Trampling Over Landlordism: The Story of the Irish Land League

In 1879 there was a war in Ireland – a war over land. 
 
Land had been the defining issue of British colonialism in Ireland for centuries, since the Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelfth century. 
 
But the land question reached fever pitch in the nineteenth century.

By the 1870s, the concentration of land ownership had reached a ridiculous level.
 
50% of Irish land was owned by just 750 families, most of them belonging to the Anglo-Irish colonial elite. 
 
Economically, this class existed to extract rent from Irish tenant farmers and labourers who actually worked the land, and to evict those who couldn’t pay.
 
Most of the owners were absentee landlords, too, living far away from the Irish land that kept them rich. 
 
The Great Famine of 1845 to 1852, observed by a negligent and callous British government, only made matters worse.
 
Mass death (1 million Irish died in the Famine) and emigration of rural tenants, combined with a wave of new evictions, meant land ownership was even more unequal afterward.
 
As always, the Irish people fought back.
 
But their resistance was spontaneous and sporadic – obstructing evictions, petitioning the government, threatening (murderously) greedy landlords – and most of it was criminalised by the British authorities.
 
This was until 1879, when Irish land agitation began to take a much larger, more organised, and powerful form.

In 1879, there was an awful harvest in the agricultural heartland of western Ireland. 
 
Economic anger was dialled up to a hundred, and Irish activists were ready to organise it into political power. 
 
Then, on this day in 1879, the labour activist Michael Davitt co-founded the Irish Land League at a mass meeting in Mayo, his home county.
 
Thousands of people came from all across the west. 
 
The League was demanding rent cuts and an end to evictions in the short term, and after that, radical land reform for all Ireland, either in the form of tenants owning the land they worked or, in Davitt’s vision, common ownership.
 
The Land League created a powerful new coalition in Irish politics. 
 
It brought in both labour activists and Irish nationalists, like Charles Stewart Parnell. 
 
The League also united the two main strands of Irish nationalism – constitutional and ‘physical force’ – which had often been at odds.
 
Constitutional nationalists like Parnell pursued Irish self-government by lawful or at least non-violent means, whereas the physical force tradition, represented in this period by the Fenian Brotherhood, favoured an armed struggle for independence. 
 
But the land question now brought the two currents together. Irish nationalists in both camps saw the origin of the agrarian problem in the unequal power structures of British colonial rule. 
 
As well as boycotting agents or beneficiaries of the existing land regime, Land League activists set up land courts independent of the British legal system, where rural communities democratically decided on fair rents.
 
Meanwhile, in the background, rural insurgents continued to raid manor houses and intimidate land agents.

William Gladstone’s government responded with the carrot and the stick: limited concessions on tenant ownership but also authoritarian new legislation for the repression of previously legal protest.
 
When the Land League leaders condemned Gladstone’s 1881 attempt at land reform for failing to stop evictions, he threw them in jail.
 
But in the longer term, the Land War achieved a remarkable number of its goals. 
 
Though mass agitation and rural insurgency died down in 1882, the Land League still scared the British into major reform.
 
Over the next twenty years, in tandem with new bursts of agrarian struggle in Ireland, the government was forced to help Irish tenant farmers buy out the big landlords. 
 
By the 1920s, the vast majority of Irish land was owned by the tenants.
 
But not everybody was a winner: the thousands of rural workers in Ireland who hadn’t been tenant farmers remained landless, and they continued to agitate. But now they were agitating against the very Irish farmers who’d benefited from land reform. 
 
Meanwhile, land reform hadn’t solved the question of Ireland’s future as a state. 
 
The Land War coalition of organised labour and political nationalism foreshadowed the Irish War of Independence during the 1910s and 1920s.
 
There’s a direct line from Land War activists like Davitt to anticolonial socialists like James Connolly, all part of the history of social revolution in modern Ireland.