Michael Davitt(1846–1906)

Michael Davitt was born at Straide near Foxford in County Mayo on the twenty-fifth of March 1846, second child of Martin Davitt, a tenant farmer of four acres, and Catherine Kielty. The family was evicted from the small holding in the Famine year of 1850 when Michael was four, on the inability to meet the rent. They emigrated to Haslingden in Lancashire, where the father took mill-hand work. Michael was put to mill labour at Stellfox's cotton mill at nine; at eleven, on the eighth of May 1857, his right arm was caught in the cotton-spinning machinery and was amputated at the shoulder. The Wesleyan Methodist mill-owner John Dean paid for his education at the Wesleyan day-school at Haslingden through the next four years; he took a clerk's post with John Cockcroft of Haslingden at sixteen, and through the late 1860s worked as the local Fenian organiser of the IRB across north Lancashire.

He was arrested at Paddington Station in May 1870 with a consignment of fifty revolvers for the IRB, was convicted of treason-felony at the Old Bailey on the eighteenth of July 1870 and sentenced to fifteen years' penal servitude. He served seven and a half years in Dartmoor Prison under the harshest conditions of the late-Victorian penal system, was released under ticket-of-leave in December 1877 in his thirty-second year, and returned to Mayo to find the small-tenant economy of the west again collapsing under poor harvests, falling agricultural prices and renewed evictions.

On the twentieth of April 1879, at Irishtown in his native County Mayo, he convened the large public meeting that founded the Irish National Land League, with himself as Secretary and Charles Stewart Parnell, the rising Home Rule MP, as President from October 1879. The League's tactical method, devised by Davitt and named at the Mayo meeting of September 1880 at which Parnell delivered the boycott speech, was the moral coventry of any agent or tenant who took up an evicted holding, combined with the parliamentary obstructionist tactics of Parnell at Westminster. The Land War of 1879 to 1882 broke the landlord system through Ireland: the Land Act of 1881 gave the three Fs (fair rent, fixity of tenure, free sale) to the Irish tenancy; the Land Purchase Acts of 1885, 1888, 1891 and 1903 (the last under George Wyndham) transferred the freehold of effectively the whole of Irish agricultural land from the landlord class to the working tenants, the largest peaceful land redistribution in modern European history.

He sat as Home Rule MP for Meath North 1882 to 1883, for North-East Cork 1893 to 1893, for South Mayo 1895 to 1899, and for South Mayo again 1900 to 1902; he resigned each seat in protest at successive political compromises he judged inconsistent with the constitutional position. He was the leading Irish parliamentary opponent of the South African War of 1899 to 1902 and the founder in 1899 of the Irish Transvaal Brigade that fought on the Boer side. He died at the Elphis Nursing Home in Dublin on the thirtieth of May 1906 in his sixty-first year and is buried at Straide, beside the ruined wall of the cottage from which his family had been evicted fifty-six years before. The Davitt name in modern Irish history carries the weight of the founding of the Land League and the breaking of the landlord system.