United Irish League - Renewed Agitation

Renewed Agitation

Throughout the early months of 1901 agitation was limited, merely thirty-five cases of boycotting reported, due to O’Brien’s weak health and Davitt being in America for most of the year. Despite this the Nationalists felt the old sting of League meetings being outlawed, the traditional reaction of the Administration to the least sign of popular unrest. In August 1901 the UIL reached nearly 100,000 members, when its Directory issued a resolution calling for active agitation throughout Ireland. O'Brien now at the height of his prestige, dominated the UIL machine and in a vigorous speech on 15 September called for “a great national strike against ranching and grabbing” as its winter program. What he wanted was boycotting and the filling of Irish jails. Dillon also made several fiery speeches against the government, and to tenants encouraging them to demand rent reduction and "for the purpose of driving every landlord out of the country".

With the National Convention in January 1902 claiming 1230 branches, the scene was thus set for a clash between a strong government, which was in no mood to allow an Irish land war to deflect it from its own constructive ideas, and a League pledged to attack landlordism, turning more and more to the traditional weapons of boycott and outrage. The attitude of the Dublin Castle administration hardened to such a degree that O’Brien moved a parliamentary amendment in January 1901 condemning a resort to the methods of Arthur Balfour. A steady stream of proclamations and arrests continued so that between 1901 and 1902 amongst others, thirteen Irish MPs were imprisoned under the Crimes Act and by the Spring of 1902 the counties of Cavan, Clare, Cork, Leitrim, Mayo, Roscommon, Sligo, Tipperary and Waterford were proclaimed to fall under the Act.

The UIL agitation focused attention on the fact that many families lived on patches of land too small to provide a decent livelihood even without rent. Agitation by tenant farmers continued to press for compulsory land purchase, but the four years of almost ceaseless activity that O’Brien put into the League had not brought the benefits for the tenants he had hoped for, apart from giving the Parliamentary party a new lease of life. Nevertheless, the Chief Secretary for Ireland Wyndham came to recognise the dire situation of the starved population of the west of Ireland. The existence of the United Irish League, the conversion of the Ulster Protestant tenant leader T. W. Russell to compulsory land purchase, O’Brien whipping up enthusiasm for his winter program of boycotting and agitation together with the cost of maintaining a huge police force to quell agrarian unrest, influenced Wyndham to recognise that the time had come to construct a Land Bill for Ireland.