The Land War

Above : Photo Of Michael Davitt

Gladstone was but half convinced. He saw that to the complication to Ireland of an agrarian system unsuited to the circumstances of the country the prevalent disorders were mainly due. This he proposed to remedy by means of a comprehensive Irish Land Bill. Unfortunately,however, a Coercion Bill was to precede the remedial measures.That the effects of the latter in Ireland would be lamentable was pointed out by many of the Irish members, and notably by Parnell himself. Their efforts to impede its passage were vain, and in March, 1881, the Coercion Act became law.

Above : Portrait Of John Blake Dillon

The summer of 1879 had teen cold and wet. Most of the crops were extremely poor, and the potato crop practically a total failure. This, of course, meant for the rural population of a great part of Ireland nothing short of famine. Amongst the despairing peasantry, the advice of the Land League to consider the needs of their families before satisfying the claims of the landlords, and, at the same time, to ” keep a firm grip on their homesteads,” found ready acceptance.

Above : Photo Of Young Michael Davitt

Foundation of the Land League.— In 1846, there was born to a small farmer named Davitt in Straide Co. Mayo, a son destined to play a leading part in the history of the Irish Land Agitation during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth. Before he was five, the young Michael saw his parents evicted and cast on the road-side, and the cabin which had been their home, levelled to the ground, owing to the failure of his father to pay the impossible rent which the landlord demanded of him. The scene which he then witnessed engraved itself indelibly on the child’s memory, and translated itself later into a resolve to make the destruction of the system under which such things were possible his lifework.