Land League Suppressed
After the general election of April 1880 with the land war still raging, Parnell believed then that supporting land agitation was a means to achieving his objective of self-government. Prime Minister Gladstone attempted to resolve the land question with Balfour’s dual ownership Second Land Act of 1881, but it failed to eliminate tenant evictions. Parnell and his party lieutenants, William O'Brien, John Dillon, Michael Davitt and Willie Redmond went into a bitter verbal offensive against the Act and were imprisoned in October 1881 in Kilmainham Jail, together with other prominent members of the League, under the Irish Coercion Act. Together in jail it was easy to decide what action to take. The famous No Rent Manifesto was issued calling for a national tenant farmer rent strike. Finally, on 20 October the Government moved to suppress the Land League.
A genuine No Rent campaign was virtually impossible to organise, and many tenants were more interested in ‘putting the Land Act to the test’. It further seemed that the Coercion Act, instead of banishing agrarian crime, had only intensified it. Although the League discouraged violence, agrarian crimes increased widely. For the ten months before the Land Act was passed (March–December 1880), the number of "outrages" were 2,379, but in the corresponding period of 1881 with the Act in full operation the numbers were 3,821. The figures to March 1882, with Parnell in jail, showed a continued increase.
It was time for both sides to calm the situation. In April 1882 Parnell moved to make a deal with the government, seeing militancy would never win Home Rule. The settlement, known as the Kilmainham Treaty, involved withdrawing the manifesto and undertaking to move against agrarian crime. By 2 May all internees were released from jail, Davitt on the 6 May, the day of the Phoenix Park murders. With the Land League still suppressed, Parnell resurrected it with much ceremony together with Davitt on 17 October, proclaimed as a new organisation called the Irish National League.
Read more about this topic: Land War
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