Parnell at Ennis

A new political method is rarely invented in a study. More often it arrives in the open air, in answer to a question shouted up from a crowd, when a leader who has been thinking in private for a year is forced to say in public what he has already decided in silence. The instrument is in his hand before he names it; the crowd only hears the naming.

THE LANDLORD'S SON

Charles Stewart Parnell was born at Avondale House in Wicklow on the twenty-seventh of June 1846, into the Protestant Ascendancy that the Land League he now led was raised against. His mother was American, the daughter of a United States naval commodore who had fought the British in 1812; his father held the Avondale estate of four thousand acres. He had been schooled at Magdalene College Cambridge, sent down before taking his degree, returned to Wicklow as a landlord himself at twenty-two. The country he inherited was a country of memory: the Famine of 1845-49 still inside living recall, the cottier class wiped out, the population halved by death and emigration, the land question unsettled and dangerous. He had entered the Commons for Meath in 1875 with no oratorical gift and a stammer he had not mastered. By 1880 he was Member of Parliament for Meath, Member of the Land League executive since the founding at Castlebar the previous October, and, since May, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster. He was thirty-four. The Fenian tradition behind him answered the land question with the maimed beast in the field and the burning rick. He had rejected those methods, and he had not yet replaced them.

THE MARKET SQUARE

Sunday the nineteenth of September 1880, in heavy west-of-Ireland sun. The platform was a temporary scaffold of planks at the eastern side of the market square at Ennis in County Clare. By the count of the Limerick Chronicle the next day, about ten thousand people stood in the square below; tenant-farmers and small-holders of Clare and the Galway-Clare border parishes, in from the surrounding countryside on a Sunday afternoon for the political meeting of the Land League advertised in the Nation for the previous fortnight. On the platform with him were James Joseph O'Kelly, the Irish-American journalist of the New York Herald, now Member for Roscommon; Michael Davitt, the founder of the League, exhausted from the morning meeting at Ennistymon and not on the speaker list; and Father Patrick White of Miltown Malbay, the local parish priest. An hour before Parnell mounted the planks, Father White had brought a delegation of Clare tenants to him with a question. What were the tenants to do, in the League's programme of resistance, when one of their own neighbours broke ranks and took on a holding from which a previous tenant had been evicted? He had not given Father White his answer. He had told the priest he would speak to it from the platform.

THE SECOND BEFORE THE WORD

He stood and looked over the square. Ten thousand faces in the September sun, the line of them running back to the shop fronts, the children up on the shoulders of their fathers. He let the silence hold a moment, long enough to feel the question settle on the planks under him. The Fenian method had a name and a history and the British state had the law written for it already; coercion legislation lay in the desk at Dublin Castle, drafted, waiting for the next maimed bullock to be cause enough. He had read, in the American papers his mother's family sent across, of the temperance societies in the United States, of how a saloon-keeper in a dry county could be put outside the door of every house on his street without any man laying a hand on him, of how the law had no charge to bring against a closed door or a turned back. He had carried the idea for months and had not yet put it to a crowd. The country was asking now. If he did not answer here, the answer would be given by other men in other parishes, with petrol and a knife, and he would lose the League to them inside three months. He could feel the calculation finishing itself. The British state could prosecute a burning. It could not prosecute a silence. He drew breath.

THE PERORATION

He spoke for forty minutes without notes. The peroration arrived towards four o'clock. By the verbatim shorthand of James Tighe of the Freeman's Journal, which is the primary record of the speech, he put the question to the crowd: what are you to do to a tenant who bids for a farm from which his neighbour has been evicted? A voice from the square shouted back shoot him. He shook his head. I think I heard somebody say shoot him, he said. 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 square cheered the proposition. The League executive in Dublin adopted it formally at its next meeting. The thing was loose in the country before the harvest was in.

LOUGH MASK

Six weeks later, at Lough Mask House in County Mayo, a fifty-year-old English land-agent of Lord Erne by the name of Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott went out to serve eviction notices on tenants in arrears of rent. By the eleventh of November he could not bring in his own crop. Every labourer on the estate had walked off the work. The shopkeepers in Ballinrobe would not sell to him. The blacksmith would not shoe his horse, the post-boy would not carry his letters, the laundress would not take in his linen. His own household servants had left the house. He stood at the window of Lough Mask House and looked out at a hundred acres of root crops and grain he could not lift from the ground. The Times of London picked the story up on the twentieth of November. By the first of December the English papers were using the man's name, in lower case, as a verb. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first printed use of to boycott as a transitive verb on the thirteenth of December 1880, eighty-four days after the Ennis speech. A man's name became a method in the time it took the leaves to come off the trees.

THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

The British state moved as he had calculated it would, and could not. Gladstone's Coercion Act of 1881 reached into the country and arrested Parnell himself in October, lodging him in Kilmainham Gaol; from Kilmainham he issued the No Rent Manifesto, and the Land League went on without him. The Land Act of 1881 conceded the three F's the League had demanded, fair rent, fixity of tenure, free sale. He came out of Kilmainham in May 1882 by the Kilmainham Treaty with Gladstone, and through the 1880s ran the Irish Parliamentary Party as a disciplined bloc of eighty-six votes at Westminster, holding the balance of the House. Home Rule came within sight of him in 1886 and was beaten in the Commons by thirty votes. He was, at that moment, the uncrowned king of Ireland by the phrase of Timothy Healy, who would later turn against him.

AVONDALE

The end was its own matter. The O'Shea divorce of 1890 broke him in the Catholic country he had built his bloc out of; the Irish Party split that December at Committee Room Fifteen; he died at Brighton on the sixth of October 1891, aged forty-five, and was buried in Glasnevin under a single block of Wicklow granite that carries the one word Parnell. The instrument he had put into the country at Ennis outlived him by every measure that counts. Gandhi used it against the salt monopoly and the cloth of Manchester; the Montgomery Improvement Association used it against the Alabama bus lines through the winter of 1955-56; the anti-apartheid movement used it against the produce of South Africa; Cesar Chavez used it against the grape growers of the San Joaquin Valley. The method has no patent on it and carries no royalty. It belongs to whoever picks it up.

THE PLAQUE

The market square at Ennis is now Bank Place. The wooden platform is long gone. On the wall of the former Bank of Ireland building at the eastern side of the square, where the planks once stood, Clare County Council fixed a bronze plaque in 1980 on the centenary of the speech. The new political methods come into the world this way, not in the cabinet rooms where the empires think they are decided, but on a Sunday afternoon in a country town, in answer to a question shouted up from the square, by a man who has done his thinking in private and has only to find the words. The plaque is small. A reader passing along Bank Place can stop in front of it and read the four lines and walk on. The square behind them is the same square.