Davitt

The Davitts of Straide in central County Mayo were a Catholic small-tenant family on the lands of the Earl of Lucan in the early nineteenth century. In November 1850 the family was evicted from their cottage by the crowbar brigade of the local landlord agent, and emigrated to industrial Lancashire. The young Michael Davitt (1846–1906), four years old at the eviction, grew up in Haslingden, lost his right arm in a cotton-mill accident at age eleven, and rose through the Manchester Fenian movement of the 1860s into seven years of penal servitude at Dartmoor (1870–1877) for arms-running.

On his release in 1877, Davitt returned to Mayo and to organising work; in October 1879 at Castlebar he convened the founding meeting of the National Land League of Ireland, with himself as Honorary Secretary and Charles Stewart Parnell as President. The Land War of 1879–82 followed: the most successful tenant-farmer political movement in modern European history, securing the Land Acts of 1881 and 1903 which together transferred Irish land ownership from the Anglo-Irish landlord class to the Catholic tenant majority over the following thirty years.

Davitt served as Member of Parliament for North Meath in 1892 and for South Mayo from 1895 to 1899, resigning his seat in protest against the Boer War. He toured South Africa as a journalist for Freeman's Journal during the war. He was, by the assessment of every Irish labour historian, the principal political teacher of the Irish Catholic working-class of the late nineteenth century, the man who made the land question the founding question of modern Irish politics.