D. D. Sheehan - Land and Labour Leader

Land and Labour Leader

Early in his life when appointed correspondence secretary of the Kanturk Trade and Labour Council, Sheehan began active involvement in labour and trade union affairs – "I was engaged in an attempt to lead the labourers out of the poverty and misery that encompassed them" he wrote.

In August 1894 the Irish Land and Labour Association (ILLA) was formed to agitate on behalf of small tenant farmers and agrarian labourers as follower organisation to the Irish Democratic Trade and Labour Federation, setting forth Michael Davitt’s achievements. As ILLA chairman, Sheehan in alliance with its secretary the Clonmel, County Tipperary solicitor J. J. O'Shee (Member of Parliament for West Waterford from 1895), they campaigned for radical changes in land and labour laws, in particular the granting of smallholdings to rural labourers. After Sheehan returned from England in 1898 he threw himself into organising the ILLA, at the same time convinced that social change could only be advanced by means of political and constitutional agitation, but at no times through physical force.

In the towns and in the country, labourers had to live in hovels and mud-wall cabins which bred death and disease, huddled together in indiscriminate wretchedness, landless and starving, the last word in pitiful rags and bare bones. The grant of Local Government and the extension of the franchise, enabled the labourers to eventually take a mighty stride in the assertion of their independent claims. Sheehan recorded that

“Those of us who had taken up the labourer’s cause . . . went our way building up branches, extending knowledge of the labourers’ claims, educating these humble folk into a sense of their civic rights and citizen responsibilities . . . It was all desperate hard, uphill work, with little to encourage and no reward beyond the consciousness that one was reaching out a helping hand to the most neglected, despised and unregarded class in the community”

Under his leadership as President, the ILLA spread rapidly across Munster and later Connacht, campaigning vigorously against the pitiful plight of small tenant farmers and rural labourers, claiming for their rights, demanding sweeping changes to the inadequate Irish Land Acts, duly acknowledged by government. By 1900 he had helped found and organize nearly one hundred ILLA branches, mostly in County Cork, County Tipperary, and County Limerick, which increased to 144 by 1904. The achievement was not without considerable middle-class hostility to the labourer movement. Farmer, shopkeeper, clerical and political party hostility originated not alone locally, ill-will was equally noticeable at a national level. The Irish Party leadership refused to consider direct Parliamentary representation to the Land and Labour Association, an indication of the middle-class determination with maintaining its hold over national politics.