United Irish League - Objectives

Objectives

The decline in population since the Great Famine had been accompanied by the conversion of previously cultivated land into large grazing ranches, so that in many areas most of the local population was still crowded on tiny, uneconomical holdings within sight of open, untilled fields. At the very place in Westport where in 1879 Parnell once launched the Irish Land League, and in response to the near-famine of 1897-8, O’Brien established a new organisation, the United Irish League (UIL) in January 1898 under the banner of ‘’The Land for the People’. The League had as its prime declared object the breaking up of the large grassland farmers, by compelling them to surrender their lands voluntarily to the Congested Districts Board, established by Balfour in 1891, for redistribution amongst the tenants of smaller agricultural holdings. It was largely welcomed even amongst some of the clergy whilst the authorities on the other hand kept the new movement under close observation. Actually, O’Brien put more life into the country in the first six months of the League than the Nationalist party had aroused in years, after widespread agrarian agitation recommenced in 1898.

The clergy in the district around Westport and Newport, County Mayo promoted the League with considerable zeal, one parish priest called for a branch to hunt the grabbers and Scottish graziers out of the country . Elsewhere the clergy were in no hurry to sanction the League’s agitation. Except for Archbishop McEvilly of Tuam, who expressed sympathy for the goals of its agitation. By September 1899 the League had spread to the extent that all six Connacht bishops expressed approval of attempts "to create peasant proprietorship with enlarged holdings in the west of Ireland". The Tuam provincial hierarchy’s accommodation of the League up to 1900 reflected predominantly the genuine congruence of their social ideals with the stated aims of the movement.

The League was equally and explicitly designed to reconcile the various parliamentary fragments by bringing them together in a new grass roots organisation around a programme of agrarian agitation, political reform, settlement of the Irish land question and pursuit of Irish Home Rule. William O’Brien was the prime mover, and the difficulty of the project can be gauged from the fact that the parliamentary leaders had very different opinions on the land question. Dillon regarded the unresolved land issue as an essential motor for the nationalist home rule movement. O’Brien championed the smallholders against the large graziers while Davitt, whose original idea had been state ownership and agrarian socialism, was not particularly enamoured by peasant proprietorship.

Though O’Brien claimed that his organisation had no political objective, he became intrinsically aware that to further their cause the three split factions of the IPP needed to be re-united. He strongly believed that only agitational politics combined with constitutional pressures, rather than physical force, were the best means of achieving its goals. It was O’Brien’s and Davitt’s hope that reunion could be forced on the party from the outside, by organising the country and transforming the Irish representation in Parliament through the election of "good men". Dillon became ambivalent about the new association, believing that it would lead to confrontation with the government and endanger the alliance with the Liberals . This marked the first significant strain in the O’Brien-Dillon relationship.