Land War - Land League 1879

Land League 1879

The Land League was founded in 1879 by Michael Davitt - a former Irish Republican Brotherhood member and radical politician. Initially it had sought reforms including the "Three Fs" - Fair rent, Fixity of tenure and Free sale, which were conceded and then enacted by the British Government between 1870 and 1881. With Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of mainstream Irish nationalism and the Irish Parliamentary Party as its President, it included other agrarian agitators and activists William O'Brien, John Dillon, Timothy Healy and Willie Redmond. As an outcome of Parnell's and O'Brien's October 1881 No Rent Manifesto, rents were paid in full for a period to League organizers or local parish priests, who then tried to negotiate a reduction with the landlord in settlement of the rents owed. Though rents were reduced judicially during 1881-82 by the new Land Commission, further abatements were sought. Agricultural labourers that were sub-tenants of tenant farmers were still expected to pay their rents.

The traditional view of the Land War in Ireland has been of the displacement of a Protestant Ascendancy class and the often absentee landlords. The former ascendancy had been on the decline since the Great Hunger of the late 1840s, and for them the problem was that previously agreed rents could not be paid after the slump in prices from 1874; some allowed generous rent rebates while others stuck to the agreements and enforced their property rights. Some were already owed rent and many had mortgaged their property and needed the rents to pay the mortgage costs. Many new landlords since the famine were Irish Catholics, but were still associated with the Ascendancy because of their wealth. A survey of the 4,000 largest Irish landlords in 1872 revealed that 29% lived outside Ireland. By then, 43% of all proprietors were Roman Catholics, though the richest owners were mostly Anglicans.

Rent strikes often led to evictions. Land League members resisted the evictions en masse during the Land War, resulting in enforcement of evictions by court judgements for possession that were carried out by the quasi-military Royal Irish Constabulary. Murders of some landlords, their agents and policemen, as well as attacks on supportive witnesses and on their property and animals, all occurred as reprisals for evictions. In response, the British army were often deployed to back up the police, restore law and order and enforce evictions, after the Coercion Acts were passed. For protesting tenants, these Acts were a form of martial law; their opponents saw it as the only way to guarantee their legal rights.