The Tenant Right League was a federation of local societies formed in Ireland in the wake of the Great Famine to check the power of landlords and advance the rights of tenant farmers. An initiative of northern unionists and southern nationalists, it articulated a common programme of agrarian reform. In the wake of the League's success in helping return 48 pledged MPs to the Westminster Parliament in 1852, the promised unity of "North and South" dissolved. An attempt was made to revive the all-Ireland effort in 1874, but struggle for rights to the land was to continue through to the end of the century on lines that reflected the regional and sectarian division over Ireland's continued place in the United Kingdom.
The immediate occasion for the formation of the League was the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849. The legislation failed to acknowledge the Ulster tenant right. The un-codified custom in Ireland's northern province restrained the freedom of landowners to rack rent and to evict paying tenants at will. It also allowed that in working his holding a tenant acquired an "interest" that he might sell on at the end of his tenancy. Typically this took the form of demanding from the incoming tenant a lump sum payment (often as high as £ 10 an acre) that might, for example, be enough cash to allow the outgoing tenant to take his family to America.[1]:143–144
Supporters argued that by granting farmers a degree of security and by allowing them to at least share in the benefits of their own improvements to the land (clearing, fencing, drainage etc), the tenant right was the key to Ulster's relative prosperity. Attacks upon it by landowners and land speculators had provoked serious agrarian disturbances in the seventies of the 18th century, the Hearts of Steel Rebellion, and in the 1830s these had begun to recur with a new tenant fraternity, the "Tommy Downshire Boys".[2][3]
The 1849 Act had been preceded in 1843 by the Devon Commission, which in its report on the Irish land system rejected the Ulster Custom as dangerous to "the just rights of property". Landlords who followed the Commission suggestion and chose either to ignore or to trivialise the custom, had had their actions upheld by the courts.[2] Against this background, and with additional distress of the enveloping Famine that bore down on those still able to sustain themselves in rising Poor Law rates, otherwise loyal Protestant farmers interpreted the omission of tenant right from Act as an existential threat. Increasing evictions (of which there were officially over 100,000 in 1849).[4]:294 also provoked new tenant protection societies (commonly under the guidance of local Roman Catholic clergy) in the south for whom an extension of the Ulster Custom was a minimum demand.[5]
The Young Ireland veteran Charles Gavan Duffy was persuaded by the initiative of James MacKnight, editor of the Londonderry Standard,William Sharman Crawford MP, a progressive County Down landlord, and group of radical Presbyterian ministers, that there was a basis for a national movement.[6] In his paper The Nation Duffy reproduced an address by their newly formed Ulster Tenant Right Association in which McKnight proposed that "all proprietary right has its foundation in human labour'" and that, "as a public institution, created by state", landlordism should be "regulated by law".[7]
The "League of North and South"
Together with Frederick Lucas, former Quaker and founder of the progressive international Catholic weekly, The Tablet, and John Gray, owner of the leading nationalist paper, the Freeman's Journal, Duffy and MacKnight issued writs for a national tenant-right convention.[6][8]
The convention met on September 8, 1850, in the City Assembly House at Dublin. Duffy recalls "upwards of forty members of Parliament, about two hundred Catholic and Presbyterian clergymen, and gentlemen farmers, traders, and professional men from every district in the country" answering "the call".
Reserved, stern Covenanters [Presbyterian traditionalists] from the North, ministers and their elders for the most part, with a group of brighter recruits of a new generation, who came afterwards to be known as Young Ulster, sat beside [Catholic] priests who had lived through the horrors of a famine which left their churches empty and their graveyards overflowing; flanked by farmers who survived that evil time like the veterans of a hard campaign; while citizens, professional men, the popular journalists from the four provinces, and the founders and officers of the Tenant Protection Societies completed the assembly.[6]
With MacKnight presiding, the assembled formed the all-Ireland Tenant Right League. A council was elected of 120 representatives from the four Irish provinces,[8] dedicated to a reform of land tenure popularly summarised as the "Three F's".[9][10]
Fair Rent (assessed by land value and fixed to prevent the rack renting of tenant improvements)
Fixity of Tenure (so long as the fair rent is paid)
Free Sale (the right of farmers to sell their "interest" in their holding to an incoming tenant).
Although free sale (the Ulster Custom) implied that tenants possessed property rights in land they did not legally own, the League programme did not touch directly on the question of land ownership.[11] Neither did it address the distress of the landless and un-enfranchised rural majority: "cottiers", "farm servants" and their dependants.[12] Despite its populist rhetoric, the League consisted "almost exclusively of well-off farmers",[11] and could be represented by "improving landowners" such as William Sharman Crawford in County Down and George Henry Moore in County Mayo.
County meetings in Wexford and Kilkenny hosted MacKnight, the Rev. David Bell, John Rogers and other Presbyterian ministers who the Belfast News Letter accused of endeavouring, “to inspire a bitter hatred against the class" of landlords, and of advocating theories, “calculated to stir up animosities between the landlord and the tenant classes", "infinitely more bitter", than any previously.[13] Bell returned the favour inviting Catholic delegates from the south to an assembly of tenant farmers at Ballybay, in County Monaghan, where, Duffy enthused, "resolutions were proposed by Masters of Orange Lodges, and seconded by Catholic priests".[6]
The Tenant Right League built in strength under its national organiser, the Young Irelander from Newry, John Martin. It had the support of the surviving Repealers in the British House of Commons; and of a number of English Radicals. In the House of Commons, the Radical leader John Bright noted in the wake of the Dublin convention that "Instead of the [tenant-right] agitation being confined, as heretofore to the Roman Catholics and their clergy, Protestant and Dissenting clergymen seem to be amalgamated with Roman Catholics at present; indeed, there seems an amalgamation of all sects on this question", and he advised the House to "resolutely legislate on it."[8]
In the 1852 general election, the League appeared to triumph. Some 48 Tenant-Right candidates, including Duffy and Lucas, were returned to parliament having taken the pledge "to hold themselves perfectly independent of, and in opposition to, all governments which do not make it part of their policy and a cabinet question to give the tenantry of Ireland a measure embodying the principles" of a tenant-right bill that Sharman Crawford (then MP for Rochdale in England) had unsuccessfully proposed in 1852.[5]
Disaffection in the north, secession in the south
The engagement of Ulster protestants, though considerable to begin with, soon fell away.[5] Of the 48 pledged MP who from 1852 were to sit at Westminster as the Independent Irish Party only one had been returned from Ulster: William Kirk from Newry where, despite the property franchise, the Catholic vote was determinant.[14][15] In Monaghan, Bell was to find that of his 100 congregants who had signed the requisition asking John Gray to stand in their constituency only 11 voted for him.[16] In Down, Sharman Crawford had his meetings broken up by Orange vigilantes.[17] In the 1857 general election Samuel MacCurdy Greer won on a platform of the three F's in the City of Derry, but it was by identifying with the British Radicals (later the Liberal Party) not with the IIP.[18][19] "In language reminiscent of 1798", Presbyterian journalists, tenants and ministers roundly denounced Irish landlords, and their auxiliaries, the established Church of Ireland and the Orange Order, and they did not desert the tenant cause.[20] John Rogers (of Comber) who likened landlords to "locusts that came up on Judea"[20] and who saw in the Tenant League a "union of north and south in one glorious brotherhood for the regeneration of their common country" was to be elected Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in 1863, replacing Henry Cooke who had accused him of preaching communism,[15] and again in 1864.[21]
But for an all-Ireland tenant league, an early difficulty in the north was the campaign for the repeal of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act 1851 in which Lucas and several prominent member of the League were involved. Together with the presence of so many Repealers (ready to support a Catholic-majority parliament in Dublin), the determination to remove restrictions on the titles assumed by a revived Catholic episcopate in both Ireland and Great Britain heightened the suspicion that the League was being used for political purposes beyond its declared agenda.[5] It was the case as well that landowners in the north threatened to withdraw their consent for the existing Ulster Custom if their Conservative nominees were not elected,[22][20] and that they had League electoral meetings broken up by Orange "bludgeon men".[15] In November 1852, Lord Derby's short-lived Conservative government introduced a land bill to compensate Irish tenants on eviction for improvements they had made to the land. The Tenant Compensation Bill passed in the House of Commons in 1853 and 1854, but failed win consent of the landed grandees in the House of Lords. The bill had little impressed the League and its MPs as landlords would been left free to pass on the costs of compensation through their still unrestricted freedom to raise rents.[23]
Holding the balance of power in the House of Commons, the Independent Irish MPs voted to bring down the government. But in the process two of the leading members, John Sadlier and William Keogh, broke their pledges of independent opposition and accepted positions (respectively as a junior Lord of the Treasury and as Solicitor General) in a new, on the issue of tenant rights equally unsympathetic, Whig-Peelite administration..[4]:295[24] Significantly in a League debate in February 1853 MacKnight, wary of any sign of Irish separatism, did not support Duffy in condemning these desertions. Rather, he protested the increasingly strident nationalism of southern League spokesman and their supporters.[25]
The Catholic Primate, Archbishop Paul Cullen, who had been sceptical of the independent opposition policy from the outset, sought to rein in clerical support for the remaining IIP in the constituencies.[26] This was accompanied by the defection from the League of the Catholic Defence Association (to it detractors, "the Pope's Brass Band"). Lucas's decision to take a complaint against Cullen to Rome only further alienated clerical support.[27]:120
Collapse
Neither the League nor its parliamentary grouping survived the decade. Lucas died in October 1855 shortly after the failure of his mission to Rome. A month later Duffy published a farewell address to his constituents, declaring that it was no longer possible to accomplish the task for which he had solicited their votes[28] He emigrated to Victoria, Australia, where on a platform of land reform he re-entered politics.
By 1856, the parliamentary strength of the independents had dwindled to a dozen. When, in 1858, the Conservatives returned to office with a stable majority, "the temptation to trade Irish votes for Irish concessions became in the end irresistible".[27]:121
Agricultural prices began to rise from 1853, and were given an additional stimulus by the onset of the Crimean War in the following years. Tenant-right agitation died down. MacKnight remained active in a movement for whom the notorious Derryveagh evictions of 1861 served as a sharp reminder of the still unrestricted power of the landowner.[1] Shortly before MacKnight's death, and as agrarian conditions again deteriorated, there was an attempt to revive an all-Ireland league. In January 1874, the Route Tenants Defence Association (Ballymoney) for whom MacKnight had been an inspiration,[29] organised a major North-South National Tenants Rights conference in Belfast.[30] In addition to the three F's, resolutions called for loans to facilitate tenant purchase of land and for breaking the landlord monopoly on local government.[31][32] Once again there was a determination to organise parliamentary constituencies so as to return Members pledged to tenant rights.[32] The challenge, however, came sooner than expected. A general election was called for February.
In the south the tenant programme was adopted by candidates of the new Home Rule League, while in the north it was championed by Liberals. Conscious that the [secret] Ballot Act 1872 had weakened the landlords' authority, Conservatives expressed a willingness to give the Ulster Custom legal force. But as in 1852, they relied heavily on confusing tenant-righters with Catholic nationalists and their separatist cause.[32]
The Conservatives triumph in Ulster was not as complete as in 1852: two tenant-right Liberals were returned from County Londonderry, and in DownJames Sharman Crawford succeeded where in 1852 his father William had failed. However, in the south and west the tenant-right movement clearly aligned with Home Rulers. With the formation in 1879 of the Irish National Land League the struggle for rights to the land advanced under the openly nationalist leadership of Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell.
The second Land Act introduced by William Ewart Gladstone in 1881 conceded free sale, improved security of tenure, and introduced a machinery for arbitrating rent. Finding themselves reduced to not much more than a receiver of rents, landlords denounced the concessions as "confiscation".[33] For tenants in Ulster, including Protestants who had flocked to Land League meetings only the year before,[1]:156 the Act was seen as fulfilling their key demands and they immediately used the Act to adjust rents. After a few years' experience of the Act land agitation revived in the south and west, but the basis for cooperation with Protestant tenants in the north had been further reduced.[5]
Notes
1 2 3 Bardon, Jonathan (1996). A Shorter Illustrated History of Ulster. Belfast: Blackstaff Press. ISBN0856405868.
1 2 Kennedy, Brian (1954), Ch. IV "Tenant Right before 1870", in T.W. Moody and J. C. Beckett, Ulster since 1800, (pp. 39-49), pp. 42-43. London, British Broadcasting Corporation.
↑ McKnight, James (1848). The Ulster Tenants' Claim of Right; or, Landownership A State Trust; The Ulster Tenant-Right An Original Grant from the British Crown, and the Necessity of Extending its General Principle to the other Provinces of Ireland, Demonstrated; In a Letter to the Right Honourable the Lord John Russell. Dublin.
↑ Walker, Brian M., ed. (1978). Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland 1801–1922. A New History of Ireland. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. pp.296–7. ISBN0901714127. ISSN0332-0286.
The Independent Irish Party (IIP) was the designation chosen by the 48 Members of the United Kingdom Parliament returned from Ireland with the endorsement of the Tenant Right League in the general election of 1852. The League had secured their promise to offer an independent opposition to the dominant landlord interest, and to advance an agrarian reform programme popularly summarised as the "three F's": fair rent, fixed tenure and free sale.
Daniel O'Connell (I) (Irish: Dónall Ó Conaill; 6 August 1775 – 15 May 1847), hailed in his time as The Liberator, was the acknowledged political leader of Ireland's Roman Catholic majority in the first half of the 19th century. His mobilisation of Catholic Ireland, down to the poorest class of tenant farmers, secured the final instalment of Catholic emancipation in 1829 and allowed him to take a seat in the United Kingdom Parliament to which he had been twice elected.
The Irish Parliamentary Party was formed in 1874 by Isaac Butt, the leader of the Nationalist Party, replacing the Home Rule League, as official parliamentary party for Irish nationalist Members of Parliament (MPs) elected to the House of Commons at Westminster within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland up until 1918. Its central objectives were legislative independence for Ireland and land reform. Its constitutional movement was instrumental in laying the groundwork for Irish self-government through three Irish Home Rule bills.
The Irish National Land League was an Irish political organisation of the late 19th century which sought to help poor tenant farmers. Its primary aim was to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they worked on. The period of the Land League's agitation is known as the Land War. Historian R. F. Foster argues that in the countryside the Land League "reinforced the politicization of rural Catholic nationalist Ireland, partly by defining that identity against urbanization, landlordism, Englishness and—implicitly—Protestantism." Foster adds that about a third of the activists were Catholic priests, and Archbishop Thomas Croke was one of its most influential champions.
Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, KCMG, PC, was an Irish poet and journalist, Young Irelander and tenant-rights activist. After emigrating to Australia in 1856 he entered the politics of Victoria on a platform of land reform, and in 1871–1872 served as the colony's 8th Premier.
George Henry Moore was an Irish politician who, in the 1850s, was a co-founder of the Tenant Right League, of the Catholic Defence Association and, as the Member for Mayo in the United Kingdom Parliament, of the Independent Irish Party. Although an advocate of tenant rights, and renowned for his relief efforts during the Great Famine, at the time of his death in 1870 Moore was defending his rights as a landowner against an oath-bound tenant society, the Ribbonmen. He was the father of the novelist George Augustus Moore and of the Fianna Fáil Senator Maurice George Moore.
The Land Acts were a series of measures to deal with the question of tenancy contracts and peasant proprietorship of land in Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Five such acts were introduced by the government of the United Kingdom between 1870 and 1909. Further acts were introduced by the governments of the Irish Free State after 1922 and more acts were passed for Northern Ireland.
Ireland was part of the United Kingdom from 1801 to 1922. For almost all of this period, the island was governed by the UK Parliament in London through its Dublin Castle administration in Ireland. Ireland underwent considerable difficulties in the 19th century, especially the Great Famine of the 1840s which started a population decline that continued for almost a century. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a vigorous campaign for Irish Home Rule. While legislation enabling Irish Home Rule was eventually passed, militant and armed opposition from Irish unionists, particularly in Ulster, opposed it. Proclamation was shelved for the duration following the outbreak of World War I. By 1918, however, moderate Irish nationalism had been eclipsed by militant republican separatism. In 1919, war broke out between republican separatists and British Government forces. Subsequent negotiations between Sinn Féin, the major Irish party, and the UK government led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which resulted in five-sixths of the island seceding from the United Kingdom, becoming the Irish Free State, with only the six northeastern counties remaining within the United Kingdom.
The Protestant Ascendancy, also known simply as the Ascendancy, was the political, economic, and social domination of Ireland between the 17th century and the early 20th century by a minority of landowners, Protestant clergy, and members of the professions, all members of the Established Church. The Ascendancy excluded other groups from politics and the elite, most numerous among them Roman Catholics but also members of the Presbyterian and other Protestant denominations, along with non-Christians such as Jews, until the Reform Acts (1832–1928).
Young Ireland was a political and cultural movement in the 1840s committed to an all-Ireland struggle for independence and democratic reform. Grouped around the Dublin weekly The Nation, it took issue with the compromises and clericalism of the larger national movement, Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association, from which it seceded in 1847. Despairing, in the face of the Great Famine, of any other course, in 1848 Young Irelanders attempted an insurrection. Following the arrest and the exile of most of their leading figures, the movement split between those who carried the commitment to "physical force" forward into the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and those who sought to build a "League of North and South" linking an independent Irish parliamentary party to tenant agitation for land reform.
The Land War was a period of agrarian agitation in rural Ireland that began in 1879. It may refer specifically to the first and most intense period of agitation between 1879 and 1882, or include later outbreaks of agitation that periodically reignited until 1923, especially the 1886–1891 Plan of Campaign and the 1906–1909 Ranch War. The agitation was led by the Irish National Land League and its successors, the Irish National League and the United Irish League, and aimed to secure fair rent, free sale, and fixity of tenure for tenant farmers and ultimately peasant proprietorship of the land they worked.
William Sharman Crawford (1780–1861) was an Irish landowner who, in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, championed a democratic franchise, a devolved legislature for Ireland, and the interests of the Irish tenant farmer. As a Radical representing first, with Daniel O'Connell's endorsement, Dundalk (1835-1837) and then, with the support of Chartists, the English constituency of Rochdale (1841–1852) he introduced bills to codify and extend in Ireland the Ulster tenant right. In his last electoral contest, standing on the platform of the all-Ireland Tenant Right League in 1852 he failed to unseat the Conservative and Orange party in Down, his native county.
William Johnston was an Irish Orangeman, unionist and Member of Parliament for Belfast, distinguished by his independent working-class following and commitment to reform. He first entered the United Kingdom Parliament as an Independent Conservative in 1868, celebrated for having broken a standing ban on Orange Order processions and as the nominee of an association of "Protestant Workers". At Westminster, Johnston supported the secret ballot; the accommodation of trade unions and strike action; land reform; and woman's suffrage. He was succeeded in 1902 as the MP for South Belfast, by Thomas Sloan, similarly supported by loyalist workers in opposition to the official unionist candidates favoured by their employers.
Protestantism is a Christian minority on the island of Ireland. In the 2011 census of Northern Ireland, 48% (883,768) described themselves as Protestant, which was a decline from approximately 50% from the 2001 census. In the 2011 census of the Republic of Ireland, 4.27% of the population described themselves as Protestant. In the Republic, Protestantism was the second largest religious grouping until the 2002 census in which they were exceeded by those who chose "No Religion". Some forms of Protestantism existed in Ireland in the early 16th century before the English Reformation, but demographically speaking these were very insignificant and the real influx of Protestantism began only with the spread of the English Reformation to Ireland. The Church of Ireland was established by King Henry VIII of England, who had himself proclaimed as King of Ireland.
Samuel MacCurdy Greer (1810–1880), was an Irish politician who, in Ulster championed Presbyterian representation and tenant rights. He was a founder member of the Ulster Tenant Right Association and of the all-Ireland Tenant Right League. In the general election of 1857 he was returned to Westminster on a tenant-right platform for County Londonderry.
William Kirk was an Irish linen-mill entrepreneur and Member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. He was elected, with the endorsement of the Tenant Right League, as an independent for constituency of Newry in 1852, and again in 1857. He stood down as a candidate for re-election in 1859. In 1865 he entered the arena as a Liberal candidate for Armagh, but he failed to win the seat. His final appearance on the political stage was in 1868, when, returning to Newry as a Liberal, he successfully contested his old seat. Despite failing health, he continued to attend parliament, and maintained his support for tenant rights and for "mixed" education.
The Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870 was an Act passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1870.
The Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881 was the second Irish land act passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1881.
David Bell (1818–1890) was an Irish tenant-right activist who became both an Irish, and later in the United States a pro-Reconstruction, republican. A Secessionist Presbyterian minister, he was radicalised by his experience of the Great Irish Famine. Bell helped establish the Tenant League in Ulster, but increasingly despaired of constitutional methods. He was inducted into the Irish Republican Brotherhood by Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa and drawn onto its executive council. In American exile from 1865, he sought to associate physical-force Fenianism with the Radical U.S. Republican agenda of black suffrage and Reconstruction.
James MacKnight (1801–1876) was an Irish journalist and agrarian reformer whose call for Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure and Free Sale briefly surmounted Ireland's political and sectarian division. In the United Kingdom general election of 1852 the all-Ireland Tenant Right League, which MacKnight formed in a joint initiative with Charles Gavan Duffy, helped return 48 pledged MPs. Pulled between Catholic and nationalist sentiment in the south and the strength of Protestant and unionist feeling in the north, the League and its Independent Irish Party did not survive the elections of 1857. In Ulster, MacKnight supported tenant-right candidates committed to the legislative union with Great Britain, while remaining sharply critical of British government efforts to address Ireland's continuing agrarian crisis.
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This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : O'Brien, Richard Barry (1912). "Duffy, Charles Gavan". In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography (2nd supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co.
