Davitt at Irishtown

A consensus is rarely broken by those who stand outside it. More often it is broken, in plain daylight and on a wet field, by a man raised inside its discipline who has decided that the discipline is now the cause of the hunger. The Irish countryside in the spring of 1879 was held together by an old understanding: that the tenant's quarrel was with the Protestant landlord and not with the priest. To touch the priest was to touch the parish, and to touch the parish was to touch the only authority the cottier had left after the rent was paid. It took a one-armed Fenian, lately out of Dartmoor, to walk up onto a platform in a village of eighty houses and end that understanding in twelve minutes.

THE BOY FROM STRAIDE

He was born at Straide in Mayo on the twenty-fifth of March 1846, in the second winter of the Famine, to Martin Davitt and Catherine Kielty. On the eleventh of November 1850 the family was put out of its cottage for arrears, the door barred, the thatch pulled. He was four. They walked the relief road east into Lancashire and settled at Haslingden among the mill Irish. At eleven, feeding a spinning mule at Stellfoxe's in Baxenden, he caught his right arm in the cogs; the surgeon took it off at the shoulder. At fifteen he joined the Manchester circle of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. At twenty-four he was sentenced to fifteen years' penal servitude for running arms; he served seven of them at Dartmoor, breaking stone in the long black overcoat the prison issued, learning to write with his left hand. He came out in December 1877, and through 1878 he travelled the western counties on the train and on foot, listening to tenant farmers in kitchens where the dresser was bare. The cattle-plague of 1877 had taken the stock; two wet harvests had taken the oats. Rent day was coming and there was nothing to meet it with.

THE PARISH OF KNOCK

Six miles north of Irishtown stood the parish of Knock, and over its altar stood Canon Geoffrey Bourke, parish priest and, by inheritance from his cousin John Bourke, landlord of the Bourke estate. In the first months of 1879 the canon had served eviction notices on forty cottier families of his own communicants for arrears that the cattle-plague had made unpayable. This was the snag in the old political weave. Since the days of O'Connell the tenant's grievance had been kept aimed at the Protestant ascendancy; the Catholic landlord, where he existed, was held to be the exception that did not need to be named. To name him from a public platform, in a Catholic county, in front of his own parishioners, was to do something that had not been done in two generations. John W. Walsh of Balla put up the platform on the Saturday evening on the express principle that it was to look like a political meeting and not a sodality. There would be no priest on it. There would be no benediction. The cross at the centre of the village square would have to suffice.

THE TWENTIETH OF APRIL

Sunday morning the rain came down on the Plains of Mayo as it had come down all week, soft and steady out of the Atlantic, and the roads to Irishtown ran with it. By noon it had cleared, and the carts began arriving from Knock and Aghamore and Tooreen and Ballyhaunis, from Claremorris and from over the Galway line. They came on foot and on horseback and on the long low traps the small farmers used for fairs. By three o'clock the village square of eighty houses held a crowd the Mayo Constitution would put the next morning at eight thousand, and which by Davitt's own later count was between six and ten thousand. The platform stood at the market cross. John O'Connor Power, Member for Mayo, was to speak first. Thomas Brennan, a Castlebar farmer, was to speak second. Davitt was to speak third. He stood at the side of the platform in his Dartmoor coat with the right sleeve pinned at the shoulder, watching the faces below him and turning over in his head what he meant to say.

A SECOND OF TIME IN MAYO

He had written no script. He never did. The line he had been turning since Christmas was simple enough, that the tiller had a property in the soil he tilled by every law of God and man, and that the system that denied it must go. The difficulty was not the line. The difficulty was the name. To speak the line in the abstract was to say what every Fenian on a platform had said since the rising of 1867; to speak it here, six miles from Knock, was to put the canon's name inside it. He could feel the price of that as plainly as he had felt the cogs of the mule at eleven. Within a fortnight, he knew, the protest would be read down from the altar of every parish in the diocese, and his own bishop, Canon Bourke's uncle by blood, would lead the reading. The men in front of him would hear themselves named from the pulpit at the Sunday mass they had walked four miles to reach. Some would not come back to the next meeting. Some would. The land question, he had decided in a Dartmoor cell some years before, was the question of who eats, and the question of who eats did not turn on the religion of the landlord. The country had not done a public political act on a Catholic landlord in two generations. The country had to start. He went up to the rail when Brennan stepped down, and the cheering took a long moment to settle. He spoke for twelve minutes, by the Freeman's Journal reporter James Tighe's notebook. He closed on the line he had been turning: the tillers of the soil have the right of property in the soil they till, by every law of God and man; the system that denied it must be broken by public agitation and political organisation before the country could begin to live. He named no priest. He did not have to. Every man in the square knew which estate the eviction notices had come from, and every man understood that to stand still and cheer was to put his name to the breaking of the old rule. They cheered for a long time.

THE NOTICES WITHDRAWN

Within three weeks Canon Bourke had withdrawn the forty notices, and he was not seen on the landlord side of his parish business again. Within six weeks the meeting had been repeated at Westport, at Tuam, at Claremorris, at Castlebar and at Galway, with crowds of the same size and the same composition. The cottiers of Mayo, Galway and Roscommon began paying only Griffith's valuation, the lower Crown survey figure of the 1850s, and refusing the rack-rent above it. The condemnations came from the altars as Davitt had known they would, and the meetings went on past them. On the sixteenth of August the Land League of Mayo was constituted at Castlebar with Davitt as Secretary. On the twenty-first of October the National Land League of Ireland followed at the same town, with Charles Stewart Parnell as President.

THE LONG TRANSFER

The Land War ran from 1879 to 1882 and won, in legislative form, the Land Act of 1881; the Acts that followed it, between 1881 and 1923, transferred more than fifteen million acres from Anglo-Irish landlord ownership into the hands of the Catholic tenants who worked them, the largest peaceful transfer of land in modern European history. Davitt served two further prison terms for seditious speech, sat in Westminster for North Meath in 1892 and for South Mayo from 1895, and resigned his seat in protest against the Boer War. He died at the Elphis Hospital in Dublin on the thirty-first of May 1906, sixty years old, after complications from a dental operation. He was carried home to Mayo and buried at Straide, ten yards from the cottage from which his family had been put out in November 1850.

THE COTTAGE AT STRAIDE

The consensus that held the Irish countryside in 1879 was not undone by an army or by a parliament; it was undone in twelve minutes on a platform at a market cross, by a man who had decided that the price of speaking was lower than the price of silence. What is left of him sits in Mayo still: the roofless walls of the Davitt cottage at Straide, kept as they were the day the bailiffs came, and ten yards off, under a slab of Mayo limestone, the grave of the boy who walked out of them.