Parnell

On the afternoon of Sunday the nineteenth of September 1880, in the market square at Ennis in County Clare, on the western seaboard of Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell, thirty-four years old, the recently elected leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster and the President of the Irish National Land League (founded the previous October at Castlebar by Michael Davitt with Parnell as its presiding chairman), addressed a crowd of about ten thousand tenant-farmers and small-holders on the question of how the Irish countryside should respond to land-grabbers (the tenants who took on a holding from which a previous tenant had been evicted). The speech, made without notes from a wooden platform on the eastern side of the Ennis market square, ended in the four-paragraph instruction that became the founding text of an entirely new political tactic. *Now what are you to do to a tenant who bids for a farm from which his neighbour has been evicted? You must shun him in the streets of the town, in the shop, in the market-place, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him severely alone, putting him into a moral Coventry, isolating him from his kind as if he were a leper of old.* The word *boycott*, after Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, the Mayo land-agent at Lough Mask House who was the first man on the island to whom the tactic was systematically applied that same November, entered the English language within six weeks of the Ennis speech and is in the *Oxford English Dictionary* with the date 1880.

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