 A. Stinchcombe, ‘Agricultural Enterprise and Rural Class Relations’, American Journal of Sociology, 67:2 (1961), 165–76. 4 R. D. Crotty, Irish Agricultural Production, Its Volume and Structure (Cork, 1966). 5 C. M. Arensberg and S. T. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland (2nd edn. Cambridge, MA, 1968). 6 P. Bew, Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland, 1890–1910: Parnellites and Radical Agrarians (Oxford, 1987); F. Campbell, Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland, 1891–1921 (Oxford, 2005). 7 M. A. G. Ó Tuathaigh, ‘Land Question, Politics and Irish Society’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land, Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), p. 169; T. Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’: The Land Question in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 2004), pp. 40–5; Campbell, Land and Revolution, pp. 242–55; A. Mitchell, Revolutionary Government in Ireland: Dáil Éireann, 1919–22 (Dublin, 1995), pp. 130–2. 8 Dooley, ‘Land for the People’, p. 46; Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland, pp. 258–7, 314–17; Mitchell, Revolutionary Government, pp. 131–7; 336–7; E. Rumpf, and A. C. Hepburn, Nationalism and Socialism in Twentieth Century Ireland (New York, 1977), pp. 21–5, 55; P. Bew, ‘Sinn Féin, Agrarian Radicalism, and the War of Independence, 1919–1921’, in D. G. Boyce (ed.), The Revolution in Ireland, 1879–1923 (Basingstoke, 1988), pp. 217–35; B. Novick, Conceiving Revolution: Irish Nationalist Propaganda during the First World War (Dublin, 2001), pp. 179–80. 9 From S. J. Waddell to John Collins, 23 January 1923 (Inspectors File for S. J. Waddell, Land Settlement Commission [LSC] papers: National Archives, Ireland [NAI]); Campbell, Land and Revolution, pp. 249–50. 10 Ibid., pp. 69–70; Dáil Debates, vol. 4, cols. 354–8, 6 July 1923; K. O’Shiel, ‘Memories of My Lifetime – 10: No Contempt of Court’, Irish Times, 21 November 1966, p. 10. 11 Return of Cases Dealt with by Land Courts, Miscellaneous Inspectors Notes, 15 May 1923 (LSC papers no. 19: NAI). It is not clear if this figure included those cases where transfer was allowed, but the claimants could not meet the price set by the court valuer.

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12 K. O’Shiel, ‘Some Recent Phases of the Land Question in Ireland’, Manchester Guardian Commercial, 10 May 1923, p. 14. 13 Memorandum from Dáil Eireann Department of Agriculture to Members of the Dáil: Explaining the Dáil Land Act, Policy and Proposals re Land Scheme, October 1919 (LSC papers no 15: NAI); Irish Times, 1 March 1921, p. 6; Dáil Debates, vol. 4, col. 355, 6 July 1923. 14 Dáil Debates, vol. 15, col. 2578, 24 June 1926; vol. 16, cols. 1739–8, 24 June 1926. 15 K. O’Shiel,‘Memories of My Lifetime – 12: On the Edge of Anarchy’, Irish Times, 23 November 1966, p. 11; Dáil Debates, vol. 16, col. 1737, 24 June 1926. 16 Figures calculated from Report of the Irish Land Commissioners, 1923–1928, p. 51. 17 Statement of Mortgages and Repayments of the National Land Bank, National Land Bank files, 22 October 1922 (Dáil Éireann Files DE 5/62/1: NAI). 18 Dáil Debates, vol. 9, cols. 574–5, 31 October 1924; vol. 16, cols. 1737–9, 24 June 1926; vol. 18, cols. 848–9, 871–3, 24 February 1927. 19 Figures taken or calculated from Dáil Debates, vol. 4, cols. 354–8, 6 July 1923; vol. 9, cols. 574–5, 31 October 1924; Annual Report of the Irish Land Commissioners, 1980, Pl 306, p. 18. 20 Calculated from a Statement of Mortgages and Repayments of the National Land Bank, National Land Bank files, 22 October 1922. 21 Memoranda from: H. Healy to G. McElligott, 1 January 1925, G. McElligott to Land Commissioners, 7 January 1925, Charles Kettle to G. McElligott, 16 October 1925, Acquisition File, Coolure Trustees (CC35: Irish Land Commission Records [ILCR]). 22 Dáil Debates, vol. 16, cols. 1738, 1762, 24 June 1926. 23 Ibid., vol. 2, cols. 969–70, 19 January 1923; vol. 2, cols. 1923–6, 1 March 1923; vol. 3, col. 990, 17 May 1923; vol. 3, col. 2506, 26 June 1923; vol. 3, col. 2064, 2 July 1923; vol. 6, cols. 1217–18, 20 February 1924; vol. 7, col. 2039, 6 June 1924; K. O’Shiel, ‘Memories of My Lifetime – 11: The Last Land War’, Irish Times, 22 November 1966, p. 11;‘Memories of My Lifetime – 12: On the Edge of Anarchy’, p. 11; Campbell, Land and Revolution, pp. 249–51; Mitchell, Revolutionary Government, pp. 131–2. 24 Forcible Possession Cases: Reports & Returns Sent to the Minister for Agriculture, 10 January 1923 (LSC papers no. 18: NAI); O’Shiel, ‘Some Recent Phases of the Land Question in Ireland’, pp. 13–14. 25 Dáil Debates, vol. 7, col. 2039, 6 June 1924. 26 Forcible Possession Cases: Reports & Returns Sent to the Minister for Agriculture, 10 January 1923. 27 From Supt G. Brennan, Ennis District, An Garda Síochána, to Irish Land Commission, Acquisition File, H. V. McNamara, Co. Clare, 21 May 1924 (S. 2414: ILCR). 28 Form of Inspectors Report on Untenanted Land, Acquisition File, Madame E. J. de Janasz, 17 April 1925 (S. 4282: ILCR). 29 Memoranda from B. J. Geoghegan, Land Inspector, to Sean Collins, 2, 8, 10 February, 9 March 1923; to Land Settlement Commission, 23 January 1923; to

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30 31 32 33

34 35

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Minister for Agriculture, 23 January 1923: Inspectors’ Files re Seizure Cases (LSC papers no. 19: NAI). Memorandum from Geoghegan to Collins, 10 February 1923. O’Shiel, ‘Some Recent Phases of the Land Question in Ireland’, p. 14; Dáil Debates, vol. 16, col. 1761, 24 June 1926. Dáil Debates, vol. 3, col. 2506, 26 July 1923; vol. 6, col. 1217, 20 February 1924. Memorandum on Seizure of Land, from Minister for Agriculture, Patrick Hogan, to President,William Cosgrave, Minister for Defence, General Mulcahy, and Minister for Home Affairs, Kevin O’Higgins, 22 December 1922 (Department of the Taoiseach General Registered Files S. 1943: NAI). Ibid. Ibid.; Eunan O’Halpin, Defending Ireland: The Irish State and Its Enemies since 1922 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 30–3. Among the measures were Public Safety (Emergency Powers) Act, 1923, no. 28, s. 6, Schedule; Public Safety (Emergency Powers) Act, 2, 1923, no. 29, Schedule; Public Safety (Punishment of Offences) Temporary Act, 1924, no. 15, s. 2. From Brennan to Irish Land Commission, 21 May 1924. Memoranda from Geoghegan to Collins, 2, 8, 10 February, 9 March 1923. Dáil Debates, vol. 2, cols. 393–4, 10 May 1922; vol. 4, cols. 355–6, 6 July 1923. Land Act, 1923, no. 42, ss. 28, 29; Land Act, 1933, no. 38, ss. 29, 32; K. O’Shiel, ‘The Work of the Land Commission’, Public Administration in Ireland, 2 (1953), 67. D. S. Jones, ‘Land Reform, Legislation, and Security of Tenure in Ireland after Independence’, Eire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies, 33: 1 (Spring/Summer 1998), pp. 116–43. Land Act, 1923, ss. 32, 33; Land Act, 1933, ss. 29, 32; Land Act, 1939, no. 26, s. 39. Committee Stage, Land Bill, 1923, Dáil Debates, vol. 3, cols. 309–10, 6 July 1923. Land Act, 1933, s. 32. In re Estate of Roscrea Meat Products Ltd, [1958] I. R. 47. Dáil Debates, vol. 3, col. 1943, 14 June 1923. Calculated from the Annual Report of the Irish Land Commissioners, for each year from 1923–28 to 1987. M. Moran,‘The Sociological Impact of the Work of the Irish Land Commission’, Annual Report of the Irish Land Commissioners, 1959/60, Pr 5821, p. 32. Annual Report of the Irish Land Commissioners, 1950/51, Pr 1100, p. 6. Michael Moran, ‘Land Tenure and the Viable Farm’, National Farmers Association Year Book, 1960 (Dublin, 1960), p. 5. Figures calculated from the Annual Report of the Irish Land Commissioners, for each year from 1923–28 to 1987. Moran, ‘The Sociological Impact of the Work of the Irish Land Commission’, pp. 32–3; Kevin O’Shiel and T. O’Brien (Secretary to the Land Commission), ‘The Land Problem in Ireland and Its Settlement’, paper given to the First International Congress on Agrarian Law, Florence, Italy, April 1954, reprinted in Annual Report of the Irish Land Commissioners, 1954/55, Pr 3419, p. 60.

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52 Dáil Debates, vol. 206, col. 68, 27 November 1963. 53 Ibid., vol. 222, col. 1214, 4 May 1966. 54 Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on the Problems of Small Western Farmers, Pr 6540 (Dublin, 1961), p. 11. 55 Land Policy: Laid by the Government before each House of the Oireachtas, December 1980, Prl. 9372 (Dublin, 1980), pp. 7–8. 56 Dáil Debates, vol. 103, cols. 1442–53, 22 November 1946. For further references to the order of preference see Minister for Lands answers to questions, Dáil Debates, vol. 199, col. 1080, 6 February 1963; vol. 222, col. 1214, 4 May 1966; vol. 235, col. 1944, 27 June 1968; Memorandum from S. J. Waddell, Chief Inspector, to Inspectors, Irish Land Commission, IN 18/39, 6 December 1939 (Department of the Taoiseach General Registered Files S 6490A: NAI). 57 Annual Report of the Irish Land Commissioners, 1981. 58 D. S. Jones,‘The Transfer of Land and the Emergence of the Graziers during the Famine Period’, in Arthur Gribben (ed.), The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America (Boston, 1999), pp. 85–103. 59 P. Bew, ‘The National Question, Land, and Revisionism: Some Reflections’, in D. G. Boyce and A. O’Day (eds), The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (London, 1996), pp. 96–7. 60 D. S. Jones, ‘Conflicts within the Irish Government over Land Distribution Policy’, Eire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies, 36: 3 & 4 (Fall/ Winter, 2001), p. 109. 61 Martin Hughes to Padraic O’ Maille, TD, Acquisition File, James Brannick, 26 July 1926 (S. 5530: ILCR). 62 C. Ó Gráda, A Rocky Road: Irish Economy since the 1920s (Manchester, 1997), pp. 46–53; T. Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–79 (Glasgow, 1981), pp. 141–6. 63 Ó Gráda, A Rocky Road, pp. 144–50; Daly, The First Department, pp. 158–209. 64 H. Belloc, The Servile State (2nd edn., London, 1913); T. Storck, Foundations of a Catholic Political Order (Beltsville, 1998), pp. 8–13, 43–86, 115–23; A. N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc (London, 1984), pp. 130–1. 65 Ó Gráda, A Rocky Road, pp. 155–6; T. Inglis, Moral Monopoly: Catholic Church in Modern Irish Society (Dublin, 1987), pp. 72–3; F. O’Driscoll, ‘Social Catholicism and the Social Question in Independent Ireland: The Challenge to the Fiscal System’, in M. Cronin and J. Regan (eds), Ireland: The Politics of Independence, 1922–49 (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 121–43. 66 M. Moran, ‘Some Aspects of Current Land Reform and Afforestation’, Transcript of speech to Agricultural Science Association Conference, Galway, 21 September 1967 (GIS 1/317: NAI). 67 It was later retitled The Peasant, and then The Peasant and Irish Ireland, and lastly The Irish Nation and the Peasant. Originally published in Navan, Co. Meath in 1903, it was published in Dublin from 1906. 68 Moran, ‘Some Aspects of Current Land Reform and Afforestation’.

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69 Brown, Ireland, pp. 146–8.Tom Garvin has identified some of the key tenets of agrarianism in Ireland, which he referred to as ‘ruralism’, and assessed their influence on republican thinking; see his 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin, 1996), pp. 152–3. 70 B. O’Neill, The War for the Land in Ireland (London, 1933), pp. 159–65. See also R. English, Radicals and the Republicans: Socialist Republicanism in the Irish Free State, 1925–1937 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 86–95; R. English, ‘Socialist Republicanism in Independent Ireland, 1922–49’, in Cronin and Regan (eds), Ireland: The Politics of Independence, 1922–49, pp. 84–97; Rumpf and Hepburn, Nationalism and Socialism, pp. 91–3.

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

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7

Fergus Campbell: Land and Revolution revisited

The book Land and Revolution examines the development of the land question, and its relationship to the evolution of nationalist politics, in Ireland between the fall of Parnell in 1891 and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921.1 The book tells the story of nationalist politics and radical agrarian activity in the west of Ireland largely through a detailed case study of east Galway between the early 1890s and 1921. Although other case studies are introduced from other parts of the west of Ireland, the east Galway case study is central, and the book makes a serious attempt to provide a narrative of both the activities of nationalist political organizations and the development of agrarian protest in that locality over the entire period. The main evidence used to construct that narrative is the series of month-by-month police reports and intelligence notes collected by the British state, and these enable a close study of how protest develops, changes, begins and (sometimes) ends. They provide statistical data that can be quantified but also qualitative evidence and quasi-ethnographic observations on what is going on by the County and District Inspectors of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). In addition to this, I followed the narrative in the local nationalist press, especially the Connacht Tribune (available from 1909 onwards), as well as political correspondence between local activists and national leaders (John Dillon, John Redmond and William O’Brien papers). I also found some local political papers (Martin Finnerty and Martin Ward papers in Galway, among others) and interviewed the sons and daughters of local political activists as well as local historians who knew a great deal about the oral traditions of their localities. A further dimension to the study was to look at those individuals who were involved in nationalist organizations and agrarian protest and to try to profile their social background and how this changed over time using data in the census and in the land valuation books.

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My first aim, then, was to tell the story of nationalist politics and agrarian protest in a particular locality that was, arguably, representative of the west as a whole, and the book was organized chronologically to achieve this.The first chapter examined the nature of the land question in Ireland between the Great Famine and the turn of the century and looked at the key developments and the key participants in nationalist politics and agrarian protest over that period. Chapter 1 also culminated in a study of the origins of the UIL in County Mayo in 1898–99. As the main Home Rule organization in the Irish countryside, the UIL, in both its ‘national’ and its local manifestations, was at the heart of both nationalist politics and agrarian protest, and – at one level – the book is a history of the UIL between 1898 and its demise in 1918. The second chapter of the book examines the UIL’s campaign for compulsory land purchase that rattled the British state so much that the Irish Chief Secretary, George Wyndham, introduced his famous land act in order to try to restore law and order in 1903. Indeed, Wyndham (who was personally committed to land purchase) was able to use the agitation to persuade the government to introduce an extensive and expensive scheme for land purchase in Ireland. Chapter 3 examines the history of the UIL and agrarian protest between 1904 and 1910 and looks at the impact of the Wyndham Land Act on agrarian protest and the UIL. I argue that a new land agitation began to emerge in 1904 with the dual aim of forcing landlords to sell on terms dictated by the tenants and to include their untenanted grazing land in the sale. This agitation developed into a countrywide campaign that has been labelled by historians (although not as far as I know by contemporaries) as the Ranch War. This chapter also demonstrates that the leaders of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) pushed renewed agrarian protest in 1907 to unite their support base and to strengthen their position vis-à-vis the emerging Sinn Féin Party that was gaining significant strength in parts of Ireland from about 1906 onwards. The central chapter in the book is the fourth, and it explores the personnel, the ideas and the mechanisms that the UIL used to implement its policies in rural Ireland. League branches constituted themselves as land courts that decided who had the right to occupy land (usually evicted farms and grazing farms).This chapter examines how these courts worked, but it also analyses the composition of the UIL branches that presided over these courts. I make the argument in this chapter that many UIL branches in County Galway were composed of two wings or sections. On the one hand, members who were small farmers and labourers constituted a radical section that sometimes had connections with the IRB and

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pushed for a radical redistribution of land and were prepared to use violence to achieve this. On the other hand, those members who were shopkeepers or large farmers usually cautioned against the use of violence and were prepared to accept the guidance of the Catholic Church and to allow land redistribution to evolve gradually. In public, these two wings of UIL branches appeared to agree (although there were outbursts of conflict as at Craughwell and Gurteen between 1909 and 1912). In private, however, members of either wing tried to push the UIL in the direction that would best serve their own interests. At the centre of this chapter is a detailed study of a dispute at Craughwell in east Galway over an evicted farm that split the parish into two sections (one moderate and well off and the other poorer and more radical) and generated a violent feud that dictated political allegiances there for most of the twentieth century. In some respects, chapters 5 and 6 expand on the ideas introduced in chapter 4. Chapter 5 explores the development of the Sinn Féin Party in east Galway and shows that it built itself upon a radical agrarian tradition in the region with its roots in the earlier Land War period (1879–81) and possible connections to the secret society tradition of the early nineteenth century. It shows that some sections of Sinn Féin at the local level attempted to implement socially radical policies in terms of land redistribution. The sixth chapter considers the implications of my study of east Galway, and other parts of the west, for our understanding of the nature of the Irish revolution (1916–23). This chapter suggests that the revolution did change Irish politics in terms of personnel by allowing a younger and generally more proletarian group of people to take power from the ageing rural bourgeoisie who had run the show more or less from 1879 onwards. This chapter also suggests that Sinn Féin contained both radical and agrarian elements and that republicans in the countryside were more radical than their comrades among the national leadership of the Sinn Féin Party. There were important changes in the redistribution of land during the revolutionary period, and these also contributed to the social revolution in landownership that had been taking place in rural Ireland since 1879. Finally, the chapter demonstrates that there were some genuinely socially radical initiatives during the revolutionary period. The seizures of land of 1920, often carried out by large groups of men, women and children, did bring about an immediate redistribution of some grazing land, and this certainly contributed to the ongoing process of social revolution. There were also some attempts to establish collective farms, and this experiment did challenge the underlying capitalist ethos of Irish society. Finally, the chapter suggests that the revolutionary period did witness

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important social transformations in terms of the local political leadership and accelerated land redistribution but that there was a contest going on between radical and conservative elements, and that the outcome of that contest was not clear at the high point of revolution in 1920–21. When I began work, there was a sizeable literature on the UIL, notably in works by Paul Bew, Philip Bull and David Jones.2 The prevailing view in Bew, Bull and Jones’s work was that the dominant form of agrarian conflict after the implementation of the Wyndham Land Act was between large and small tenant farmers rather than between landlord and tenant. The assumption made by previous historians was that the Wyndham Land Act had immediately solved the conflict between landlord and tenant by facilitating massive land purchase. Partly because I made use of a series of lost police reports that covered the years between 1903 and 1908 (that none of the previous authors had used) Land and Revolution revealed that antilandlord conflict remained very important after 1903. In fact, the agitation that has become known as the Ranch War and which has been presumed to be an agitation to redistribute grazing land was really an anti-landlord conflict during which tenants campaigned for landlords to sell their estates at purchase prices favourable to the tenants and to include the untenanted grazing land that they owned in the sale.The key point that I made was that the Wyndham Land Act did transform the Irish land question but that this did not happen overnight but took many years, and during that period, there was considerable conflict over the price landlords were willing to accept and that which tenants were prepared to pay. As far as I know, this argument had not been made before I wrote Land and Revolution. The reconsideration of these social and economic realities has important implications for our broader understanding of this period. Bew and Bull both argued that the solution of the land purchase problem in 1903 opened up an opportunity for the Irish nationalist movement to become more conciliatory to both the Irish landlords and the British state. However, if it is accepted that conflict between landlord and tenant remained important after 1903 – and it was certainly the case that this was largely because landlords could be quite intransigent about the prices that they wanted to be paid for their estates – then the possibilities for conciliation were seriously reduced. Bew and Bull also suggested that continued agrarian conflict would inevitably be divisive for the Irish nationalist movement after 1903 because – as far as they were concerned – it would lead to increased conflict between large and small tenant farmers. However, my book showed that if agrarian conflict after 1903 was mainly antilandlord, then this would actually serve to unite the tenant farmer class, and

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this is – I believe – what happened. In fact, the IPP promoted agrarian agitation in 1907 because its fortunes were in decline – following the Irish Council Bill debacle – and it enabled the IPP to strengthen its position vis-à-vis the newly emerging Sinn Féin Party. It is unlikely that the IPP would have pursued a policy at this juncture that would have divided its provincial support base. The historians whom I read when I began research tended to argue that the Wyndham Land Act – widely viewed as the most important and influential legislation introduced by any British government during the Act of Union (1801–1921) – was the product of George Wyndham’s benign attitude to Ireland. This view fitted with the then dominant historiographical tendency to emphasize the positive elements of British rule in Ireland. The evidence from the police reports and in Wyndham and Arthur Balfour’s papers in the British Library, however, presented an alternative reading of this development. In fact, as Land and Revolution showed, there was a widespread agitation throughout Ireland in favour of compulsory land purchase, and it was this agitation that Wyndham was forced to respond to in 1902–03 and that resulted in his famous land act. I contradicted the literature by suggesting that the British state’s hand was forced by the pressure from below and that it was the UIL’s agitation from below that forced the government to legislate so dramatically on the land question in 1903. In one sense, my argument presented a more complex understanding of the origins of the Wyndham Land Act than that which preceded it. As I acknowledged in the book, Wyndham was personally committed to land purchase, but the government and the Treasury were reluctant to implement his ideas. The agitation, and Wyndham’s framing of that agitation to the government, persuaded the prime minister and the cabinet to support Wyndham’s ambitious and costly proposals. Once again, I am not aware of this argument being made by any historians before the presentation of my paper on this at the Irish history seminar at Hertford College, Oxford (one of the key forums for Irish historians to present their ideas from 1992 onwards). I delivered this paper in March 1997, and it was later published in the Historical Journal and then became part of chapter 2 of Land and Revolution. If there was a sizeable literature on the UIL and the first decade of the twentieth century, the literature on the 1910–21 period was gigantic (and is getting bigger). Apart from all the books on the Easter Rising and on major nationalist figures, there was an extremely influential study of local politics in County Clare between 1913 and 1921. David Fitzpatrick’s first book stood like a colossus above the rest of the literature and was regarded by the older generation of Irish historians as ‘the bible of the

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Irish revolution’ – as one historian described it to me in 2000 – and as the most outstanding work of the generation of historians who had taught me Irish history.3 One of the key arguments of Fitzpatrick’s book was that the Irish revolution was characterized more by continuity than by change, and this was perhaps most evident in his contention that the Sinn Féiners in County Clare were former members of the Home Rule movement. Land and Revolution queried this hypothesis and showed that the evidence for continuity was between 3 and 13 per cent and that Sinn Féiners were not generally former Home Rulers. In fact, I contended that Sinn Féiners were younger, poorer and more indebted to the Fenian radical agrarian tradition than Fitzpatrick had allowed. This suggested that there were important discontinuities, as well as continuities, during the revolution. At that point, none of the conclusions of Politics and Irish Life had been challenged, and I felt that my critique raised important questions about how Fitzpatrick had read his own evidence (which did not suggest that there actually was a thick strand of continuity between Home Rulers and Sinn Féiners in Clare) and about the origins and nature of the Sinn Féin movement in rural Ireland during the revolution. Even so, I agreed with previous historians that the outcome of the revolution was a conservative state. My contention was that the path to this conservative revolution was not as smooth and straightforward as some previous historians have suggested. There were important changes – in terms of personnel and in terms of land being redistributed – and there were experiments in collective ownership. If these experiments were defeated, they remain important as revealing that the revolutionary outcome was the result of a series of contests. Fitzpatrick would probably agree with some of this, but much of the historical writing on this period since 1977 (when his book was published) suggested that the revolution was innately and inevitably conservative in character (this argument was made by Michael Laffan, Mike Cronin and John Regan).4 Unlike Fitzpatrick, though, I suggested that the small farmer class were a distinct section within the tenant farmer class (that Fitzpatrick regarded as conservative) that had socially radical objectives, and so I contended that the reality as well as the potential for radical social change during the revolution was all the greater. My background I was born at Carlisle in the north of England in 1970. My mother, Máiréad, was born at Colmanstown, near Athenry, in 1940, and my father, Seán, was born in Thurles, County Tipperary, in 1923. Every summer of my life

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between 3 months and 18, I travelled with my parents and (after 1971) my brother to spend summer holidays with my maternal grandparents at Colmanstown. My grandfather, Michael Jordan, was born at Colmanstown in 1907, and my grandmother, Annie Collins, was born at Abbert (also in County Galway) in 1916. Michael inherited his father’s small farm of about 10 acres in 1924 (when James died) and he met my grandmother when she moved to the Colmanstown area to work for the grazier Smith who owned a substantial grazing farm there. When I met my grandparents and came to know them in the early 1970s and 1980s, they appeared to come from another world. My grandmother wore the old-style aprons and dresses, and my grandfather wore the dark suits and white collarless shirts (and on journeys to Burke’s shop his trilby-like hat) that we see in photographs of rural Ireland from the 1930s. There was a sense that my grandparents, their way of life and their values were those of a past rural Ireland, perhaps a very past rural Ireland. The house that my grandfather and my mother were born in at Colmanstown was a two-roomed thatched cabin with walls two feet thick that had withstood the night of the Big Wind of 1839 and whose inhabitants had (at least physically) survived the famine. This old cabin – as it was known by the 1970s when it was used to house cattle – had been a home to my grandfather’s grandmother, Hannah Daly, who had been born there in 1819 and who lived there with her sister Catherine in the 1850s. When I visited Colmanstown as a child in the 1970s and especially as a teenager in the mid-1980s, there was a feeling of becoming part of a family heritage with deep roots in the past. My decision to become an Irish historian was undoubtedly influenced by the experience of learning something about my grandparents and their world. Indeed, when I began to read books about Irish history, I felt that the voices of people like my grandfather and my grandmother were not present.The history of the ordinary people of the west of Ireland, it seemed to me when I was an undergraduate history student in Oxford in 1991, had not yet been written, and I felt driven to tell some of their stories. I think it is significant that the initial impulse to begin researching the land question in the west of Ireland was an emotional connection and a curiosity about the strange and mysterious (to me) world of Colmanstown rather than just a concern with solving an intellectual problem. I began studying for a degree in modern history at Oxford University in 1988, but I did not specialize in Irish history while I was there (although I do remember a handful of tutorials with the late Angus MacIntyre in his elegant rooms in Magdalen College). Those Oxford tutorials presented a different

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view of Irish history to that which my uncle Padraic had once shared with my brother and I during an afternoon in the summer of 1984 while driving the back roads of east Galway in his bright orange V W Beetle. While I was at Oxford, I learned two lessons that formed the kind of historian I would become. As I have said, I had been raised in an Irish family in Carlisle in the 1970s and the 1980s, but I had never particularly thought of myself as Irish. Although we went on holiday to the farm in Galway every summer and my parents listened (sometimes literally) religiously to RTÉ Radio, many of my friends also had Irish parents, and none of these practices seemed unusual in northern England. But at Oxford, I became aware that not everyone was as well disposed to the Irish as I was. The antipathy towards Irish people, and especially Catholic Irish people, that I observed among some people at Oxford meant that by the time I finished my degree, I felt that my second-generation Irishness was an important part of my identity which had been latent and more or less taken for granted beforehand. At some level, this translated itself into a feeling that I should try to tell the story of ordinary Irish men and women to ensure that they were not simply marginalized, neglected or caricatured in the historical record. It also resulted in my writing an article for the Wadham College magazine (the short-lived Wadwords) presenting the then very unpopular view in Wadham that the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ had evolved at least in part from the manner in which Catholics had been treated in Northern Ireland between 1922 and 1968. Any attempt to understand the nationalist position in Northern Ireland at that time – even an attempt that acknowledged the barbarism of the Provisional IRA – was regarded as support for the Provos in some quarters, or so it seemed to me in 1988–89. The second lesson I learned at Oxford was that history ought to be combative and confrontational. Almost the first thing C. S. L. (Cliff) Davies, then the senior historian at Wadham, and an expert in early modern British history, ever said to me was that the only time I should ever quote another historian was if I was going to disagree with him or her, and we were encouraged to argue aggressively against the literature in our essays. It may be significant that Cliff’s mentor and predecessor at Wadham, Lawrence Stone, had a reputation for being confrontational sometimes to the point of violence during tutorials. It was said that one undergraduate waiting to enter Stone’s office observed the student who had a tutorial before him being thrown down the stairs at the end of his session. This was probably apocryphal, but there is no question that the Wadham school of historical inquiry demanded robust criticism and defence and was not for the faint-hearted (and notwithstanding the presence of Jane Garnett

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there was a macho dimension to the discussion of history at Wadham and Oxford more generally in the 1980s). Indeed, the Oxbridge school of historians of that generation taught that the only history writing that mattered was that which engaged critically with what had been written already (otherwise, what was the point of writing history?). This method of teaching together with the obsession with critically engaging with the existing literature meant that when I began studying Irish history in earnest, I did so with a keen sense of spotting gaps or problems in the literature and attempting to develop an argument that was novel and original. One of the first decisions I had to make when I began studying for my PhD at Bristol University in 1992 was the position I would take on the then fraught debate about Irish historical revisionism. Broadly speaking, revisionism had been the dominant school of Irish historical writing since the late 1930s when Theo Moody and Robin Dudley Edwards established the journal Irish Historical Studies (IHS). In the climate of the 1920s and the 1930s, Irish history was often written in a less than empirical manner and sometimes fabricated to support the legitimacy of the fledgling Irish Free State. Moody and Edwards, fresh from the Institute of Historical Research in London, set about establishing rigorous empirical methods as the underpinning methodology for their reconceived version of Irish history. Their revisionism attempted to interrogate the Irish past using archival material in a scholarly manner. However, they were also censorious of the legitimate subject matter for Irish historians and imposed an unofficial ban on articles that looked at the post-1900 period. Looking back on it, this was a strange decision. It is perhaps understandable that they felt it was almost impossible to write very recent history or that a traumatic past should not yet be investigated when many of the participants in that past (and particularly the Civil War of 1922–23) lived. But the introduction of a repressive impulse to the writing of scholarly Irish history in its foundational moment does perhaps say something about the mentality of Moody and Edwards and might also tell us something about the problems with revisionism that have become increasingly evident over the last 40 years. After all, a historian might decide not to write about the post-1900 period, but she could not fail to write from the vantage point of the post-1900 period if that is when she lived, and – in any case – much of Irish politics in the twentieth century saw itself as evolving from events in the distant Irish past the reinterpretation of which must have a knock-on effect on post-1900 developments. Basically, the idea that the toxic post-1900 history could be split off somehow suggests that there was what psychoanalysts would call a paranoid–schizoid

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dimension to Moody and Edwards’s academic project.5 In other words, the problematic or traumatic past was to be split off from rather than integrated into the story of the nation.This censoring of what historians were allowed to research or think about must have applied a dead hand to intellectual developments and greatly limited creativity and freedom of expression. This censorship inevitably had an impact on the writing of the history of the Irish revolution. Perhaps the absence of a scholarly forum for the discussion of the revolution meant that when repressed thoughts were finally vented, there was an explosive quality to their articulation. Indeed, the failure to allow scholarly discussion of the revolution before the 1960s may have allowed a traumatic past to fester and to be eventually partially re-enacted in Northern Ireland precisely because it had not been properly thought about by historians. By the time the ban was lifted, the Northern Irish Troubles were beginning and those historians who decided they could examine the archives of the revolution were also very influenced by what was going on in the North. While the early conflict in Northern Ireland between, say, 1964 and 1969 was really about civil rights for Catholics, the evolving situation gave rise to the Provisional IRA as the dominant expression of Catholic grievances. Irish historians were then presented by the early 1970s with a violent conflict in which the Provisional IRA were responsible for most of the violence even if they did not monopolize it, and the state forces (British and Northern Irish) and Loyalist paramilitaries also contributed very significantly to the escalation of violent conflict. For unclear reasons, however, many (although not all) Irish revisionist historians appear to have taken their cue from Conor Cruise O’Brien and accepted the idea that a historical writing that was sympathetic towards Irish nationalism in the past might legitimize violent Irish nationalists in the present.6 When the first scholarly histories of the Irish revolution came to be written, then, they were composed in a manner that was very critical of Irish nationalism in all but its constitutional forms and that often regarded Irish unionism and even the British state sympathetically. The late 1960s, then, ushered in a second phase of Irish historical revisionism when study of post-1900 developments was allowed and indeed encouraged. During this phase of Irish revisionism (c. 1968–98), the key elements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish history, including the Great Famine, the Land War, the landlord–tenant relationship, the Easter Rising and War of Independence, were aggressively reconsidered, and often the nationalist version of those events was inverted. The Great Famine, was not, in fact, a key turning point in nineteenth-century Irish history; the Irish landlords were not oppressive exploiters but

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indebted and under-renting their tenants; the Land War of 1879–81 began because tenants were becoming more prosperous; the Easter Rising was idiotic, under supported and did not change the course of Irish political development at local level; and the IRA were not heroic freedom fighters but psychotic maniacs with a tendency to massacre Protestants. When I began reading about revisionism in the early 1990s, I had some serious reservations about it, but I was struck by how weak its critics sounded. In particular, Brendan Bradshaw – who wrote the most important critique of revisionism then available – raised important points about the dispassionate and unemotional character of revisionist discussion of the Great Famine that resonated with me.7 But he then proceeded to undermine his argument – to my mind and as I saw it in the early 1990s – by suggesting that there was a place for a present-centred history that told a story of the past designed to make a community feel good about itself in the present even if it was empirically wrong. In an era of holocaust denial, historians are rightly opposed to versions of the past that ignore the evidence in the interest of telling a good (or indeed a bad) story, and I found this aspect of Bradshaw’s article difficult to stomach. If I was going to be a historian, I felt it was essential to be determined to seek out truth in so far as that was reachable and to be honest to the evidence that I found, and to be wary of tailoring versions of the past to interests in the present whatever they might be. When I first felt that I had to select my position on the revisionist debate, then, in the early 1990s, I decided that there were fewer problems with revisionism than there were with anti-revisionism. However, this was a difficult decision for me. I did feel then that there was a general tone in what was regarded as revisionist history that was condescending to the ordinary people of rural Ireland and clearly partial towards the British state.To my mind, there were certainly sections of Irish nationalist and agrarian movements in the past that had committed horrendous acts, but those movements had also campaigned for the economic well-being and political rights of the ordinary people, and this was rarely acknowledged in the discussions I had with revisionist historians or in some of the key revisionist books published in the 1970s and 1980s. I was also concerned that prominent revisionists appeared to believe that scholars were somehow devoid of bias themselves in their dismantling of nationalist ‘myths’. On the other hand, the critiques of revisionism that were published in the 1980s and 1990s were clearly very partisan and seemed to be motivated by an inability to accept any criticism whatsoever of the nationalist project. And some revisionists were doing what revisionists should do – in other words, revising our interpretation of the

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past through scholarly examination of large amounts of evidence – and in the process producing great books like Theo Hoppen’s outstanding Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 1832–85 (Oxford, 1984). I think that I was always a little bit of a revisionist and a little bit of an anti-revisionist, but at the time, I felt I had to take sides. In Land and Revolution, I identified my work within the best parts of the revisionist tradition (that of using evidence to revise accepted versions of the past), and I applauded those revisionist historians whose work had changed our understanding of post-Famine Ireland. I also stated my belief that the true test of revisionism would be its openness to being revised itself when new evidence and new approaches and new historians came along. (I should also say that when I re-read Bradshaw’s article now I realize that I misjudged him in the early 1990s and can see now that he was not calling for the abandonment of scholarship but for the marrying of critical faculties with empathy and imagination and I find little to disagree with in his article now.) It should be said that the temper of postgraduate students in Dublin during the mid- to late 1990s was becoming very critical of Irish historical revisionism (Irish historians studying in Oxford at that time were generally strong supporters of revisionism or so it seemed to me). Among the Dublin postgraduates (at both Trinity and UCD) it was increasingly felt that revisionists were unreasonably hostile to Irish nationalism and to interpretations of the Irish past that accepted even portions of the nationalist version. In part, this was influenced by a generational conflict: the new generation of historians sometimes want to say something different to their teachers. It was also influenced by the developing peace process especially after the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 that represented a sea change by inviting nationalist and unionist paramilitaries into the political process, and this probably meant that it seemed more acceptable to look at the Irish past in a more open way since the end of the Northern Irish Troubles appeared to be on the horizon. At that time, I was involved in co-organizing a twentieth-century Irish history seminar at Trinity College Dublin (that included Joost Augusteijn, Stephen Ball, Enda Delaney, Michael Farry, Katrina Goldstone, Gerard Keown, Fearghal McGarry, Breandán MacSuibhne, Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh and many others including postgraduate students visiting from North America) and a subgroup within that larger group were a number of historians influenced by Marxism. I was a member of that group which was particularly influenced by the school of historians around the journal Past and Present, especially Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson. I felt at that time that the history from below school had not influenced the writing of Irish

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history as it might have done, and I was very influenced especially by the British Marxists and by other Marxist historians who were working on their PhDs then (Tom Crean, Paul Dillon and Andrew Shields) when I wrote Land and Revolution. In particular, I was determined to try to write about the ordinary people and to consider them collectively as influential actors in the historical process, and I made the argument that the ordinary people through their agitations did transform their own lives by forcing the British government to introduce reformist land legislation. Like most students, I would say that I was more influenced by my contemporaries than by my teachers, but I was lucky to be supervised by three fine historians. When I began my doctoral research, I was supervised by John Vincent, one of the great historians of Victorian Britain, who was deeply engaged in thinking about modern Irish history partly through his work on Gladstone and Disraeli but also following his time at Peterhouse in Cambridge where he had known Paul Bew, Joe Lee and Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh. Unfortunately, John Vincent became ill during the early 1990s and was unable to continue as my supervisor. Roy Foster with whom I had a very helpful meeting in Oxford in 1992 – and from whom I have learned a very great deal about Irish history – generously agreed to carry on supervising me along with William Beinart, an expert on South African history at Bristol University. Both John Vincent and Roy Foster are very much identified as part of the ‘high politics’ school of historical writing, and I think my engagement with them from my more ‘history from below’ perspective was creative and helpful. Although William Beinart’s expertise lies in the history of South Africa, in some respects, his instincts as a historian were closer to mine than those of either Foster or Vincent. Beinart had written history from below, and I think my work resonated with him for that reason, and his comments on individual chapters and his comparative perspective helped me to think more broadly about agrarian protest and collective action, and were extremely helpful. Since I have become a supervisor of dissertations myself I have reflected more on the supervision process and there is a developing literature on the complex emotional dynamics of the supervisor–postgraduate student relationship, on the difficulties that supervisors sometimes have with letting go of their students, of the difficulties students may have with finding their own paths, and the possible tendency for students to repeat the work of their former masters.8 I have been impressed by this work and it seems to me that these reflections may provide another useful framework to reflect on the ways in which the writing of history in Ireland has developed since the 1930s.

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Changes Since the publication of the book in 2005, I have changed my mind about some aspects of my argument and approach. In general, I now think that Land and Revolution is overly confrontational. I was influenced by the Oxbridge method of critical engagement that had been a part of my education (as well as growing up with a very argumentative father) and I think that at times I pushed my argument too hard without giving enough credit to the arguments that I rejected. To some extent, all historians do this. Arguably, David Fitzpatrick had pushed his argument for continuity between Home Rule and Sinn Féin in Politics and Irish Life further than the evidence allowed, and Peter Hart has made claims about the Kilmichael ambush and sectarianism in Cork that went beyond what the evidence revealed (I do not believe that he has done anything more sinister than that).9 All historians, and especially youngish historians, are probably inclined to do this in the interest of getting the attention of the reader and the profession (and I think it is likely that we have all done it), but it is ultimately not helpful to the broader development of historical understanding if too many conclusions are exaggerated. On the other hand, it could be argued that a historiography that contains a great deal of debate evolves in a dialectical fashion, and maybe knowledge and understanding do grow in this way. I made strong claims for the originality of my arguments in the book, and some reviewers took issue with these claims and suggested that Land and Revolution did not alter our understanding of the Irish revolution as much as I claimed.10 I do think that the book contains some arguments that continue to stand up and have changed the way we think about the first two decades of the twentieth century. I do also think that the reader of Land and Revolution will find a different Irish revolution in my book than they will discover in Politics and Irish Life or in The IRA and Its Enemies. The outcome of the revolution is obviously the same, but I think the process I describe in my book is different to that traced by Fitzpatrick or Hart, and a set of different experiences and phenomena are foregrounded (class rather than faction or ethnicity, the ongoing importance of agrarian conflict and anti-landlord agitation, the potential for social radicalism among rankand-file republicans and so on). Certainly, when I submitted the manuscript of the book to the anonymous readers at Oxford University Press in September 2001, one of the readers was almost venomous in his or her response to the chapters that took issue with the work of Bew, Fitzpatrick and Hart. I think it is also fair to say that most of the county studies that

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have been completed and that find their inspiration in Fitzpatrick’s first book have tended to emphasize how much their findings confirm his hypothesis, rather than suggesting that there might be an alternative model for the Irish revolution, as I did. I am happy that those reviewers who have criticized my book have not disputed the empirical base or even the conclusions that I reach but have tended to suggest that those conclusions complement what has been done before rather than contradicting it. What has tended to be debated is the status of the conclusions rather than their legitimacy or the evidence upon which they are based. When I began research, I was very influenced by the work of Maurice Agulhon and particularly his The Republic in the Village:The People of the Var from the French Revolution to the Second Republic (Cambridge, 1982) which Kevin Whelan very kindly leant to me. Agulhon’s book inspired me to depart to some extent from the county-study model and to try to explore the idea of a region (the ‘west’ or Connacht) which might have had a broadly similar experience, and so I examined data from the entirety of Connacht, and I also tried to look at a longer period than county studies of the Irish revolution usually do by examining the relationship between agrarian conflict and nationalist politics over a thirty-year period in some detail (and this revealed important connections between Sinn Féin of 1917–18 and secret society agitations of 1906–10 for instance). Perhaps what might ultimately distinguish Land and Revolution from Fitzpatrick’s and Hart’s books is that its tone is often more sympathetic to the ‘ordinary’ agrarian agitators than Fitzpatrick is to – arguably – any of the subjects of his book or than Hart is to the Cork IRA. Some critics of the book have suggested that it would have been better for me to write the story of nationalist politics and agrarian protest in Galway without the interference of so many reflections on how my conclusions related to the existing literature. Part of me does think that the book would read better if it was written as a story or an account of nationalist politics and agrarian protest in the west without attempts to connect my conclusions to wider debates in the literature. On the other hand, at the time I felt that I was writing against the grain of the literature, and so it seemed necessary to signpost to the reader when a road less travelled by Irish historians was being taken. Whereas one of my (slightly older) contemporaries, Peter Hart, appeared to more or less agree with the way that Irish history was being written and could pitch his first book as a development of that literature (and for that reason hardly to refer to it), I felt I needed to clear up some of (what I regarded as) the misconceptions of that literature and that this was necessary for my book to make

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any sense to the reader. For instance, the consensus when I began research was that agrarian protest after 1903 (during the Ranch War) generally consisted of conflict between small and large tenant farmers, whereas my work showed that, in fact, anti-landlord agitation continued to be the dominant element of agrarian protest and that the Wyndham Land Act of 1903 did not transform rural Irish society overnight. Similarly, there was an idea abroad that the Sinn Féin Party was unambiguously conservative, and this did not tally with my evidence, and more importantly, it emerged that some of the evidence for Sinn Féin’s conservatism was based on mistaken research.11 It seemed to me at the time that I needed to spell out some of these – to my mind – misplaced assumptions in order to establish alternative conceptions that could then be developed further. In part, the Oxbridge school of robust historical debate informed the confrontational tone of Land and Revolution, but I also think the culture of Irish political debate during the twentieth century influenced me and perhaps many other Irish historians too. Internal political debate in twentiethcentury Ireland – north and south – has been characterized by a tendency towards confrontation, hostility and the rejection of opposing views (I would suggest that this tendency has been stronger in Ireland than in many other countries). The conflict between pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty during the Irish Civil War (1922–23), for example, was much more violent and destructive than that during the War of Independence (1919–21). It could be argued that the Civil War was characterized by a level of vengeful, almost psychotic, violence quite unlike the more strategic violence that (usually) characterized the conflict of 1916–21. Indeed, it is possible that the intensity of violence during the Civil War was caused by the doubts that both sides must have had about the position that they had chosen to take, and the perceived need to obliterate these doubts by annihilating the enemy. Obviously, the Civil War gave birth to the two main political parties that dominated Irish politics during the twentieth century, and the conflict between those two parties has usually been equally uncompromising and adversarial, if largely non-violent. Similarly, in Northern Ireland, the conflict between nationalism and unionism has been extremely violent, confrontational and adversarial, with a tendency to view attempts to understand the other side as a form of betrayal. (It does need to be said that there have been some notable compromises over the last decade and throughout the conflict there were voices calling for compromise and mutual understandings but these were usually the exception rather than the rule). To some extent, I think that Irish historians – myself included – have been influenced by this tendency to dismiss opposing views rather than

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trying to give them credit, and to understand them.The debate about Irish historical revisionism has been bad tempered and there has been a tendency to dismiss the other side rather than considering what it has to offer. To take one example: there surely are issues with Hart’s methodology and use of evidence in The IRA and Its Enemies but by the same token Meda Ryan’s portrayal of Tom Barry as unambiguously heroic and the reluctance of Aubane Historical Society to acknowledge that there were anti-Protestant feelings (and possibly actions) among Cork republicans during the revolution reveals that they have blind spots too.12 I would suggest that both sides in many Irish political and historiographical debates are probably aware (either consciously or unconsciously) of the limitations of their own arguments and that this insecurity encourages them to dismiss the opposing view outright rather than trying to reflect on whatever value or insight it might contain. This is consistent with the idea of splitting off the history that one cannot bear to think about (present in the foundational moment of Irish historical revisionism) rather than making an effort to integrate it into one’s own understanding. While I was researching Land and Revolution, I was very aware of a real hostility between those historians prominently identified with revisionism and those who were critical of it (although this might have softened to some extent over the last decade). It seems to me now that the revisionists were so dismissive of their enemies because they knew that some of the anti-revisionists sometimes had a point, and that some of the critics of revisionism were so extreme because they knew that some revisionists were sometimes doing valuable work. On both sides, there has been a concern to expose and humiliate the other rather than to try and understand why the other holds their view and to reflect on whether there is anything of value in it. Perhaps we Irish historians need to think more carefully about Philip Bull’s work on conciliation and compromise in terms of both the Irish past and our relationships with each other. If I have changed my mind about some of the arguments advanced in Land and Revolution, then, it is not so much that I would present a different view but that I would be less certain of the arguments that I do make. Throughout Land and Revolution, I suggest that class conflict was a significant aspect of life in rural Ireland and that it played a part in forming political allegiances during the revolution. The underlying argument of chapters 4, 5 and 6 is that the Home Rule Party in the provinces tended to be led and supported by the Catholic middle class, while Sinn Féiners and republicans were generally more working class. In chapter 4, I argue that the conflict that took place at Craughwell between Kennyites and Hallinanites

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was essentially a class conflict. While I still do think that class played its part in generating conflict in rural Ireland, I now think that I did not give due credit to the extent that political conflicts evolved out of conflicts within families, or out of wider kinship groups. In this respect, I would not be as dismissive of some aspects of Fitzpatrick’s work on class and family as I was inclined to be when I published Land and Revolution, and I would argue that class conflicts probably coexisted alongside family and kinship conflicts and may have sometimes overlapped with them.13 Related to my conviction that class was a primary determinant of agrarian conflict was my belief that agrarian agitators were motivated by an attempt to improve the collective rather than their individual good. I would now suggest that it is possible that individualistic and collectivist visions probably sat alongside one another and that an individual could shift from collective aspirations to individualistic ones according to personal experience. It is more likely that an individual’s perception of what they are doing oscillates between thinking of individual gain and the collective good and that this might change according to the internal realities of the individual as well as the external agrarian or political context. When I wrote Land and Revolution, I was inclined to perhaps bend the evidence into a definitive answer to these kinds of questions, whereas now I would be happier to allow doubts to remain even when it is the case that one argument seems to me to be more persuasive than the other. In addition to modifying my perspective, I would now look at aspects of the past that I was not interested in when I wrote Land and Revolution. I have become increasingly interested in internal lives and in thinking about what personal or even unconscious motives might have been at play for historical actors, and I am currently working on a study of the Craughwell feud that is explored in chapter 4 of Land and Revolution using psychoanalytic methods to explore what unconscious material might influence ordinary people and I would like to briefly discuss that research.14 Inheritance patterns were at the heart of rural Irish conflict, and – it seems to me – conflict over inheritance within families exacerbated preexisting tensions between siblings. In terms of inheritance, it was generally the case that one son would be selected to become the heir of the family farm (he was not always the eldest although often this was the case). This would usually happen relatively late in the son’s life, and he would then be in a position to marry and have children. The other sons would either remain on the farm as labourers or emigrate, and daughters would either be married off to another farmer (with the help of a dowry) or emigrate. It is likely then that in a whole variety of respects conflict between male

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siblings may well have been intense in rural Irish families. Psychoanalysts tell us that sibling conflict is significant in all families and particularly where parents are not mindful of its likely development.15 The key difficulty arises when the eldest child is displaced in the attentions and affections of the parents by a younger child. This might give rise to antipathy between the elder and the younger child, but also in an exaggerated attempt by the older child to regain attention, thereby displacing the younger child in the attentions of the parents. It is possible that siblings might feel aggressive towards one another, but it is also possible that siblings might feel guilty about the way they have treated the other. If we imagine that this set of dilemmas may have been present among and between the children in a rural Irish family, then the addition of inheritance patterns that pitted siblings against one another could only have exacerbated these pre-existing tensions. If we look at the conflict at Craughwell – as described in chapter 4 of Land and Revolution – it is clear that the Hallinanites were often the inheriting sons who had already taken ownership of their family farms, whereas the Kennyites were either non-inheriting sons or sons who were likely to inherit but had not yet done so. Indeed, the feud at Craughwell could be regarded as a contest between the older men who had inherited farms and the younger men who did not have land who were also competing with one another as rival candidates to find a marriage partner in the parish.There was, then, a level of the feud at Craughwell that appeared to pit inheriting sons against non-inheriting sons (even if they were not always members of the same families), and it is possible that conscious or unconscious sibling conflict fed into the feud at Craughwell. If we accept this contention and reflect on its wider implications, then it is possible that the conflict at Craughwell was really about inheritance. The Kennyites appear to have been presenting an alternative to primogeniture and suggesting that some land should be made available for all the sons of farmers. If we further consider the implications of non-inheritance to a male adult, however, it is possible that the Kennyites were agitating on behalf of young men to inherit land that would enable them to proceed to adulthood and to marry and have children. In the absence of land or emigration, they would live out their days as bachelor labourers and become impotent old ‘boys’, never able to become men. If we try to reflect on the underlying motivations for feuding at Craughwell, I think it is possible that the Kennyites were attempting to redistribute land in such a manner that would allow the (otherwise) disinherited boys of the parish to become potent men able to develop into husbands and fathers. In other words, our thinking about the struggle for land in rural Ireland

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needs to extend beyond the political or the economic to thinking about what the acquisition of land might mean to the emotional life of an individual and a community.This might – in turn – help us to think in new and creative ways about why young men and young women became involved in agrarian conflict. I have also begun thinking about the impact of methods of parenting on the development of young adults in early twentieth-century Ireland. The history of childhood in Ireland is beginning to be written. There is important work by Moira Maguire and others although this tends to focus on abuse of children in institutions and also on the way children were perceived by the state in government reports and so on.16 As yet we do not know much about what life was like in ordinary families of any class or ethnic background. However, the anthropological work that has been done on small farmer families in the west of Ireland in the 1970s suggests a bleak picture. Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s An Clochan is populated by mothers who tend not to nurse their children, who do not worry when a baby bangs his or her head and who think that infants need to toughen up and that this will be a good lesson for them to learn for later life.17 Paradoxically, those mothers in Clochan that Scheper-Hughes observed also suggest that infants will not remember how they were treated as children, and so it does not matter how they are treated. Of course, it is now widely acknowledged that even if there is not conscious memory of infancy, it is precisely in this period of child development when foundational elements of mental structure are put in place. Broadly speaking, Bowlby and others suggest that a child who is loved and contained by her parents will tend to grow up more happily than a child who is neglected and left to resolve his own inner torments.18 If we imagine that Scheper-Hughes’s research is accurate and credible, and if we take the further leap and imagine that child-rearing practices in rural Kerry in the 1970s may not have been radically different to those in rural Kerry in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries and that rural Kerry may be broadly similar to other parts of rural Ireland, then it is possible that children were not particularly well contained by their parents in late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Ireland. If children were not contained then it is likely that they would tend to grow up to feel insecure and anxious. It is possible that the Catholic Church reinforced some of these patterns with its anxieties about physical contact and possible sexual feelings between family members. Given the tendency of the members of rural parishes to feud with one another (this was evident politically during the revolution in the contest between

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Sinn Féin and Home Rulers in 1917–18 and between pro- and antiTreaty sides in 1922–23, and thereafter in the intense local rivalry between Cumann na nGaedheal/Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil up to the present day), it is possible that child-rearing methods in rural Ireland may have created a population that tended towards insecurity and feeling easily slighted, and that therefore fell easily into conflicts with one another that were difficult to resolve. These are large speculations involving some imaginative leaps, but it is nonetheless the case that Irish children were reared in a particular way (or ways) and that this may well have influenced their behaviour when they became adults. Since the completion of Land and Revolution, I have also become very interested in social and individual remembering in modern Ireland. The work of Irish history that has influenced me the most since I completed Land and Revolution is Guy Beiner’s Remembering the Year of the French.19 In this book, Beiner makes a very persuasive case that folklore and the oral tradition (in its various forms) can successfully carry valuable information about the past over a very long period of time. Reading the book caused me to reflect again on many of the interviews about east Galway that I had done during the 1990s and to think not just about what interviews told me about the past but also about the process of remembering and repressing or forgetting in rural Ireland that the interviews also revealed. The end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland (after 1998) and reflections on how that conflict might be remembered or forgotten has also set some of these thought processes in motion. For other more personal reasons, this has become a question that I am now investigating in another article, and I have recently conducted about 20 interviews with people at Craughwell about the past and what it means to people in local communities today. What has struck me the most about Craughwell is that there appears to be a formal and an informal oral tradition. In the formal version, difficult aspects of the past that reveal feuding, extreme violence and possibly false allegations of sexual deviance are repressed in favour of stories that reflect the unity of the parish, the malevolence of the British state and the Irish landlords, and the contribution of local people to the nationalist movement. These more formalized aspects of the oral tradition are preserved in local monuments and in ‘national’ collections of folklore and oral history (notably the Irish Folklore Commission and the Bureau of Military History). In the more informal oral tradition preserved by local historians who have collected stories from their parents and their parents’ friends, and which are shared by local people in private gatherings and only rarely shared with outsiders, a very different version of the past is available. This

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informal oral tradition does remember internal divisions, violence and betrayal and recalls more complicated and perhaps less honourable episodes and individuals. My research on the oral tradition at Craughwell in the early twenty-first century suggests that there might well be serious omissions in the oral traditions that survive, and confirms that there are at least as many stories about the past that are lost as those that survive. This ongoing research also suggests that very complex and ambiguous histories often survive in rural villages that are infinitely rich and more valuable than the broader stories that nationalist and revisionist historians sometimes invented about black-andwhite struggles between the state and the people, or the landlord and the tenant. This work also suggests that there has been a kind of splitting off in the remembering of local events in rural Ireland where most members of the parish know little about what happened and yet a small number of people know a great deal but tend to keep their stories to themselves. In this respect, remembering in rural Ireland appears to be characterized by a paradoxical sense of knowing and not knowing at the same time, and the implications of this for future generations (in terms of the way in which the past is passed on in both direct and indirect ways) need to be reflected on further. Conclusion What can be concluded from these reflections? Obviously, a very key way in which our views about the past change is as a result of the emergence of new evidence, and in some respects, it is the gathering of new material that has allowed my ideas about the past to change (and it was the gathering of new evidence that enabled me to say something original in the first place). However, a much more influential factor – to my mind – are the changing interests and perspectives of the historian. In part, this is stimulated by reading new material that provokes reassessments of both interpretation and methodology. This is also greatly influenced by changes in our world and how we perceive those changes: for instance, the vantage point from which a Celtic Tiger cub regarded the Irish revolution in 1999 is very different from that which Irish undergraduate students (many of whom may currently be bound for South Australia) must be currently looking back on the revolutionary era. Similarly, the apparent end of the Troubles with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and subsequent agreements means that new historians are not growing up watching a grotesque war taking place on their television screens which must have both consciously and unconsciously been projected back onto the past by

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those Irish historians who reached their prime in the 1970s and 1980s. But most important I think are the changes that take place in a person’s life.The reasons why my interpretations have changed are largely because I have changed. I am older (43 years old); I am in a secure-ish job that does not require me to impress and retain the patronage of senior historians in order to make a living; I am a father and more interested in the nature of parenting and childhood and in the future than I used to be; and I am more interested in my own internal life than I was when I wrote the book. It is inevitable that when a person changes the way that they think about themselves and their own life, and when the world in which they live in changes, that they will bring the new thoughts that they have to their interpretation of the past. It is for this reason – hopefully – that none of our ideas or understandings of the past will ever remain stuck or static and that the history of the Irish land question as well as everything else will always be open to reinterpretation. Notes 1 F. Campbell, Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland, 1891–1921 (Oxford, 2005). 2 P. Bew, Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland, 1890–1910: Parnellites and Radical Agrarians (Oxford, 1987); P. Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism, 1850–1938: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin, 1996); D. Jones, Graziers, Land Reform and Political Conflict in Ireland (Washington, 1996). 3 D. Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life, 1913–1921: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution (Dublin, 1977). 4 M. Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Fein Party, 1916–23 (Cambridge, 1999); M. Cronin and J. Regan (eds), Ireland: The Politics of Independence, 1922– 1949 (Basingstoke, 2000). 5 See M. Waddell, Inside Lives: Psychoanalysis and the Growth of Personality (London, 1999). 6 C. Kinealy, ‘The Great Irish Famine – A Dangerous Memory?’, in A. Gribben, The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America (Boston, 1999), p. 251 and p. 253. 7 B. Bradshaw, ‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 26, 104 (November 1989), 329–51. 8 See Peter Loewenberg, Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (New Jersey, 1996). 9 P. Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1917–23 (Oxford, 1998), Ch. 2. 10 See, for instance, Matthew Kelly in the English Historical Review, cxxi, 491 (April 2006), 561–3. 11 See Campbell, Land and Revolution, p. 276.

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12 M. Ryan, Tom Barry: IRA Freedom Fighter (Dublin, 2005). 13 D. Fitzpatrick, ‘Class, Family, and Rural Unrest in Nineteenth Century Ireland’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Irish Studies 2: Land, Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 37–76. 14 On the relationship between history and psychoanalysis, see (among many others) P. Gay, Freud for Historians (Oxford, 1987); T. G. Ashplant, ‘Fantasy, Narrative, Event: Psychoanalysis and History’, History Workshop Journal, 23, 1 (1987), 165–73; and J. Straub, Dark Traces of the Past: Psychoanalysis and Historical Thinking (Oxford, 2010). 15 See J. Mitchell, Siblings (Cambridge, 2003). 16 M. Maguire, Precarious Childhood in Post-independence Ireland (Manchester, 2009). 17 N. Scheper-Hughes, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics (Berkeley, 2001). 18 J. Bowlby, A Secure Base (London, 2005 edition). 19 G. Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk Memory and Social Memory (Madison, 2006).

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

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8

Heather Laird: Decentring the Irish Land War: women, politics and the private sphere The dominant Irish historical narrative, at its most basic, sees the history of Ireland since the beginning of the nineteenth century as a series of revolts and risings which posed a direct challenge to the colonial state with lulls in between. This narrative is underpinned by a narrow notion of the political, with events and actions only considered historically significant if they affect the structures of organized politics relating to the sphere of the state. The historical writings which seek to challenge the parameters of this dominant narrative by focusing attention on what James C. Scott refers to in Weapons of the Weak as ‘everyday’ forms of resistance are generally considered to belong to social as opposed to political history.1 For the Indian historian and postcolonial scholar Ranajit Guha, a distinction between ‘political’ resistance, which directly impacts on the state, and ‘social’ resistance, which operates outside the domain of the state, is symptomatic of a state-centred historiography that condemns certain sectors of the population to political and historical insignificance.2 The Subaltern Studies Collective, of which Guha is a founder member, believe that such suppressed histories can only be restored if the political arena is extended outside the structures of the state. In historical accounts of Ireland in which the political is defined purely in terms of that which directly affects the state, and historical change is believed to be powered by these narrowly defined political forces, women, who were for the most part excluded from formal male political culture, tend to be assigned a marginal role. State-centred histories, in other words, are invariably patriarchal histories. One of the means employed to counteract this marginalization is to seek out examples of ‘exceptional’ women who did operate in the arena of the state, or close to it, and focus attention on them. This strategy, which most commonly takes the form of the biographical study,3 could be categorized, with reference to the feminist historian Gerda Lerner, as ‘compensatory history’ in that it is concerned

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with inserting ‘notable women’, who have ‘achieved’ in the same way men who are deemed ‘notable’ have achieved, into the ‘empty spaces’ of mainstream historiography.4 While scholarship of this kind reminds us of the impressive contribution that women like Constance Markievicz made to Irish society, it fails to challenge the values and structures of the historiography it is supplementing. In this chapter, I will demonstrate, with reference to women and agrarian unrest in the 1880s land agitation, that an historical framework which decentres familiar notions of power and the political and, consequently, expands the category of the historically relevant brings women in from the margins of Irish history. In state-centred Irish historiography, the impetus for the transformations that took place in the Irish land system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is traced, in its nationalist variations, to the words and actions of the nationalist leadership and, in its revisionist variations,5 to the words and actions of the colonial government. Nationalist and revisionist historiographies, therefore, while ideologically opposed, are both based on the assumption that the driving forces of historical change are to be found within the realm of public power. That some of those working within the field of Irish women’s history share this assumption is evidenced by Margaret Ward’s claim that members of the Ladies’ Land League who were denied ‘prominent positions in [...] political circles’ were ‘denied access to the “front”’ of the Land War.6 It would appear that the ‘front’ of this war for Ward, as for many nationalist and revisionist historians, is to be situated in the public sphere of organized politics. Contemporary accounts of the Land War suggest, however, that its ‘front’ may be more accurately located within the domain of everyday life. In November 1881, the Leinster Leader reported on a series of events in County Carlow that followed the refusal of a member of the Clonmore branch of the Land League, James Carty, to pay his rent. Having been informed that Carty’s crops were to be confiscated and sold,7 three thousand women and men, many of whom had to be turned away, are said to have gathered in the fields to save his potatoes and turnips.When the work was completed, this ‘army’ of labourers are reported as having ‘marched in processional order to Clonmore, a distance of two miles’, shouldering ‘their forks, shovels, and spades, as if they were weapons of defence’.8 Men and women like those who marched to Clonmore carrying their farming implements as if they were rifles dictated the terms by which the Land War would be fought and ensured that the British army spent much of that war performing what army superiors considered to be inappropriate tasks. In the case of a tenant farmer like James Carty who was refusing

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to pay his rent, British army units might be involved in the confiscation of animals and crops.Troops were called on in Queen’s County (now County Laois) in May 1881, for example, to prevent a crowd of over 400 people disrupting the seizure of a herd of cattle.9 In Ireland under the Land League, Clifford Lloyd, who in 1881 had been assigned to the newly established position of special resident magistrate, described a week-long expedition for the seizure of stock. Included in the expedition were an agent, a sheriff, ‘sixty men of the 48th, under Captain Bell, sixty men of the RIC, thirty horses, and six army service-wagons, carrying the bedding, food, and necessaries for the week’.10 Lloyd tells us that as soon as they were seen approaching, church bells were rung and the cattle they had come to seize were hidden in old sheds or driven up the sides of mountains. On some such occasions, the expedition was forced to retire, ‘amidst the jeers of the groups of men and women who had collected in the fields’.11 According to Lloyd, a sheriff embarking on this task in Kilmallock requested a force ‘made up of a squadron of the Greys, detachments of the 25th, 48th, and 57th Regiments and Transport Corps, which, with about 200 of the RIC, make a total of about 500 men’.12 On the occasions when farm stock was successfully seized, army units might be drafted in to help transport the confiscated stock to a sheriff’s sale and to ensure that the sale itself proceeded unimpeded. Soldiers attempted to confiscate vehicles to transport crops and animals to a sheriff’s sale near Edenderry at the beginning of January 1882, for example, but found their efforts thwarted as ‘drivers escaped by galloping at full speed’.13 By the end of 1881 and the beginning of 1882, sheriff’s sales had become one of the main ‘battlefields’ of the Land War. The Freeman’s Journal, reporting on a sheriff’s sale that took place on Lord Mayo’s estate in December 1881, stated that there was a ‘large assembly of people, and their numbers were momentarily increased by the ringing of chapel bells in the district and the blowing of horns’.14 Amidst the haycocks, ‘decorated with pictures taken from the Weekly Freeman of Davitt, Parnell and Dillon’, that were put up for auction, a woman ‘opened a bag of feathers and […] thickly coated the uniform of the police’.15 In the same month, there were no bidders for cattle belonging to Mary Cole at a sheriff’s sale held in Trimblestown that was heavily attended by members of the Ladies’ Land League. The sale was subsequently adjourned.16 British army units, in other words, spent much of the Land War engaged in duties that under ordinary circumstances would have been considered within the realm of the civil forces.17 As pointed out by Donal O’Sullivan in his history of policing in Ireland, it was not uncommon at this time to

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see ‘two neat, well-turned-out Guardsmen, in white jackets, deep in the mountains of Kerry, protecting a herdsman on an evicted farm’.18 Moreover, according to one contemporary commentator, the RIC as they operated in Ireland during the period of the Land War were not policemen in the conventional sense of the term: ‘They are armed and drilled soldiers; armed with muskets, buck-shot, and bayonets, and under military discipline’.19 The British government’s appointment of an auxiliary force drawn mainly from the army reserve in December 1881 to assist the RIC in the day-to-day policing of rural Ireland was a tacit acknowledgement that the Land War was being fought in the civil domain. Consequently, the arena that Margaret Ward has argued women’s activities were for the most part confined to during the Land War was in actuality the site of the ‘front’ of the war. Anti-eviction agitation Contemporary and subsequent writings on the 1880s land agitation point to the centrality of women to one of the Land War’s key combat zones: evictions and their disruption. Verbal taunts, scalding water, boiling gruel, burning turf, manure, mud, rocks and sticks were some of the weapons employed by rural women against process servers armed with eviction notices and protected by the police and military. In the early stages of the Land War, it was reported that a process server in County Mayo ‘had a narrow escape’ at Newton Clogher, when he was chased by ‘about one hundred’ women armed with ‘tongs, sticks, stones, etc’.20 Around the same time, a land agent to Sir Arthur Guinness was ‘warmly received by a young woman named Noonan, who, it appears, was not content with giving him the contents of a bucket of boiling water until she let the empty vessel fly at his cranium’.21 In The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, Michael Davitt gave an account of events he witnessed during a trip to the village of Carraroe in County Galway in January 1880. These events, which have since being termed the ‘Battle of Carraroe’, centred on an attempt by a local process server, who was accompanied by Sub-Inspector Gibbons and a contingent of police, to serve eviction notices on tenant farmers living on Thomas Kirwan’s estate.When the process server, a man named Fenton, approached the home of Mr Faherty, he was ‘set upon by the women and the process snatched from his hand and torn to pieces. A skirmish ensued in which a few bayonet wounds were received by boys and women, but the body of men, who marched as “lookers-on,” took no part in the first onset’. Fenton, still accompanied by the police, subsequently attempted to serve a process

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on Mrs Mackle, who ‘succeeded in throwing a shovelful of burning turf upon Sub-Inspector Gibbons, and thereby driving him from the house’.22 When David Sears, a local process server with a bodyguard of 17 constables, attempted to serve eviction notices the following September on tenant farmers on an estate near Lough Mask that was owned by Lord Erne and managed by Captain Charles Boycott, a woman named Mrs Fitzmorris, who refused to accept the writ that Sears was presenting to her, waved a red flag to warn the inhabitants of the nearby cabins of his approach. The women who gathered as a result of this signal are said to have ‘descended on David Sears and the constabulary, pelting them with mud, stones and manure, stopping them from serving the remaining notices and eventually driving them to seek shelter in Lough Mask House’.23 According to Joyce Marlow, Captain Boycott, who was out for the day, returned in the evening to find ‘Sears and the constables still sheltering in the house’ and talking ‘of the howling ladies’.24 That night, Sears’ wife is reported to have received a visit from ‘a woman of the parish of Neale’ who informed her that the women had found out that a process-server had no legal right to nail his writs on a cabin door, unless it was closed against him, nor to take in a constable unless he was resisted, and that they had determined to leave the doors partly open and not to fight him until he should enter,‘and, then, every woman of them’ll have a kettle of hot water handy, and fling it in his face’.25

Not surprisingly, David Sears resisted Boycott’s demands that he deliver writs the following day. It was this series of events that inaugurated the infamous ‘Boycott Affair’.26 That the employment of flags to warn of an approaching process server was not particular to the women on Lord Erne’s estate is suggested by a series of interviews held with the American reporter and political activist, James Redpath: In some parts of the West of Ireland the peasantry have a secret code of signals. By waving a flag (you may call it petticoat if you like) of a certain colour, the neighbours come to a cabin to assist the signalling party [...]. If I remember rightly, the red flag means that the process-server has come.These signals caused all the women and girls in the neighbourhood to assemble.27

When asked by the interviewer whether the men also gathered at the signal, Redpath stated that the assembling women ‘won’t allow the men to resist the process-server because they are sent to jail so long for doing so, and, besides, these women think they can take care of the processserver themselves’.28

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Available evidence confirms that women who resisted evictions were less likely to be arrested than men engaged in similarly confrontational behaviour.29 Nonetheless, some of these women did face possible imprisonment for their actions, as is evidenced by Adam Mitchell’s contribution to a House of Lords’ report on Irish jury laws: There was a very bad case I prosecuted not long ago in Tullamore at the petty sessions, in which nine women were charged with violently beating a process server, taking the processes from him and throwing them into the canal. They battered his face. There were nine charged, and the magistrate convicted six out of the nine, and sentenced them to a month’s imprisonment.30

In the later Plan of Campaign, 43 people, most of them women, were arrested on charges of assault and obstruction when 200 soldiers and between 300 and 400 policemen were drafted into County Clare to evict tenant farmers on Colonel O’Callaghan’s Bodyke estate.31 The journalist, F. J. Higginbottom, who witnessed the events, claimed that notwithstanding these arrests, it took ‘a whole fortnight to dispossess the tenantry, amid scenes of excitement and strife’.32 Among those arrested were possibly the woman who ‘threw an iron hoop at one of the emergency men’ and struck a district Inspector of Constabulary instead, and the three girls who threw ‘bucketful after bucketful of [...] boiling gruel’ at emergency men holding umbrellas.33 Furthermore, women who resisted evictions were not exempt, by virtue of their sex, from violence on the part of the authorities. Following Fenton’s failed attempt to serve the process on Mrs Mackle in Carraroe, a ‘fierce fight’ is said to have broken out between the women present and the bayonet-wielding constabulary who had accompanied the process server.34 It was only after some of the women had been injured that the previously docile men entered the fray, surrounding the constabulary and attacking them with ‘stout blackthorns and stones’.35 Women who attempted to disrupt evictions on Hans Browne’s estate near Claremorris, in the same month as the ‘Battle of Carraroe’, were reported in the Connaught Telegraph to have been stabbed with bayonets, hit with fists and clubbed with the butts of rifles. One young woman named Mary Fahy ‘received a terrible gash on the back of the hand, another what looked very like a bayonet stab in the arm, whilst several were knocked down, trampled upon, their faces blackened, and their garments torn’.36 In September 1880, women who resisted evictions on George Moore’s estate are said to have received ‘rough handling’ from ‘one or two old

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grisly veterans’.37 The following year, six women, one of whom was pregnant, who were part of a crowd comprised mainly of women and children that confronted a process server near Kiltimagh in County Mayo, were set upon by the policemen accompanying the process server and beaten with fists, kicked and struck with the butts of rifles. Shots were then fired at the crowd, and one of the women present, 17-year-old Kate Beirne, was badly wounded.38 Women’s engagement in the kinds of anti-eviction agitation outlined above has tended to be interpreted by historians and cultural commentators working within the field of Irish women’s history as an extension of their domestic role. Janet K. TeBrake, in ‘Irish peasant women in revolt’, proposes that ‘the large numbers of women participating in this form of social protest did so because the peasant community considered it a woman’s traditional responsibility not only to take care of the home but also to preserve it’.39 Margaret Ward, in her work on the Ladies’ Land League, asserts that ‘political agency for peasant women in rural Ireland was confined to defence of land and home from the demands of the landlord. That agency was a product of their domestic role and community acceptance of their participation was rooted in that understanding’.40 Niamh O’Sullivan, in her analysis of attempts to deny women access during the Land War to what she refers to as the ‘revolutionary public space’, states that ‘women saving homes was, apparently, acceptable, women saving Ireland was not’.41 In the work of the latter of these commentators, attention to drawn to Michael Davitt’s assertion in The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland that Irish women ‘could not be better employed’ than in ‘[t]he fight [...] to save the homes of Ireland – the sacred, domestic domain of a woman’s moral supremacy in civilised society’.42 Given this perceived link between women’s disruption of the eviction process and a gender ideology that proclaimed the rightful place of woman to be the home, the confrontational behaviour of the women on Thomas Kirwan’s and Lord Erne’s estates can be interpreted as reinforcing as opposed to undermining the public/private dichotomy. As stated by Margaret Ward, ‘[w]hile [women’s] resistance to evictions was expected (and could take the form of physical attacks and rioting) there was never any suggestion that the gendered separation of spheres was being breached’.43 In response to Ward, it could be argued that the notion of a clear female-private/male-public sphere divide is based largely on the experiences of middle-class women in ‘advanced’ metropolitan countries and, consequently, may not be as applicable to other locations and classes.44 Moreover, even if we are to accept Ward’s thesis that women’s anti-eviction

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activities operated largely within the private sphere and ultimately failed to transgress the public/private boundary, we must also question Ward’s aforementioned notion of the public sphere as the location of the ‘front’ of the Land War. ‘Charitable’ activities As is the case with women’s participation in anti-eviction agitation, the erection of Land League huts by the mostly middle-class membership of the Ladies’ Land League could be interpreted as reinforcing the public/ private dichotomy in that it involved providing homes, even if only temporary, for evicted tenant farmers.45 In addition, the role of the Ladies’ Land League, according to Margaret Ward, was initially ‘conceived solely as one of dispensing charitable relief’, and charity at this time was a wellrecognized element of the female sphere of activity.46 Indeed, female philanthropy tended to be viewed as ‘an extension of the maternal role’ with the ‘charitable woman [...] conventionally seen as offering to the poor and needy a care comparable to that which she gave to her own family within the home’.47 A description of the housing of evicted tenant farmers that, in its nurturing undertones, is suggestive of relatively straightforward charity work was published in Sinn Féin on 16 October 1909. In this article, Jennie Wyse Power, a prominent member of the Ladies’ Land League and the first president of Cumann na mBan, tells of a journey she made to Hacketstown, a village on the borders of Wicklow and Carlow, where fifty families were being evicted for non-payment of rent. These families, Power states, ‘were to be sheltered and looked after’.48 The evening before the expected evictions, Power ‘went abroad to see what could be done to house the families about to be evicted, and took on myself to hire and repair a large disused house, sufficient to shelter three families’.49 In The Tale of a Great Sham, however, Anna Parnell puts forward an analysis of the erection of Land League huts that draws attention to the strategic and symbolic importance of this activity. Land League shelters, according to Parnell, gave the tenants ‘a chance of following the counsels contained in the No Rent manifesto’ and functioned as a ‘permanent sign and symbol that all power did not lie with the foreign enemy in possession of the country’.50 Anna Parnell’s reflections on the erection of Land League huts clearly indicates that the ‘charity’ work performed by the Ladies’ Land League, while possibly an extension of the domestic role of its members, differed in one key respect from the benevolent ventures associated with ‘charitable women’ in England and Ireland. As pointed out by Sara Mills, philanthropy

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was designed to alleviate poverty without challenging the status quo.51 The ‘philanthropic’ works performed by the Ladies’ Land League, by contrast, were primarily designed to challenge the status quo, with the alleviation of poverty of secondary importance. Indeed, an article that was published in the Freeman’s Journal in December 1881 suggests that the erection of Land League huts were on some occasions transformed into public displays of disaffection with the colonial state. Following the loading of materials for Land League huts on ten carts in Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim, members of the Ladies’ Land League are said to have ‘decorated the horses with green ribbons’. When these preparations were completed, ‘a procession was formed’ and the carts were paraded through the town.52 That the erection of Land League huts was viewed by the authorities as more than the mere alleviation of poverty is clearly evidenced by their concerted efforts to prevent this activity from taking place. Jennie Wyse Power, in the aforementioned article published in Sinn Féin, outlined attempts made by the police and military to deny members of the Ladies’ Land League access to the site of the eviction.53 Hannah Reynolds, a member of the Ladies’ Land League, was arrested in west Cork at the home of Catherine Murphy, a tenant farmer facing eviction, following a speech in which she urged tenant farmers on the estate of the Earl of Bantry not to pay their rent and reassured them that the Ladies’ Land League would build huts for them if they were evicted.54 Anna Parnell, who in The Tale of a Great Sham referred to the arrest and imprisonment of workmen whom the Ladies’ Land League had employed to erect such shelters, is reported to have angrily confronted the Lord Lieutenant as he rode down Westmoreland Street in Dublin over the government’s decision to prevent the building of Land League huts.55 In the aftermath of the Protection of Person and Property Act of 1881, various organizations (the Political Prisoners’ Fund, the Ladies’ Prisoners’ Aid Society, the Political Prisoners’ Aid Society, the ‘Irish World’ Prisoners’ Aid Society, the Political Prisoners’ Sustentation Fund, the Commercial Men’s Political Prisoners’ Aid Society and the Suspects’ Sustentation Fund) appealed for food and funds for those who were being detained without trial.56 One of the principal functions served by the Ladies’ Land League was the collection of such funds. Among the resolutions passed at a meeting that took place in November 1881 to establish a Rathangan branch of the Ladies’ Land League was the following: ‘that we should comply with Miss Parnell’s request, and place two or three collecting boxes in the town, the total amount to be forwarded to Miss Parnell every month’.57 In the same month, it was proposed by the secretary of the Maryborough branch of the Ladies’ Land League that ‘ladies in businesses put boxes in

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their shops in order to receive subscriptions in aid of [the] Prisoners’ Fund and ladies in country districts get a list of probable subscribers and call on them to aid in the good work’.58 The Ladies’ Land League also collected funds for those who had been evicted for non-payment of rent. In 1881, Canon Ulick J. Bourke referred to the Ladies’ Land League as an organization through which Irish women dispensed charity to evicted tenant farmers and their families.59 Bourke, through this description, was perhaps attempting to defend the League’s members by equating the work they performed with philanthropy of the sort associated with ‘respectable’ middle- and upper-class women in England and Ireland. As pointed out by Barbara Corrado Pope, ‘fund raising: planning and selling tickets for balls and theatrical events, donating time and needlework to charity bazaars, and soliciting money on the street and in churches’ was a principal occupation of ‘charitable women’ in the nineteenth century.60 As with the erection of Land League huts, however, fundraising and the dispensing of such funds, as performed by the Ladies’ Land League, were not charity work in the conventional sense of the term. A central tenet of female philanthropy was the notion that the potential beneficiaries of charity could be divided into two distinct categories: the deserving poor, who had regular jobs and supposedly self-help attitudes, and the undeserving poor, who were perceived to be lazy, drunk and rowdy. That the Ladies’ Land League also divided into categories those who wished to be in receipt of the funds they had collected is evidenced by their shocked response to the discovery that the bulk of the applications for relief they were receiving were coming ‘not from those who had obeyed League policy and had suffered eviction for refusing to pay more than a reasonable rent, but from those who had simply been unable to pay any rent at all’.61 For ‘charitable women’, the division between the deserving and the undeserving poor was based on adherence to a set of middle-class moral standards that underpinned the status quo. For the Ladies’ Land League, this division was based on a willingness to partake in a campaign that threatened the status quo.The reluctance of members of the Ladies’ Land League to dispense funds to those who, through poverty, had found themselves unable to pay their rent was at least in part due to a desire to distinguish their acts of ‘charity’ from the kinds of charity work with which Canon Bourke had sought to associate them. Furthermore, ‘charitable women’ were unlikely to be threatened with arrest and imprisonment for their philanthropic activities. In December 1881, Margaret Dineen, secretary of the Ladies’ Land League, wrote to E. D. Gray, editor of the Freeman’s Journal, to inform him that notice had

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been given to the Ladies’ Land League to cease to collect for the Suspects’ Sustentation Fund. Failure to comply with this directive, she had been informed, would result in the imprisonment of members of the Ladies’ Land League.62 In her letter to the Freeman’s Journal, Dineen connects the fundraising activities performed by the Ladies’ Land League with public displays of disaffection with official law by going on to state that the police, under the directive of Clifford Lloyd, had warned the publicans of Ballylanders that they would lose their licences if they continued to put up shutters when arrests were made in the neighbourhood and did not ‘abstain in future from manifesting the least sign of sympathy for anyone arrested under the Coercion Act’.63 Boycotting Antipathy to an official legal system that many in Ireland associated with the conquest of the country created a space for the establishment of alternative systems of control that monitored and regulated the behaviour of rural communities.64 Boycotting, which was primarily directed towards ‘land-grabbers’, was one such system of control.65 What this tactic amounted to in practice, as the following extract from a speech by Charles Stewart Parnell makes clear, was extreme social ostracism and isolation: When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop-counter, you must show him in the fair and at the marketplace, and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a sort of moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed, and you may depend upon it if the population of a county in Ireland carry on this doctrine, that there will be no man so full of avarice, so lost to shame, as to dare the public opinion of all right-thinking men within the county and to transgress your unwritten code of laws.66

Boycotting was viewed with horror, not only by those on the receiving end of it but also by members of the Irish administration and British legal experts. William Forster’s biographer, T. Wemyss Reid, wrote of the Chief Secretary’s conviction that official law had become virtually powerless in Ireland, while the unofficial systems of control that were displacing it had grown in strength.67 Justice James Stephen, in ‘On the suppression of boycotting’, argued that participation in a boycott amounted to the ‘usurpation of the functions of government’ and, consequently, boycotts should ‘be

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recognized in their true light as acts of social war, as the modern representatives of the old conception of high treason’.68 Since women were at the centre of the social networks which bound rural communities together, a boycott’s success was largely dependent upon their participation. Women not only took part in the more general forms of social ostracism that comprised boycotting, they reinforced this isolation by refusing to ‘walk out’ with or marry those who were being boycotted. At a Land League meeting held in Waterford in 1882, a young woman named Margaret Sheehan addressed the crowd as follows: ‘We, the young girls of Waterford,Tipperary and Kilkenny, resolve and promise before this vast multitude to reject with scorn and contempt any matrimonial proposals from Michael Hickey as a punishment for his heartlessness to a poor labourer and his young and helpless family of seven’.69 During the later Plan of Campaign, David Sheehy, member of Parliament, included a reference to the ‘marriage boycott’ in a speech on ‘landgrabbing’ that he delivered in Galway, claiming that if social ostracism was enacted in full against a ‘land-grabber’, not ‘a shopkeeper in Portumna, Tynagh, Woodford or Loughrea would sell him as much as a ha’porth of snuff and the ugliest woman in all Tipperary would not marry him’.70 In September 1880, James Redpath gave a speech in County Mayo in which he counselled those present not to ‘deal with the grocery man that will sell [a ‘land-grabber’] provisions’.71 As women controlled the household economy, their purchasing power was pivotal to the boycott of shopkeepers and merchants. A successfully boycotted grocer, as stated during the later Ranch War, had his flour ‘turn musty on the shelf’, his lard ‘remain on his hands until it rots’, and his preserved meat ‘well tested by time’.72 Women’s purchasing power also played a role in the ‘No Rent’ manifesto in that women were urged by Anna Parnell ‘to pay for all groceries with cash, so that their husbands would be unable to save the money for rent payment’.73 Conclusion Relocating the ‘front’ of the Land War from the public sphere of organized politics to the civil domain of everyday life reveals the centrality of women to this episode in Irish history. Moreover, extending the notion of the political ‘beyond the activity of a few dazzling personalities or the agreements made by a handful of leaders’ establishes the women who participated in the Land War as political subjects.74 In studies of Irish women’s history, these women tend to be divided into two categories: women who transgressed gender boundaries by engaging in formal political activities,

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such as speaking at Land League meetings, and women whose Land War activities were an extension of their domestic role and, consequently, failed to challenge the ‘public/private’ dichotomy. If we accept, however, that women were central to the Land War and that, on the whole, their participation remained broadly within a recognizably female sphere of activity, we must also question the application of a conventional notion of the private sphere, based largely on the experiences of British middle-class women, to late nineteenth-century Ireland. The private sphere in 1880s Ireland was a war zone, not a haven from war. In the case of the women who threw mud, stones and manure at the process server near Lough Mask, protecting their homes against those who sought to evict them was undoubtedly an extension of their domestic responsibilities, but it was also intrinsic to the 1880s land agitation.The women who resisted evictions or refused to buy groceries from a boycotted shopkeeper may not have crossed the public/ private divide, but the Land War certainly did. Notes 1 J. C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), p. 29. 2 See R. Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in R. Guha and G. Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford, 1988), pp. 37–44. 3 See, for example, A. Haverty, Constance Markievicz: An Independent Life (London, 1988); M. O’Neill, From Parnell to De Valera: A Biography of Jennie Wyse Power, 1858–1941 (Dublin, 1991); J. Côté McL., Fanny and Anna Parnell: Ireland’s Patriot Sisters (Dublin, 1991); M. O’Neill, Grace Gifford Plunkett and Irish Freedom (Dublin, 2000); S. McCoole, No Ordinary Women (Dublin, 2003). 4 G. Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (Oxford, 1979), pp. 145, xiv. See also M. Cullen, ‘Foreword’, in M. Kelleher and J. H. Murphy (eds), Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres (Dublin, 1997), p. 5. 5 Irish revisionist histories, such as F. S. L. Lyons’ Ireland since the Famine (1971), R. Foster’s Modern Ireland: 1600–1972 (1989) and M. Elliott’s The Catholics of Ulster (2000), which present British rule as extending modern institutions into a ‘backward’ Irish society, could be categorized, with reference to Ranajit Guha, as ‘neocolonialist’ historiography. This is the term applied by Guha to a historiography that depicts the colonial regime as a civilizing force which, through the introduction of liberal Western values, helped ‘promote social reform, combat superstition and generally raise the level of the indigenous culture’. R. Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA, 1997), p. 80.

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6 M.Ward,‘The Ladies’ Land League and the Irish Land War 1881/1882: Defining the Relationship between Women and Nation’, in I. Bloom, K. Hagemann and C. Hall (eds), Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000), p. 241.Ward is right, of course, to draw attention to the attempted exclusion of members of the Ladies’ Land League from formal political culture. 7 Refusal to pay rent could result in a civil bill process, signed by the landlord, being served on the tenant farmer requiring him/her to appear before the county court judge. If the county court judge found in favour of the landlord, he would direct the sheriff to execute the civil bill decree to obtain the debt owed. Under this decree, the sheriff was entitled to seize goods belonging to the tenant farmer and auction them to the highest bidder. 8 ‘“No Rent”, in Carlow’, Leinster Leader (12 November 1881), p. 2. 9 V. Crossman, Politics, Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 1996), p. 140. 10 C. Lloyd, Ireland under the Land League: A Narrative of Personal Experiences (London, 1892), p. 163. 11 Ibid., p. 125. 12 Ibid., p. 121. 13 ‘Sheriff’s Sales Near Edenderry – Seizure of Cars’, Freeman’s Journal (6 January 1882), p. 5. 14 ‘Sheriff’s Sale’, Freeman’s Journal (24 December 1881), p. 7. 15 Ibid., p. 7. 16 ‘Sheriff’s Sale in Trimblestown’, Freeman’s Journal (21 December 1881), p. 7. 17 The employment of British army units in policing duties was a cause of considerable concern for military authorities and the War Office as it was seen to breach the legal status of the soldier. See R. Hawkins, ‘An Army on Police Work, 1881–2’, Irish Sword, 11:43 (1973), pp. 75–117; Crossman, Politics, Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, p. 140. 18 D. J. O’Sullivan, The Irish Constabulary, 1822–1922: A Century of Policing in Ireland (Kerry, 1999), p. 160. 19 J. Redpath, Talks about Ireland (New York, 1881), p. 87. 20 ‘Serving Processes in Clogher Lynch’, Connaught Telegraph (21 June 1879), p. 4. 21 ‘Scalding a Land Agent’, Connaught Telegraph (21 June 1879), p. 5. 22 M. Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland; or the Story of the Land League Revolution (London, 1904), p. 217. 23 J. Marlow, Captain Boycott and the Irish (New York, 1973), p. 137. 24 Ibid., p. 137. 25 Redpath, Talks about Ireland, p. 80. 26 For an overview of the ‘Boycott Affair’, see G. Moran, ‘The Origins and Development of Boycotting’, Galway Archaeological and Historical Society Journal, 30 (1985–86), 51–60. 27 Redpath, Talks about Ireland, pp. 79–80. For further information on James Redpath, see J. R. McKivigan, Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, 2008).

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28 Ibid., p. 80. 29 See J. K. TeBrake, ‘Irish Peasant Women in Revolt: The Land League Years’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1992), 76. 30 Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Irish Jury Laws, House of Lords, 1881 (117), viii. Cited in M. Luddy, Women in Ireland, 1800–1918: A Documentary History (Cork, 1995), p. 250. At this time, Adam Mitchell was the sessional crown solicitor for King’s County (now County Offaly). 31 See L. M. Geary, The Plan of Campaign, 1886–1891 (Cork, 1986), pp. 73–4; see also Freeman’s Journal (2–18 June 1887). 32 F. J. Higginbottom, The Vivid Life: A Journalist’s Career (London, 1934), p. 79. 33 ‘The Jubilee Eviction Campaign:The Bodyke Tenantry’, Freeman’s Journal (4 June 1887), p. 5; ‘The Jubilee Eviction Campaign: The Bodyke Tenantry’, Freeman’s Journal (8 June 1887), p. 7. 34 M. Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, p. 217. 35 Ibid., p. 217. 36 ‘Process Serving in the West’, Connaught Telegraph (17 January 1880), p. 2. 37 ‘Process Serving on Mr Moore’s Estate – Resistance by the Women’, Connaught Telegraph (25 September 1880), p. 5. 38 See TeBrake, ‘Irish Peasant Women in Revolt’, pp. 76–7. 39 Ibid., p. 76. 40 Ward, ‘The Ladies’ Land League and the Irish Land War 1881/1882’, p. 233. 41 N. O’Sullivan, ‘The Iron Cage of Femininity: Visual Representation of Women in the 1880s Land Agitation’, in T. Foley and S. Ryder (eds), Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin, 1998), pp. 190, 184. 42 Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, p. 299. 43 Ward, ‘The Ladies’ Land League and the Irish Land War 1881/1882’, p. 233. Niamh O’Sullivan takes a somewhat different approach, arguing that the rural women who engaged in confrontational behaviour when resisting evictions were crossing a ‘threshold’, a ‘social borderland’ (O’Sullivan, ‘The Iron Cage of Femininity’, p. 196). 44 Partha Chatterjee, in his writings on India, and Carol Coulter, in her writings on Ireland, indicate that the private sphere itself may need to be rethought in the colonial context. Both suggest that the private sphere functioned quite differently in colonized locations than it did in metropolitan centres in that the home, as a bulwark against colonial culture and values, had a significance that it lacked in metropolitan patriarchy. See P. Chatterjee, ‘The Nation and Its Women’, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (Oxford, 1999); C. Coulter, ‘Feminism, Nationalism and the Heritage of the Enlightenment’, in T. P. Foley, L. Pilkington, S. Ryder and E. Tilley (eds), Gender and Colonialism (Galway, 1995); C. Coulter, ‘Nationalism, Religion and the Family’, The Hidden Tradition: Feminism, Women and Nationalism in Ireland (Cork, 1993). See also S. Mills, Gender and Colonial Space (Manchester, 2005), pp. 31–4.

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45 For a more detailed discussion of the class backgrounds of the members of the Ladies’ Land League, see D. E. Jordan, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 297–300. 46 Ward, ‘The Ladies’ Land League and the Irish Land War 1881/1882’, p. 234. 47 Mills, Gender and Colonial Space, p. 129; R. Raughter, ‘A Natural Tenderness: The Ideal and the Reality of Eighteenth-Century Female Philanthropy’, in M. G. Valiulis and M. O’Dowd (eds), Women and Irish History: Essays in Honour of Margaret MacCurtain (Dublin, 1997), p. 76. 48 ‘Jennie Wyse Power Describes the Activities of the Ladies’ Land League’, in Luddy (ed.), Women in Ireland, 1800–1918, pp. 265–8, 266. 49 Ibid., p. 266. 50 A. Parnell, The Tale of a Great Sham (Dublin, 1986), pp. 116, 151. Indeed, Anna Parnell’s account of the activities of the Ladies’ Land League during the period of the Land League suppression clearly demonstrates where power in Ireland, as conventionally defined, actually lay at this point in time in that, for the most part, it is a description of the mundane tasks of government. Collecting information on every region in the country, administering relief where necessary and suffering ‘from one of the inconveniences all governments are supposed to be afflicted with, in being charged higher prices than anyone else’, Anna Parnell found herself in the frustrating situation of providing a provisional government for an imprisoned Land League she ultimately disapproved of but firmly believed to be a ‘government de facto’ (pp. 115, 57). 51 See Mills, Gender and Colonial Space, p. 130. See also B. C. Pope, ‘Angels in the Devil’s Workshop: Leisured and Charitable Women in Nineteenth-Century England and France’, in R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston, 1977), pp. 296–324, 321. 52 ‘Erecting Houses for Evicted Tenants’, Freeman’s Journal (1 December 1881), p. 5. 53 ‘Jennie Wyse Power Describes the Activities of the Ladies’ Land League’, in Luddy (ed.), Women in Ireland, 1800–1918, p. 267. 54 See TeBrake, ‘Irish Peasant Women in Revolt’, pp. 71–2. See also, ‘A Lady Sentenced to Imprisonment’, Freeman’s Journal (24 December 1881), p. 5. 55 Parnell, The Tale of a Great Sham, p. 121; M. Ward, ‘The Ladies’ Land League, 1881–82’, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London, 1983), pp. 29–30. 56 See Freeman’s Journal (1 December 1881), p. 5. 57 ‘Rathangan Ladies’ Land League’, Leinster Leader (12 November 1881), p. 7. 58 ‘Minute Book of the Maryborough Branch of the Ladies’ Land League’, National Library of Ireland, Lalor papers, MS 2070. At the inaugural meeting of that branch in February 1881, the Ladies’ Land League was referred to as the Irish National Ladies’ Land Relief League. 59 Connaught Telegraph (19 February 1881).That such a defence was necessary is evidenced by editorials published in the same paper in December 1881 in which the Ladies’ Land League is referred to as a group of ‘childless women’

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and the Land League huts they were erecting as a ‘class of overgrown mousetraps’ (24 December 1881), p. 4; (5 December 1881), p. 4. Pope, ‘Angels in the Devil’s Workshop’, p. 319. Ward, ‘The Ladies’ Land League, 1881–82’, p. 19. ‘The Police and the Ladies’ Land League’, Freeman’s Journal (17 December 1881), p. 5. Ibid., p. 5. For a detailed analysis of alternative legal concepts and structures in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, see H. Laird, Subversive Law in Ireland: From ‘Unwritten Law’ to the Dáil Courts (Dublin, 2005). Those who took over land from which a previous tenant had been evicted were commonly referred to as ‘grabbers’ and were widely considered to be the most significant violators of the ‘unwritten agrarian code’. Cited in F. S. L. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell (London, 1977), p. 134. T. W. Reid, The Life of Rt. Hon. W. E. Forster, vol. 2 (London, 1888), pp. 294–5. According to Michael Davitt, the emergence of the Ladies’ Land League facilitated this legal crisis: ‘under the very nose of Mr Forster, and in utter defiance of his most strenuous application of the arbitrary powers at his disposal, everything recommended, attempted, or done, in the way of defeating the ordinary law and asserting the unwritten law of the league [...] was more systematically carried out under the direction of the ladies’ executive than by its predecessor’. Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, p. 341. J. F. Stephen, ‘On the Suppression of Boycotting’, Nineteenth Century, 118 (December 1886), p. 769. State Paper Office, Irish National League papers, 1/414, 1882. Cited in TeBrake, ‘Irish Peasant Women in Revolt’, p. 72. Wilfred Scawen Blunt v. John Byrne in the High Court of Justice in Ireland [c. 5401], House of Commons, 1888, LXXXIII.11, 21–2. Cited in Geary, The Plan of Campaign, p. 40. Cited in Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, p. 268. ‘United League in County Leitrim: Wholesale Intimidation’, Irish Times (17 November 1906). Ward, ‘The Ladies’ Land League, 1881–82’, p. 16. R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz, ‘Introduction’, in R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston, 1977), pp. 1–10, 3.

Bibliography Contemporary sources Manuscript material ‘Minute Book of the Maryborough Branch of the Ladies’ Land League’, National Library of Ireland, Lalor papers, MS 2070.

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Contemporary publications Newspapers and periodicals

Connaught Telegraph Freeman’s Journal Irish Times Leinster Leader Other contemporary publications Davitt, Michael. The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland; or the Story of the Land League Revolution (London, 1904). Higginbottom, Frederick J. The Vivid Life: A Journalist’s Career (London, 1934). Lloyd, Clifford. Ireland under the Land League: A Narrative of Personal Experiences (London, 1892). Parnell, Anna. The Tale of a Great Sham (Dublin, 1986). Redpath, James. Talks About Ireland (New York, 1881). Reid, T. Wemyss. The Life of Rt. Hon.W. E. Forster, 2 vols. (London, 1888). Stephen, James F. ‘On the Suppression of Boycotting’, Nineteenth Century, 118 (1886), 765–84.

Later works Writings in Irish studies Coutler, Carol. ‘Nationalism, Religion and the Family’, The Hidden Tradition: Feminism,Women and Nationalism in Ireland (Cork, 1993), pp. 5–19. ——. ‘Feminism, Nationalism and the Heritage of the Enlightenment’, in T. P. Foley, Lionel Pilkington, Sean Ryder and Elizabeth Tilley (eds), Gender and Colonialism (Galway, 1995), pp. 195–209. Crossman,Virginia. Politics, Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 1996). Cullen, Mary. ‘Foreword’, in Margaret Kelleher and James H. Murphy (eds), Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres (Dublin, 1997), pp. 5–8. Geary, Laurence M. The Plan of Campaign, 1886–1891 (Cork, 1986). Groves, Patricia. Petticoat Rebellion:The Anna Parnell Story (Cork, 2009). Haverty, Anne. Constance Markievicz: An Independent Life (London, 1988). Hawkins, Richard. ‘An Army on Police Work, 1881–2’, Irish Sword, 11:43 (1973), 75–117. Jordan, Donald E. Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge, 1994). Laird, Heather. Subversive Law in Ireland: From ‘Unwritten Law’ to the Dáil Courts (Dublin, 2005). Luddy, Maria (ed.). Women in Ireland, 1800–1918: A Documentary History (Cork, 1995). Lyons, F. S. L. Charles Stewart Parnell (London, 1977). Marlow, Joyce. Captain Boycott and the Irish (New York, 1973).

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McCoole, Sinéad. No Ordinary Women (Dublin, 2003). McKivigan, John R. Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of NineteenthCentury America (Ithaca, 2008). McL. Côté, Jane. Fanny and Anna Parnell: Ireland’s Patriot Sisters (Dublin, 1991). Moran, Gerard. ‘The Origins and Development of Boycotting’, Galway Archaeological and Historical Society Journal, 30 (1985–86), 49–64. O’Neill, Marie. From Parnell to De Valera: A Biography of Jennie Wyse Power, 1858–1941 (Dublin, 1991). ——. Grace Gifford Plunkett and Irish Freedom (Dublin, 2000). O’Sullivan, Donal J. The Irish Constabulary, 1822–1922: A Century of Policing in Ireland (Kerry, 1999). O’Sullivan, Niamh. ‘The Iron Cage of Femininity: Visual Representation of Women in the 1880s Land Agitation’, in Tadhg Foley and Seán Ryder (eds), Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin, 1998), pp. 181–96. Raughter, Rosemary. ‘A Natural Tenderness: The Ideal and the Reality of Eighteenth-Century Female Philanthropy’, in Maryann Gialanella Valiulis and Mary O’Dowd (eds), Women and Irish History: Essays in Honour of Margaret MacCurtain (Dublin, 1997), pp. 71–88. TeBrake, Janet K. ‘Irish Peasant Women in Revolt: The Land League Years’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1992), 63–80. Ward, Margaret. ‘The Ladies’ Land League, 1881–82’, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London, 1983), pp. 4–39. ——. ‘The Ladies’ Land League and the Irish Land War 1881/1882: Defining the Relationship between Women and Nation’, in Ida Bloom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall (eds), Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000), pp. 229–47.

Other works Bridenthal, Renate and Koonz, Claudia (eds). Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston, 1977). Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (Oxford, 1999). Guha, Ranajit.‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in R. Guha and G. Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford, 1988), pp. 37–44. ——. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA, 1997). Lerner, Gerda. The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (Oxford, 1979). Mills, Sara. Gender and Colonial Space (Manchester, 2005). Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985).

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

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9

Anne Kane: The transcendent role of Catholic discourse in the Irish Land War1

Central to Paul Bew’s seminal study of the Irish Land War is explaining the challenge that confronted Charles Parnell and the Irish National Land League (INLL): how to resolve the conflict of interests between the diverse social and political groups that constituted the land movement – different classes of tenant farmers, Home Rulers, Fenians and radicals, Irish Americans and the Irish Catholic Church (ICC).2 The challenge that confronted Parnell and the INLL is also a puzzle for social historians. Historical social movements, those that are socially transformative such as the Irish Land War, are always constituted of multiple, diverse and often conflicting social groups. Thus, one of the questions for analysts of social movements and historical transformation is the problem of political alliance: how is it that conflicting groups are able to construct and maintain an alliance? Seldom is this puzzle more vexing than in the case of the Irish Land War. The potential oppositional constituency in 1879 (what Samuel Clark terms the ‘challenging collectivity’)3 can be conceptualized as a dense web of social identities, with the different subjects arranged in a hierarchy of power relations, both to the dominant political power and among themselves. Prior to and during the Land War, the dispersed activities of subordinate groups within the established power structure were mediated by different locations, understandings and responses to hegemonic power and ideology. Despite a common heritage of conquest and oppression, and some overlap of identity, ideology and goals, the differential experience, association and location of Irish groups in the established power structure contributed to diverse beliefs, interests and political discourses. Split over the question of which cause – land or nation – should be the first priority, nationalists and land reformers had historically been at odds when trying to combine the two causes. Further complicating the situation, the ICC, as it grew in institutional strength and exerted

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an increasing hold on social life, had arguably become the most significant Irish political actor throughout the nineteenth century. Despite being a constant advocate for tenant farmers and at least sympathetic to the cause of Irish independence, the primary goals of the Catholic hierarchy, such as Catholic education, trumped the latter two and compelled the Church to engage in compromise with the state authorities. Irish social groups fragmented internally as well.The small and subsistenceoriented peasants believed the larger, more substantial tenant farmers, especially graziers, to be nearly as oppressive as landlords. Conversely, larger farmers viewed subsistence peasants and small farmers as a drag on economic progress. Larger farmers, having benefited from post-Famine prosperity, tended to favour gradual, moderate land reform. Small farmers and peasants, perennially poor and ‘land starved’, believed that only landownership or ‘peasant proprietary’ would bring them security. Nationalists were split between radicals, who wanted complete separation from Britain, and Home Rulers, who advocated a federal type of political union. Lastly, the Catholic hierarchy and clergy were deeply divided on issues of both land reform and national independence. The ultramontane faction of the church hierarchy, those maintaining strict obedience to Vatican dictates, favoured gradual and constitutional land reform and movement towards national independence. Those operating within the Gallican tradition of Irish patriotism tended to support more radical land reform and complete separation from Britain. The lower clergy often lined up according to the stance of their respective bishops, but not always. And as the Land War began, some bishops, particularly the nationalist Archbishop MacHale, who would have seemed to have been a likely supporter, opposed it. Thus, conflict within the range of relevant groups in Ireland produced as big an obstacle to political alliance and movement mobilization as conflict between the groups. Given the conflicting positions of the different Irish groups and factions, the possibility of an alliance and a viable movement might have seemed remote in 1879. And the social group, indeed the institution, whose participation in the movement appeared most in question was the ICC, primarily because of the privileged position it held in Ireland’s power structure at the outset of the Land War. The Church had developed a strong position of power in the Irish political system throughout the nineteenth century, acquired largely through compliance with and concessions from the state authorities. It was therefore wary of jeopardizing the social control it enjoyed by aligning itself with anti-British forces. Would the hierarchy and clergy support or oppose a movement directed

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by lay leaders, some who were not Catholic, and many possessing the radical and Fenian pedigree that the Church abhorred? As it turned out, though bishops and priests were comparative latecomers to the movement, and divisions within the ICC remained throughout the Land War, the Church for the most part came to support and participate in the land movement and Land League.The reasons why the Church joined the Land War have been illuminated by historical research and analysis: fear of losing its position of authority among Irish Catholics and of a lay leadership usurping that authority;4 realization that the agitation would continue with or without its participation; the desire to provide a moderating influence;5 genuine concern for parishioners, especially the tenant farmers; the sympathy of many clergy for both agrarian and nationalist causes; and a special affinity with middle-class farmers who shared the same socio-economic background of many of the clergy.6 Detailed historical research, by documenting the extent and nature of clerical involvement in the movement, has also shown that the ICC was indeed a significant participant in the Land War.7 The role the ICC played in the Land War, a thornier problem and the issue of this chapter, has also been widely analysed. One of the most important functions of the Catholic clergy in the land movement was organizational, especially establishing, administering and coordinating local League branches.8 As argued by James O’Shea, parishes were at the centre of Irish rural social life, and the parish priest was the centre of the parish community. Donald Jordan concludes that, even in County Mayo, the formation of local League branches was possible only after the clergy joined the movement and endorsed its goals.9 Furthermore, due to their clerical training, priests were ‘natural’ organizers.10 In this organizational capacity, including chairing and speaking at branch and mass meetings, priests essentially ‘blessed’ the movement and gave it much cohesion. The participation of the Catholic clergy, and the support of a limited number of bishops, legitimized the land movement and Land League, neutralizing a good deal of opposition among Irish moderates, and in turn encouraging the latter, whether the large class of politically moderate middle-sized farmers or constitutional Home Rulers, to join the struggle. The conclusion drawn by a number of historians is that the ICC’s ‘overall impact on the land movement was to moderate its tone and begin to divert its goals away from those the priests felt to be unrealistic’.11 In early meetings in the west, and in later meetings in southern and eastern

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counties, clergymen focused on the immediate goal of tenant relief during the agricultural depression and on the longer-term goal of securing land reform from parliament.12 While the radical demand of peasant proprietary was seen as imprudent by most priests and prelates, calls for land confiscation directly violated Catholic doctrine regarding private property. And, of course, virtually all bishops and priests condemned violence of any type. The eventual wide clerical participation in the Land War did help sway the movement down a more moderate path and away from its early radical stance. And as Donald Jordan and Paul Bew forcefully argue, it was this moderating influence that led to the various, unintended, outcomes of the land movement, such as the compromise with the state authorities achieved by the 1881 Land Act. At the same time, it is widely recognized that the Catholic clergy and hierarchy were far from a politically homogenous group. Both in private and in public they voiced widely divergent and often conflicting positions regarding the land movement, its leaders, its goals and its methods.13 Thus, the moderating clerical role cannot be understood merely, or even largely, in terms of the intended goals of the hierarchy and clergy, or by the strength of clerical participation as measured by the number of priests actively involved in the movement, serving as presidents of local League branches and chairing and speaking at mass demonstrations. Nor can the moderating influence that the clergy and hierarchy brought to the movement explain the alliance forged among its diverse participants. Various arguments have been put forth to explain the political alliance forged between the differing constituents of the land movement. Samuel Clark contends that by the time of the Land War a convergence of material interests among different classes led to movement mobilization. However, Paul Bew has convincingly shown that the constituent groups of the Land War, including the Catholic clergy, never shared the same goal, nor did they ever agree to compromise their various interests.14 Bew focuses on these conflicting interests, based largely on class, and he views the very fragile alliance in the movement as forged through constantly changing strategies of protest and resistance devised within the Land League.15 James Donnelly’s explanation is that grievances based on frustrated expectations, and originating in an unjust land tenure system and agricultural crisis, led to collective action.16 While the shared experience of deprivation and oppression among diverse groups may have been crucial, it was not enough to unite those groups in collective action, as

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many prior years of frustrated attempts demonstrate. Finally, a ‘great man’ thesis, in the person of Charles Stewart Parnell, is offered by Emmet Larkin and Margaret O’Callaghan.17 Larkin contends that: The subtle process by which the Irish finally transcended their local and provincial origins, or even their more cosmopolitan and ideological allegiances... and sublimated their old loyalties in a national political consciousness... owes most to the political genius of Parnell. For it was Parnell who successfully focused that consciousness in the Land League by creating during 1879 a genuinely national grass-roots organization which made every tenant farmer in Ireland realize not only that he had a great deal in common with every other Irishman, but that in their recently acquired conscious unity there was dignity as well as power.18

Larkin is right to point to the process of transcendence and transformation of identity and ideology during the Land War, but is wrong in suggesting that it was accomplished by one man, no matter how great his political genius or power, or indeed by any one group, organization or institution. The national political consciousness that Larkin recognizes was constructed by all who participated in the Land War: virtually all the Irish people. Political consciousness is fundamentally about meaning or the sense people make of their worlds, the significance they give to past and present experience and events, and their expectations and aspirations for the future. Meaning is embodied in, as well as constructed and transformed through, symbolic systems that are in turn embedded and deployed through discourse representational structures consisting of symbolic codes, tropes, myths and narratives for constructing, interpreting and maintaining ‘reality’.19 Discourse is also a social and political practice in which language is used to create, interpret, categorize, appropriate, negotiate, challenge, disseminate and realize various experiential, social and cultural meanings.20 The political struggle the Irish engaged in during the Land War consisted of making claims to power holders (landlords and the state authorities). But, just as important, was the aim to create understanding about what was going on among potentially contentious allies (different nationalist politicians and leaders, different economic classes and agrarian groups and a diverse Irish Catholic hierarchy and clergy). It was through an ongoing discursive process – born out of class and political conflict, economic crises and rapidly unfolding political contingencies – that a sense of national identity began to emerge that allowed disparate social groups to forge and

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maintain a political alliance strong enough to erode the landlord system and the legitimacy of British domination.21 In its effort to exert control of the land movement and retain the political and social power it had acquired, the ICC situated itself at the heart of discursive struggles throughout the Land War. Particularly at mass land meetings, but also in sermons, pastorals and letters published in newspapers, bishops and priests invoked doctrine, Irish Catholic history and church authority to persuade the populace to either refrain (initially) or to participate in the Land War. Furthermore, since Catholicism was part of the worldview and social identity of most individuals and groups participating in the land movement, lay leaders and activists inserted Irish Catholic history, beliefs and symbolism into their discursive rhetoric throughout the Land War so as to mobilize the population to collective action against landlords and the state authorities. I am not arguing that the discursive intentions of clerical or lay leaders and activists invoking Catholic symbolic elements and narratives were always, or even often, achieved. On the contrary, I will contend that in discursive practice – whether in mass meetings, sermons, newspaper editorials, letters to the editor and many other communicative events and sites – Catholic discourse actually collided with competing discourses, including those of Home Rulers, radical separatists and tenant farmers. The effect of this continual expression of competing discourses, and the mixture and merging of discursive elements,22 was to open up a dynamic process of symbolic transformation. By means of this transformation, all the Irish – including members of the ICC – were exposed to new ideas, encouraged to interpret their old understandings, and to engage collectively in forging a new form of Irish nationalist identity. Neither the ICC, nor its representatives, or lay activists who appropriated Irish Catholic symbolic elements were able to control how those elements were interpreted, especially as Catholic discourse was constantly expressed in dialogue with other discourses. In short, Irish Catholicism was a determinative factor in the Irish Land War, but often not as the institution or its members intended. It was the process and outcome of symbolic construction through discursive struggle during the Land War that led to the emergence of the transcendent nationalist consciousness identified by Larkin and to the alliance of conflicting social groups. As they engaged in discursive practice during the Land War – at land meetings, in live and published sermons and in letters to editors – members of the Catholic clergy and hierarchy based their texts fundamentally on Catholic beliefs, such as the divinely ordained authority of bishops and

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clergy, Catholic virtues and Church teaching on the means to salvation. However, as we will see, the rhetoric of priests and bishops, though couched in a shared Catholic discursive structure, often differed depending on which faction of the Church they adhered to (Ultramontane, Gallican, ‘moderate’) and/or their diverse responses to Land War events. Thus, like the competing nationalist and agrarian groups, Church personnel imparted various and sometimes conflicting symbolic messages to audiences. Furthermore, the discourse of Church personnel often conflicted with the secular discourse of lay leaders, activists and speakers, even when the latter appropriated Catholic symbolism and narratives into their discursive texts. And conversely, as the land movement developed, Church personnel began to incorporate the more politically explicit discursive elements promulgated by secular participants, especially as their speeches increasingly absorbed interpretations and narratives of recent Land War events. My analysis of the role of Irish Catholic discourse in the Land War will be necessarily illustrative, as charting meaning-construction and discursive transcendence throughout the three-year period is beyond the scope of this chapter. I propose to focus on speeches delivered mostly by priests at land meetings in the early period of the Land War as it developed in the west. Though the early western phase of the Land War is rightly considered as the most militant and as the phase in which Church personnel played a lesser role, we will readily see how early discursive participation by the clergy immediately infused a moderate tone conveyed through symbolic elements, codes and narratives. Yet what analysis of Church personnel participation during the first year of the movement also reveals is a transition away from traditional moderation in clerical discourse, and an emergent synthesis of Irish Catholicism and nationalism. Irishtown, Knock and Westport and the response of the Catholic clergy The mass meeting at Irishtown, on 20 April 1879, proved to be the explosion that launched the Land War. Only two newspapers in Ireland, the Tuam Herald and the Connaught Telegraph, reported on the event, although T. W. Moody writes that ‘news of the meeting flew round Mayo, [and] requests for repeat performances at other places reached the organisers’.23 While Fenian activists worked with local tenant farmers to organize fresh meetings, some local Catholic clergy denounced the emerging movement from the altar. On 1 June, tenant farmers from Knock, Aughamore,

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Barnacarroll, Kilvine and Annaugh and other east Mayo parishes staged a mass meeting to protest against condemnation of the fledging movement by Archdeacon Cavanagh, the parish priest in Knock, as issued in his sermon of the previous Sunday. According to the Connaught Telegraph, Father Cavanagh ‘imported to [the movement’s] organizers sinister and ulterior motives, and personally accused Mr. [John] O’Keane [O’Kane], of Claremorris, to be engaged, with others, of preparing the country for revolution.’ 24 At this ‘indignation’ meeting, attended by not less than 20,000 people (according to the Connaught Telegraph), a ‘respectable’ tenant farmer,Tobias Merrick, took the chair and delivered an impassioned speech decrying clerical misrepresentations of the farmers’ efforts to attain justice: We are determined to assert our rights despite all opposition, open or covert, come from what quarter it may, and if we are faithful and united, and possess honesty and energy, we can make our country what it ought to be, ‘Great, glorious and free’ (great cheering). [I] would be very sorry to say anything disrespectful to a Roman Catholic clergyman, but this much [I will] say, don’t stand between the people and their rights; if you do, you must be prepared to accept the consequences.25

The public rebuke of a Catholic priest by tenant farmers demonstrates growing militancy amid increasing rural distress in the west of Ireland, as well as the antagonism between even those social groups – the priest and the people – thought to be ‘as one’. Indeed, Eugene Hynes concludes from his analysis that the ‘Knock demonstration... dramatically shows how the authority of priests and the landlords was intertwined’.26 The discourse at such indignation meetings was usually directed at landlords and the government, the rhetoric clearly challenging the latter’s hegemony. However, in this case at Knock, discursive indignation challenged a powerful Irish institution, the ICC, to join the movement against landlord domination, and provided symbolic markers – the concepts of faith and unity – on which the priests and the people could transcend their differences. A week after the Knock indignation meeting and two months after the Irishtown land meeting, an even larger and even more important mass meeting took place at Westport, County Mayo. This gathering proved momentous as it signalled Charles Stewart Parnell’s entry into the land movement, and because it brought to a head the confrontation between the ICC and the emerging movement. The day before the Westport meeting, the Freeman’s Journal published a letter to the editor from John MacHale, Archbishop of Tuam. In the missive, MacHale expressed his

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sympathy for the tenant farmers but condemned the growing agitation, claiming it violated and threatened the principles of Catholicism: Of the sympathy of the Catholic clergy for the rack-rented tenantry of Ireland, and of their willingness to co-operate earnestly in redressing their grievances, abundant evidence exists in historic Mayo, as elsewhere. But night patrolling, acts and words of menace, with arms in hand, the profanation of what is most sacred in religion - all the result of lawless and occult association, eminently merit the solemn condemnation of the ministers of religion, as directly tending to impiety and disorder in Church and society. Against such combinations in this diocese, organised by a few designing men, who, instead of the well-being of the community, seek only to promote their personal interests, the faithful clergy will not fail to raise their warning voices, and to point out to the people that unhallowed combination leads invariably to disaster and to the firmer riveting of the chains by which we are unhappily bound as a subordinate people to the dominant race.27

While many historians believe that MacHale’s letter was actually written by an assistant to the ageing prelate and possibly directed more at Rome than the Irish,28 it was received by the meeting’s organizers, Parnell and the Irish public as a denunciation of the movement by the most ardent nationalist in the Irish Catholic hierarchy, and ‘perhaps the most beloved and respected public figure in Connaught’.29 The publication of the letter in the most widely read newspaper in Ireland displayed yet another antagonism within the nationalist camp. MacHale’s words, such as ‘the chains by which we are unhappily bound as a subordinate people to the dominant race’, clearly demonstrate his devotion to Irish political autonomy.They also represented the basis of a possible convergence with other nationalist groups, as they were symbolic metaphors and concepts equally used by diverse nationalists. Yet, at this point, even nationalist bishops and clergy looked warily on an emerging movement headed by secular leaders espousing militant demands and calling for illegal and possibly violent action. The success of the Westport meeting proved that tenant farmers would not be deterred by condemnation of the movement from the Catholic Church and demonstrated to Parnell that he could impose his leadership over the clergy.30 By temporarily eclipsing the political influence of the ICC among even its most devoted adherents, positioning Parnell (a landed Protestant MP) to become head of the movement and garnering widespread publicity for the movement through coverage in major newspapers, the Westport meeting constituted one of many ramified events of the Land War.31 Soon, a spate of major meetings followed on the heels of the

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Westport one. Now aware that the land movement would proceed with or without them, priests began to openly participate for all the reasons discussed above. Discursive moderation at the Claremorris meeting Despite the hostility of Archbishop MacHale to the land movement, a Tenant Right Meeting, heavily attended by local priests (at least 11), took place in Claremorris in County Mayo on 13 July 1879.32 The meeting is noted in many Land War studies, as it represented the initiation of Catholic clergy into the Land War.33 It is worth recounting a small portion of it here as it illustrates the moderate rhetoric used by some priests who challenged the radical discourse of lay leaders in the early stages of the movement. The parish priest of Claremorris, Rev. Ulick Canon Bourke, a nephew of Archbishop MacHale and also considered a ‘nationalist’,34 chaired the meeting and delivered a speech full of discursive elements typical of larger ICC discourse: There are two extremes which the Irish people should avoid - a settled supineness in asserting their rights ... The second is the senseless challenging, on the part of one or two, of the whole British Government, and the power which it wields ... As dutiful Catholics you must be obedient to the laws, for social order rests on laws; and in wishing to enjoy liberty yourselves you ought not to indulge in license when dealing with others. But I have no fears on that head. I know the people of this parish well. I know that they are lovers of their religion, of order, and of just law, and that they know how to respect the rights of others. Prove that you are men of worthy descendants of a noble race, worthy to live in this fair and fertile country, worthy of the saving faith by which you are animated (hear, hear). What have you assembled for here to-day? What have the Catholic clergy come here for today? We have come at the call of charity, of mercy and of justice – of charity, for take away the wrongs which affect the Irish tenant farmer, and you cut off at one stroke the baneful root of much sin and evil in this land; of mercy, for it is an attribute of mercy to come to the aid of those in distress or depression; and of justice, for equity demands a fair adjustment between the rights and obligations of the tillers and owners of the lands. It is very meet indeed that the Catholic priest should come on a platform in which he stands forth as the advocate of his people in the triple cause of charity, mercy, and justice (cheers). We ask the landlords whose rents are too high to come to the relief of their tenantry, and to help those of them who need help, in order to tide over the present depression, and to secure them in a home in the land of their fathers (great cheering).35

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In his speech, Canon Bourke reminds his audience that they are Catholics and as such they must maintain obedience to legitimate authority, the British government and its laws, even as they assert their rights in the face of any injustice those laws maintain. Bourke’s account of the clergy’s presence at the meeting, and now as part of the movement, asserts the paternal role of the Catholic clergy: it is they who will advocate to the government and landlords for relief of tenant distress, just as the clergy serve as their advocates to Christ. Bourke inserts central regulatory concepts of Catholic virtue – charity, mercy and justice – in explaining the motivations of the priests, and by extension how the pillars of moral action should guide the behaviour of priests, tenants and landlords. As all must continue to obey the laws, the priest will ‘ask’ the landlords to come to the immediate aid of their suffering tenants (as demanded by charity and mercy), and to make adjustments to enhance tenant rights and to fulfil their obligations as landlords, in the name of justice. Bourke’s text is characteristic of the early moderate clerical discourse delivered from land meeting platforms in the west. It upholds the land laws and the temporal authority of the British government and the landlords, renders a submissive understanding of charity, mercy and justice (one in which those in power should be enjoined to act in accordance with), and both directly and indirectly reminds its Catholic listeners that God’s grace is imperilled if they stray from the strict moral rules of the Church. By October 1879, the discourse of Catholic clergy speaking at meetings in the west had clearly become more militant in its symbolic representation of the British government, landlords and land laws, as well as in its counsel as to what action the tenants and the movement might take. This emerging militancy on the part of Catholic priests has been seen as resulting variously from worsening economic conditions, the priests ‘following the lead’ of their parishioners and from their interdiscursive adoption of symbolic elements from lay leaders. The first two reasons are standard explanations of growing clerical militancy, while the latter explanation is based on the cultural perspective I present. However, these explanations are not mutually exclusive. If the clergy were following the political lead of the people, as well as attempting to regain that lead, then they were compelled to use symbolic elements appropriated from the discourse of lay activists who were inspiring the people, as well as incorporate some of the changing symbolic understandings of movement participants. In addition, the clergy must have been reinterpreting their discourse and that of secular leaders in the context of worsening conditions and the meagre response from power holders. Finally, those clergy who held more radical

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political beliefs prior to the land movement most likely felt emboldened to express them now, again following the lead of the people. At a land meeting in Castlebar, on 28 September, Rev. James Canon Magee, the Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Tuam,36 briefly enjoined the assemblage not to engage in ‘menace or insult’, but then proclaimed that ‘radical changes in the land laws’ were imperative, and provided a lengthy narrative of the evil outcomes of the prevailing ‘feudal system’: That system has lately been justly described as more suited to the robber chiefs of the Middle Ages than to the enlightenment of the nineteenth century. It has been abolished in almost every civilized country in the world. It is perpetuated in this in favour of a class, and to the destruction of an entire people. That the landlord can at his whim or fancy do either of two things – he can either impose an impossible rent on the tenant and thus starve him out of his land, or should he deem that process too slow, evict him altogether. Now I say without fear of contradiction, that any system that confers that power on one class, especially when it is insignificant in numbers, no matter how highly placed it may be, is against the mass of the people, and is an iniquitous law, and that while such a power of depopulating an entire (sic) district – I might say an entire country – with means of the notice-to-quit, together with the uncertainty of tenure and bad times, hangs like the sword of Damocles over the head of the poor tenant, misery and discontent must be the inevitable consequence. That the landlord has the power of imposing an impossible rent and of starving the tenant out of his land requires very little demonstration before the tenant farmers of Mayo. The remains of the ruined homesteads of the people, scattered over the face of the land, are ample although silent, but most eloquent testimony to this terrible fact.37

Like so many speeches emanating from meeting platforms, Canon Magee’s speech characterized the land system as feudal, and thus unjust, and the landlords as ‘robbers’ who abused their power by starving, evicting and depopulating the country. Symbolized and narrated as such, the message is that landlords are violating the commandment against stealing, are not fulfilling the duties of those in power and thereby negating the obligation of Irish Catholics to respect their position of authority. Joining with nonclerical and even radical voices of the movement, Magee proclaims the Irish land system to be uncivilized and the cause of misery and discontent. This symbolization of the land system indicates that the people and the movement should be working to eliminate the system, not appealing to the landlords and government to be charitable, especially as the system is inherently unjust, and devoid of charity and mercy. Countering Canon

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Bourke’s previous appeal to the mercy of landlords and the British government, Canon Magee asserts, through his symbolic characterization of the land system, that the former are incapable of mercy. At Newport in County Mayo on 19 October, the parish priest, Rev. Richard Prendergast, opened a land meeting by explicitly connecting the Catholic religion and priests to the movement: You have come from homes today after having attended our Divine service, and now it appears really after all that religion is in every way connected with our object. After we gave up our hearts and souls to the Almighty God we come now to pay a debt of mercy to the people all around (cheers). It is in the very truest sense of the term a mercy for the priest to go with the people, and raise their voices to proclaim their difficulties and their terrible privations. The object, then, of this meeting is nothing more nor less than that.38

In his speech, Prendergast points out to the meeting participants, many of them part of his flock, that their transition from Sunday Mass to a mass land meeting is divinely inspired. Furthermore, participation in the land movement is action based on Catholic beliefs. As understood in Catholic faith, the phrase ‘debt of mercy’ infers that just as God shows mercy to believers, those who have received it must practice it: the priests must work for the relief of the farmers, and the people must practice mercy by working for tenant relief. This is the third symbolic rendition of the meaning of mercy developed by priests early in the movement; we can see how it is now transformed from an attribute of the powerful, to a denial of that attribute, and finally to an attribute and practice of the Irish priests and people. By attributing divine inspiration to meeting attendance and associating the Catholic religion with movement activity, Prendergast is interdiscursively grafting traditional Catholic concepts to political movement participation. In so doing, he is aligning the goals of Irish Catholicism with those of the struggle for Irish freedom, and contributing to the transcendence and resolution of any conflict between religious belief and political activity. At a mass meeting at Dromore West in County Sligo on 5 October, the parish priest Rev. J. J. O’Kane continued the discursive refrain of Catholic priests as the true defenders of the people, implicitly downgrading the status of lay leaders.Yet, his pronouncement about political action is indicative of the more confrontational turn many clergy were taking: [I]f ever there was a time in the chequered history of our country when the priest should open his mouth, I say it is the melancholy autumn of 1879 (cheers). A Voice – The priest and people always together.

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Who knows the people’s wants better than the priest who is daily with them, who has intercourse every day with the tenant farmers, with the poor. His eyes cannot be closed to the distress, his ears must be attentive to their reasonable demands, and therefore I say his voice should sound the tocsin of the impending dangers (cheers). It has been said that we have met to agitate the people, but I say if we constitutionally agitate for the good of our country let us be called agitators (cheers).We have come here neither to dictate nor bully, nor incite, but we are come here to declare before the world that except the Irish people be succoured by reasonable relief the Irish people must pass in the year 1879 from the land of their birth (never). It has been said that we have come to excite the people. I deny it.We come not to excite, but we come to defend your cause constitutionally and according to the law (cheers). Any man who would dare by word or act to offend on this occasion, or by ... any act contrary to the law is a wolf in sheep’s clothing (cheers).39

O’Kane warns against any type of unlawful action, possibly one of the ‘impending dangers’ he refers to, but his words indicate some of the symbolic transformation that would occur throughout the movement. He appropriates the term ‘agitator’ from the discourse of movement opponents (including those in the Irish Catholic hierarchy hostile to the movement) to vilify it and associates it instead with lawful, constitutional action. Most powerfully, O’Kane applies the concept of agitator to himself and others joined in the tenants’ cause. Thus, O’Kane aligns himself with lay movement leaders (including Fenians and radicals) instead of reinforcing the divide between them that the ICC had long maintained. Another major indication of the more confrontational stance emerging in the discursive practice of priests are attacks on the British government, exemplified in the following text delivered at a Mayo land meeting in Killala by the parish priest, Rev. Peter J. Nolan, on 26 October: Prompt action on the part of the Government might have averted the unutterable horrors of that terrible time ... But the government did just what they are doing today – nothing whatever. As a result of the fatal blundering what a huge butcher’s bill – slaughter all round of a full million of the Irish race ... The cold-hearted Saxon [Sir Stafford Northcote, Chancellor of the Exchequer] can promise no assistance. No wonder that the very name of England should be hateful to the Irish race both at home and abroad. How often, in the day of [Ireland’s] destiny – in anguish and agony like some famished beggar – her voice has been sent across the channel imploring help which is scornfully denied her by haughty and perfidious Albion? And the characteristic answer breathing contempt for our voice comes back ‘no Irish need apply’ on the tossing waves of that rough strip of ocean which both God and nature seem to have intended as a barrier to separate us as a nation from the land of the Saxons.

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It would seem as if England, instead of sympathizing with us in our misfortunes, rather exulted in the destruction of our race ... Would it be using language too strong to say that a Government refusing to do its duty in such circumstances is deliberately and effectually putting the people to death, and deserves the everlasting execration of the whole civilized world. ... for all the miseries of our country there is one unfailing remedy – that Ireland should ... manage her own affairs in her own Parliament.40

Evoking the Famine years, Nolan provides a narrative linking the government’s response to the current crisis to past policy failures and predicts the same dire consequences: death and destruction. He deploys a well-known symbolic concept, ‘Perfidious Albion’, to characterize England and its representatives, and Thomas Moore’s term ‘Cold-hearted Saxon’ to portray a ruler not meeting the responsibilities of office (thus violating Catholic doctrine on lawful authority), but instead overseeing the destruction of a people, vividly symbolized by the metaphor of a slaughtering butcher. In calling for its denunciation by the civilized world, the priest effectively condemns the British government.The symbolic message is that this unjust, oppressive government should be resisted, and the ultimate solution held forth is an Irish Parliament. Of course, resistance must be constitutional, and Nolan narrativizes a recent land meeting in Tipperary at which [A] letter was read from the renowned Archbishop of Cashel, whose voice – whether raised in the cause of God or the cause of country – sends a throb of delight through every pulse of the heart of Ireland.That truly noble patriot prelate, like our own revered and venerated Bishop, encourages every Constitutional effort to heal the galling wrongs of this trampled nation (loud cheering). Let it go forth to the world that this meeting has been a most orderly one – that law and order has reigned supreme.41

By intertextualizing a recent event and the words of Archbishop Croke, a confirmed and renowned nationalist who supported the land movement from the outset, into his discursive text, the Rev. Nolan encourages political action but also reaffirms the Church’s stance on the nature of that political action: it must be lawful and constitutional.

The Gurteen events On 2 November 1879, a notable land meeting took place at Gurteen in County Sligo.Two antagonistic forces, radical nationalists and the Catholic clergy, openly confronted one another. As an unforeseen result, the radical rhetoric of the meeting, provoked in large measure by the moderate

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discourse of the clergy, set off a chain of events that resulted in significant symbolic transformation and, ironically, in the movement overcoming some of the problems of alliance and mobilization it was facing. The first speaker, Fr. John McDermott, the parish priest of Loughlin, acknowledged the need ‘to change the land system by which you are ground down to the earth’ and disparaged landlord and government proposals of emigration as an acceptable solution.Yet, he also appealed to the morality of landlords and to the paternalism of the government: [W]e want no more emigration; we want to live at home; and to this end we call upon the landlords in the first instance to do their duty by the people; and next we call upon the Government to assist us with public works until better times come (cheers).42

The national and local lay leaders strongly countered Fr. MacDermott’s conciliatory stance. First, Land League organizer John Dillon evoked fear and shame in his narrative by invoking Famine memories to disparage any deferential stance towards landlords and the government: There [are] two ways of approaching this question of getting reasonable reductions from the landlord[s] of the country. One way [is] the begging method ... which ... from the Famine up to 1860 had resulted in leaving the wide and fruitful plains of Roscommon bereft of... the finest and proudest peasant colonies in all Ireland ... [Will you] follow into the poor house or the paupers grave [this] brave peasantry ... or [will you] beg no longer?

Following Dillon, Michael Davitt compared the hard-working farmers to the idle landlords: ‘The farmers must work from morn till eve to support themselves and their children when in steps Mr. Lazy Unproductive Landlord and demands almost half of the money so earned, to sustain himself in the licentious and voluptuous life he very often leads’. Davitt condemned the land system that allowed such a social system and brought the threat of ‘another artificial famine’. He further deepened the evil connotation of rent by claiming it to be ‘an unjust and immoral tax upon the industry of the people’. Finally, he symbolically associated the ‘three F’s’ with the misery the Irish farmers were now experiencing: Are we here to listen to any proposal of fixity of tenure at fair rents?... I say no; that is fixity of landlordism, fixity of poverty and squalor, and fixity of degradation... I say that... in the face of another impending famine... the time has come when the manhood of Ireland will spring to its feet and say it will tolerate this system no longer.43

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James Killen, a Belfast barrister, followed with a fiery speech in which he argued for various forms of retribution. Interrupting Killen, Fr. McDermott decried his violent rhetoric and how it aroused the audience: Killen: Since the day when the cursed feudal laws were introduced by Norman savages the land of Ireland had been three times confiscated, but always in favour of the aristocracy. [We want] a fourth confiscation, or rather a restitution now in favour of the people. [I leave] it to [you] to say whether that was to be done by the pen, the pencil or the sword. A voice: Plenty of Lead! Father McDermott: [We have] not come [here] to talk about using physical force. Killlen: [I do] not recommend [force] but [I] would be glad to see every man... carrying a rifle, and knowing how to use it. The time for nambypamby speaking had passed; [we have] been beggars long enough.44

The discursive exchange at the Gurteen meeting illustrates the refusal of INLL leaders and western supporters to moderate their militant stand or discursive rhetoric to avoid offending the sensibilities of the Catholic clergy, as well as their willingness to express their militancy from the same platforms on which members of the clergy sat. But while Fr. MacDermott protested, and many clergy felt ill at ease with the militancy expressed in the speeches, the state authorities interpreted it as a challenge to the rule of law. Beginning a counter-campaign of repression and coercion, the government moved to suppress the Land League on 19 November 1879, by arresting Michael Davitt, James Killen and James Daly and charging the three movement leaders with using seditious language at the Gurteen meeting.45 With their arrests, the discursive elevation of Michael Davitt and the Land League, and the simultaneous denunciation of the government, began at numerous land meetings and in newspaper editorials. One such meeting was held in County Sligo in the rural district of Carracastle on 7 December 1879. The report in the Sligo Champion stated that ‘those present were... almost all of the tenant class’.46 Illustrating how discursive interpretation, in conjunction with contingent events such as the arrest of the League leaders, could transform the symbolic understandings and positions of individuals, the same Fr. John McDermott who opposed the militancy of Davitt and others just weeks earlier now exalted them. Fr. McDermott first narrated the

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actions of the government in arresting the movement leaders and then admonished his audience to follow the example of Davitt: I believe the action of the Government was not intended to arrest the movement, but rather to drive us, as I said to acts of violence and thus... crush us (groans and cheers). But we are not such fools; we scorn their threats, nor will we be allured into acts of violence by our enemies... the landlord and... the Government. Why is it that Michael Davitt is such a power in the land at present? Because he was willing to go back into the sunlight or into the prison cell, provided only that either the one or the other should bring some good to the cause... So it must be to-day with each and all of us. We must also, like him, be prepared for any fate. We must be willing to do and labour as he has done in the cause of Ireland, and we must consider that labouring in the cause of our native land is itself a sufficient reward for all our exertions.47

In his narrative of Davitt and the arrests, Fr. McDermott combined nationalist and agrarian themes and symbols, positioning the land as the basis for nationalist unity. While the priest exalts Davitt and his dedication to the cause, he is also portrayed as a ‘labourer’ of the sacred land.This is imagery that could well resonate with tenant farmers, allowing them to imagine their own heroic actions. In addition, the cleric’s political move closer to the militants and away from government authority (‘the enemy’) signalled to participants at meetings and to readers of newspapers that they too could embrace more energetically the Land League cause. Finally, as mentioned, many of the clerical discursive themes were interdiscursively incorporated into discursive performances by lay activists, even the most radical. Hundreds of examples exist but one will have to suffice here. The following excerpt is from a speech delivered by Michael Davitt at a land meeting in Drumsna in County Leitrim in December 1879, following his acquittal: Almighty God created this island ... that the people should live in happiness ... We are therefore appealing to the laws of Providence, we are acting consistently with religion and morality when we ask for the tenant farmers to remain in Ireland and insist upon your just rights ... that you may live in your own country in plenty and contentment, not in poverty and squalor.This movement is a moral and religious – a national – movement in unison with the wants of Humanity. We base our rights with the objective interests of mankind. What we demand for Ireland we demand for humanity – independence from poverty and proletarian degradation. We demand that God’s created land would be used for the wants and necessities of the God-created people.48

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Davitt deploys Catholic discursive elements by explicitly referring to Almighty God and His intention that the land be used for all the people and the laws of Providence. In line with clerical leaders, he decries emigration and uses this central discursive element in admonishing farmers to remain in Ireland and fight. Demonstrating how interdiscursive and intertextual use of symbolism can lead to discursive transformation, Davitt imbues elements found in previous clerical speeches with a radical twist: he represents Land League demands and action – considered by many in the Church to be unlawful and against Catholic doctrine – to be consistent with religion and the will of God, thereby legitimizing radical action with a tenant worldview moulded by the ICC. Through this discursive device, Davitt allows tenants to understand their protest against landlords as guided by God’s will. At the same time, he challenges the ICC, especially its members still opposing the land movement to join the campaign: if the movement is on the side of God, then those opposing it are not, even if they represent the Catholic Church. Concluding discussion Since the publication in 1978 and 1979 of the two seminal class-centred works on the Irish Land War by Paul Bew and Samuel Clark, social history has undergone a so-called ‘cultural turn’. Most generally, this approach is based on Max Weber’s edict that meaning underlies all social (including political) action and that meaning is embedded in symbolic and discursive systems. If we want to understand why individuals and collectives act in certain ways, we need to analyse the symbolic systems by which they interpret and understand their situation. In short, the cultural dimension of social – and political – action is as constitutive of social order and social change as material and instrumental forces, such as class and political power. However, symbolic meanings and the diverse cultural systems in which they are embedded are never static. In periods of historical transformation, symbolic meaning can become very fluid indeed. Cultural models are then open to transformation in the context of publicly contentious sociopolitical relations and contingent events, and this process of meaning construction and reconstruction can in turn be transformative of the symbolic systems of diverse political actors. As part of a larger attempt to provide an overdue and in-depth cultural analysis of the Land War,49 this chapter has illustrated one major component – the role of Irish Catholic clerical discourse as it was articulated first in confrontation and then converging with discourses of other

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Land War actors. What emanated from this process was an emergent transcendent cultural structure, a new nationalist ideology and identity. As the Irish Catholic hierarchy and clergy struggled to maintain the strength of religious belief in Ireland, as well as their position of power and influence in the face of mass social insurgency, the discursive stance of the clerical Church was inadvertently transformed. Based largely on Roman Catholic doctrine and Vatican edicts, the ICC had long upheld respect for British legal authority and advocated accommodation with that authority as well as with the private property rights of landlords. This stance underpinned the early efforts of most bishops and clergy to oppose and resist the land movement. When the hierarchy’s opposition to the movement proved ineffective, the Church faced the possibility of losing political and spiritual control of the Irish people. And as the clergy reacted by increasingly and actively supporting the Land League, and the British government imposed stronger measures of repression, clerical personnel were forced to scrutinize discursive codes and practices that no longer seemed appropriate. A major discursive struggle within the ICC, and between Irish clergy and other Land War participants, thus ensued that would have a significant impact on the emerging nationalist ideology and identity. The main tenets of the Church’s doctrines did not change but were recast in an Irish nationalist form. First, the notion of the legitimacy of British rule in Ireland was discarded and replaced by a recognition that authority should emanate from an Irish state. Second, the bishops firmly resolved that the land of Ireland should be owned by Irish farmers rather than landlords. And finally, constitutionalism was to be upheld, not with the goal of accommodating British rule but rather with the objective of bringing it to an end. These transformations in Irish Catholic discourse emerged from discursive struggles waged among the contending groups constituting the land movement, including members of the Church. The struggles within and among the various groups were waged largely through the medium of heavily ritualized events50 and thus overlapped and influenced each other. When their old discursive models of conciliation failed them the retributive and militant discourse of Fenians and radical agrarian activists provided symbolic codes for more conservative movement participants, including the Catholic clergy, to confront mounting agrarian crisis, landlord intransigence and British coercion. Reciprocally, as the Church increasingly became involved in the Land War struggle, the militancy of the movement was tempered. Thus, while the differences between and within the various groups constituting the land movement were not resolved, their discursive expression and articulation in hundreds of

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ritualistic events (such as land meetings) resulted in a transformative reordering of symbolic codes and narrative structures and the emergence of a transcendent and unifying counter-hegemonic structure in the form of an embryonic Irish nationalist identity. It was this ‘new’ symbolic structure that supplied the basis for alliance during the Land War and proved enduring, though never fixed, for many decades afterwards. All the while, contention over land, the political power of the Catholic Church, national independence, and the symbolic meaning of all these issues continued as a constant of Irish life. Notes 1 This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Donald Jordan, scholar of Ireland and beloved friend. 2 P. Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1978). 3 S. Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, 1979). 4 E. Larkin, The Roman Catholic Church and the Creation of the Modern Irish State 1878–1886 (Philadelphia, 1975), pp. 25, 29, 49–50; Clark, Social Origins, p. 280; C. J. Woods, ‘Parnell and the Catholic Church’, in D. G. Boyce and A. O’Day (eds), Parnell in Perspective (London, 1991), pp. 9–37. 5 E. Hynes, Knock: The Virgin’s Apparition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cork, 2008), p. 162. 6 J. O’Shea, Priests, Politics, and Society in Post-Famine Ireland: A Study of County Tipperary 1850–1891 (Dublin, 1983). 7 Ibid. 8 Clark, Social Origins, p. 288; D. Jordan, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo for the Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 252–3. 9 Jordan, Land and Popular Politics, p. 253. 10 O’Shea, Priests, Politics and Society, p. 83. 11 Jordan, Land and Popular Politics, p. 247; see also Bew, Land and the National Question, pp. 128–31; O’Shea, Priests, Politics and Society, p. 85. 12 Gerard Moran argues that a major motivation for priests’ presence at early meetings in the west was the impending famine and their ‘hope that they would be able to advance the demand to secure rent abatements from landlords’. Moran cites this objective as the reason for the participation at meetings of three priests discussed in this paper, Frs. Magee, Prendergast and Nolan. ‘“Near Famine”: The Roman Catholic Church and the Subsistence Crisis of 1879–1882’, Studia Hibernica, 32 (2002–03), pp. 155–77. 13 See Larkin, The Roman Catholic Church, pp. 1–90, for a detailed discussion of the struggle between Irish Catholic bishops over the Land War. 14 See Bew, Land and the National Question, pp. 217–24, for his critique of various explanations of the INLL alliance. 15 Ibid., pp. 222–3.

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16 J. S. Donnelly, Jr., The Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork (London, 1975). 17 Larkin, The Roman Catholic Church, p. xxvi; M. O’Callaghan, British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland: Criminality, Land and the Law under Forster and Balfour (Cork, 1994), pp. 7, 9–10. 18 Larkin, The Roman Catholic Church, p. xxvi. 19 A. Kane, ‘Theorizing Meaning Construction in Social Movements: Symbolic Structures and Interpretation during the Irish Land War, 1879–1882’, Sociological Theory, 15 (1997), 249–75. 20 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977). 21 A. Kane, Constructing Irish Nationalist Identity: Ritual and Discourse during the Land War, 1879–1882 (New York, 2011). See also A. Kane, ‘Narratives of Nationalism: Constructing Irish National Identity during the Land War, 1879–1882’, National Identities, 2 (2000), 245–64. 22 Two concepts drawn from discourse analysis will be used in this paper to explore further this process of discursive mixing and merging.While ‘interdiscursivity’ refers to the articulation of different discourses and genres together, ‘intertextuality’ refers to the practice of drawing on particular discursive structures of already established meanings and understandings. See L. Chouliaraki and N. Fairclough, Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis (Edinburgh, 1999). 23 T. W. Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846–82 (Oxford, 1982), p. 296. 24 Connaught Telegraph, 7 June 1879. See Hynes, Knock, pp. 121–2, for a discussion of Cavanaugh’s beliefs and political stance. 25 Connaught Telegraph, 7 June 1879. 26 Hynes, Knock, p. 153. 27 Freeman’s Journal, 7 June 1879; see also M. Davitt, Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (London, 1904), p. 153, and Moody, Davitt, p. 303. 28 Larkin, The Roman Catholic Church, p. 19. 29 Moody, Davitt, p. 303. 30 Jordan, Land and Popular Politics, pp. 222–3; Larkin, The Roman Catholic Church, p. 22. 31 The Westport meeting was reported in most of the provincial newspapers in the west, as well as the Freeman’s Journal, the Nation, the Dublin Evening Mail, the Belfast News Letter, the Limerick Reporter, The Times (of London) and the Pall Mall Gazette (Moody, Davitt, p. 306). 32 See Bew’s account of the meeting in Land and the National Question, p. 68. 33 For examples, see Jordan, Land and Popular Politics, pp. 237–41; Bew, Land and the National Question, p. 68. 34 Hynes, Knock, pp. 155–66. 35 Connaught Telegraph, 19 July 1879. 36 Later Magee would become chair of the Castlebar branch of the Land League. See Moran, ‘Near Famine’, p. 166. 37 Connaught Telegraph, 4 October 1879.

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Connaught Telegraph, 25 October 1879. Freeman’s Journal, 6 October 1879. Connaught Telegraph, 1 November 1879. Ibid. Sligo Champion, 8 November 1879. Freeman’s Journal, 4 November, 1879. Limerick Reporter, 21 November, 1879 See Moody, Davitt, p. 351 Sligo Champion, 13 December 1879. Ibid. Freeman’s Journal, 13 December 1879. Kane, Constructing. The dearth of cultural analyses on the Land War has also been recognized and discussed by Eugene Hynes, ‘Nineteenth-Century Irish Catholicism, Farmers’ Ideology and National Religion: Explorations in Cultural Explanation’, in Roger O’Toole (ed.), Sociological Studies in Roman Catholicism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Lewistown, 1989), pp. 45–70. 50 For further elaboration of this point, see Anne Kane, ‘The Ritualization of Newspaper Reading and Political Consciousness: The Role of Newspapers in the Irish Land War’, in Lawrence McBride (ed.), Reading Irish Histories: Texts, Contexts, and the Creation of National Memory, 1870–1922 (Dublin, 2003), pp. 40–61.

Bibliography Contemporary sources Newspapers Connaught Telegraph Freeman’s Journal Sligo Champion Western News Later works Bew, Paul. Land and the National Question in Ireland,1858–82 (Dublin, 1978). Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977). Chouliaraki, Lilie and Norman Fairclough. Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis (Edinburgh, 1999). Clark, Samuel. Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, 1979). Davitt, Michael. The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (London, 1904). Donnelly, James S., Jr. The Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork (London, 1975). Hynes, Eugene. ‘Nineteenth-Century Irish Catholicism, Farmers’ Ideology and National Religion: Explorations in Cultural Explanation’, in Roger O’Toole (ed.), Sociological Studies in Roman Catholicism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Lewistown, 1989), pp. 45–70.

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——. Knock: The Virgin’s Apparition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cork, 2008). Jordan, Donald, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo for the Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge, 1994). Kane, Anne. ‘Theorizing Meaning Construction in Social Movements: Symbolic Structures and Interpretation during the Irish Land War, 1879–1882’, Sociological Theory, 15 (1997), 249–75. ——. ‘Narratives of Nationalism: Constructing Irish National Identity during the Land War, 1879–82’, National Identities, 2 (2000), 245–64. ——. ‘The Ritualization of Newspaper Reading and Political Consciousness: The Role of Newspapers in the Irish Land War’, in Lawrence McBride (ed.), Reading Irish Histories: Texts, Contexts, and the Creation of National Memory, 1870–1922 (Dublin 2003), pp. 40–61. ——. Constructing Irish National Identity: Discourse and Ritual during the Land War, 1879–1882 (New York, 2011). Larkin, Emmet. The Roman Catholic Church and the Creation of the Modern Irish State, 1878–1886 (Philadelphia, 1975). Moody, T. W. Davitt and the Irish Revolution 1846–82 (Oxford, 1982). Moran, Gerard. ‘“Near Famine”: The Roman Catholic Church and the Subsistence Crisis of 1879–1882’, Studia Hibernica, 32 (2002–03), 155–77. O’Callaghan, Margaret. British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland: Criminality, Land and the Law under Forster and Balfour (Cork, 1994). O’Shea, James. Priests, Politics, and Society in Post-Famine Ireland: A Study of County Tipperary 1850–1891 (Dublin, 1983). Woods, C. J. ‘Parnell and the Catholic Church’, in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (ed.), Parnell in Perspective (London, 1991), pp. 9–37.

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

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Gerard Moran: Matthew Harris, Fenianism and land agitation in the west of Ireland

I While biography is sometimes regarded as something of a sidetrack in history and of peripheral merit, this fails to take into account the contributions individuals can make to society and to political development in the periods in which they live. These contributions are often moulded by personal experiences, the localities and communities in which the individuals lived and their reactions to particular incidents and events. We know more about the Fenian movement and Land League agitation from the biographies of high-profile individuals such as James Stephens, Charles Kickham, Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell than from research on the organizations that they led or were involved in. Because of the regional significance of the Fenian and Land League movements, the role of individuals in the development and organization of these movements contributes in crucial ways to our understanding of how they worked and functioned.This is especially the case with the Land League as the formation and expansion of the agitation was influenced by local personalities.While much has been written on the contributions of James Daly, Michael Davitt and others, it is unfortunate that the role of other influential individuals has been largely ignored or marginalized.1 One of the most forgotten personalities of the Land League period is Matthew Harris whose contribution to Irish history has not been properly acknowledged, but who nonetheless played a crucially important role in involving the Fenian movement in agrarian agitation in the west of Ireland. Harris, who was born in Athlone in 1825, came from a revolutionary nationalist background. We know that his grandfather, Peter Harris, took part in the 1798 rebellion in Kildare and was subsequently executed at Monasterevin.While it is unclear when Harris came to live in Ballinasloe, we know that he worked as a building contractor based in the town for most

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of his life. His initial involvement in Irish nationalist movements was with the Repeal organization. When the split occurred, he sided with the Young Irelanders, although it is unclear if he played any role in the 1848 rebellion. Having joined the organization in 1865, Harris played a prominent role in the Fenian movement in the west of Ireland in the late 1860s. He was the head centre for Ballinasloe in 1867 and was responsible for the south Roscommon area. At that time, his principal function was the importation of rifles, most of which came from the north of England, and their distribution to members of the IRB in the province.2 T. W. Moody suggests it was possible that some of the arms transmitted by Michael Davitt in 1870 were sent to Harris.3 While he had no direct association with land, he had inherited the family farm near Athlone, but this was given to his sister.4 In the 1870s, the Fenian movement was in total disarray after the debacle of the 1867 rising, split by internal divisions that resulted in various factions and unclear as to its direction, approach or focus.Without strong leadership, it was unable to unite the various groupings behind a coherent strategy. This resulted in the movement adopting a more pragmatic approach that allowed its members to engage with other groupings. In particular, an agreement was reached with Isaac Butt’s Home Rule movement whereby the Fenians would support his parliamentary methods on the understanding that if no progress was made within three years, then Butt would advocate the use of revolutionary methods to secure Irish independence. This was a major U-turn by the militant nationalists as up to this their involvement in parliamentary politics had been on the basis that if elected they would not take their seats in the House of Commons. Some Fenian candidates were opposed to allowing their names go forward for election, as was true of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa at the Tipperary by-election in 1869.5 As a result of the 1873 agreement, sometimes called the ‘First New Departure’, Matthew Harris and other Fenians were to play a major role in the 1874 general election, with Harris becoming the campaign manager in the Co. Mayo election for the Fenian, John O’Connor Power, who was also the Connacht representative on the Supreme Council of the IRB. Among the other Fenians who took part in the Mayo election were Mark Ryan, Thomas Brennan and P. W. Nally.6 Harris was a pragmatic republican, and while prepared to cooperate with constitutionalists in political agrarian agitations, he had little faith in the parliamentary system redressing Irish grievances and in particular winning concessions on the national question. For all that he was prepared to involve himself in the 1874 election campaign, and again in Roscommon in 1880, in support of fellow Fenians standing for election.

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The 1873 agreement between Butt and the Fenians came to an acrimonious end in 1876 when the hardliners within the Supreme Council of the IRB had it overturned. From August 1876, all IRB members had to withdraw active cooperation with the constitutional nationalist movement, something that led to the expulsion or resignation of three members of the Supreme Council, including O’Connor Power. While the historical assessment of the 1873 agreement has largely concentrated on the political coalition, Harris and other Fenian leaders in the west of Ireland availed of the opportunity to make greater contact with tenant and ribbon groups. Vincent Comerford raises an important and pertinent point when he states that Fenianism in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s became a refuge and a base for those individuals who felt excluded from their proper place in Irish society, and nowhere was this sense of exclusion more apparent than among the small farmers and labouring classes in the west of Ireland.7 In the immediate aftermath of the 1867 rebellion, major efforts were made by Dr. Mark Ryan and others in Connacht to reorganize the Fenian movement in the province.8 By early 1879, nearly 30 per cent of the Fenian membership in the country was based in Connacht, comprising mainly labourers and small farmers. Many joined because there was no other organization in the country to represent their interests and Fenianism was the only credible movement available. In the main, they did not join for ideological reasons, but because the Fenians were the only group prepared to listen to their grievances. Harris was one of the Fenian leaders who felt that an agrarian agitation could be made into a powerful revolutionary weapon outside of parliament and that lay beyond the control of the constitutional politicians. Owen McGee points out how Harris ‘believed that destroying the political power of the landed aristocracy in Ireland should be the first priority of any sincere Irish republican’.9 As a result of the expulsions from the Supreme Council of the IRB, Harris was elected to replace O’Connor Power as the Connacht representative. Harris’s abilities impressed the IRB leadership. When John Devoy, the head of the Clan na Gael organization in the United States, visited Ireland in February 1879, he described Harris as being of above average intelligence with a thorough knowledge of the people and a great personal interest in the west. However, Devoy also felt that Harris was too easy-going.10 The 1876–77 period is regarded as a lean one for Fenianism as it lacked leaders and activists of quality. While the organization continued to stress the need for amnesty for the Fenian prisoners who were still incarcerated in British prisons, Harris realized the movement had to be more popular by taking on board issues

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which affected the people, and in particular the agricultural classes of the west. As Brian Griffin points out, local Fenians like Harris ‘were more in tune with the sentiment of small farmers ...’ than the national leadership.11 It must be put down substantially to Harris’s organizational qualities and energies that while the Fenian movement was in decline in Leinster and Munster in the late 1870s, membership in Connacht was on the increase. II The establishment of the Ballinasloe Tenants’ Defence Association (BTDA) in May 1876 helped to consolidate the alliance between the Fenians and small farmers.12 The BTDA differed from the other farmers’ clubs that existed at this time in that it was more radical and focused on small farmers’ grievances.The farmers’ clubs in the east and south of the country were largely composed of graziers and large farmers and were more concerned with their interests. The BTDA in contrast held regular demonstrations, which attracted crowds of between 2,000 and 5,000 persons, at which rack-renting landlords, evicting proprietors and large graziers were denounced. Unlike many of the other tenants’ defence associations and farmers’ clubs that came into existence in the 1870s, no single incident or reason was responsible for the formation of the Ballinasloe association. Harris and the other leaders appear to have established it in response to the depressed condition of the small farmers in the region and so as to support the land bill Isaac Butt had introduced in the House of Commons.While Butt’s land bill was acceptable to Harris and the other neo-Fenians, it was of more benefit to the large farmers as it had been framed in association with the Central Tenants’ Defence Association. What is also the case is that the neo-Fenians were unhappy with sections of the bill, in particular its inclusion of the larger farmers, and over the following years, tensions became increasingly evident.13 The leadership of the BTDA was in the hands of constitutional nationalists and Fenians. Its president, James Kilmartin, a poor law guardian for Ballinasloe Union who had a 112-acre farm at Shralea, two miles outside the town, was a constitutional nationalist. Harris, as vice-president, and Michael M. O’Sullivan, as secretary, were Fenians and non-farmers.14 At the inaugural meeting in May 1876, Kilmartin identified the cause of the tenant farmers with the cause of Ireland, stating that each depended on the other for their prosperity. Kilmartin argued that united and persistent action inside and outside parliament would result in the emancipation of the tenant farmers from the thraldom of landlord tyranny.

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A special appeal was made to the small farmers of the region to become members.15 Membership was open to anyone on payment of an annual subscription, with the minimum charge being one shilling, and council members were urged to use their influence to enrol as many of their friends as possible.16 At every opportunity, Harris put the small farmers’ case to the fore. Thus, at a meeting in Corbett’s Hotel, Ballinasloe, on 15 June 1876, he denounced the graziers for the injuries they had inflicted on smaller farmers and stated they were not interested in the good of the country: the typical grazier cares little for this country; he is as remarkable for his want of public spirit as he is for the absence of every quality that fits men for social intercourse of the amenities of civil life.17

At a Ballinasloe demonstration on 3 November 1878, with Charles Stewart Parnell, John O’Connor Power and James Daly of the Connaught Telegraph in attendance, Harris condemned Irish landlords and pointedly reminded those present that the distinction between ‘good and bad landlords’, which moderate reformers generally insisted upon making, only served to weaken the tenant movement. He added: the exterminating laws of England do not spare the good any more than it does the bad tenant. Landlords must be made to realize that when the great law of retributing justice arrives it would exempt no one.18

Throughout the Land League agitation, Harris never missed an opportunity to point to the exterminating policies landlords such as Lord Dunsandle and Allan Pollock were using against small farmers in east Galway. At a demonstration at Riverville in September 1880, Harris said that Dunsandle had laid waste to large sections of his estates and ‘exterminated his fellow men, weak women and children’.19 In 1877, Harris, in his evidence at the Shaw Lefevre parliamentary select committee established to enquire into the failure of the land – purchase provisions of the 1870 Land Act, stated that unless the western small farmers were enabled to buy out their holdings – and many would be willing to do so if three-quarters or fourfifths of the purchase price was advanced – the small tillage farmer would be replaced by the large grazier who provided almost no employment and was detrimental to the community.20 At a land conference in Dublin in April 1878, Harris came into conflict with other tenant leaders when he insisted that graziers with more than 60 acres should be excluded from land reform legislation. This viewpoint led to exchanges in the Connaught Telegraph with Thomas Robertson of the Kildare Tenants’ Defence Association, who had a 211-acre farm near

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Athy, and who argued that large farmers also deserved fixity of tenure as a matter of right.21 Harris continued to attack the graziers and, in a letter to the Freeman’s Journal in February 1879, claimed that their interests were not compatible with those of the small farmers; and that their dominant position in the agrarian agitation of the 1870s was not welcomed by the western tenants.22 Such an intervention is significant as it came only six weeks before the Irishtown meeting, about which Harris was undoubtedly aware of because of his connections with James Daly and Michael Davitt who were involved in its organization. The significance of the Ballinasloe tenants’ movement was not just confined to the east Galway–south Roscommon region. Within a short time, local leaders in other parts of Connacht were highlighting what Harris and the BTDA had achieved through proper organization and commitment. James Daly, the proprietor of the Connaught Telegraph in Castlebar, lauded the achievements of the Ballinasloe movement and called for similar organizations throughout the province.23 The support of newspapers like the Connaught Telegraph, the Tuam Herald and the Western News was important to the BTDA as the coverage they provided helped in expanding and consolidating the movement’s support base while spreading its agrarian philosophy and aims further afield. At the same time, Harris realized that little could be achieved without similar groups being established throughout the west of Ireland. Harris and the BTDA were therefore responsible for organizing a major demonstration at Headford, Co. Galway, in February 1877 where the principal speakers were James Daly, Michael M. O’Sullivan and himself. All three speakers called for a tenants’ defence association to be established in the town that would campaign for the rights of small farmers. Harris was also one of the principal speakers at the demonstration that launched the Mayo Tenants’ Defence Association in October 1878. Despite the initial enthusiasm for such local clubs, they did not enjoy the success of the BTDA; indeed, the Headford and Mayo associations did not survive for very long. Given his involvement with the land agitation and his position on the Supreme Council of the IRB, it was not surprising that Harris was committed to the Second New Departure when, despite the Irish Fenian leadership’s opposition, it was first proposed by Davitt, Parnell and Devoy in early 1879. In a letter to the Irishman in January 1879, Harris stated that the British government controlled everything in Ireland and that it was therefore unrealistic to ignore this reality. While Harris stated that national independence could never be won by peaceful means alone it was, so long as Ireland remained connected with Britain, in the best interests of all

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nationalists to use parliament to gain concessions for the betterment of the people.24 Despite his elevation to the Supreme Council of the IRB in 1876, Harris continued his contacts with constitutional nationalists, indicating his readiness to work with all sections of the nationalist movement for the good of Ireland. Other Fenians held similar views and looked at what was being achieved in Ballinasloe as indicating what was possible. Michael Davitt during his period in prison had come to broadly the same conclusions regarding the land question and how it could be used to advance the national issue. One of the first people that Davitt visited when he returned to the west of Ireland in February 1878 was Harris. According to Paul Bew, Davitt’s interests in the land question, given his residence in Lancashire and the length of time he was incarcerated, were largely undeveloped upon his release from prison, but his contact with Harris and other western Fenians would quickly change this.25 Harris and the neo-Fenians in the 1876–79 period laid the foundations for the New Departure in which Fenians and constitutional nationalists would unite to seek a solution to the land question. It was an approach that the Clan na Gael leader, John Devoy, was to pursue with Parnell and Davitt when they published their proposals in June 1879, but the formula for success had already been pioneered by Harris in Ballinasloe. Harris was one of the eleven members of the Supreme Council of the IRB who met in Paris between 9 and 16 January 1879 to discuss the New Departure plan with Devoy. While Davitt and in particular Harris were strongly in favour of the new approach being adopted, the other members felt its acceptance would be a total betrayal of the Fenian philosophy. Not surprisingly, therefore, it was an acrimonious meeting, with Harris and Davitt being the only ones favouring the Fenians taking an active part in the agrarian agitation, and the only ones aware of the agricultural crisis about to erupt in Ireland. Without avail, Harris argued that an agrarian agitation could be a powerful weapon in the advancement of political revolution. Throughout 1879 and 1880, Harris continued to be a strong advocate of the New Departure and its leadership. When Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa and John O’Leary launched a blistering attack on Michael Davitt while he was on a lecture tour of North America in the spring of 1880, Harris, even though he was still a member of the Supreme Council of the IRB, came to his defence. In a letter to the Irishman, Harris suggested that what constituted a nation was its people and that the landlords had destroyed the people. It was the land reformers who were striving to organize and elevate the people: ‘Their views may be too utilitarian for politicians, but if you ignore the utilitarian aspect of any movement…

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you take away half its strength’.26 It was largely because of his defence of Davitt and the New Departure, and by implication his attack on the Fenian leadership, that Harris and Davitt were removed from the Supreme Council of the IRB in the summer of 1880. By being a pragmatist, Harris, in contrast to the likes of Stephens and Doran, believed that he was not betraying his fundamental Fenian principles. He realized that the IRB had to concern itself with social problems and work with other groups to further the cause of independence and improve the position of the people. All this Harris indicated in June 1880 when he appealed to all nationalists not to show a preference for the national over the social struggle; his appeal was based ‘on the belief that the land movement due to its class basis is in essence national’. ‘What’, he asked, ‘is it that constitutes this island a nation? Is it not the people by whom it is inhabited? Destroy the people and you destroy the nation’.27 By early 1879, the agrarian agitation in east Galway was in decline. Activity had fallen off, and the membership was falling within the Ballinasloe movement. The moderates, led by James Kilmartin and Walter Duffy, had become increasingly unhappy in late 1878 and early 1879 at the radicalism of Harris and his fellow Fenian, Michael M. O’Sullivan. The BTDA, according to the moderates, should concentrate on the agrarian question to the exclusion of political issues.28 As the BTDA had begun to decline, a new movement to unite the small farmer class was already in the making. Harris, in an undated letter to John O’Leary probably composed in early 1879, said that Davitt, himself and others were in the process of establishing a new organization.29 This was to be the Land League, and Harris made it known that the whole idea for this new mobilization had been borrowed from John O’Connor Power. Harris had already met with Davitt in February 1879 and was probably being kept informed of developments because of his involvement with the BTDA and the Supreme Council of the IRB. It appears that Harris did not inform the other BTDA leading members of what was afoot as, two weeks before the Irishtown meeting, James Kilmartin wrote to the press stating that the land agitation ‘is at one time like a blazing conflagration, and at another time like a smouldering fire’ and that it was then experiencing rapid heat loss.30 III Conventionally, the Irishtown meeting of 20 April 1879, convened to protest the rent increases being imposed by a local landowner, is regarded as the opening event of the Land League agitation. While the issue of who

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inspired the Irishtown demonstration is still debated, there is no denying the heavy Fenian involvement. Five of the speakers at the demonstration had Fenian connections: Harris, Michael M. O’Sullivan, John Ferguson, Thomas Brennan and John O’Connor Power.31 Furthermore, the early days of the Land League agitation saw Fenians outside of Connacht joining forces with western Fenians in helping to organize demonstrations in Westport in June and in Claremorris in July.32 At the Irishtown and Westport demonstrations, the crowds, in the absence of the local clergy, were marshalled by local Fenians who also supplied the main speakers. From the outset, the Fenians made it known that the objective of the demonstrations was not just to get rent reductions and to secure the relief of distress. Fenians were also active in introducing the threat of violence. Thus, at the Westport meeting of 8 June at which Parnell was the principal speaker, Michael M. O’Sullivan told his audience that they could continue demanding Home Rule, but it would never be secured peaceably: ‘Moral force is truly a great power; but it becomes a greater power when backed by physical force – by the power of the sword’. Harris expressed similar views in suggesting that an agrarian agitation could be made into a powerful revolutionary force and in further contending that the movement should remain entirely outside of parliament and free from Home Rule Party control. Interestingly, the first resolution at the meeting concerned not agrarian issues but self-government.33 It was to be expected, given the heavy involvement of local Fenians, that Harris would be a regular speaker at land meetings in Mayo and north Galway throughout the spring and summer of 1879.The radicalism infusing his BTDA speeches was still very much in evidence. At the Westport meeting, he spoke about the relationship between small and large farmers and equated the large grazing farmers with the landlords. He drew attention to the growing militancy of the small farmers: ... The people are beginning to revolt – to feel that if they did not stand up against such inequity, they would be as criminal as the landlords and graziers themselves.34

Besides the prominent local Fenian contribution, the support of local newspapers, such as the Connaught Telegraph, the Tuam Herald and the Western News which carried lengthy reports of the demonstrations, greatly assisted the development of the land movement. In the early formative months, the movement, in a development that Harris strongly favoured, was led by the laity with little or no clerical involvement. That Harris should take this stance is unsurprising in view of the way the Fenians had

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been condemned by the Catholic Church, and the laity had been warned in the 1860s and 1870s against any association with militant nationalism. In the early days, many Catholic priests and prelates, including Archbishop John MacHale of Tuam, had even condemned the land movement and its leadership. Not until the meeting in Claremorris on 13 July did the clergy attempt to reconcile their differences with the agitation. At this demonstration, Harris made his feelings known about clerical participation in the land agitation. Speaking on the resolution for greater unity between priests and people, he laid down exacting terms by saying that if the priests were to be involved, it was the people and not the priests who would determine the direction the movement would take. As long as the clergy were united against the common enemy, the union with the people would last, but if the priests sided with the enemy, they would not have the people’s support. If the union was to take place, the clergy would have to support the people, but they could not dominate them.35 There may have been other reasons why Harris adopted this approach towards the clergy. He was aware that one of the principal reasons for the failure of the Tenant Right movement of the 1850s was the withdrawal of clerical support. Harris had witnessed the power and influence of the Catholic clergy during the famous 1872 Co. Galway by-election and had been careful to ensure that the local clergy were not heavily involved in the leadership of the BTDA.36 Over the previous two months in 1879, the clergy had not endeared themselves to Fenians like Harris.We find, for instance, the parish priests of Knock and Balla condemning the land demonstrations organized by local Fenians in their parishes. A battle for control of the movement between the clergy and the militant nationalists had broken out that eventually would result in the priests taking substantial control. Clerical involvement in the land agitation was partly motivated by a desire to counteract the neo-Fenian radicalism. On occasion, it appeared that both sides were more intent on attacking each other than the common enemy, as is seen in the confrontation between Michael M. O’Sullivan and Fr Livingstone of Dunmore.37 Nor did the conflict between Fenians and priests disappear when the Land League expanded outside of Connacht. We find the parish priest of Birr, Dr Bulger, refusing to chair a land demonstration in the town in October 1880 unless Harris left the platform. The 1880 general election also highlighted the uneasy relationship in constituencies such as Mayo, Roscommon and Leitrim where neo-Fenians opposed clerically supported candidates. For his part, Harris played an influential role in the Roscommon election when he canvassed for the Dublin-born journalist and Fenian,

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James J. O’Kelly, against the O’Conor Don, the nominee of the local bishop and clergy. Sections of the clergy claimed that Harris and the neo-Fenians within the Land League were anti-clerical and anti-religious, a charge that the militants rejected. The establishment of the National Land League in October, with Parnell as president, saw the neo-Fenian influence in the land agitation come under threat. That only 5 of the 60-man executive committee of the National Land League had any connection with militant nationalism reflected Parnell’s suspicions of the Fenians.38 On the other hand, the League adopted a more professional approach to organizing as it expanded across the country; in early 1880, a number of paid local organizers were appointed, with Harris becoming the organizer for the Ballinasloe region. Clearly, Harris was well qualified for this post on account of the time and effort he had contributed to the development and advancement of the agrarian agitation not only in east Galway, but also more widely in Connacht, and by virtue of his intimate knowledge of the region and his ability to communicate with the farmers effectively. The functions of his organizing post included the distribution of relief supplied by head office and the consolidation of the League within the east Galway region. While some of the local organizers received a salary, others were only paid expenses.39 It is unclear what remuneration Harris received, but there is evidence that he was experiencing financial difficulties as a result of the impact of the economic downturn on his building contracting business and the increasing amount of time he was devoting to League activities. On two occasions, collections were organized for Harris. For all that, Harris’s position was on the rise, as is evident in April 1880 when the executive of the Land League was expanded from 7 to 14 and Harris along with John Dillon, John Ferguson and Thomas Sexton were co-opted on to the committee. April 1880 brought major changes to the Land League. The general election introduced the land agitation to a wider audience and became the means of returning MPs who supported its aims as well as Parnell. For Harris and the Land League in the Ballinasloe area, their target was not the Co. Galway representatives but those in the neighbouring constituency of Roscommon. Harris was urged to run for parliament but declined on the grounds that he would be degrading himself as an Irishman if he did so. Each of the two nominal Home Rulers in Roscommon, the O’Conor Don and Charles French, had been targeted by the BTDA since 1876 because of their voting record in the House of Commons, particularly in relation to the land question.40

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The land conference in Dublin at the end of April was a defining moment for the Land League and its subsequent direction. For the first time, the agrarian movement of the west joined forces with the remnants of the Central Tenants’ Defence Association, and the farmers’ clubs found in the grazing areas of the south and east. This was not a union of like-minded agrarian groups as sharp differences existed between the small farmers of the west and the graziers. As James Donnelly points out, large farmer involvement was inspired by a desire to protect their economic position which, after enjoying unprecedented prosperity in the first half of the decade, had been eroded by the agricultural crisis of the late 1870s. In contrast, small farmer participation was motivated by survival and the struggle to keep their farms.41 Far from welcoming the new Land League activists, Harris resented the stronger farmers’ presence at the April conference and poured scorn on their involvement and their proposals. He demanded that the eviction of the smallholders should cease, while the graziers argued that the League should demand that all evictions should cease. Fundamentally, the question was: which group of tenant farmers should have priority in the agitation? The strong farmers made it known that they were joining the Land League to put forward their own case and that western farmers’ grievances were secondary. Harris argued for the primacy of the small farmers and highlighted the differences and hostility that existed between the two groups; the small farmers, in his view, were as hostile to graziers as they were to the landlords. After all, the graziers had benefited from the clearances at the expense of the small farmers. Here Harris was anticipating the conflict that 20 years later would spark the ‘Ranch War’.42 Harris told the conference that if the small farmers of the west of Ireland united with the graziers in endeavouring to get a land bill it would be ‘the union between the shark and the prey’.43 Aside from everything else, Harris and the other neo-Fenians were reluctant to accept the large farmers into the Land League as they feared being overshadowed in terms of influence. Harris believed that the graziers were not reliable politically and in the past had been identified with those forces on the Right of the Irish political spectrum such as the Whigs, the nominal Home Rulers and even the Conservatives. Even at the 1880 general election, the graziers had mainly supported moderate Home Rulers.44 Furthermore, Harris believed the large farmers were only interested in short-term militancy.The demand for peasant proprietorship he saw as having a negative impact on the securing of political independence for Ireland.With the ownership of their land secured, he feared that the large

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farmers would become more selfish and forget their less fortunate countrymen. His pronouncement that the grazing system was not in the public interest implied a preference for the reintroduction of extensive tillage farming, the abolition of large grazing farms and the employment of a larger agricultural labour force. Harris went as far as to state that tenants with farms over £50 valuation should be excluded from the benefits of land reform. The disagreement evident at the April land conference highlighted a major problem with the neo-Fenian strategy in the agrarian agitation: its failure to have a coherent policy as to how to advance the movement. While it favoured the extension of the agitation to the rest of the country, it was not prepared to incorporate the large grazier groups or to forge any informal alliance with them. This was evident from the early demonstrations in the west of Ireland when Fenians like Harris constantly called for the break-up of large grass farms and their redistribution to uneconomic smallholders. However, despite the opposition of Harris and other neo-Fenians, grazier participation in the Land League was set to increase. Increasingly, Harris’s unwavering defence of the small farmers and his opposition to the graziers put him at odds with much of the League’s leadership, at both the national and local levels. His relationship with James Daly, one of the founding fathers of the land agitation in the west and someone who had worked closely with Harris in the 1876–80 period, now came under strain.While Daly was also advocating the rights of small farmers, he did not support the exclusion of the graziers from any proposed land legislation as he felt they would desert the Land League, and thus many of its ablest men would leave the movement.45 Instead of a class-based agitation, the only way forward for Daly required the united action of all the agrarian classes opposed to landlordism. Once the Land League advanced outside its western base, the influence of Harris and the other local Fenian leaders declined. By mid-1880, control of the movement was centralized in Dublin with the Fenians Patrick Egan, Thomas Brennan and Michael M. O’Sullivan in control and not disposed to consult with the local Fenian leadership. Connacht was the one region where neo-Fenian power remained strong, something that created the problem of how to control the radical element for the central organization. Harris and others were viewed to be too inflexible and radical to accept or encourage large farmer participation. Frustration within Fenian ranks in the west at the moderate direction the Land League was taking, and at its perceived deference to Parnell and the IPP, was on the rise. From the summer of 1880, the militants adopted a more independent approach

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and a series of Fenian-organized demonstrations were held in the Mayo– Galway area at which the Land League leadership and the drift towards parliamentary agitation were severely criticized.46 Among those in attendance at a meeting in Irishtown on 27 June 1880, organized by the western Fenians, were P. W. Nally, John O’Kane and Daniel O’Connor, who had been involved with the first Irishtown demonstration on 20 April 1879.47 Harris spoke at a number of these meetings, and at a Ballyhaunis demonstration in October 1880, he stated that the liberty and independence of Ireland would only be gained by fighting and not by talking. Harris urged his audience to use every means at their disposal to keep the great national question alive.48 There were also occasions when Harris’s speeches contained contradictory elements. In June 1880, he delivered speeches at Sligo and Galway, for instance, in which he stated that the Land Leaguers should be prepared to work with all people, even the wealthy or aristocratic, in order to advance the League’s objectives. At other demonstrations, however, he criticized the organization and its approach.49 The authorities were becoming increasingly concerned about the level of Fenian activity in the west of Ireland and in particular in the east Galway region. In October 1880, a constabulary report sought to assess the strength of militant Fenianism in the Galway–Mayo region. According to Police Inspector T. F. Leighton, the Fenian movement in the Ballinasloe area was very strong, and Harris was described as ‘the agent of a secret society having revolution for its objective’ and who used inflammatory language to incite outrages.50 For this reason, the RIC authorities advised that the Ballinasloe district be proscribed. While the second half of 1880 saw divisions grow within the Land League in the west, it also witnessed internal divisions within the neoFenians ranks as to the broader approach they should take.51 As much as Harris was present at a number of the Fenian-organized demonstrations and his rhetoric remained characteristically radical, he was not, unlike many of his fellow neo-Fenians, prepared to break with the Land League. All the while Harris continued to attack the graziers, and he sometimes urged the western farmers to participate more in the agitation as otherwise it would fall under the control of the large farmers of the south and east.52 In his pamphlet of February 1881, he called for tenants with farms under 30 acres to be enabled to purchase their holdings and for compulsory sales.53 Given Harris’s prominent position within the Fenian movement and his radicalism, it was inevitable that he would be closely monitored by the police authorities. Of course, the failure to convict Davitt, Daly and

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J. B. Killeen in November 1879 was a major setback for the government’s coercive approach. Over the following six months, it adopted a waiting game, monitoring events without intervening directly. The same policy continued when Gladstone came to power in April 1880. Much of the increased lawlessness and agrarian crime in the Galway–Mayo area towards the end of 1880 was the work of militant nationalists operating under the cover of the agrarian agitation. This lawlessness attracted national attention because of the large number of murders committed. Numbered among the victims were James Connors; Lord Dunsandle’s agent, Peter Dempsey, who had taken over an evicted tenant’s farm at Riverhill; and Constable James Linton at Loughrea.54 The Irish Chief Secretary, W. E. Forster, wished to introduce coercive measures to counteract this lawlessness, but his cabinet colleagues preferred to continue relying on the existing legislation. In November 1880, Harris and 13 others, including Parnell and Michael M. O’Sullivan, were charged with conspiracy to prevent the payment of rent and generally to create hostility between landlords and tenants.55 When the courts dismissed the charges in December, the League and the accused became national heroes in the same way that failed prosecutions had enhanced the reputations of Davitt, Daly and Killeen after Gurteen. From this point on, the authorities kept Harris under close surveillance, and he was again arrested on 16 April 1881 and imprisoned on the charge of incitement to assault. On this occasion, he was not released from prison until 3 February 1882. IV While Harris’s position within the Land League was not as prominent in the post-1880 period, his radicalism did not falter. In his pamphlet of 1881 entitled Land Reform: A Letter to the Council of the Irish National League, he proposed that farmers holding 30 acres and less should be enabled to purchase their holdings, that tenant purchase should be placed on a compulsory basis and that tenant repayments of purchase loans should be spread over a 20-year period. Another of his proposals to assist small farmers involved a re-examination of the way the poor law valuation was calculated. Discrepancies existed under the old system, depending upon when the valuations had been undertaken, but in general these tended to be more favourable to grazing land than to tillage land. Harris proposed that those electoral divisions with relatively low pauper numbers be more highly rated than those with larger pauper population. His basic intention here was that the poor law rate burden should fall heaviest on the grass farms

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and, as he stated, on ‘the worse than useless class that occupied them’. Clearly, Harris was also ahead of his time in advocating land purchase on the basis of the state providing purchase loan financing to the tenants. Within the Land League, Harris continued to be a distinctive and often lone voice supporting small farmers’ grievances. What is also clear is that he became increasingly disenchanted with the direction the agitation had taken. At a meeting of the Ballinasloe branch of the Land League in April 1881, he lamented the fact that the movement had lost its way and that the radical potential of the original programme had gone unrealized. Once again, he attacked the graziers, maintaining that they now regarded themselves as a second gentry and that it could not be forgotten that they had attempted to wipe out the people in certain localities. While reluctantly he had accepted graziers into the movement for the sake of unity, he was not afraid to voice his pessimism about the graziers as a purely self-interested class. By welcoming in the rural bourgeoisie, the League had allowed the graziers to impose their aims upon the organization, and in the process had abandoned the small farmers of the west In spite of this pessimistic analysis, Harris, unlike many other Fenians, was still not prepared to abandon the Land League. As clearly as he could see the limitations and faults of the movement, he realized that the best policy was to try and bring about change from within the organization. Harris continued to hold strongly militant nationalist views and to maintain that independence could only be achieved through military means. However, he also accepted that concessions for Ireland, particularly in relation to the land question, could be secured through the building of alliances with various other interests, whether these were constitutional nationalists or moderate tenant reformers. All in all, Harris’s role in the land agitation between 1876 and 1882 must be seen as important in laying the foundations for the New Departure of June 1879 and as vital in helping to give concrete shape to the original principles of the Land League. Notes 1 See G. Moran, ‘James Daly and the Rise and Fall of the Land League in the West of Ireland, 1879–82’, Irish Historical Studies, xxxix, 114 (November 1994), 189–207. 2 See B. Griffin, ‘The IRB in Connacht and Leinster, 1858–1878’ (Unpublished MA thesis, St Patrick’s College Maynooth, 1983), pp. 59–60; A. B. Finnegan, ‘The Land War in South-East Galway, 1879–1890’ (Unpublished MA thesis, University College, Galway, 1974), p. 20. Between 1867 and the late 1870s, large consignments of arms, mainly bayonets and rifles, were sent to Harris

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3 4

5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

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for distribution among members in Connacht. See Parnell Special Commission, x, pp. 177–8, qs. 94581–94. T. W. Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846–82 (Oxford, 1981), p. 191. Report from the Select Committee on the Irish Land Act, 1870; together with the proceedings of the committee, minutes of evidence and appendix, HC 1878 (249), xv, I, p. 270, qs. 4987–8. See R. V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82 (Dublin, 1985), pp. 178–9; G. Moran, ‘The Fenians and Tipperary Politics, 1868–1880’, Tipperary Historical Journal (1994), 74–8. See G. Moran,‘The Changing Course of Mayo Politics, 1868–1874’, in R. Gillespie and G. Moran (eds), A Various Country: Essays in Mayo History, 1500–1900 (Westport, 1986), pp. 146–52; D. E. Jordan, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 188–9; Comerford, The Fenians in Context, pp. 200–1; M. Ryan, Fenian Memories (Dublin, 1943), pp. 41–4; J. Stanford, That Irishman: The Life and Times of John O’Connor Power (Dublin, 2011), pp. 46–51. Comerford, The Fenians in Context, p. 211. Griffin, ‘The IRB in Connacht and Leinster’, pp. 83–6. O. McGee, The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Fein (Dublin, 2005), p. 58. W. O’Brien and D. Ryan (eds), Devoy’s Post Bag, 1871–1928, 1 (Dublin, 1979), p. 405. Griffin, ‘The IRB in Connacht and Leinster’, pp. 107–8. For the background of the Ballinasloe Tenants’ Defence Association and its establishment, see G. Moran, ‘‘‘Laying the Seeds for Agrarian Agitation”: The Ballinasloe Tenants’ Defence Association, 1876–1880’, in C. King and C. McNamara (eds), The West of Ireland: New Perspectives on the Nineteenth Century (Dublin, 2011), pp. 75–8. P. Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1979), pp. 54–5. Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the Working of the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act, 1870, and the Acts Amending the Same, HC 1881, xviii (2779-iii), p. 692, qs 10998–21005. Jordan, Popular Politics in Ireland, p. 202. See Moran, ‘Laying the Seeds for Agrarian Agitation’, p. 76; Rules of the Ballinasloe Tenants’ Defence Association (NLI, 47, 373/3, Sweetman papers). Connaught Telegraph, 24 June 1876. Connaught Telegraph, 9 November 1878; Jordan, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland, p. 212. Special Commission, x, vol. 1, p. 339. Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution, p. 210. S. Clark, The Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, 1979), p. 257. Freeman’s Journal, 24 June 1876.

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23 See Moran, ‘James Daly and the Rise and Fall of the Land League in the West of Ireland’, pp. 190–1; ibid., ‘Laying the Seeds for Agrarian Agitation’, p. 82. 24 Irishman, 14 January 1879; Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution, pp. 275–6. 25 Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, p. 53. 26 Irishman, 26 June 1880; Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution, p. 390. 27 Western News, 26 June 1880. 28 Western News, 14 June 1879; Nation, 14 June 1879; In December 1878, Michael M. O’Sullivan, still advocating a more radical approach, pointed out how: ‘A Final Appeal to the Sword…Should Not Altogether Be Lost Sight Of’, Western News, 7 December 1878. 29 O’Brien and Ryan (eds), Devoy’s Post Bag, 1871–1928, ii, pp. 129–30. 30 Western News, 5 April 1879; See also Moran, ‘James Daly and the Rise and Fall of the Land League in the West of Ireland’, pp. 191–2; Moran, ‘Laying the Seeds for Agrarian Agitation’, pp. 87–8. 31 See Moran, ‘James Daly and the Rise of Fall of the Land League in the West of Ireland’, p. 192. 32 Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War, p. 279. 33 Bew, Land and the National Question, p. 59; G. Moran, ‘An Assessment of the Land League Meeting at Westport, 8 June 1879’, Cathair na Mart, 3 (1983), 54–9. 34 Jordan, Land and Politics in Ireland, p. 227. 35 Jordan, Land and Politics in Ireland, pp. 241–2. There was a large Fenian presence at this demonstration as, earlier in the day, a meeting had been held at which John Devoy had explained the terms of the New Departure to local Fenians. 36 See B. Casey, ‘Land, Politics and Religion on the Clancarty Estate, 1851–1914’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, NUI Maynooth, 2011), Chap. 3. 37 On the conflict between the clergy and the neo-Fenians, see G. Moran,‘“Near Famine”:The Roman Catholic Church and the Subsistence Crisis of 1879–82’, Studia Hibernica, 32 (2002–03), 161–2; Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, pp. 96–7. 38 See Bew, Land and the National Question, p. 69; Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution, pp. 335–8. 39 Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution, p. 361. 40 See Moran, ‘Laying the Seeds for Agrarian Agitation’, pp. 76, 81. 41 J. S. Donnelly Jr., The Land and People of Nineteenth-Century Cork: The Rural Economy and the Land Question (London and Boston, 1975), pp. 251–4. 42 For the conflict between graziers and small farmers during the ‘Ranch War’, see F. Campbell, Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland, 1891–1921 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 84–123; D. S. Jones, ‘The Cleavage between Graziers and Peasants in the Land Struggle, 1890–1910’, in S. Clark and J. S. Donnelly (eds), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914 (Manchester, 1983), pp. 374–418.

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Connaught Telegraph, 8 May 1880; Bew, Land and the National Question, pp. 102–3. C. C. O’Brien, Parnell and his Party, 1880–90 (Oxford, 1954), pp. 12–13. Jordan, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland, p. 269. See Connaught Telegraph, 3 July 1880. Connaught Telegraph, 3 July 1880. Ibid., 16 October 1880; Jordan, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland, p. 279. See McGee, The IRB, p. 71. Fenians suspects in Galway and Mayo, October 1880 (NAI, CSO, RP, 1880/3468). See Moran, ‘James Daly and the Rise and Fall of the Land League in the West of Ireland’, pp. 201–6; Jordan, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland, pp. 269–82. Western News, 11 December 1880. See Connaught Telegraph, 3 July 1880. Finnegan, ‘The Land War in South-East Galway’, pp. 49–63. Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution, pp. 427–8.

Bibliography Contemporary sources Manuscript material Chief Secretary’s Office, Registered papers (National Archives of Ireland, 1880). Parnell and Crime Special Commission

Contemporary publications Newspapers and periodicals

Connaught Telegraph Freeman’s Journal Irishman Nation Western News Parliamentary papers Report from the Select Committee on the Irish and Act; together with the proceedings of the committee, minutes of evidence and appendix, hc 1878 (249) xv, 1. Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the Working of the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act, and the Acts Amending the Same, HC 1881 (2779 iii), xviii. Other contemporary publications Ryan, M. Fenian Memories (Dublin, 1943).

Later works Bew, P. Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1978). Campbell, F. Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland, 1891–1921 (Oxford, 2005).

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Clark, S. The Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, 1979). Comerford, R. V. The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82 (Dublin, 1985). Donnelly, Jr., J. S. The Land and People of Nineteenth-Century Cork: The Rural Economy and the Land Question (London and Boston, 1975). Jones, D. S. ‘The Cleavage between Graziers and Peasants in the Land Struggle, 1890–1910’, in J. S. Donnelly Jr. and S. Clark (eds), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914 (Manchester, 1983), pp. 374–418. Jordan, D. E. Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge, 1994). Moody, T. W. Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846–82 (Oxford, 1981). Moran, G. ‘An Assessment of the Land League Meeting at Westport, 8 June 1879’, Cathair na Mart, 3 (1983), 54–9. ——. ’The Changing Course of Mayo Politics, 1868–1874’, in R. Gillespie and G. Moran (eds), ‘A Various Country’: Essays in Mayo History, 1500–1900 (Westport, 1986), pp. 135–53. ——. ‘James Daly and the Rise and Fall of the Land League in the West of Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, xxxiv, 114 (November 1994), 189–207. ——. The Fenians and Tipperary Politics, 1868–80’, Tipperary Historical Journal (1994), pp. 73–90. ——. ‘“Near Famine”: The Roman Catholic Church and the Subsistence Crisis of 1879–82’, Studia Hibernica, 32 (2002–03), 155–78. ——. ‘‘Laying the Seeds for Agrarian Agitation’: The Ballinasloe Tenants’ Defence Association, 1876–1880’, in C. King and C. McNamara (eds), The West of Ireland: New Perspectives on the Nineteenth Century (Dublin, 2011), pp. 73–92. McGee, O. The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Féin (Dublin, 2005). O’Brien, W. and Ryan, D. Devoy’s Post Bag, 1871–1928, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1979). O’Brien, C. C. Parnell and His Party, 1880–90 (Oxford, 1954). Stanford, J. That Irishman:The Life and Times of John O’Connor Power (Dublin, 2011).

Unpublished theses Casey, B. ‘Land, Politics and Religion on the Clancarty Estate, 1851–1914’ (PhD thesis, NUI Maynooth, 2011). Finnegan, A. ‘The Land War in South-East Galway, 1879–1890’ (MA thesis, University College, Galway, 1974). Griffin, B. ‘The IRB in Connacht and Leinster, 1858–1878’ (MA thesis, St Patrick’s College Maynooth, 1983).

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

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Tony Varley: The politics of ‘holding the balance’: Irish farmers’ parties and land redistribution in the twentieth century Introduction Farmers, even if led by nationalist politicians or activists, have typically been at the heart of the politics of the Irish land question whether this is understood to mean tenancy reform, land purchase or the division and redistribution of land.The effects of land agitation and land reform on the class differentiation of farmers, the subject of varying interpretations among historians, have been viewed as centring heavily on the contrasting fortunes of big and small farming classes. One view has the bigger tenants emerging as the foremost beneficiaries of tenancy reform and peasant proprietorship and sees the economic power of the ‘strong farmers’ enduring in the longer term, thus leaving them ‘the dominant social, economic and political class in Ireland almost to the present day’.1 A contrasting interpretation sees a combination of smallholder-centred land agitation and land reform and a political revolution sympathetic to their cause, creating ‘... a class of sturdy smallholders who would dominate Irish society for most of the twentieth century’.2 While tenancy reform and tenant purchase could attract a wide spectrum of farmer support during and after the Land War (1879–82), the same cannot readily be said of land redistribution. It is for this reason that Samuel Clark sees the class alliance between big and small farmers that gave the Land League much of its strength as crucially dependent on the suppression of land redistribution as a major issue.3 Others maintain that the demand for land redistribution was not so easily suppressed and that consequently the cross-class farmer alliances found within the Land League (at least in Mayo), and more generally in the United Irish League, were always frail and prone to challenge and collapse.4 Given its potential to be divisive, we might expect that farmers intent on forming their own parties would find the issue of land redistribution

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equally troublesome. To the extent that land redistribution contributes to large and small farmers seeing themselves as different classes with diverging economic interests capable of generating serious conflict, its effects may be highly incapacitating politically, especially if it hinders them in constituting themselves as a single political class, one capable of becoming a coherent and major force in competitive party politics. By and large, as Maurice Duverger sees it, European small and large farmers have failed historically to build major agrarian parties. The tendency for those farmers’ parties that have appeared to have larger farmers as their prime constituency has made for a relatively narrow support base that accounts for ‘the inevitable limits to their expansion and their fairly general tendency towards the Right and conservatism’.5 As for smallholders and landless agricultural workers, these have tended to ‘prefer to join Socialist or Communist parties’ rather than form their own parties or join farmers’ parties.6 The significance of all this for Duverger is that there exists no agricultural class, only a division between the agricultural proletariat and the agricultural proprietors, and a deeper division still between the smallholder and the large-scale farmer.7

Similarly, Jeffry Paige’s global survey concludes that what autonomous organization family farmers can muster tends to be weak, externally induced and to shun ‘radical demands for the redistribution of property’ in favour of greater ‘control of the market in agricultural commodities’.8 Whether the patterns Duverger and Paige identify were replicated in the Irish experience, and for reasons specifically related to land redistribution, will now be considered. In the interwar period, we find Irish farmers making three major attempts – in the guises of the Farmers’ Party (1922–32), the National Centre Party (1932–33) and Clann na Talmhan (Family of the Land) (1938/39–65) – to organize their own parties.9 The post-war slump, the Great Depression and the Economic War provided favourable conditions in the interwar period for these different parties to present farmers as a single, embattled, and increasingly impoverished and politically marginalized class. As long as they remained threatened by hostile price/cost-squeezing market forces and wrong-headed state policies and lacked a strong capacity for autonomous organization, they had the makings of a strong case that the potential of peasant proprietorship to function as a force for economic and social advancement could never be adequately realized.

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In the event, none of these three farmers’ parties made the transition from minor to major or indeed to survive in the longer term. A number of reasons have been given (either singly or in combination) for their minor standing and ultimate disappearance: the dominance of nationalism and nationalists in the electoral sphere, debilitating internal class divisions, leadership, organizational and tactical inadequacies and the tendency for large agrarian parties to be more a feature of pre-modern peasant societies where subsistence rather than commercial agriculture holds sway.10 It would be naive to presume, if this constellation of reasons is to be credited, that land redistribution was the only obstacle facing the Irish farmers’ parties. Yet, given its political salience in the turbulent interwar years, the issue was unlikely to have been irrelevant either.To explore land redistribution’s specific impact on the fortunes of our three farmers’ parties, we will now consider where it featured in their appearance and in their ultimate weakening and disappearance. Appearance Did redistributive land reform contribute to the formation of the Farmers’ Party in 1922–23? Fear that the benefits of landownership could never be properly enjoyed while certain threats bulked large was palpable among the IFU activists who founded the Farmers’ Party in 1922–23. Some of this fear had its origins in the wartime economy when state regulation (especially compulsory tillage) was seen to have impinged unacceptably on the rights of property in land. The Selborne Committee report had sparked alarm that wartime coercive controls on farmers and farming might become a permanent feature of peacetime agricultural policy, even to the point of evoking the spectre of land nationalization.11 As levels of social and political unrest rose, completing land purchase became an IFU priority, but on this issue as well as on that of land redistribution, internal divisions were evident. In May 1920, an IFU deputation had met Sir Hamar Greenwood ‘to press for the completion of Land Purchase’.12 And at Greenwood’s invitation, the IFU and the Irish Landowners’ Convention had met to discuss and agree certain points for a common approach.13 Three years later as the 1923 Land Bill wended its way through the Dáil, Patrick Hogan (Minister for Agriculture) asked the first leader of the Farmers’ Party, Denis Gorey, TD for Carlow-Kilkenny: ‘Was there not an agreement

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between the landlords and the Farmers’ Union in 1920 to settle upon a twenty-five per cent reduction basis?’ Gorey replied as follows: There was an agreement between them in that year to take thirty per cent reduction on first term rents, and twenty-four per cent reduction on second term rents. I want to say that the Farmers’ Union in those days was a Landlords’ union led by a landlord, Colonel O’Callaghan Westropp, and backed by landlords’ men in the union. They were kicked out of it and then we formed the Unpurchased Tenants’ Organisation. They did not represent the unpurchased tenants and never acted for them.14

The 1920 Land Bill, in view of the worsening security situation, would never make it to the statute book. Without avail, the IFU’s Land Purchase Committee was still pushing for the enactment of new land legislation in 1921, and the Clare ex-landlord Col. George O’Callaghan-Westropp, Gorey’s nemesis and still leading IFU figure, was anxious that this be introduced under British rule. Writing from London in June 1921, where he was engaged as the IFU’s chief lobbyist in its campaign against the proposed importation of Canadian store cattle to the United Kingdom, he reported how: There is now talk here that if Lloyd George, James Craig, and De Valera meet ‘Land Purchase must form part of the Settlement’. That is the very thing I want to avoid. It is most unfair that young parliaments should be encumbered with the dregs of this wretched business.15

O’Callaghan-Westropp was quick to detect a strong association between the proposal to lift the embargo on the importation of Canadian store cattle and the resolution of land purchase. His prediction in June 1921 was that ‘... if the Canadian stores are let in it will at once be made an excuse for No Rent and No Purchase Instalments…’.16 He further feared that if the incipient No Rent campaign in the south gathered pace, ‘common ruin’ awaited the unsold landlords and their tenants, along with a repudiation of purchase annuities.17 Although personally unsympathetic to any serious land redistribution policy, O’Callaghan-Westropp was not slow to use the issue to advance the IFU’s purposes. We find him arguing in 1921, in the context of the IFU’s ongoing campaign against the lifting of the embargo on Canadian store cattle imports, that land redistribution was already significantly eroding the north Leinster cattle-fattening belt, thus strengthening Irish dependence on the store cattle export trade.18

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Land-related farmer anxieties did not diminish as the post-war agricultural economy slumped, the new state slipped into civil war and rural labour unrest grew more menacing. A leading reason why the surge of wartime and post-war syndicalist trade unionism among rural labour sent shock waves through the IFU leadership was the prospect of radical land redistribution and land nationalization that it raised. Nor was the threat of wholesale land confiscation confined to pockets of grassroots radicalism or isolated ‘soviets’. At its 1920 and 1923 congresses, the Irish Trade Union Congress had adopted motions effectively favouring ‘the collectivisation of agriculture as “a democratic settlement” of the land question’.19 By 1923, the conclusion being drawn in IFU leadership circles from the challenge of the ‘red flag’ men was that the provisional government had failed in its duty to protect farmers and their property and that farmers could no longer fully depend on nationalist politicians to act in their best interests.20 For this and other reasons, it was considered up to ‘farmers [to] select genuine farmers for the TDships (sic), and rigidly shut out men who have other callings and interests and other axes to grind’.21 But not all IFU activists could see the wisdom of farmers forming their own national political party.Those opposed to the idea (such as O’Callaghan-Westropp) believed that the IFU would be better served by standing clear of direct involvement in competitive party politics and putting its energy instead into constituting farmers as a single and unified economic (as against political) class.22 For those in favour of an exclusively interest group approach, there was much to build on already for, by 1921, the IFU ‘had become a fairly powerful lobby in Irish politics’.23 Conceivably, steering clear of electoral politics might also improve the IFU’s chances of benefiting from the establishment of close working relationships between organized farmers and the state.24 In the event, those who backed the idea of the IFU having its own political wing carried the day but ultimately at the cost of weakening the IFU. While power in the IFU was concentrated centrally in its annual congresses and in the national executive, power in the country was highly dispersed among the county branches. At the national level, the expectation was that the IFU and the Farmers’ Party would work in tandem with the latter broadly being said by the former where agricultural and related matters were concerned.The new party’s top leadership was aware of the need to build as broad a support base as possible if farmers were to become a serious independent political force. A conscious move was therefore required to distance the new party from the gentry and grazier

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identity the IFU had acquired in certain circles and that its critics regularly used as proof that it had little or nothing to offer the small farmer.25 To broaden its appeal, the new party desired to appeal to the smallholder majority and to accept land redistribution as a legitimate demand. While the Farmers’ Party, no less than the IFU before it,26 may have ‘tried to play down class differences’ among farmers during the 1923 election campaign,27 this did not deter it from favouring a policy of land redistribution at the expense of big ranchers and graziers. Its 1923 election manifesto called for ‘completion of Land Purchase and division of the ranches’.28 The message of the IFU’s Galway executive to its members in 1922 had gone further by endorsing the idea of certain landless men benefiting under renewed land redistribution: You want Land Purchase extended and completed, and you want more land. You rightly believe that more land can and ought to be secured to give a chance to the landless ‘farmers’ sons’ to live and work for, and in Ireland (emphasis in original).29

At the same time, views within the leaderships of the central IFU and the Farmers’ Party, as became evident in responses to the 1923 Land Bill and Act, could be sharply divided on the question of land redistribution. In the Dáil, Denis Gorey welcomed the government’s ‘ranch-breaking’ proposal and spoke as follows: It may not be a final solving. Other times may decree that the name of ranch will be transferred to very small holdings. It may be that this may not be quite a final settlement, but, for the moment, I am glad that this question of the big ranches is going to be dealt with. I know something of the circumstances in the West, and I know of vast tracts of land in the Midlands and some other counties round about which are absolutely untenanted.You can drive along the road in a motor car for miles and see nothing, perhaps, but a man mounted on a horse, and a dog or two. The class of individual who owns land like that and farms on those lines is no good to any country or nation. If the country were to be farmed and run on these lines we would not have a population of more than 400 or 500 in any county, and as a Nation we would not be 50,000. A decent standard of living must be provided for the people who have been all their lives in the West of Ireland and in some other districts outside the West of Ireland.30

In the Seanad, Sir John Keane (a leading IFU figure and speaking in a personal capacity) struck a very different note to Gorey’s. He was disposed to see the government’s proposed congestion relief policy as overly ambitious (if not utopian) in its aims and substantially unattainable. His main

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concern, as a farmers’ representative, was that any serious pursuit of the policy would gravely damage farmers’ security of tenure and thus create uncertainty that would undermine the prospects for agricultural development. ‘You have’, as he put it, to face the fact that on the one hand you can only partially relieve by these far-reaching powers bona fide congestion, and on the other hand you have the feeling of insecurity which any measure of compulsion like this must bring to an existing occupier.31

Other well-placed observers also saw strong farmer concerns as applying a conservative break on any possibility of the Farmers’ Party backing a radical land policy. Patrick Hogan observed in 1923 that the reason the Farmers’ Party ‘cannot afford to enter into a competition with the Labour Party to see who can give the unpurchased tenants the greater reduction’ was that They are afraid if they accept the help of the Bolshevists in regard to the reduction of rent the Bolshevists would begin to look for something more, namely, a reduction in the size of the holdings.32

Once the Hogan Bill passed into law, the focus shifted to how the government’s ranch-breaking project was to be implemented. In April 1924, the IFU chairman, R. A. Butler, Michael Doyle (a Farmers’ Party TD) and Sir John Keane, as members of the Commission on Agriculture (1922–24), all signed the Commission’s majority report whose position on land redistribution began from the principle that ‘... a country’s rural economy must be regarded as an interdependent whole, and not in the terms of holdings big or small’.33 The majority report therefore recommended that ‘... any scheme involving the closer settlement of grass land should have due regard to the market which these lands at present afford for the finishing of stock reared on poorer land and on smaller farms’.34 A related recommendation, reflecting the way that ‘... these first class lands are being put to their best use in being devoted to the fattening of stock’, was that the government should ‘... proceed with due caution in the matter of their redivision’.35 Sir John Keane and George O’Brien signed the Commission on Agriculture’s majority report subject to a note that drew attention to the danger that, under the state’s newly acquired powers to fix prices in ‘compulsory sales’ in pursuit of ‘the compulsory redistribution of land’, farmers might lose the incentive ‘to invest capital and effect permanent improvements in their holdings’, especially if they saw themselves liable to

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‘be deprived of the fruits of their enterprise and industry by having their land taken from them by process of law, capriciously or at an unfair price’. Were this threat to materialize, in the view of Keane and O’Brien, ‘injurious consequences to the agricultural production of the country’ were to be expected.36 That land redistribution could have negative consequences for those who stood to gain as well as lose land was something adverted to by Conor Hogan, a Co. Clare Farmers’ Party TD, when he drew attention in 1926 to how poor men who had purchased land with Land Bank financing were failing for want of capital and because their holdings, besides being purchased at a ‘stiff price’, were uneconomic to begin with.37 Did land redistribution figure in the crisis conditions that inspired the formation of the National Centre Party in 1932–33? With the demise of the IFU and the Farmers’ Party, and the Economic War beginning in 1932, a space opened up for a new farmers’ party. A realization that the Economic War promised to be catastrophic for Irish farmers was what gave impetus to the formation of a National Farmers’ and Ratepayers’ League (NFRL) in September–October 1932. In early January 1933, the NFRL had acquired a political wing with the appearance of the National Centre Party. Once again, the air was heavy in the early 1930s with red scare fears, associated now not with radicalized rural labour but with the IRA, Saor Éire, the Labour Party and increasingly with Fianna Fáil.38 Some of this new red scare dwelled on the possibility that private property rights in land were about to come under renewed attack. Fianna Fáil’s rise to power in 1932, as a self-professed party of the rural underdog committed to accelerating land redistribution, appeared to give substance to the view that red scare fears were about to be realized. Elements within Cumann na nGaedheal, disposed to read the Economic War as Fianna Fáil’s attempt to engineer a pro-peasant agrarian revolution at the expense of export agriculture and the cattle economy,39 even came to view the government’s promised land legislation as the ‘first step in an Irish antiKulak campaign’.40 Fear that radical land redistribution or even collectivization might be forcibly imposed was reflected in the Centre Party’s desire to preserve ‘individual liberty and individual ownership’.41 Yet the NFRL central executive’s private deliberation on Fianna Fáil’s upcoming land legislation was notably measured. Under Frank MacDermot’s chairmanship, the response of the NFRL’s standing committee was strongly influenced by considerations of holding a class balance within the ‘the agricultural community as a whole’. As regards ‘the coming Land Bill’, it was noted at the standing

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committee’s meeting of 3 June 1933 that the NFRL ‘... includes all classes of farmers, farm labourers etc. and must estimate the legislation from the standpoint of the agricultural community as a whole and not any particular section of it’.42 What the National Centre Party’s top leadership therefore desired was to ‘be supplied with as much solid and impartial information as possible to enable them to judge how the Land Bill will work out and to improve it by their suggestions’.43 When the standing committee met again on 9 June, the NFRL’s and National Centre Party’s desire to represent ‘the agricultural community as a whole’ was enunciated at greater length. On this occasion, MacDermot reminded his colleagues ... that when the organisation was founded a pledge was given that when the interests of large farmers, small farmers and agricultural labourers might conflict, the League would endeavour to hold the balance between them and not favour one rather than another. Consequently, the Centre Party’s line on the Land Bill must not be one of mere defence of the property rights of large and medium sized farmers, but must be founded on the principles of justice, individual liberty, encouragement of thrift and hard work, combined with consideration for the needs of the poor and the landless.44

Of course, MacDermot was not blind to the possibility that Fianna Fáil might be tempted to go too far with its new land legislation. He therefore thought it ... might be wise to emphasise (a) that no new scheme for the compulsory purchase of land ought to come into being during the artificial conditions created by the Economic War [and] (b) no power of compulsory purchase should be given in respect of any land where the occupier could show it was at present providing adequate employment in proportion to its size and character, sons and dependents working on the land to be included in such employment.

When the issue was thrown open to discussion, a number of points ‘needing special attention’ were raised. One of these was that ‘lands already acquired or offered for sale should be divided before further compulsory acquisitions take place’. The new land bill, it was further suggested, should contain provisions to provide ‘protection against inadequate price’. Something else considered desirable was that such terms ‘as “congestion”, “ordinary farmer”, “proper methods of husbandry” should be more clearly defined’. Fearing political interference, it was considered important besides that the bill should take the necessary ‘precautions’ to guard ‘against the purchase and division of land being run in effect by a political caucus’.45

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As important as was Fianna Fáil’s forthcoming land legislation to the NFRL’s standing committee in the early summer of 1933, ending the economic war was easily its most pressing concern. And to ensure that Irish farmers be spared the calamity of future economic wars, ‘more influence for the agricultural community over government policy’ was sought.46 It has been suggested that dissatisfaction with the pace of land redistribution under Fianna Fáil was a primary reason for Clann na Talmhan’s appearance in 1938–39, but land redistribution per se attracted little or no attention when the movement first began to appear in Galway. Much more prominent at the very outset were four other considerations: persisting anger at the losses and humiliations of the Economic War years and a host of other perceived Fianna Fáil policy failures (especially the rising property rates);47 the government’s decision in 1938 to establish a new commission on agriculture; the severe hardship caused by excessive rainfall and flooding in 1938–39; and the personal political ambition of Michael Donnellan, the movement’s first leader. While the Farmers’ Party and the National Centre Party have often been viewed as essentially parties of the large farmer, Clann na Talmhan in contrast has been associated very much with the small farmers of the west. Such a view of the party rests on its western origins,48 the spatial distribution of its electoral strength and top leadership, the lands cabinet portfolio it held in the 1948–51 and 1954–57 inter-party governments, the presence within it of TDs (Bernard Commons and Dominick Cafferkey in particular) who favoured a more radical land policy, and from it ending its days as an exclusively Connacht-based political entity. This characterization is of course not without its merits, but it does obscure the complexities arising from the manner the early party was led by large farmers and was conceived by Michael Donnellan and others as appealing to ‘working farmers’ across the country. ‘While we come mainly from Connacht’, Donnellan declared in 1941, ‘we represent, in a way, the working farmers elsewhere - that is to say the farmers of from £20 to £40 valuation’.49 In a speech of March 1940, Donnellan had been careful to distinguish between the rancher and the ‘large farmer’, declaring that his party stood ‘for fair treatment to all, whether large farmer, small farmer, or farm labourer’ while at the same time standing ‘four square for the division of the ranches’.50 The many large farmers attracted to the early Clann na Talmhan in Galway were still hostile to Fianna Fáil in the aftermath of the Economic War, still smarting from Cumann na nGaedheal’s perceived attack on fixity of tenure in the 1923 Land Act and increasingly convinced that Fine Gael’s days as a significant political force were numbered.51

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Land redistribution as such may not initially have been a significant issue in Galway, but the desire to appeal at once to big and small ‘working farmers’ would soon create its own difficulties. Martin Finnerty, a cofounder of the movement in the county, took his leave in 1939 when it became clear to him that Donnellan was ready to contemplate making common cause with the Leinster farmers recently mobilized by the Irish Farmers’ Federation (IFF).52 Behind Finnerty’s decision to depart was a conviction that western smallholders had their own special interests and needs that were incompatible with those of large western and non-western farmers alike. Nor was Finnerty prepared to go quietly. In a letter to the local press, he described Donnellan, O’Kelly and Colleran as ‘ranchers’ and warned the public that ‘war conditions are the ranchers’ harvest’.53 The reply to Finnerty asserted that Donnellan and O’Kelly were both ‘working’ farmers, that the new movement had to be open to ‘all farmers’ and that it was indeed ‘composed of producers of every valuation’.54 After breaking with Donnellan’s group in May 1939, Finnerty resurrected his Western Farmers’ League and tried, briefly and without obvious effect, to mobilize support around issues considered more relevant to western smallholders.55 Even prior to Finnerty’s departure, Donnellan, given his western background and his own pro-small man political sympathies, had not shied away from identifying himself with the cause of the western smallholder. Framed within a discourse of colonization and dispossession, the earliest Donnellan argument in favour of a tiered derating scheme was that it would be grossly unjust to completely derate highly valued good land in the large farm counties ‘from which the forefathers of farmers here in the west were driven out of by Cromwell and sent “to hell or to Connacht”’.56 Of course, Donnellan’s early political speeches can also be read as an attempt to gloss over internal class differences among western farmers. Clann na Talmhan, he pronounced in August 1939 shortly after Finnerty’s exit, ‘was not an organisation of graziers, of blueshirts or green shirts, but an organisation of hard-working farmers like the people of Galway, Mayo, Roscommon, Kerry and all the poor counties’.57 It was when Clann na Talmhan spread to Mayo, and set down dense roots there in 1942–43, that issues associated with land redistribution per se – such as the Land Commission’s perceived tardiness – began to be taken up more frequently and with considerable vigour. By early 1943, land redistribution had even begun to surface in the central party’s deliberations. When the strong farmer and businessman Patrick Belton bade adieu to the party in March 1943, he complained that it had been

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infiltrated by Communist ideas and that the westerners were ‘out to seize land everywhere’.58 IFF-related activists had founded the National Agricultural Party in the summer of 1942, and, with a general election rapidly approaching, Clann na Talmhan had merged with this new party early in 1943. The new expanded Clann na Talmhan, to go by its 1943 election manifesto, was intent on appealing to strong farmers, land-hungry smallholders as well as to farm labourers. As was equally true of the Farmers’ Party in 1923 and the NFRL/Centre Party in 1933, we find an attempt being made to strike a plausible balance between the interests of big farmers, anxious to preserve the principle of ‘fixity of tenure’, and those of struggling small farmers eager to see more prominence given to ‘land division’.59 Decline and disappearance How (if at all) did redistributive land reform contribute to the weakening and demise of our three farmers’ parties? We have seen how each one faced a dilemma where land redistribution was concerned: to embrace the issue too eagerly risked losing strong farmer support, while merely to pay lip service to it risked alienating the support of the numerous land-hungry smallholder population. Predictably, managing this dilemma on the basis of striking a balance that somehow might satisfy both sides was anything but easy. Of course, land redistribution narrowly conceived was not the only issue that required a balancing act. It is possible to relate the question of land redistribution to the broader challenges our three farmers’ parties faced in balancing the class interests of big and small farmers, the political interests of farmers standing on opposite sides of the Treaty/Civil War divide and the organizational interests arising from the desire to mobilize farmers via a combination of an interest group and a political party working in tandem. That the class and political interests of Irish farmers were closely linked became ever more evident as the tendencies for larger farmers to be pro-Treaty, and for smaller ones to be anti-Treaty, embedded themselves.60 Of course, at once reflecting and reinforcing such tendencies were the political and policy stances of the main pro- and anti-Treaty nationalist parties.61 It was the inability to strike these class, political and organizational balances adequately that proved critical in accounting for why our farmers’ parties would remain minor in stature and would ultimately fade and die. The question for us therefore is to assess how much the issue of land redistribution contributed to this outcome.

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Denis Gorey’s early desire for the Farmers’ Party was for it to constitute farmers as a single political class and to become a major force in Irish politics, but how well in practice was this wish fulfilled? Judging by the evidence of the polls, the electorate was not wholly convinced, certainly in the west. Failure to elect a single Farmers’ Party TD in Connacht in 1923 appears – to go by the case of Martin Egan (the Galway IFU branch secretary and chairman of Galway County Council in 1925) – to have weakened the western bargaining position within the IFU/Farmers’ Party. The reluctance to adequately support Egan’s Senate candidacy provoked him to write to the press in 1925, saying that ‘the only reasonable excuse I got for not receiving sufficient support in our party was that Connacht failed to elect a member to the Dáil at the last election’.62 Not alone did the uneven spread of its Dáil seats make it difficult for the Farmers’ Party to call itself a genuinely national political force, but it left it open to the charge that its real strength was in the strong farmer counties.63 Fundamentally, the Farmers’ Party, in the eyes of its Fianna Fáil critics, was a party of the strong farmer, the gentry and the ranching interest.64 Against the accusation that theirs was a party of ‘landlords, ranchers, graziers and Freemasons’, the Farmers’ Party new leader (Patrick Baxter) countered in September 1927 that ‘there was no truth in these allegations, as the patriotic national records of every member of the party would show’.65 Contesting the 1923 election had signalled not only the Farmers’ Party’s public acceptance of the Treaty settlement and the new state’s legitimacy but a readiness to participate in its representative assemblies.With Fianna Fáil’s appearance in 1926 as a party actively seeking the support of anti-Treaty smallholders and landless men and advocating accelerated land redistribution on their behalf, the difficulties faced by a broadly pro-Treaty and mildly pro-land redistribution Farmers’ Party multiplied in a way that pushed it ever closer to Cumann na nGaedheal. Before the June election of 1927, the central IFU was able to veto a Farmers’ Party proposal to merge with Cumann na nGaedheal.66 Stung by this response, Denis Gorey promptly defected to Cumann na nGaedheal. The June and September elections of 1927 saw the Farmers’ Party disastrously lose 9 of its 15 Dáil seats. After the September 1927 election, a coalition of sorts with Cumann na nGaedheal did materialize, with the new party leader, Michael Heffernan, becoming a parliamentary secretary.67 A revealing indication of how much the Farmers’ Party and the IFU were drifting apart at this point was that the IFU executive only approved of this coalition retrospectively.

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Of course, the ideal of the two bodies working in tandem was not being well served by the tendency of the Farmers’ Party to function as a loose collection of independents, with little party discipline, and by the way the IFU itself was becoming more factionalized and fractious.68 Already in 1925, Col. O’Callaghan-Westropp (still an active member of the IFU’s standing committee) was writing despairingly of a ‘jealousy-torn union which has never recovered from the pains of its birth’ and ‘a moribund Parliamentary party’.69 The difficulties experienced in having the IFU and the Farmers’ Party work in tandem interacted with the challenges of striking and holding class and political balances between Irish farmers. We find elements in Cumann na nGaedheal ready to exploit the farmers’ difficulties here.Thus, the secretary of Cumann na nGaedheal, Michael Tierney, suggested in 1926 that the Farmers’ Party leadership was attempting ‘to be two incompatible things – a technical organisation and a political party – at the same time’.70 Likewise when Martin Egan switched his allegiance to Cumann na nGaedheal in 1927, he observed with ‘regret and disappointment’ how Irish farmers: both as leaders, and as followers ... do not seem capable yet to form a successful independent farmers’ political party, combined under the same leadership with a useful and successful business organisation.71

Matters were not helped by the way conflict between bigger and smaller farming classes, albeit not kindled by differences over land redistribution per se, was driving the Farmers’ Party and the IFU further apart. Up to the time he left the party, we find Denis Gorey, who had long championed the cause of the unpurchased tenants, expressing his contempt in public for such leading IFU figures as Col. George O’Callaghan-Westropp and Sir John Keane, whom he took to be members of an ‘old gang’ of Irish landlords and ex-landlords.72 No less than the Farmers’ Party, the National Centre Party, though capable of working effectively with the NFRL (for practical purposes they were largely one and the same) and less afflicted by internal class dissension than either the IFU/Farmers’ Party or Clann na Talmhan, was dogged during its brief lifespan by its limited electoral appeal and spatial spread. What critically went against it as well was its observed closeness to Cumann na nGaedheal.73 Both its leadership and its perceived closeness to the old Farmers’ Party and to Cumann na nGaedheal coloured the view taken of the NFRL/National Centre Party by Fianna Fáil activists who lost no time in debunking its pretensions to represent the mass of

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small farmers. Here the presence within its ranks of large landowners such as F. B. Barton and the Duc de Stacpoole played into the hands of the NFRL’s Fianna Fáil critics, allowing them to dismiss it as ‘a league of graziers’,74 a charge MacDermot was eager to refute.75 In many respects, the fall of the NFRL/National Centre Party offers a parallel case to that of the IFU/Farmers’ Party, for again it was the perceived menacing presence of Fianna Fáil – this time a Fianna Fáil riding high after securing its first overall majority in January 1933 at the height of the Economic War – that drove it into the arms of Cumann na nGaedheal. Whether the National Centre Party might have built on its Dáil representation to become a truly countrywide party cannot be known, but the fact that its electoral successes broadly coincided with those of the old Farmers’ Party did not auger well.76 After a mere eight months of independent existence, the National Centre Party in August 1933 merged with Cumann na nGaedheal and the National Guard to form the United Ireland Party (soon to be known as Fine Gael). Why the National Centre Party leadership chose this course reflected the deepening agricultural crisis posed by the Economic War and the shattering of any immediate prospect of replacing Fianna Fáil in office. Considerations of land reform did not come into it. As much as the 1933 Land Bill had elicited a degree of unease within the NFRL/National Centre Party, Frank MacDermot was ultimately ready to credit Frank Aiken’s acceptance of amendments and his assurances that the new legislation had sufficient safeguards to prevent wholesale injustice being inflicted on Irish farmers. As he put it in August 1933: I shall continue to oppose this Bill if for no other reason than what appears to me to be its untimeliness in the middle of the so-called economic war; and also because even up to the last moment certain Fianna Fáil spokesmen carrying considerable weight in the country have continued to make very alarming declarations as to the manner in which this Bill is going to be operated. In view of these circumstances I do not feel free to withdraw my opposition. At the same time I do not like to part from this Bill without paying a tribute to the courtesy and spirit of accommodation that have been shown by the Acting-Minister for Lands and Fisheries [Frank Aiken] and the Attorney-General. A large number of amendments have been accepted, some of considerable importance, and I think that whatever the defects of the Bill are as it stands at present, it is enormously preferable to what it was when it was at first introduced. The Minister and some of his colleagues have given us very specific assurances as to the spirit of impartiality and commonsense in which the Bill is going to be administered and as to the genuine degree of independence that is going to be left to the Land

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Commission and as to the absence of political pressure which a great many of the Fianna Fáil clubs expect to be able to exercise. If the assurances he has given are carried out I will not be slow to express my gratification when the occasion offers on the way in which the Bill is administered.77

With its 11 Dáil seats the only perceived chance of opposing Fianna Fáil effectively, and of offering a realistic alternative to it, was seen by the NFRL/Centre Party leadership to necessitate making common cause with Cumann na nGaedheal, a party it was close to on the Treaty and Economic War issues. Raymond Ryan hints at another possible reason why the NFRL should have folded its tent so soon. With NFRL rank-and-file militancy on the rise as the effects of the Economic War bit deeper, it was reasonable to expect that grassroots direct action would soon have precipitated a full-scale crisis of authority for MacDermot and the NFRL’s moderate standing committee.78 Did land redistribution damage Clann na Talmhan’s survival chances? Martin Finnerty’s departure in 1939 did not set back the emerging party. Later on, the interest shown in Mayo in accelerating land redistribution may have counted for much, but counterbalancing radical tendencies in the county was the conservative strong farmer presence of Joseph Blowick. Arguably, the class balance in Clann na Talmhan nationally tilted in favour of the strong farmers in 1944 when Blowick replaced Donnellan as party leader. For all Donnellan’s eagerness to maintain a balance centred on reaching out to ‘working’ farmers of different sizes, by 1944 his volatile leadership style had attracted critics within the national party. To these critics, the stolidly conservative Blowick appeared to offer a safer pair of hands at the helm. The potentially divisive nature of land redistribution was brought home most of all in 1946–47 when a protest at the auction sale of a Mayo farm led to Deputies Commons and Cafferkey serving a month in Sligo jail. In response to the actions of his two Mayo parliamentary colleagues, Clann’s deputy leader, Patrick Cogan, resigned from the party. With Cogan went the main link to the IFF and to that constituency for whom security of tenure had always been a core value.79 For the party, a significant implication of Cogan’s departure was that it became more difficult for it to project itself as a truly national farmers’ party. Membership of the first inter-party government (1948–51) saw Clann na Talmhan’s land policy become more conservative and identical with that of Fine Gael. The party had desired the agriculture portfolio in 1948 but had to settle instead for lands. Joseph Blowick’s 1949/50 Land Bill was conceived as striking a fairer balance between those whose land the Land

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Commission was acquiring and those being allocated farms or farm enlargements as part of the resettlement policy. Minister Blowick made it clear that in future ‘the market value of the property would be paid’.80 The new Land Bill was also conceived as an attempt to undo some of the perceived damage to have resulted from the politicization of land policy under Fianna Fáil. ‘Many grave problems’, in Blowick’s view, ‘arose from the patchwork methods employed by the Fianna Fáil government, because of the small farms which were given to some of their supporters’.81 Blowick was not the only senior figure within the party holding such views. In November 1948, Donnellan told a party meeting in Galway that Landless men did get land in the past, men who were yes men of Fianna Fáil and when those individuals had it one year or two, went and sold it. You must realise that that holding of land cost the taxpayer approximately £1,400; there is a stop put to that kind of racket.82

In March 1949, Blowick was keen to ensure that the Land Commission be more careful in future that allotted land got into the right hands. As he put it: The cry ‘The land for the people’ is one that has been misunderstood and misapplied in Ireland for many years. It does not take into consideration that the farmer is a skilled man, and that his skill is obtained from his experience, from his early training and from the interest he shows in his property.83

In response to Deputy Giles’s anxieties that ‘the farming economy of Meath, Kildare and W/Meath would not be upset by division of land into small farms, and complicated by the migration scheme’, and that the new Land League was doing ‘irreparable damage’ in Meath, Blowick described the Meath land agitation ‘as close to Communism, but no notice of it would be taken in the Land Commission’.84 As if the striking of class, political and organizational balances was not difficult enough, the farmers’ parties also faced the challenge of representing farmers practicing different forms of agriculture (such as dairying, dry stock, tillage or mixed farming).Totally overshadowing Blowick’s 1950 Land Act, and even the party’s participation in coalition government, was the revolt of three of Clann na Talmhan’s southern TDs over dissatisfaction with various items of government policy (such as the government’s treatment of milk producers).85 The exit of its southern TDs illustrates how the party was prone to being divided not just by questions of class and political differences but by production-related differences among farmers as well.What the mutiny of its southern TDs further showed was

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how some of the Clann na Talmhan deputies, as was true of their Farmers’ Party and National Centre Party counterparts earlier,86 viewed themselves ultimately as independents accountable in the first instance to their local executives.87 All the while Clann na Talmhan’s electoral support was haemorrhaging alarmingly; its national vote ‘halved in 1948 and halved again in 1951’.88 Conclusion Much has been made of the distinction between peasant and farmers’ parties in the wider literature on agrarian parties. The eastern European peasant parties and their politics of the early twentieth century have been viewed as distinctive for their association with subsistence peasants, preoccupation with redistributive land reform and their ‘hostility towards the towns’.89 European farmers’ parties of the sort commonly found in Scandinavia have tended in contrast to be seen as representing commercial family farmers whose prime concern historically has been with issues of the market economy, even if land redistribution mattered a great deal in Finland.90 For historical reasons linked to decolonization, the demise of the landed estates and rural poverty, the Irish farmers’ parties under discussion, though primarily ‘farmer’ rather than ‘peasantist’ in type, could never afford to turn their backs on redistributive land reform. To varying degrees the anti-rancher rhetoric commonly found among pro-land redistribution Irish nationalists was absorbed by the leaderships of our farmers’ parties as well.91 We have seen how Gorey and Donnellan in particular went along with the nationalist consensus that congestion relief via land redistribution was a worthy subject of public policy and that in the ‘ranches’ a substantial supply of redistributable land was to be found. There were of course those (such as Sir John Keane) who had reason to fear that if all large cattle farms, especially the fattening land, were lost to land reform, then the cattle trade (and with it the national economy) would suffer major damage, as would those small farmers who looked to the fattening farms as an outlet for their immature store cattle. Danger also lurked in seeking to source land for congestion relief by throwing the net wider than the ranches. To do this was to risk impinging on the right to security or fixity of tenure of existing farmers and so compromising the very foundations of Irish commercial agriculture. Managing land-related class tensions between big and small farmers, in view of this range of diverging views, would therefore never be easy. We have seen how land issues imposed themselves on the IFU in the troubled

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years before and after the appearance of the Farmers’ Party in 1922. Completing land purchase became a pressing IFU priority and, by way of broadening its appeal, the Farmers’ Party committed itself to land redistribution at the expense of the big ranches. Internal divisions on the issue, however, effectively meant that the IFU/Farmers’ Party commitment to land redistribution in 1923 and thereafter would tend to be moderate and tentative in practice. Red scare fears were running high, and the Economic War in full spate, when the NFRL’s standing committee came to deliberate on Fianna Fáil’s imminent land bill in the early summer of 1933. Again the challenge, if the NFRL/National Centre Party was to maximize its appeal across the agrarian class spectrum, was to walk the tightrope between safeguarding security of tenure and tolerating a measure of moderate land redistribution.92 Clann na Talmhan was different to its two precursors in having among its leading figures a good number of disaffected Fianna Fáil activists (Donnellan most notably), some of whom favoured a more radical approach to land redistribution and reaching out to the rural labouring classes.93 The events culminating in Cogan’s withdrawal from the party in 1946–47 provide the most damaging case of land redistribution per se realizing its divisive potential. At the same time, Cogan’s departure did not mean that the class balance in Clann na Talmhan swung decisively in favour of the more radical western pro-land reform element. If anything, the tendency for the opposite to happen was already evident in 1944 when Blowick replaced Donnellan in the national leadership. Where land resettlement was concerned, a decided shift away from radicalism can be detected in Blowick’s Land Bill of 1949/50 which continued the policy of excluding the landless while seeking to restore some of the rights of property that previous land legislation (especially Fianna Fáil’s) was seen to have damaged.94 While the issue of land redistribution per se (with the exception of Clann na Talmhan) may not have made a critical contribution to the decline and disappearance of our three farmers’ parties, internal class and political divisions among Irish farmers did count for a great deal. As much as the three farmers’ parties sought to cultivate a class solidarity among farmers that would be both inclusive (excepting the reviled ranchers) and powerconferring, as time passed their political enemies (in Fianna Fáil especially) were always eager to expose as mythical the idea of farmers constituting a single economic and political class. For their own part, the mainstream pro- and anti-Treaty nationalist parties, besides pointing to divisions and

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other shortcomings within the farmers’ parties, regularly claimed to be the real farmers’ parties by virtue of the social backgrounds of their TDs,95 their broader electoral appeal and their ability to form governments. Ultimately, what decisively went against the attempts of the three farmers’ parties to constitute Irish farmers as a single embattled and marginalized class and to strike or hold effective balances between big and small farmers, farmers on opposing sides of the Treaty/Civil War divide, and farmers organized via interest groups and parties concurrently, was the depth of class and political divisions among Irish farmers and the way such divisions overlapped and accentuated each other. Transcending these intertwined class and political divisions presented our three farmers’ parties with challenges that ultimately proved to be beyond them. Rather than transcending class divisions among farmers, there is in fact a clear sense in which these farmers’ parties were popularly identified (through the patterns of their electoral support and the social backgrounds of their leaderships) with either larger farmers (the Farmers’ Party and National Centre Party) or smaller and mainly western ones (Clann na Talmhan).That such was the case both reflected and helped reproduce internal class differentiation in Irish agriculture. Similarly, rather than transcending the fundamental political opposition in post-independence Ireland, there is an equally clear sense in which our farmers’ parties tended to be or to become identified with the main pro-Treaty party. And, by the same token, this again both reflected and contributed to the underlying strength of the basic polarization that gave the post-independence party system much of its coherence and distinctiveness. Notes 1 E. Larkin, ‘Foreword’ to W. L. Feingold, The Revolt of the Tenantry: The Transformation of Local Government in Ireland 1872–1886 (Boston, 1984), p. xv; P. Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 (Oxford, 2007), p. 568. 2 F. Campbell, Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland, 1891–1921 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 303–4. 3 The demand for land redistribution, Clark tells us, was ‘... always played down, especially at land meetings, in order to avoid alienating the large-farm element’ (‘The Importance of Agrarian Classes: Agrarian Class Structure and Collective Action in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land, Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), p. 36). Active in leadership roles in the Land War agitation, large farmers had sufficient veto power ‘... to prevent it from turning in directions contrary to their interests’ (S. Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, 1979), p. 301).

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4 For the Land League in Mayo, see P. Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1978), pp. 132–4; D. Jordan, ‘Merchants, “Strong Farmers” and Fenians: The Post-Famine Political Élite and the Irish Land War’, in C. H. E. Philpin (ed.), Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 347–8; and for the United Irish League, see L. Kennedy, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Belfast, 1996), pp. 140–3; P. Bew, Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland 1890–1910: Parnellites and Radical Agrarians (Oxford, 1987); Campbell, Land and Revolution, pp. 149–51. 5 M. Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organisation and Activity in the Modern State (3rd edn.) (London, 1969 (1951)), p. 236. 6 Ibid., p. 236. 7 Ibid., p. 236. 8 J. M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York, 1975), p. 48. 9 Some other smaller farmers’ parties also put in an appearance. In the 1923 election, for instance, the Farmers’ Party faced competition from a number of aspiring farmers’ parties – such as the Land League of Unpurchased Tenants, Farmers and Ratepayers that came to be called the National Democratic Party – each of which presumed to speak for small farmers but none of which succeeded in winning a Dáil seat ( J. Coakley, ‘Minor Parties in Irish Political Life, 1922–1989’, The Economic and Social Review, 21, 3 (1990), 282). 10 For a recent discussion, see T. Varley, ‘On the Road to Extinction: Agrarian Parties in Twentieth-Century Ireland’, Irish Political Studies, 25, 4 (2010), 581–601. 11 See O’Callaghan-Westropp to O’Hanlon, 18 October 1919 (O’CallaghanWestropp papers, University College Dublin Archives Department (UCDAD), P38/4). 12 For an IFU insider account of this episode, see O’Callaghan-Westropp to G. de L. Willis, 11 June 1926 (UCDAD, P38/4). 13 Ibid. 14 Dáil Debates, vol. 4. col. 289, 5 July 1923. Some days later, Gorey, in a letter to the press clarifying and retracting part of his Dáil speech, acknowledged that Col. O’Callaghan-Westropp ‘occupies a respected position’ in the IFU (Irish Times, 12 July, 1923). 15 O’Callaghan-Westropp to Montgomery, 27 June 1921 (UCDAD, P38/5). 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 ‘Notes for Aspinall’, June 1921 (UCDAD, P38/5). 19 E. O’Connor, ‘Active Sabotage in Industrial Conflict, 1917–23’, Irish Economic and Social History, 12 (1985), p. 58. 20 Irish Times, 16 March 1923; see E. O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland 1824–2000 (Dublin, 2011), p. 121. 21 County Galway Farmers’ Association, Membership Card 1923, p. 9 (Martin M. Egan papers).

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22 D. Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life 1913–21: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution (Cork, 1998 [1977]), p. 225. 23 See Ibid., p. 229. 24 Over the 1921–72 period, the Ulster Farmers’ Union, with close ties to the Unionist Party, succeeded in building ‘a monopolistic consultative relationship’ with the Ministry of Agriculture (A. Greer, Rural Politics in Northern Ireland: Policy Networks and Agricultural Development since Partition (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 3, 123–4). The British National Farmers’ Union (upon which the IFU was substantially modelled) had consciously decided against forming a rural party and having its own political wing (A. F. Cooper, British Agricultural Policy, 1912–36: A Study in Conservative Politics (Manchester (1989), pp. 118–9, 36). 25 Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life 1913–21, p. 222. 26 Ibid., p. 223. 27 Coakley, ‘Minor Parties in Irish Political Life, 1922–1989’, p. 282. 28 County Dublin Farmers’ Association, Official Yearbook and Directory, 1925–26, p. 27 (Martin M. Egan papers). See also Irish Farmers’ Union. 1920. Rules, p. 3 (Martin M. Egan papers). 29 County Galway Farmers’ Association, Membership Card 1922, pp. 7–8 (Martin M. Egan papers). 30 Dáil Debates, vol. 3, col. 1159, 28 May 1923. 31 Seanad Debates, vol. 1. cols. 1477–8, 27 July 1923; see also cols. 2164–72, 3 August 1923. R. A. Butler and Thomas Linehan, two Farmers’ Party senators, did not follow Keane in voting against the bill (ibid., cols. 2177–8). For evidence of Cumann na nGaedheal/Fine Gael opposition deputies accusing Fianna Fáil of undermining security of tenure in the 1930s, see D. S. Jones, ‘Land Reform Legislation and Security of Tenure in Ireland after Independence’, Éire-Ireland, 32–3, 4, 1 & 2 (1997–98), 130–2. 32 Memorandum from P. Hogan to the President of the Executive Council, 17 April 1923 (National Archives, Department of the Taoiseach, Land Act 1923, S 3192). The minority report of Thomas Johnson and M. Duffy, the two Labour Party nominated members of the Commission on Agriculture, did in fact call for the placing of legal limits on the ‘size of holdings’ (Reports of the Commission on Agriculture, pp. 95, 98). 33 Saortát Éireann, Reports of the Commission on Agriculture (Dublin, 1924), p. 34. 34 Ibid., p. 34. 35 Ibid., p. 35. 36 Ibid., p. 71. 37 T. Dooley, ‘The Land for the People’: The Land Question in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 2004), p. 30. 38 D. Keogh, ‘De Valera, the Catholic Church and the “Red Scare”, 1931–1932’, in J. P. O’Carroll and J. A. Murphy (eds), De Valera and his Times (Cork: 1983), pp. 146–7. W. Moss, Political Parties in the Irish Free State (New York, 1968 [1933]), p. 182.

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39 Moss, Political Parties in the Irish Free State, pp. 186, 193; M. Gallagher, Political Parties in the Republic of Ireland (Dublin, 1985), p. 103. 40 F. McGarry, Eoin O’Duffy: A Self-Made Hero (Oxford, 2005), p. 203. 41 Gallagher, Political Parties, p. 104. 42 Minute Book of the National Farmers’ and Ratepayers’ League Standing Committee, 3 June 1933, UCDA, P39/MIN/6. 43 Ibid., 3 June 1933. 44 Ibid., 9 June 1933. 45 Ibid., 9 June 1933. 46 Gallagher, Political Parties, p. 104. 47 P. Moser, ‘Staatliche und Bäuerliche Vorstellunger einer Landreform: Die Auseinandersetzungen um die Landnutzung im Westen Irlands’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 40 (1990), 30–54; T. Varley, ‘Farmers against Nationalists: The Rise and Fall of Clann na Talmhan in Galway’, in G. Moran and R. Gillespie (eds), Galway: History & Society (Dublin, 1996), p. 592. 48 By 1941, Clann na Talmhan was said to have a membership of 40,000, half of which was in Galway (M. Donnellan, Commission on Vocational Organisation. Minutes of Evidence, National Library of Ireland, MS 931, 18 April 1941, p. 3190). 49 Ibid., p. 3176. While Donnellan excluded ‘the grazing man’ from the ranks of the working farmers and suggested that an over 200-acre holder was ‘not, as a rule, a working farmer’, Seán D. O’Kelly (a prominent large farmer activist in Galway) could find no reason in principle for excluding the 200-acre holder who worked his land, although he did accept that such individuals were rare (Ibid., p. 3177). 50 Connacht Tribune, 30 March 1940. Donnellan’s anti-rancher rhetoric does imply that he favoured a policy of congestion relief via land resettlement in principle. 51 Varley, ‘Farmers Against Nationalists’, pp. 600, 617. 52 The IFF was claiming in 1940 to have a membership of about 14,500, of which 13,500 were farmers and the balance agricultural labourers (Commission on Vocational Organisation. Minutes of Evidence, NLI, MS 929, 24 October 1940, pp. 2635, 2649). 53 Connacht Tribune, 21 October 1939. Paul Colleran was secretary of the Clann na Talmhan Galway county executive, and O’Kelly was Donnellan’s running mate in the 1943 general election. 54 Connacht Tribune, 28 October 1939; 4 November 1939. Colleran, in mentioning that Clann na Talmhan ‘makes no mention of fixity of tenure’, did allude to land resettlement (Connacht Tribune, 4 November 1939). 55 Connacht Tribune, 29 July 1939. A telling indication of Finnerty’s lack of progress in this venture was the loss of his county council seat at the 1942 local elections (Connacht Tribune, 29 August 1942). 56 Connacht Tribune, 25 February 1939. A recent thematic study of eviction observes that ‘the power of myth, memory and emotion should never be

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underestimated’ by students of the Irish land question (L. P. Curtis, Jr., The Depiction of Eviction in Ireland 1845–1910 (Dublin, 2011), p. 2). Mayo News, 19 August 1939. Irish Times, 15 March 1943. Varley, ‘Farmers Against Nationalists’, p. 602. M. Gallagher, Electoral Support for Irish Political Parties 1927–1973 (London, 1976), pp. 9, 19, 30–2. See E. Rumpf and A. C. Hepburn, Nationalism and Socialism in TwentiethCentury Ireland (Liverpool, 1977), pp. 73–4, 103, 143; P. Mair, The Changing Irish Party System: Organisation, Ideology and Electoral Competition (New York, 1987), pp. 25, 51; Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006, p. 452. Connacht Tribune, 25 July 1925. The Farmers’ Party did win a seat in Sligo–Leitrim in June 1927 only to lose it three months later in the September election of that year. In a similar vein, the depiction of Hogan as the ‘Minister for Grass’ epitomized the Fianna Fáil view of Cumann na nGaedheal as a pro-rancher party (J. Johnston, Irish Agriculture in Transition (Dublin, 1951), p. 105). Irish Times, 9 September 1927. J. L. McCracken, Representative Government in Ireland: A Study of Dáil Éireann 1919–48 (London, 1958), pp. 104–5; J. M. Regan, The Irish Counter-Revolution 1921–1936: Treatyite Politics and Settlement in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 1999), p. 265. Patrick Baxter, who had succeeded Gorey as party leader, was a casualty in the September election (Irish Times, 15 October 1927). A. Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics 1890–1930: The Irish Labour Movement in an Age of Revolution (Dublin, 1974), p. 192; M. Manning, ‘The Farmers’, in J. J. Lee (ed.), Ireland 1945–70 (Dublin, 1979), p. 51. O’Callaghan-Westropp to Conor Hogan, 24 June 1925 (UCDAD, P38/4). Irish Times, 23 June 1926. Galway Observer, 12 March 1927. Col. George O’Callaghan-Westropp to R. A. Butler, 19 April 1927 (UCDAD, P38/4); see note 14. That the parliamentary party abstained in the vote for president after the 1933 election made no material difference here (Irish Times, 8 and 9 February 1933). Irish Times, 27 September 1932; 12 January 1933. See M. Manning, James Dillon: A Biography (Dublin, 1999), p. 66. Roscommon Herald, 21 January 1933. F. B. Barton was another who dismissed the charge that the Centre Party was pro-grazier as without foundation (R. Ryan, ‘The National Farmers’ and Ratepayers’ League’, Studia Hibernica, 34 (2007), 183). Referring to the Economic War’s impact on the cattle trade in a Dáil speech immediately after the 1933 election, MacDermot also said: ‘…we are unable to accept the view that there is anything disreputable in connection with the buying and selling of livestock’ (Irish Times, 9 February 1933).

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76 Seven of the party’s twenty-six candidates in 1933 (and three of the eleven elected) were either outgoing or former Farmers’ Party TDs (M. Gallagher (ed.), Irish Elections 1922–44: Results and Analysis (Limerick, 1993)). 77 Dáil Debates, vol. 49, cols. 1491–2, 9 August 1933. 78 Ryan, ‘The National Farmers’ and Ratepayers’ League’, pp. 187–9. 79 Subsequently Cogan returned to the party fold before soon departing for good. 80 Minutes of Fine Gael parliamentary party meeting, 23 March 1949 (UCDA, P39/MIN/5). 81 Ibid. 82 Glenamaddy Sub-Executive meeting, 28 November 1948 (John Flaherty papers). 83 Fine Gael parliamentary party meeting, 23 March 1949 (UCDA, P39/MIN/5). 84 Ibid. 85 D. McCullagh, A Makeshift Majority: The First Inter-Party Government, 1948–51 (Dublin, 1998), pp. 238–40; Manning, James Dillon, pp. 265, 272. The milk price revolt had wider consequences in that it precipitated the collapse of the first inter-party government in 1951 (D. McCullagh, The Reluctant Taoiseach: A Biography of John A. Costello (Dublin, 2010), pp. 253–4). 86 Manning, ‘The Farmers’, p. 51. 87 Weeks estimates that independent farmers ‘regularly gained between onequarter and one-third of the Independent vote from the 1920s to the 1960s ...’ (L. Weeks, ‘We Don’t Like (to) Party: A Typology of Independents in Irish Political Life, 1922–2007’, Irish Political Studies, 24, 1 (2009), p. 15). 88 R. Sinnott, Irish Voters Decide: Voting Behaviour in Elections and Referendums since 1918 (Manchester, 1995), p. 62. 89 D. W. Urwin, From Ploughshare to Ballotbox: The Politics of Agrarian Defence in Europe (Oslo, 1980), pp. 192, 205–6. 90 D. Arter, ‘The Finnish Centre Party: A Case of Successful Transformation?’, in D. Arter (ed.), From Farmyard to City Square? The Electoral Adaptation of the Nordic Agrarian Parties (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 63–4; B. Kissane, Explaining Irish Democracy (Dublin, 2002), pp. 70–6. 91 See D. S. Jones, Graziers, Land Reform, and Political Conflict in Ireland (Washington, 1995), chap. 9. 92 Raymond Ryan comes to a different conclusion in reading the NFRL’s standing committee minutes, and the party’s decision to vote against the measure in the Dáil, as indicative of the movement’s ‘identification with larger farmers’ (‘The National Farmers’ and Ratepayers’ League’, pp. 185–6). 93 Roddy Connolly and R. M. Burke of the Labour Party were sufficiently impressed to contemplate an alliance between the two parties as part of a wider progressive alternative to Fianna Fáil (C. McGuire, Roddy Connolly and the Struggle for Socialism in Ireland (Cork, 2008), pp. 187, 193–6). 94 A somewhat different reading of Blowick’s position here can be found in David Jones’s ‘Divisions Within the Irish Government over Land-Distribution Policy, 1940–70’, Éire-Ireland, 36, 3 & 4 (2001), 102–4. 95 McCracken, Representative Government in Ireland, pp. 115–16.

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Bibliography Contemporary sources Manuscript material National Archives of Ireland Department of the Taoiseach Land Act 1923, S 3192. National Library of Ireland Commission on Vocational Organisation. Minutes of Evidence, MS 929, 931 and 941, 10 October 1940–18 April 1941. University College Dublin Archives Department (UCDAD). Papers of Col. George O’Callaghan-Westropp (Letterbooks, December 1918– January 1928, P38/4; June 1921–June 1922, P38/5). Minute Book of the National Farmers’ and Ratepayers’ League Standing Committee, Cumann na nGaedheal Minute Books, 1932–33, P39/MIN/6. Fine Gael Parliamentary Party Minute Books, P39/MIN/5.

Private papers Martin M. Egan papers (in possession of the estate of Rev. Dr. P. K. Egan, Portumna, Co. Galway). County Dublin Farmers’ Association, Official Yearbook and Directory, 1925–26. Irish Farmers’ Union. 1920. Rules, Dublin: Irish Farmers’ Union. County Galway Farmers’ Association, Membership Card 1922. County Galway Farmers’ Association, Membership Card 1923. John Flaherty papers, Cogaula, Clonbern, Co. Galway (in possession of the estate of John Flaherty, Cogaula, Clonbern, Co. Galway). Glenamaddy Sub-Executive Minute Book, 28 November 1948 to 29 March 1953.

Contemporary publications Parliamentary and other official publications Parliamentary Debates Dáil Éireann, 1922–55, vols. 2, 3, 4 (1923); 49 (1933); 103 (1946). Parliamentary Debates Seanad Éireann, 1923, vol. 1 (1923). Reports of the Commission on Agriculture (Dublin, 1924). R. 25. Newspapers Connacht Tribune Galway Observer Irish Times Mayo News Roscommon Herald

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Later works Arter, D. ‘The Finnish Centre Party: A Case of Successful Transformation?’, in D. Arter (ed.), From Farmyard to City Square? The Electoral Adaptation of the Nordic Agrarian Parties (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 59–95. Bew, P. Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1978). ——. Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland 1890–1910: Parnellites and Radical Agrarians (Oxford, 1987). ——. Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 (Oxford, 2007). Campbell, F. Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland, 1891–1921 (Oxford, 2005). Clark, S. Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, 1979). ——. ‘The Importance of Agrarian Classes: Agrarian Class Structure and Collective Action in Nineteenth-century Ireland’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land, Politics and People (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 11–36. Coakley, J. ‘Minor Parties in Irish Political Life, 1922–1989’, The Economic and Social Review, 21, 3 (1990), 269–97. Cooper, A. F. British Agricultural Policy, 1912–36: A Study in Conservative Politics (Manchester, 1989). Curtis Jr., L. P. The Depiction of Eviction in Ireland 1845–1910 (Dublin, 2011). Dooley, T. ‘The Land for the People’: The Land Question in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 2004). Duverger, M. Political Parties: Their Organisation and Activity in the Modern State (3rd edn.) (London, 1969 [1951]). Fitzpatrick, D. Politics and Irish Life 1913–21: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution (Cork, 1998 [1977]). Gallagher, M. Electoral Support for Irish Political Parties 1927–1973 (London, 1976). ——. Political Parties in the Republic of Ireland (Dublin, 1985). —— (ed.). Irish Elections 1922–44: Results and Analysis (Limerick, 1993). Greer, A. Rural Politics in Northern Ireland: Policy Networks and Agricultural Development since Partition (Aldershot, 1996). Johnston, J. Irish Agriculture in Transition (Dublin, 1951). Jones, D. S. Graziers, Land Reform, and Political Conflict in Ireland (Washington, 1995). ——. ‘Land Reform Legislation and Security of Tenure in Ireland after Independence’, Éire-Ireland, 32–3, 4, 1 & 2 (1997–98), 116–43. ——. ‘Divisions Within the Irish Government over Land-Distribution Policy, 1940–70’, Éire-Ireland, 36, 3 & 4 (2001), 83–110. Jordan, D. ‘Merchants, “Strong Farmers” and Fenians: The Post-Famine Political Élite and the Irish Land War’, in C. H. E. Philpin (ed.), Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 320–48. Kennedy, L. Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Belfast, 1996). Keogh, D. ‘De Valera, the Catholic Church and the “Red Scare”, 1931–1932’, in J. P. O’Carroll and J. A. Murphy (eds), De Valera and his Times (Cork: 1983), pp. 134–59.

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Kissane, B. Explaining Irish Democracy (Dublin, 2002). Larkin, E. ‘Foreword’ to W. L. Feingold, The Revolt of the Tenantry: The Transformation of Local Government in Ireland 1872–1886 (Boston, 1984), pp. xi–xvii. McCracken, J. L. Representative Government in Ireland: A Study of Dáil Éireann 1919–48 (London, 1958). McCullagh, D. A Makeshift Majority: The First Inter-Party Government, 1948–51 (Dublin, 1998). ——. The Reluctant Taoiseach: A Biography of John A. Costello (Dublin, 2010). McGarry, F. Eoin O’Duffy: A Self-Made Hero (Oxford, 2005). McGuire, C. Roddy Connolly and the Struggle for Socialism in Ireland (Cork, 2008). Mair, P. The Changing Irish Party System: Organisation, Ideology and Electoral Competition (New York, 1987). Manning, M. ‘The Farmers’, in J. J. Lee (ed.), Ireland 1945–70 (Dublin, 1979), pp. 48–60. ——. James Dillon: A Biography (Dublin, 1999). Mitchell, A. Labour in Irish Politics 1890–1930: The Irish Labour Movement in an Age of Revolution (Dublin, 1974). Moser, P. ‘Staatliche und Bäuerliche Vorstellunger einer Landreform: Die Auseinandersetzungen um die Landnutzung im Westen Irlands’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 40 (1990), 30–54. Moss, W. Political Parties in the Irish Free State (New York, 1968 [1933]). O’Connor, E. ‘Active Sabotage in Industrial Conflict, 1917–23’, Irish Economic and Social History, 12 (1985), 50–62. ——. A Labour History of Ireland 1824–2000 (Dublin, 2011). Paige, J. M. Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York, 1975). Regan, J. M. The Irish Counter-Revolution 1921–1936: Treatyite Politics and Settlement in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 1999). Rumpf, E. and A. C. Hepburn. Nationalism and Socialism in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Liverpool, 1977). Ryan, R. ‘The National Farmers’ and Ratepayers’ League’, Studia Hibernica, 34 (2007), 173–92. Sinnott, R. Irish Voters Decide: Voting Behaviour in Elections and Referendums since 1918 (Manchester, 1995). Urwin, D. W. From Ploughshare to Ballotbox: The Politics of Agrarian Defence in Europe (Oslo, 1980). Varley, T. ‘Farmers Against Nationalists: The Rise and Fall of Clann na Talmhan in Galway’, in G. Moran and R. Gillespie (eds), Galway: History & Society (Dublin, 1996), pp. 589–622. ——.‘On the Road to Extinction: Agrarian Parties in Twentieth-Century Ireland’, Irish Political Studies, 25, 4 (2010), 581–601. Weeks, L. ‘We Don’t Like (to) Party: A Typology of Independents in Irish Political Life, 1922–2007’, Irish Political Studies, 24, 1 (2009), 1–27.

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Land questions in modern Ireland Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

Published by Manchester University Press Campbell, Fergus and Tony Varley. Land questions in modern Ireland. Manchester University Press, 2016. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/51516.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51516

Access provided at 21 Nov 2019 22:07 GMT from Swarthmore College Libraries

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Index

Note: n after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page agrarianism 54n100, 141–3 Agulhon, Maurice 163 Aiken, Frank 252–3 Arensberg, Conrad M. 119–20 Balfour, Arthur 27, 153 Ballinasloe Tenants’ Defence Association (BTDA) 221–5 Banking Commission 44 Barry, Tom 165 Barton, F. B. 252, 261n75 Baxter, Patrick 250, 261n67 Beinart, William 161 Beiner, Guy 5–6, 169 Beirne, Kate (Kiltimagh) 181 Belloc, Hilaire 140 Belton, Patrick 248–9 Bew, Paul Conflict and Conciliation 33, 51n25, 51–2n34, 121, 152 Land and the National Question 92–3, 106, 111, 194, 197, 224 Big House, The 14–15 Birrell, Augustine 30, 51–2n34 Land Act of 1909 29–30, 35, 46 Blowick, Joseph 33, 253–4 Land Bill 253–6 Bodyke estate 180 Boland, Gerry 36–7 Bourke, Canon Ulick J. 184, 203–6 Bowlby, John 168 Boycott, Charles 179

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boycotting 99–100, 122, 185–6 Bradshaw, Brendan 159–60 Brannick, James 139 Brennan, Thomas 219, 226, 230 Browne, Hans 180 Bulger, Dr. (Parish Priest, Birr) 228 Bull, Philip 44, 106, 152, 165 Burke, Joanna 108–9 Burke, R. M. 262n93 Butler, Mary E. L. 110 Butler, R. A. 244, 259n31 Butt, Isaac Home Rule 219–20 land bill 221 Cafferkey, Dominick 247, 253 Campbell, Fergus 28–9, 34–5, 44, 73, 105, 121 Canadian store cattle 241 Carter, J. W. H. 92–3, 109 Carty, James (Clonmore) 176–7 Catholic Church childhood and parenting 168–9 land movement and 194–214, 227 organizational function of 196–7 social teachings 140–1 Cavanagh, Archdeacon 201 Chatterjee, Partha 189n44 Chesterton, G. K. 140 childhood, history of 168 Clann na Talmhan 239–57, 260n48 demise of 255 formation of 247

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INDEX

Clark, Samuel 70, 194, 197, 212, 238 Cogan, Patrick 33, 253, 256 Cohen, Jon S. 75–6 Cole, Mary (Trimblestown) 177 collectivist visions 166 Colleran, Paul 248, 260n53–4 Collins, Annie 155 colonialism 4 Comerford, R.V. (Vincent) 92, 96, 220 Commins, Patrick 56n121 Commission on Agriculture 244–5 common grazing 128 Commons, Bernard 247, 253 compensation for landowners 33, 123–8, 136–7 Concannon, Helena 110 Congested Districts Board (CDB) abolition of 31, 38 criticisms of 12, 36, 40, 48 establishment of 19n17, 26–7, 104 funding 29–30, 36 obstacles 100 secondments to NLB 126–7 western congestion 16 see also Dudley Commission Connell, Kenneth 66 Connolly, Senator Joseph 39–40 Connolly, Roddy 262n93 Connors, James 232 Constitution (1937) 142 cooperative movement 18 co-proprietorship 69–74 Cosgrove, Patrick 29 Coulter, Carol 189n44 Craig, James 241 Craughwell feud 151, 165–70 Creggs estate 123 Croke, Archbishop of Cashel and Emly, Thomas 208 Cromwell 248 Cronin, Maura 5 Crotty, Raymond 119 Cullen, Louis 66 Cumann na nGaedheal 32–3, 36–7, 42, 44, 47, 247 Economic War and Fianna Fáil 245

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Farmers’ Party and 250–2 ‘a rancher party’ 11 Daly, James 210, 222–3, 230, 231–2 Dangerfield, George 82 Davies, C. S. L. 156 Davitt, Michael ‘Battle of Carraroe’ 178 discourse 4, 211–12 Gurteen meeting 209–11 Harris and 218–19, 223–5, 231–2 history of Land War published 109–10 Parnell and 95 policies 18, 34, 99, 223–5 on women’s role 181 Deane, Seamus 3 de Freyne estate 51n24 de Janasz, Madame 128 Dempsey, Peter 232 de Stacpoole, Duc 252 de Valera, Éamon 40, 49, 241 de Valera, Sinéad Bean 110 Devon Commission: report of 68 Devoy, John 220, 235n35 Second New Departure 223, 224 Dillon, John 34, 209, 228 Dineen, Margaret 184–5 discourse analysis 198–200, 215n22 Donnellan, Michael 247–8, 253–4, 255–6, 260n49–50, 260n53 Donnelly, James S. 88, 94–7, 104, 197–8, 229 Dooley, Terence 93, 143 Dowling, Martin W. 69 Doyle, Michael 244 Dudley Commission 29–30, 35–6 Duff, Frank 56n131 Duffy, Walter 225 Dunsandle estate 35, 222 death of his agent 232 Duverger, Maurice 239 Economic War 239, 245–7, 252–3, 256, 261n75 Edgeworth, Maria 71 Edwards, Robin Dudley 157–8 Egan, Martin 38, 250–1

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INDEX

Egan, Patrick 230 electoral-franchise legislation 96, 104 emigration 8, 13–14 Enclosure movement 76 Encumbered Estates Court 14 Engels, Friedrich 74 England: Enclosure movement 76 Estates Commission 29, 32 evictions 260–1n56 anti-eviction agitations 178–82 Fahy, Mary (Claremorris) 180 Farmers’ Party 239–57 merge with Cumann na nGaedheal 251 Farrell, J. P. 35 Feingold, Bill 87–8, 91–2, 96–8, 101, 106 Fenton (Carraroe) 178–80 Ferguson, John 226, 228 Fianna Fáil agrarianism 141 economic nationalism 139–40 farmers’ parties and 52n46, 251–3 land policy 32–3, 42–8, 105, 246–7, 254 red scare fears 245 Finance, Department of 41–5, 48–9, 138 Fine Gael 33 agrarianism 141 see also Cumann na nGaedheal; United Ireland Party Finnerty, Martin 248, 253, 260n55 Fitzgibbon, John 35, 51n24 Fitzmorris, Mrs (Lough Mask) 179 Fitzpatrick, David 153–4, 162–3, 166 Forster, William E. 83, 186, 232 Foster, Roy 161 France English and French law compared 67–8 Kundera on French Revolution 80–1 French, Charles 228 Gaeltacht colonists 46 Garvin, Tom 148n69 Gavan Duffy, Charles 95 gender issues 110, 181 Geoghegan, Bernard 129, 130 Gerschenkron, Alexander 66 Gibbons, John P. 114n46

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Giles, Deputy 254 Ginnell, Laurence 33–5, 47, 53n66 Girvin, Brian 32 Gladstone, William E. 10, 66, 72, 108, 232 gombeen men 98 Gonne, Maud 109 Gorey, Denis 241–2, 243, 250–1, 255, 258n14 Gray, E. D. 184–5 graziers 27, 93, 100–1, 122–44, 243–4, 260n49 anti-grazier agitation 33, 121, 122, 138, 222–3, 229–30, 232 definition 117–18 historical sources 120–1 see also Ranch War Green, Rodney 119 Greenwood, Hamar 241 Griffin, Brian 221 Guha, Ranajit 175, 187n5 Guinness, Arthur 178 Gurteen, County Sligo 208–12 Harrington, T. C. 28 Harris, Matthew 218–33 background 218–19 Ballinasloe Tenants’ Defence Association (BTDA) 221–5 Fenian movement and IRB 219–21, 223–5 graziers denounced 222–3, 229–30, 232 Land League 225–32 Harris, Peter 218 Hart, Peter 162–5 Heffernan, Michael 250 Hickey, Michael (Waterford) 186 Hicks, John R. 65, 73–4 Higginbottom, F. J. 180 Higgins, Michael D. 114n46 Hill, Christopher 161 history of childhood 168 oral tradition 169–70 revisionism and study of 154–61, 165, 170–1 social and individual remembering 169 Hobsbawm, Eric 161

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INDEX

Hogan, Conor 245 Hogan, Patrick 31–3, 36–8, 124, 129–33, 241–4 Frank Duff and 56n131 ‘Minister for Grass’ 32, 36, 261n64 Home Rule 82–5 Third Home Rule Bill 82–3 Home Rule Party 138–9 Hoppen, K. Theodore 88, 92–3, 96, 159–60 Hynes, Eugene 201, 216n49 ICC see Catholic Church illegal occupation 127–30 individualism 17, 166 inheritance patterns 166–8 IPP see Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) IRA 37, 104, 128, 134–5, 245 Provisional 156, 158 IRB 138–9 Irish Farmers’ Federation (IFF) 248–9, 260n52 Irish Farmers’ Union (IFU) 30 Farmers’ Party 240, 250–1, 255–6 Irish Historical Studies (IHS) 157–8 Irish Landowners’ Convention 241 Irish National Land League see Land League Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) 84, 152–3 Irish Party 28, 34, 36, 42 Irish Reform Association 84–5 Irish Times 81 Irishtown 200–1 Irish Trade Union Congress 242 Jones, David 92, 100–1, 152 Jordan, Donald 27–8, 92, 196–7, 214n1 Jordan, Michael 155 Kane, Anne 106 Kaposey, John 69 Keane, John 244–5, 251, 255 Kelleher, John V. 88 Kilfenora Club 128 Killeen, J. B. 231–2 Killen, James 210 Kilmartin, James 221–2, 225 Kilmoon Club 128 Kimball, Solon T. 119–20

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269

Kirchintilloch bothy fire 41 Kirwan, Thomas 178 Kundera, Milan 80–1 Labour Party 245 Ladies’ Land League 106–10 access to the ‘front’ 176, 181–2, 186–7 charitable activities 182–5 editorial in Connaught Telegraph 190–1n59 Lalor, Fintan 3–4 Land Acts and Bills 131, 136–7 (1870) 10, 66 (1881) 197 (1891) 50n1, 104 (1903) Wyndham 7, 10–11, 28–35, 46, 81–4, 150–3, 164 (1909) 29–30, 35, 46, 131 (1920) 30–1 (1923) 31, 41, 130–1, 243 (1933) 31–2, 39, 49 (1946) 136 (1949) 33 Land Commission assessment of activities 36–41, 43–4, 123–38, 248, 253–4 budget 123, 137–8 dissolution of 121, 131 establishment of 123 records made accessible 38, 57n132 self-sufficiency facilitated 140 see also Estates Commission; O’Shiel, Kevin land-grabbers 70, 99, 139, 185–6, 191n65 Land League 10, 150 Catholic Church and 194–243 destructiveness of 83–4 Matthew Harris and 225–32 membership and alliances 28, 34, 87–112 strengths and successes 26, 238 see also Ladies’ Land League landscape of Ireland 4–5 land seizures 127–30 Land Settlement Commission 123–8 Larkin, Emmet 43, 198 Lee, Joseph 27, 34, 161 Leerssen, Joep 5–6 Leighton, T. F. (Police Inspector) 231

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INDEX

Lerner, Gerda 175–6 Lia Fáil 54n100, 137 Linehan, Thomas 259n31 Linton, James (Constable) 232 Livingstone, Fr. 228 Lloyd, Clifford 177, 185 Lloyd George, David 241 MacDermot, Frank 245–6, 252–3, 261n75 McDermott, Fr. John 209–11 MacDonagh, Oliver 66, 80 MacDonnell, Anthony 35 McGee, Owen 220 MacHale, Archbishop of Tuam, John 83, 195, 201–3, 227 Mackle, Mrs (Carraroe) 178–80 McNamara, H.V. 128–9 Macpherson, C. B. 65, 69 Magee, Rev. James Canon 205–6, 214n12, 215n36 Maguire, Moira 168 Mainséal, Eamonn (Mansfield) 40–1 Mansergh, Nicholas 80 Markievicz, Constance 176 Marlow, Joyce 179 Marxism 142 Marxist historians 160–1 Marx, Karl 73–5 Mayo, Lord 177 Merrick, Tobias 201 milk price revolt 262n85 Mill, John Stuart 10, 70 Mills, Sara 182–3 Mitchell, Adam 180, 189n30 Moody, T. W. 87–8, 157–8, 200, 219 Moore, Barrington 119 Moore, George 180–1 Moore, Kingsmill (Justice) 133 Moore, Thomas 208 Moran, Gerald 214n12 Moran, Michael 134–5, 141, 142 Murphy, Catherine (Cork) 183 Nally, P. W. 219, 231 National Centre Party 239–57 demise of 251–2 formation of 245

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National Farmers’ and Ratepayers’ League (NFRL) 245–6 nationalism 77, 139–40 radicals and home rulers 195 National Land Bank (NLB) 123–7, 245 National League see Land League New Departure, the 26, 95, 112–13 ‘first’ 219 ‘second’ 223, 233, 235n35 Nolan, Rev. Peter J. 207–8, 214n12 Nolan, Willie 14 Northern Ireland 80–6 landed families 55n106 sectarianism 81–2 The Troubles 158–60, 170–1 O’Brien, Conor Cruise 81, 158 O’Brien, George 244 O’Brien, William 27–8, 42, 80–5 UIL established 105 O’Callaghan, Margaret 198 O’Callaghan-Westropp, Colonel George 180, 241, 251, 258n14 O’Connell, Daniel 5, 8–9 O’Connor, Arthur 31 O’Connor, Daniel 231 O’Connor, Emmet 51n17 O’Connor Power, John 219–20, 222, 225, 226 O’Conor Don, Charles Owen, the 228 O’Donnell, Peadar 13, 45–6 O’Donovan Rossa, Jeremiah 219, 224 O’Higgins, Kevin 128–9 on husbandry 132 O’Kane, Rev. J. J. 206–7 O’Kane, John 201, 231 O’Kelly, James J. 227–8 O’Kelly, Seán D. 248, 260n49, 260n53 O’Leary, John 224–5 O’Neill, Brian 142 oral tradition 169–70 Ordnance Survey: Ireland in nineteenth century 4–5 Orridge, Andrew 95–6 O’Shea, James 196 O’Shiel, Kevin 36–40, 44, 49, 124–5, 128

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INDEX

O’Sullivan, Donal 177–8 O’Sullivan, Michael M. 221–7, 230, 232 O’Sullivan, Niamh 181 Ó Tuathaigh, Gearóid 161 Owen, Robert 17 Paige, Jeffry 239 parenting, influence of 168 Parnell, Anna 108–9, 182, 190n50 Parnell, Charles Stewart Davitt and 95 demonstrations 222, 226 discourse 4 electorate boosted 96 ‘great man’ thesis 198 ideologies 43, 185, 223–4 Kilmainham Treaty 108 land movement 112–13, 201–3, 228, 230, 232 Past and Present 161 Peel, Robert 9 Pollock, Allan 222 Poor Law Act (1838) 9–10 Poor Law Boards 96 Poor Law Valuations 40 Pope, Barbara Corrado 184 Prendergast, Rev. Richard 206, 214n12 Protection of Person and Property Act of 1881 89 pyschoanalysis 157–8, 166–7 rackrenting 71–2 see also land-grabbers Ranch War 11, 30, 33–5, 46, 47, 105, 122, 150–2 Redmond, John 28 Redpath, James 179, 186 red scare fears 245, 256 Reform Act of 1884 104 Reid, T. Wemyss 185 remembering, social and individual 169 rent strikes 32–5 revisionism 159, 165 Reynolds, Hannah 183 Richey, Alexander 67, 72 Robertson, Thomas 222–3 Robespierre 80–1, 86

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271

Rockites 4 Roman Catholic Church 67 Roscrea Meat Products Company 133–4 Royal Commission on Congestion 119–20 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) 178 ruralism see agrarianism Russell, T. W. 28, 51n26–7, 84 Ryan, Mark 219–20 Ryan, Meda 165 Ryan, Raymond 253, 262n92 Saor Éire 245 Scandinavia: farmers’ parties 255 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 168 Scotland: clearances 76 Scott, James C. 175 Sears, David 179 Selborne Committee report 240 self-sufficiency 139–40 Sexton, Thomas 228 Shawe-Taylor, John 84 Shaw Lefevre parliamentary committee 222 Sheehan, Margaret 186 Sheehy, David 186 Sheehy-Skeffington, Hanna 81 ‘shoneen’ 118 shopkeepers 98–9 sibling conflict 167 Sinn Féin agrarianism 141 anti-grazier agitation 121–2, 138–9 conservatism 164 development of 151–4, 165 Land Act (1923) 130–1 militancy 104 nationalist state emerging 11, 14–15, 30–1, 36, 42–7, 129 Smyth, William J. 4 socialism: rejection of 142 soil: contest for ‘soil of Ireland’ 3 Stanley, Edward Henry (Lord) 68 Stephen, Justice James 186–7 Stephens, James 218, 225 Stinchcombe, Arthur 119

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272

INDEX

Stone, Lawrence 156 strong farmers 49, 238 Suffrage Movement 107–9

valuation commissioners 123–4 Vaughan,W. E. (Bill) 43, 50n2, 66, 69, 87, 94–6 Vincent, John 161

TeBrake, Janet K. 181 Tenant League 13 Thompson, E. P. 161 ‘three Fs’ 10, 26–7, 209 Tierney, Michael 251 Tilly, Charles 87 Trollope, Anthony 71, 83 Senator Gotobed 70 Twomey, Daniel 44

Waddell, Commissioner 54n91 Wales 76 Ward, Margaret 176–8, 181–2 Weber, Max 212 Weeks, Liam 262n87 Weitzman, Martin 73, 75–6 Whelan, Kevin 56n122 Whyte, John 119 Wills-Sandford estate 35 Wolf, Eric R. 77 women compulsory acquisitions 57n132 and inheritance patterns 167–8 see also Ladies’ Land League Wyndham, George 84 on landlords 43 see also Land Acts and Bills, (1903) Wyndham Wyse Power, Jennie 109, 182–3 Wyse Power, Nancy 109

Ulster: circumstances of land occupancy 16–17 Ulster custom 17, 68–9, 72 United Farmers’ Protection Association 52n46 United Ireland Party 252 United Irish League (UIL) agrarianism 141 CDB castigated 36 development of 34–5, 150–2, 238 O’Brien 28, 105 at turn of nineteenth century 11, 48, 84, 138–9

16_Fergus_Index.indd 272

Young Ireland 5 Matthew Harris 219

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