Book Three: Distance and Devotion, 1871 to 1882

The years, 1871 to 1882

Nora's son Michael Gallagher, Seán's nephew, now writes from Ballycastle. His letters cross to his first cousin in New York, Brigid O'Donnell, called Young Brigid to tell her from her late grandmother. She is Seán's daughter, growing up American.

The Land War begins in Mayo. After poor harvests through the late 1870s brought the threat of famine back, a great meeting was held at Irishtown in April 1879, and that August the Land League of Mayo was founded in Castlebar. Michael Davitt, a Mayo man whose own family had been evicted, was at the heart of it. For the first time, tenants had a movement of their own.

Boycotting. In the autumn of 1880, a land agent named Charles Boycott, at Lough Mask in Mayo, was cut off entirely by the community around him. No one would work his land, sell to him, or speak to him. The tactic worked so completely that his name became a word in every language. The whole country watched Mayo.

The three Fs. The pressure produced the Land Law Act of 1881, which granted the "three Fs": fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale. It did not settle everything, but it was the first real crack in the old order, and it was argued over at every fireside in the parish.

The family in these years

Michael is a young farmer finding his voice in a movement that is finding its own. His letters to Young Brigid carry the meetings and the marches, an eviction resisted so a neighbour's family is kept off the roadside, and the strange pride of watching a word born in his own county travel the world. Across the water, his cousin reads about a homeland she has never seen, coming awake.

Moments from the twelve letters

• March 1871. Michael's first letter, a young man introducing himself to the cousin he has never met.
• April 1879. The Irishtown meeting, and the sense that the Land War has begun on their own doorstep.
• September 1880. The affair at Lough Mask, and the new word passing from mouth to mouth.
• August 1881. The Land Act and the three Fs, debated late into the night at the fireside.

Your county in Book Three

The O'Donnells are the Mayo edition, and the Land War began in Mayo. Each county lived the land question in its own way, so its edition carries its own agitation, evictions and estates across these years. See how the county personalisation works.