Parnell at Ennis

It is twenty past three on the afternoon of Sunday the nineteenth of September 1880, on the temporary platform of planks at the eastern side of the market square at Ennis in County Clare, in heavy west-of-Ireland September sun. He is thirty-four years old. He is Charles Stewart Parnell, born at Avondale House, Rathdrum, in Wicklow, on the twenty-seventh of June 1846, schooled at Magdalene College Cambridge, Member of Parliament for Meath since 1875, member of the Land League's executive since October 1879, and (since the election of the new Irish Parliamentary Party leadership at Westminster in May 1880) the leader in the Commons of the Irish Home Rule party.

On the square below him is a crowd of (by the Limerick Chronicle's next-day count) about ten thousand people. The crowd is mostly tenant-farmers and small-holders of Clare and the Galway-Clare border parishes. They have come in from the surrounding countryside on a Sunday afternoon for the political meeting of the Land League, which has been advertised in the Nation for the previous fortnight. The speakers on the platform with him are James Joseph O'Kelly (the Irish-American journalist of the New York Herald, now MP for Roscommon), Michael Davitt (the founder of the Land League, on the platform but not on the speaker list because Davitt has been doing the morning meeting in Ennistymon and is exhausted), and the local parish priest Father Patrick White of Miltown Malbay.

He has, in his head, the question that has been put to him by the Clare tenants' delegation through Father White an hour ago. The question is: what are the tenants supposed to do, in the Land League programme of resistance to the landlord class, when one of their own neighbours breaks ranks and takes on a holding from which a previous tenant has been evicted? The answer of the older Fenian tradition is the maiming of the offender's cattle or the burning of his haystacks. Parnell rejects the Fenian methods on principle and, more practically, because the methods give the British state the pretext for coercion legislation.

He thinks: the question Father White has put to me is the question on which the Land League stands or falls in the next year.

He thinks: if I cannot answer the question on this platform this afternoon I lose the country to the Fenians inside three months.

He thinks: the answer is the American Protestant temperance-movement tactic. The temperance movement in the United States has built, in the past ten years, the tactic of social ostracism against any man who keeps a saloon. The same tactic can be applied to the man who takes the holding of an evicted neighbour.

He thinks: if I propose the tactic to the crowd in front of me, the crowd will adopt it because the crowd is asking for an answer. The country will, by the end of the autumn, have it as the political tool. The British state cannot, by the law of the country, prosecute social shunning.

He speaks for forty minutes. The peroration arrives at four o'clock. He says, by the verbatim shorthand record taken by the Freeman's Journal reporter James Tighe (which is the primary source for the speech): what are you to do to a tenant who bids for a farm from which his neighbour has been evicted? The crowd shouts back shoot him. Parnell shakes his head. He says: I think I heard somebody say shoot him. Now I wish to point out to you a very much better way, a more Christian and charitable way, which will give the lost sinner an opportunity of repenting. When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him on the roadside when you meet him, you must shun him in the shop, you must shun him in the fair-green and in the market-place, and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed.

The crowd in the square at Ennis cheered the proposition. The Land League programme adopted it formally at the next executive meeting in Dublin. Within six weeks, by early November 1880, the tactic was being applied across Connacht, Munster and parts of Leinster. The first man on the island to whom the tactic was systematically applied was Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832–1897), the land-agent of Lord Erne at Lough Mask House in County Mayo, who in October 1880 attempted to serve eviction notices on Mayo tenants in arrears of rent and who, on the eleventh of November, was unable to harvest his own crops because every labourer on the estate refused to work for him, the local shopkeepers refused to sell to him, and his servants left. The Times of London picked up the story on the twentieth of November 1880, the word boycott (lower case, to boycott) was being used in the English newspapers by the first of December, and the Oxford English Dictionary records the first printed use of boycott as a transitive verb on the thirteenth of December 1880, eighty-four days after the Ennis speech.

The political tactic Parnell proposed at Ennis is, by every careful judgment, the foundational social-protest method of the late-nineteenth and twentieth century. The same method, under the same word, was used by Gandhi in the Indian non-cooperation movement, by Martin Luther King in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56, by the anti-apartheid movement against South African goods, by the United Farm Workers under Cesar Chavez. The Ennis market square is now Bank Place in Ennis; the platform on which Parnell stood is gone, but a bronze plaque on the wall of the former Bank of Ireland building at the eastern side of the square, put up by Clare County Council in 1980 on the centenary, marks the spot.