Origins
Acting in response to specific local needs, be it housing, land or employment, steadfast local spirits sustained Trade and Labour Leagues in parts of Cos Wicklow, Kilkenny, Laois, Kildare, Roscommon, Tyrone and Tipperary. However it was not until the formation of the Knights of the Plough a farm laborers' body founded by Benjamin Pellin, a small land-owner in the William Thompson tradition, at Narraghmore, Co. Kildare in June 1892, and of the National Labour League in Kanturk in January 1893, that the required organisation of the labourers began to take shape.
The rural area of North Cork around Kanturk and Duhallow had been since the 1860s a centre of labourer agitation and strikes, forming a number of early trade unions. The most successful was the Kanturk Trade and Labour Association established in 1889 with the assistance amongst others, of a young man as its secretary, D. D. Sheehan who had experienced eviction with his family at the height of the Land League's Land War in 1880, when his father followed William O'Brien's "Pay No Rent" manifesto, their farm taken over by a "land-grabber" who paid their rent arrears. The Kanturk Association spread to other districts under a new title, the Duhallow Trade and Labour Association, in which Michael Davitt also became involved, until it broke up under the Irish Party's "Parnell split" in 1891.
It was realised on all sides, that the 1884 enfranchisement of the labourers had been insufficient in itself to wrest solutions to grievances from the state and the rural upper- and middle-classes. The control exercised over the implementation of the labourers' acts by conservative elements in rural society had had a ruinious affect. This finally brought the labourers' bodies together in order to gain political muscle. It became the raison d'être for calling a labour convention at Limerick Junction, County Tipperary on 15 August 1894, at which the Irish Land and Labour Association was created and officially launched, its founders D. D. Sheehan as chairman together with a young Carrick-on-Suir solicitor J. J. O’Shee as its secretary.
Sheehan founded the Association to pursue tenant-farmer and labourer's grievances as a labour lobby within the nationalist movement. With labourers "as strangers in a strange land, without influence and without rights" it was to be expected that obstructions placed in the path of the labourers' welfare by landowners and farmers would invite bitter recrimination at the new Associations meetings. The Association would prove itself to be the most enduring of the labour groups. Agrarian agitation was unique in that it was an all-Ireland agitation. Ulster tenant-farmers and labourers equally demanded rights, their movement the Farmers and Labourers Union led by T. W. Russell. The Irish Trade Union Congress passed a motion in 1896 which recommended that in every parish in Ireland, a branch of the ILLA be founded.
Read more about this topic: Irish Land And Labour Association
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