The Land War and land agitation was taken up by people like Parnell because they thought that it would eventually lead to a solution of the national question. In Galway on 14 October 1880, Parnell had said, ‘I would not have taken off my coat and gone to this work if I had not known that we were laying the foundation in this movement for the regeneration of our legislative independence.’ This was all part of the Home Rule movement which is discussed in the next chapter.
RELIGION
Just as politics was not everything during the years of O’Connell and Young Ireland, so ‘the land’ was not the only issue during this period. This was also an important period for religion in Ireland, particularly in the area of increased reforms of the Catholic Church. The central figure in all this was Paul Cullen, who became archbishop of Armagh in 1849 and then archbishop of Dublin in 1852. He continued earlier attempts at ending folk celebrations which had become intertwined with religious observations (see chapter two). Because of his training at the Vatican as a young man, he thought it was crucial to the continued strength of Catholicism in Ireland that religious practices be standardized and be brought under the control of local priests (meaning, for instance, that observances of marriages and deaths would be under the control of the local church). His efforts were greatly helped by the fact that the reduction in population due to Famine deaths and emigration (along with a slight increase in the number of priests being trained) meant that there were more parish priests per capita. This no doubt helped local priests gain more control over religious practices (as well as semi-religious and folk rituals) in their areas.
Along with this tightening of religious practices came an emphasis on increased purity in relations between the sexes. One effect of the Famine had been that farmers did not divide their land up amongst their children, but settled on one (usually male) who would inherit the whole. This heir would often be matched with an available marriage partner who also had property (usually as part of a dowry). In this way, marriage generally became mainly a question of increasing property holdings in a family. All of this meant that marriages usually happened later in life, and that fewer people married (these were generally those who did not inherit land). Many of those who did not marry emigrated, and for those who stayed behind, the increased influence of the church meant that celibacy was supported and encouraged. This combination of economic necessity and church influence led to the acceptance of a stricter moral life amongst most Irish people, and may have led to the strong influence that the Catholic Church was to have on Irish life for the rest of the century and at least the first half of the twentieth century.
INTERPRETATIONS – FENIANISM
Traditionally, the Fenians have been seen as a strictly nationalist movement without social or economic goals. Although the Catholic Church and much of the O’Connellite Catholic middle class were opposed to Fenianism, it quickly became part of general nationalist history, which merged most specific types of national struggle into one general movement. John O’Leary published his Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism in 1896, which tried to establish that his own hostility towards the Catholic clergy was held by Fenians generally. John Devoy published his Recollections of an Irish Rebel in 1926, arguing that Fenianism was a serious revolutionary movement with committed members selflessly fighting for its ends. By this time, however, Devoy had become more of a constitutional nationalist, which was reflected in his support of the Treaty of 1921 (see chapter seven). James Connolly wrote in his Labour in Irish History (1910) that Fenianism was part of a wider European movement of working-class agitation. Connolly was a socialist who argued that trade unions and working men’s associations were going to take over covert nationalist revolutionary organizations. This socialist emphasis was taken up by Emile Strauss in his Irish Nationalism and British Democracy (1951), but the Fenians were given more credit for the social and economic background of their members, who were largely drawn from the working class. Strauss argued that while Fenianism’s lack of social and economic militancy for the working class was regrettable, it may be seen as a valid part of a larger tradition of European class struggle. Desmond Ryan argued something similar in his biography of James Stephens (The Fenian Chief, 1967). He wrote that Stephens was a proto-left-winger and that Fenianism was a popular movement for democracy. This nationalist tradition with a socialist tint was taken further by Leon Ó Broin, whose history of the 1867 rising, Fenian Fever (1971), was a detailed examination of the failed rebellion. This emphasis on violence and rebellion, Ó Broin argued, was central to Fenian ideas. In his Fenian Movement (1968), T.W. Moody had argued something similar. Most Irish revolutionaries started out as constitutional moderates and only gradually turned militant. The Fenians, however, decided from the very outset that violence was the best means to secure independence. This was a fundamental change in nationalist thinking that greatly affected future generations.
R.V. Comerford revised this interpretation in 1985 with his publication of The Fenians in Context (1985). Comerford argued that nationalism was only part of the Fenian movement. He emphasized the social and recreational aspects of Fenian organizations and tried to show that they were much more broadly based than previously thought. The argument is that the political factors of Fenianism were not enough to attract members in the numbers that it did. The IRB, Comerford argues, provided ‘a form for fraternal association and communal self-expression’. Fenianism was ‘a voluntary social movement posing as a military organization’. Comerford’s work has unearthed new information and insights about the Fenians, but his interpretations have been criticized for a lack of consideration of the primary nationalist purpose of the Fenians. John Newsinger’s Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain (1994) argued this strongly. Newsinger’s analysis of the deep revolutionary nature of the Fenians, and their class-based hope of overthrowing the British, is somewhat polemical, however.
In some ways, this argument over the precise purpose of the Fenians mirrors the debate over the scope of nationalism – whether political independence would be enough, or whether cultural aspects were equally important. This question will arise more starkly in chapter seven.
INTERPRETATIONS – LAND WAR
The popular view of landlords as English foreigners controlling Irish land, as absentee owners who did not care about their tenants, who charged them excessive rents and who evicted them heartlessly, was born out of popular folklore and mythology. It was also upheld by J.E. Pemfret’s The Struggle for the Land in Ireland, 1800–1923 (1930). While undoubtedly true in many instances, this view has been criticized in recent years for being too sweeping a condemnation, and for covering over the very real and deep complexities in landlord and tenant relations. One of the most interesting, and controversial, interpretations to be put forward in recent years is W.E. Vaughan’s re-assessment of the relations between landlords and tenants during this period. His Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland (1994) argues that, between 1858 and 1876, rents were relatively low, there were few evictions, reasonable agricultural prosperity, and a well-established relationship between landlords and tenants during this period. On the question of absenteeism, he shows that seventy-three percent of Irish landlords were resident in Ireland. Vaughan also argues that threatened evictions were intended to get tenants to pay their rents rather than clear them from the land in order to create larger holdings. The legal and financial difficulties in obtaining an eviction (partly due to the work of the Land League) made it unlikely that a landlord would press his property rights to the extreme point of eviction. Vaughan also shows that the landlord class itself was most at fault for its social and economic difficulties during this period. They incurred high social expenses in trying to live like their counterparts in England. They did not invest in the land or new agricultural technology to the extent they should have, and they sought to live off their rents alone rather than become agricultural entrepreneurs, which was what English landlords were trying to do.
The Land League has also undergone
extensive scrutiny. Patrick O’Farrell argued that
the Land League was not a movement for land reform, it was a wholesale crusade for the establishment of a peasant Ireland. It was not – despite Davitt’s personal advocacy of land nationalization – a forward-looking socialist solution to the problem of Irish freedom and identity, it was a backward-looking peasant solution. (Ireland’s English Question, 1971)
Joseph Lee expressed the opposite view. In his Modernization of Irish Society (1973), he argued that the Land League did not have a strong vision of a peasant Ireland. League rhetoric was based on political ends, not on romantic ideas of a pastoral society. Such visions, Lee asserts, were actually constructed by landlords. This difference between the establishment of a backward-looking, nostalgic feeling towards peasantry (which lasted well into the twentieth century) and the Land War and land reform as part of Irish modernization, is central to the debate on the Land War. In his Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (1978), Paul Bew argued that, rather than being a defensive organization aimed at helping distressed tenants, the Land League was an ‘offensive movement’. The number of evictions was simply not great enough to allow a purely tenant defence league to raise an outcry and mobilize. This is partly based on the argument that the boycott was actually rather limited in its application, and that the more dominant strategy was ‘rent at the point of a bayonet’. That is, the League’s idea was to force landlords and land agents to collect their rents through the use of the courts or the militia, which would almost instantly cause a confrontation, with all its intended propaganda value. The Land League’s most important contribution, according to Bew, was that it paid the legal bills for tenants while the eviction process was grinding along. American dollars were instrumental in funding this aspect of the League’s work. Bew also showed the diversity of motives and desires in Land League agitation across the country, as well as among different economic classes of tenants. Some stressed rent reductions, some wanted land redistribution, and some land labourers mainly wanted better wages. Although these various parts of the League seemed to go in different directions, there was a good deal of general anti-landlord feeling among all Leaguers. Bew praised the League for its successes, notably the success in having the Three Fs passed and forcing the land courts to set reasonable rents. Its failure was that many of these reforms did not help the social and economic situations of many poor tenants. In the west, particularly, emigration continued to be seen as the only effective alternative.
In addition to a debate over the Land League itself, historians have argued about how closely the land and the national question were actually linked. There are two main arguments. The first says that the land and the national question were woven together, that, for the Irish peasant, ‘the landlord’ and ‘the English’ were the same enemy. This was part of the traditional nationalist argument. There is some truth to this interpretation, and it certainly captures the rhetoric perfectly. As with most of these interpretations, however, it is too strong. It does not take full account of the fact that many of the more constitutional nationalists like Isaac Butt (see chapter six) did not take a deep interest in land questions. The second line of interpretation is that the Land War grew out of an already established tradition of rural conflict, and that Fenianism or any other national movement would have to join this underlying Irish rural movement. This is Robert Kee’s basic argument in The Green Flag: a History of Irish Nationalism (1972). Bew counters this by arguing that the Fenians had a stronger political purpose than Kee implies. They thought that the British government would never grant land reform, and therefore the only option left for Ireland was self-rule. Philip Bull has argued more recently (in his Land, Politics and Nationalism: a Study of the Irish Land Question, 1996) that the reason that the land and the national question became so closely linked was that there were a series of conflicting assumptions about the land held by landlords and tenants. Further, these were left unresolved for so long that they became the major issues in Irish life. The national question, therefore, was completely influenced by this long-standing problem and had to address it. ‘The land’ and ‘the nation’ were not necessarily linked in theory, but they became so in practice.
Like other periods of Irish history, many historians have shifted their focus to the cultural aspects of the Land War. Of particular note is Anne Kane’s Constructing Irish National Identity: Discourse and Ritual During the Land War 1879-1882 (2011), which mainly uses newspaper reports of public meetings (official Land League meetings, and non-League meetings), demonstrations, evictions, and court proceedings to show how perceptions of the land issue changed, and particularly how language was used and transformed in these public discourses. For instance, as the Land War progressed, ‘rent’ changed from simply meaning the necessary cash transaction between landlord and tenant to becoming almost synonymous with oppression, first from landlords themselves, and then from the whole British system in Ireland. She also shows how the most serious and violent actions of Land War agitators started in the west, and that newspaper reports were one of the most important reasons that the Land War became more serious in the east by 1882.
SIX
Home Rule, 1870–93
During the period of Fenian activity and increasing land agitation, a constitutional force to gain a form of independence was founded.This was the Home Rule movement, and it was to dominate Irish politics until the First World War. As in the age of O’Connell, Irish politics became hopelessly entangled with British parliamentary and party politics in this period. The Home Rule drama was largely played out in political circles in London. The Independent Irish Party and Fenianism both contributed to the Home Rule movement, though. The Independent Irish Party provided parliamentary models for Home Rulers to follow, and the Fenians provided a popular movement from which Home Rulers could draw strength. Home Rule was almost immediately attractive to many Irish people, especially those who could vote in parliamentary elections. It basically argued that an Irish parliament should be re-established and the Union be repealed, but that the British government should retain control of foreign affairs. (This, of course, was reminiscent of O’Connell’s repeal movement.) There were various reasons why Home Rule was attractive to different sections of Irish society. Catholics (who made up the majority of agricultural workers) had been let down by Gladstone’s somewhat weak Land Act of 1870, and Protestants had been unhappy with the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. This led many from both religions to think that Irish affairs would be better handled from Dublin.
ISAAC BUTT AND THE ORIGINS OF HOME RULE
On 1 September 1870, Isaac Butt, a prominent Protestant lawyer in Dublin, founded the Home Government Association, and began agitating for a type of federalism, or local rule for each country in the United Kingdom. According to this idea, England, Scotland and Ireland would have their own parliaments, and the British parliament at Westminster would handle foreign affairs and imperial questions. While he was a student at Trinity College Dublin, Butt and a few other students founded the Dublin University Magazine and an ‘Orange Young Ireland’ group, the name jokingly applied to Butt and his friends who were strongly Protestant and unionist, but also patriotic nationalists in terms of Irish culture and national identity. Butt’s group thought that much of the government of Ireland was badly handled and wrote of the difficulties of ruling Ireland from London. Butt had also defended many of the Young Irelanders at their trials in 1848 and 1865–8. This experience, as well as what he had seen in the Famine, led him to become more active in nationalist politics. This has traditionally been explained as a sort of conversion from unionism to nationalism. More modern historians see no such conversion, but a continuous strand of ideology going back to his Trinity College days. Throughout the period of his political activity, Butt was committed to the British Empire and to Conservative politics. While later supporters of Home Rule thought of it as the best they could obtain from a British government (while, in reality, wanting full inde
pendence), Butt thought that Home Rule was the best possible solution to the problem of conflicting national identities within the United Kingdom. Butt founded the Home Government Association with the co-operation of Protestant and Catholic middle-class support, and he hoped it would lessen sectarianism. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church was suspicious of the movement and discouraged people from joining (although this proved difficult, and the church warmed to the movement later on). And conservative Protestants worried that they would be overwhelmed by Catholic participation in the movement. In 1873, the Home Rule Association was replaced by the Home Rule League, and a British counterpart, the Home Rule Confederation, was also set up. Home Rule became a popular idea amongst many farmers, and the fact that many of them were organized into local farmers’ clubs meant that spreading the Home Rule message among them was quite easy.
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