Davitt · 1879
Davitt at Irishtown
On the afternoon of Sunday the twentieth of April 1879, in the small village of Irishtown on the border between Counties Mayo and Galway, on the western edge of the Plains of Mayo, Michael Davitt, thirty-two years old, the Mayo-emigrant Fenian who had served seven years' penal servitude at Dartmoor between 1870 and 1877 and who had spent the previous eighteen months organising tenant-farmer protest meetings across the western counties, convened the land meeting that is, by the careful judgment of every Irish historian since R. F. Foster, the founding event of the Irish Land War. Eight thousand tenant-farmers and small-holders from the surrounding parishes (and, by the tradition, several thousand more who could not get into the small village square) gathered to protest the impending eviction of forty cottier families by the Catholic priest Canon Geoffrey Bourke of Knock parish, who was the local landlord. The meeting was the first sustained public protest against a Catholic landlord by Catholic tenants in the nineteenth-century Irish countryside, and the political shock-effect (a Mayo-Catholic priest, in a Catholic county, faced by his own parishioners) was the moment the Land War became politically possible. Six months later, on the twenty-first of October 1879, Davitt founded the National Land League of Ireland at Castlebar with Parnell as President.
It is twenty past three on the afternoon of Sunday the twentieth of April 1879, on a temporary platform at the centre of the market cross of Irishtown, a village of perhaps eighty houses on the Mayo-Galway boundary, twenty miles south-east of Ballina. He is thirty-two years old. He is Michael Davitt, born at Straide in Mayo on the twenty-fifth of March 1846, son of Martin Davitt and Catherine Kielty, evicted with his family at the age of four in November 1850, brought up in Haslingden, Lancashire, lost his right arm at eleven in a cotton-mill accident at the Stellfoxe's mill in Baxenden, joined the Manchester Irish Republican Brotherhood at fifteen, served seven years of a fifteen-year sentence at Dartmoor for arms-running (1870–1877). He is in the long black overcoat he had worn at Dartmoor (the only coat he owns), with the right sleeve pinned up where the arm was amputated.
On the village square below him is the crowd. By the Mayo Constitution's estimate the next morning, eight thousand people. By Davitt's own later memoir, between six and ten thousand. The crowd is mostly Catholic tenant-farmers and small-holders of the surrounding parishes (Knock, Aghamore, Tooreen, Ballyhaunis). They have come on foot, in carts, on horseback, in heavy April rain that has cleared at noon. The platform on which Davitt is standing has been put up the previous evening by John W. Walsh of Balla, the local Land-League organiser of Mayo-Galway, on the explicit principle that the meeting must look like a political meeting and not a religious one.
The local landlord whose evictions the meeting has been called to protest is Canon Geoffrey Bourke of Knock parish, the parish priest of Knock (the village six miles north of Irishtown that would, four months later, on the twenty-first of August 1879, become the site of the Marian apparition of Knock and the second Catholic-Marian pilgrimage centre of nineteenth-century Europe). Canon Bourke holds the lands of the Bourke estate from the family of the late John Bourke, his cousin; he has, in the past three months, issued eviction notices to forty cottier families of his Mayo tenants for non-payment of rent after the cattle-disease failures of 1877–78.
Davitt thinks: the political principle has been, since the 1820s, that the Catholic landlord is the exception. The Catholic tenant's protest has been against the Anglo-Irish Protestant landlord. To protest publicly against a Catholic priest who is a Catholic landlord, in a Catholic county, is to break the Catholic-political consensus.
He thinks: the Catholic-political consensus is wrong. The land question is the question of who eats. The question of who eats does not turn on the religion of the landlord.
He thinks: Canon Bourke is, in his ecclesiastical capacity, my own bishop's nephew. The protest will, within a fortnight, be condemned from the pulpit of every Catholic church in Mayo.
He thinks: that is the political price. The political price is the political price. The country has not done a public political action on a Catholic landlord in two generations. The country has to start.
He speaks at twenty past three. The principal speech is by John O'Connor Power, the Mayo Member of Parliament; Davitt speaks third, after a local farmer called Thomas Brennan. His speech is not long, by the Freeman's Journal reporter James Tighe's verbatim: about twelve minutes. He says, in the closing peroration: the tillers of the soil have the right of property in the soil they till, by every law of God and man. The system of Irish landlordism is incompatible with the principle. The system must be broken, by the methods of public agitation and political organisation, before the country can begin to live. The crowd cheers for a long time.
Within six weeks of the Irishtown meeting, similar meetings had been held at Westport, Tuam, Claremorris, Castlebar and Galway. The local cottier families across Mayo, Galway and Roscommon began withholding rent in the standard Irish League form (paying only Griffith's valuation, the lower assessed rent set by the Crown's 1850s land-survey). Canon Bourke withdrew his eviction notices within three weeks of the Irishtown meeting and was not seen on his Knock parish landlord business afterward. The Land League of Mayo was formally constituted at Castlebar on the sixteenth of August 1879, with Davitt as Secretary; the National Land League of Ireland followed at Castlebar on the twenty-first of October, with Parnell as President.
Michael Davitt continued as the organisational force of the Land League through the Land War of 1879–82 (which won, in legislative form, the Land Act of 1881 and laid the political ground for the further Land Acts that, between 1881 and 1923, transferred over fifteen million acres of Irish land from Anglo-Irish landlord ownership to Catholic tenant ownership, the largest peaceful land-transfer in modern European history). He served two further prison terms (1881–82 and 1883) for seditious speech. He was Member of Parliament for North Meath in 1892, for South Mayo from 1895 to 1899, and resigned his seat in protest against the Boer War. He died at Elphis Hospital, Dublin, on the thirty-first of May 1906, sixty years old, of complications following a routine dental operation. He is buried at Straide in Mayo, ten yards from the cottage from which his family was evicted on the eleventh of November 1850. The cottage is, in the care of the Michael Davitt Museum at Straide, the museum-piece of the modern Irish-land-question commemoration.