The Land War: How Mayo Started the Fight for the Land

On 20 April 1879, on open ground at Irishtown near Claremorris, a crowd of tenant farmers gathered to protest the rents being demanded on a local estate. Nothing about the day announced a turning point. Yet historians date the start of the Land War in Ireland to that Mayo meeting, and what began there did as much as anything in the nineteenth century to change who would own the land of Ireland. For once, the story of a national fight does not begin in Dublin or London. It begins in the west, in Mayo.

The land they worked but did not own

In the 1870s the great majority of Irish farmers owned no part of the fields they worked. They were tenants, most holding from year to year at a rent the landlord or his agent set, and a tenant in arrears could be put out with little recourse. Outside Ulster and its tenant custom, a man who drained a field or built a byre was improving another man’s property, and could find his rent raised for his trouble. Behind every dealing between landlord and tenant, thirty years back and still within living memory, stood the Famine and the clearances that followed it.

At the end of the 1870s the system met a crisis it could not carry. Three poor seasons ran together from 1877, cheap American grain was dragging farm prices down, and in 1879 the potato failed again in the west. In Mayo that winter the talk was not of politics but of hunger coming back. Rents that had been payable in the good years of the early 1870s simply were not payable now, and evictions were rising.

Michael Davitt comes home

The man who turned that fear into an organised movement had lived every part of it. Michael Davitt was born at Straide, Co. Mayo, in 1846, in the middle of the Famine. When he was four, the family was evicted for arrears and took the emigrant road to Lancashire. At eleven, working in a cotton mill, he lost his right arm to a machine. As a young man he gave himself to the Fenian movement and served seven years in Dartmoor for arms smuggling, and he came out of prison in December 1877 holding to a simple, radical idea: the land question was not one Irish grievance among many. It was the ground the rest stood on, and any fight for the nation had to begin in the tenant farmer’s field.

Irishtown, 1879: Ireland’s Land War begins in Mayo

Davitt was closely involved in organising the Irishtown meeting, together with local men such as James Daly of Castlebar, editor of the Connaught Telegraph. The grievance was immediate and local: rents on an estate near the town. The crowd was counted in the thousands, with claims running far higher, and the meeting stayed orderly from first to last. Within weeks, the rents in dispute had been reduced.

That result travelled. Through the summer of 1879, great open-air meetings spread across Mayo and the neighbouring counties. At Westport that June, Charles Stewart Parnell, the rising force of the Irish party at Westminster, told a Mayo crowd to keep a firm grip of their homesteads, and the phrase went around the country. The method was new: not conspiracy, not a rising, but the open, massed pressure of tenants who had discovered they could act together and win.

From Castlebar to the country: the Land League

On 16 August 1879, at Daly’s Hotel on the Mall in Castlebar, the movement gave itself a structure: the National Land League of Mayo. Its aims were blunt. Defend tenants facing eviction, force rents down to what the failed seasons could bear, and work towards the end of landlordism itself, the land of Ireland for the people of Ireland.

Two months later, on 21 October 1879 in Dublin, the Mayo model went national as the Irish National Land League, with Parnell as president and Davitt among its secretaries. What made the League unlike any tenant movement before it was organisation and money, and a great deal of the money was American. Parnell toured the United States in the early months of 1880, raising funds for famine relief and for the League among the emigrant communities of the eastern cities, and Patrick Ford’s New York weekly, the Irish World, gathered subscriptions from Irish readers in mill towns and mining camps across America. The emigrants’ dollars did for the national fight what their remittances had long done for their own families: kept it standing. For the first time, a tenant facing his landlord had lawyers, funds and newspapers at his back.

Boycotts, coercion and the three Fs

The League’s sharpest weapon turned out to be refusal. A landlord, agent or land-grabber who crossed the community was to be left entirely alone, no labour, no custom, no dealings, a discipline set out by Parnell at Ennis in September 1880 and put to the test within weeks on an estate at Lough Mask, in the affair that gave the English language the word boycott. Alongside it ran the daily war: evictions resisted, League huts built for families put out on the road, rents withheld until abatements were given.

The government answered with coercion, and Davitt’s ticket-of-leave was revoked in February 1881, sending him back to prison to the fury of the country. But in the same year the pressure told. Gladstone’s Land Law (Ireland) Act of 1881 conceded the “three Fs” the movement had demanded: fair rent, fixed by new land courts; fixity of tenure while that rent was paid; and free sale of the tenant’s interest in his holding. The courts began cutting rents across the country. It was nothing like the end of the matter, but the landlord’s old absolute power was broken, and both sides knew it.

Even then the fight was not done. That October, Parnell and other leaders were jailed in their turn and the League suppressed, and through the winter that followed much of its work passed to the Ladies’ Land League under Anna Parnell, which kept evicted families housed and the movement breathing until the prisoners came out in 1882.

What Mayo started

The Land War did not so much end as change instruments. Purchase acts followed the rent fights: the Ashbourne Act of 1885 lent tenants the full price of their holdings, and the Wyndham Act of 1903 moved whole estates from landlord to tenant. Within a lifetime of the Irishtown meeting, the tenant farmers of Ireland had, holding by holding, become its owners. Davitt lived to see most of it done; he died in 1906. It amounted to a social revolution carried out field by field, and it began at a meeting in a Mayo field.

In Yours, From Ireland, these are the years of Book Three, and the family lives close to the centre of them. Michael Gallagher writes to his cousin in New York of the Irishtown meeting in April 1879, stands in the crowd at Castlebar that August, watches an evicted neighbour’s family kept off the roadside in February 1880, and argues the three Fs at the fireside in August 1881. You can read the Land War in Book Three, one of the eight Books of the family’s century of letters.