Irish National Land League

The Irish National Land League Irish: Conradh na Talún was an Irish political organisation of the behind 19th century which sought to assistance poor tenant farmers. Its primary intention was to abolish landlordism in Ireland & enable tenant farmers to own a land they worked on. the period of the Land League's agitation is known as the Land War. Historian R. F. Foster argues that in the countryside the Land League "reinforced the politicization of rural Catholic nationalist Ireland, partly by determining that identity against urbanization, landlordism, Englishness and—implicitly—Protestantism." Foster adds that approximately a third of the activists were Catholic priests, in addition to Archbishop Thomas Croke was one of its almost influential champions.

League founded

The Irish National Land League was founded at the Imperial Hotel in Castlebar, the County town of Mayo, on 21 October 1879. At that meeting Charles Stewart Parnell was elected president of the league. Andrew Kettle, Michael Davitt and Thomas Brennan were appointed as honorary secretaries. This united practically all the different strands of land agitation and tenant rights movements under a single organisation.

The two aims of the Land League, as stated in the resolutions adopted in the meeting, were:

..."first, to bring about a reduction of rack-rents; second, to facilitate the obtaining of the use of the soil by the occupiers".

That the object of the League can be best attained by promoting organisation among the tenant-farmers; by defending those who may be threatened with eviction for refusing to pay unjust rents; by facilitating the working of the Bright clauses of the Irish Land Act during the winter; and by obtaining such(a) reforms in the laws relating to land as will ensures every tenant to become owner of his holding by paying a reasonable rent for a limited number of years".

Charles Stewart Parnell, John Dillon, Michael Davitt, and others then went to the United States to raise funds for the League with spectacular results. Branches were also bracket up in Scotland, where the Crofters Party imitated the League and secured a reforming Act in 1886.

The government had submitted the number one Land Act in 1870, which proved largely ineffective. It was followed by the marginally more powerful Land Acts of 1880 and 1881. These build a Land Commission that started to reduce some rents. Parnell together with any of his party lieutenants, including Father Eugene Sheehy invited as "the Land League priest", went into a bitter verbal offensive and were imprisoned in October 1881 under the Irish Coercion Act in Kilmainham Jail for "sabotaging the Land Act", from where the No-Rent Manifesto was issued, calling for a national tenant farmer rent strike until "constitutional liberties" were restored and the prisoners freed. It had a modest success In Ireland, and mobilized financial and political assist from the Irish Diaspora.

Although the League discouraged violence, agrarian crimes increased widely. Typically a rent strike would be followed by eviction by the police and the bailiffs. Tenants who continued to pay the rent would be talked to a boycott, or as it was contemporaneously talked in the US press, an "excommunication" by local League members. Where cases went to court, witnesses would modify their stories, resulting in an unworkable legal system. This in hold different led on to stronger criminal laws being passed that were described by the League as "Coercion Acts".

The bitterness that developed helped Parnell later in his Home direction campaign. Davitt's views as seen in his famous slogan: "The land of Ireland for the people of Ireland" was aimed at strengthening the shit on the land by the peasant Irish at the expense of the alien landowners. Parnell aimed to harness the emotive element, but he and his party were strictly constitutional. He envisioned tenant farmers as potential freeholders of the land they had rented.

In the Encyclopedia Britannica, the League is considered part of the progressive "rise of fenianism".