I

The complexities of late Victorian Irish social radicalism manifested themselves through the activities of the Land League, Irish National League and United Irish League. On the eve of the Land War of 1879–81, 7,000 landlords owned widely disparate estates of up to 160,000 acres, with tenant farmers renting farms of varying sizes and quality from them.Footnote ² The result of the various land acts that came into operation between 1870 and 1909 saw a revolutionary transformation of ownership to 600,000 tenant farmers.Footnote ³ Agrarian movements, such as Tenant Leagues, had emerged from the late 1840s and early 1850s, but they generally represented the interests of a small group of stronger farmers. These organisations disappeared as soon as economic conditions improved and they rarely paid attention to the plight of agricultural labourers or subsistence farmers scratching out a bare living on marginal land in the west of Ireland where the risk of crop failure always lingered. These subaltern classes were voiceless and marginalised in any re-imagining of an Irish nation, with references always to the sturdy or strong farmer. This forced them to engage in episodic periods of localised agrarian violence against those above them in the rural class system.

Matt Harris, the subject of this article, made the first tentative efforts to organise small tenant farmers and labourers in the west of Ireland, primarily in counties Galway and Mayo. He was one of the first to take the plight of this group seriously, remarking that their powerlessness led to them remaining subjugated. The second level leaders of the Land League, that is, those who were not of the class of Davitt and Parnell, are of great significance as a local measure of the progress of the popular cause. Harris worked alongside an array of other grassroots leaders to ensure that these classes gained some semblance of a shared identity.Footnote ⁴ This paralleled the rise of constitutional nationalism in Ireland as it became an all embracing, evocative and serious force to be reckoned with by the end of the first phase of the Land War.

Harris was born on a small farm outside Athlone in 1826 and later became a building contractor in Ballinasloe. He had a revolutionary background: his grandfather, Peter Harris, was executed in 1798 for his part in the rebellion in Kildare. Harris was in turn a Repealer, Young Irelander, Fenian, Land Leaguer and Member of Parliament, having become a Fenian in 1865 and Member of Parliament in 1885.Footnote ⁵ Throughout his life he contended that an inadequate resolution of the Irish land question by the British government perpetuated the social malaise experienced by small farmers in the west of Ireland. Harris's testimony to the Parnell Commission was acknowledged as an insightful analysis of life in the west of Ireland from the mid 1870s. He stated that he was forced from his family farm so that he had to become a building contractor, although he had previously remarked that he gave the farm to his sister.Footnote ⁶ Nevertheless, the testimony serves as a useful explanation of his animus towards graziers and landlords.Footnote ⁷

This article focuses upon Harris's writings and ideas pertaining to the social difficulties presented by the land question and condition of labourers between 1876 and 1882. The Ballinasloe Tenant Defence Association was established in 1876 as the question of land reform began to move centre stage. Donald Jordan explains that while Parnell was not fully convinced of the usefulness of utilising the land movement and temporarily relegating Home Rule: ‘it is quite likely that during his visit to Ballinasloe in 1878, [he] became intrigued with the possibility that a land movement may have for the nationalist struggle . . . the vigour of the nascent agitation had caught Parnell off guard, but he had yet to be convinced of its usefulness to his parliamentary campaign’.Footnote ⁸ Harris was also eager for labourers to have a stake in the soil, paralleling earlier efforts in Britain by Joseph Arch through the National Agricultural Labourers's Union.Footnote ⁹ In 1882 Harris attempted to organise labourers in Ballinasloe into a distinct movement as they had previously been active in the Land League. This was his first public involvement in politics following his arrest and release under the terms of the Protection of Persons and Property Act which, Paul Bew argues, removed the last remaining radical hue in the Land League, as it was now under the control of the larger farmers of Leinster and Munster.Footnote ¹⁰

II

Harris believed that centrally organised and controlled movements would eventually be dominated by stronger interests, remarking ‘I am not a man who cares very much for central bodies. My work was amongst the masses of the people’. Previously these ‘masses’ had been mere extras in political movements, but because of the efforts of Harris and others, they began to play a leading role in political activities.Footnote ¹¹ In a pamphlet entitled A Paper on the Present Condition, Socially and Politically of the Artisans of Ireland (1880), Harris summarised why he strongly advocated reforms for marginalised farmers in the west, explaining that:

He found such indifference unfathomable and wanted to see the enactment of legislation that would benefit small farmers, particularly those holding thirty acres or fewer.Footnote ¹³

Priests were seen as the natural leaders of the people and they had acquired a reputation for zealous electioneering in the nineteenth century. They received unfavourable attention because of their activity during the 1872 by-election campaign which was held following the resignation of Sir William Gregory after he was appointed ambassador to Ceylon. The Catholic landlord, Captain John Phillip Nolan, locked horns with Captain William le Poer Trench, scion of the house of Clancarty, a staunch evangelical Protestant family from Ballinasloe, with the religious beliefs of both sides attracting vitriolic language. Captain Nolan emerged victorious in what became a bitter, and at times, violent contest. His expediency in offering de facto tenant right on the Portacarron estate alarmed the Galway landlords. During the campaign, sectarian hostility was expressed by Catholic clergy in most vociferous terms, even though such extreme vitriol was generally absent from election campaigns in Galway, both before and after this contest.Footnote ¹⁴ Trench successfully appealed the result and the presiding judge, William Keogh, delivered such a scathing judgement that Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone became concerned that it could lead to an imperial crisis. But this did not inhibit the zeal of the priesthood, which remained active in neighbouring Mayo in 1874.

The Fenian and Supreme Council member, John O’Connor Power, stood for election in Mayo in 1874 and Harris was his campaign manager. J. J. Lee argues that O’Connor Power's ‘election team in 1874 formed the nucleus of the subsequent tenant leadership’.Footnote ¹⁵ The failed 1867 rebellion meant that a new direction was needed and the beginnings of this were manifested in O’Connor Power's election and willingness to sit in parliament, which embodied the first of a series of ‘New Departures’ on the part of Fenians and constitutional politicians. Clerical pressure saw O’Connor Power withdraw his candidature in the general election, but after its result was nullified, he stood in the subsequent by-election and was victorious, thus becoming the first Fenian to take his seat in Parliament. While O'Donovan Rossa had been elected for Tipperary in 1869, Fenian hostility towards constitutional politics and the oath of allegiance to the crown meant that he remained absent from Westminster.Footnote ¹⁶ The Supreme Council was isolated from the reality in Ireland due to their exile in Paris and Charles Kickham's stance prevented other Fenians from getting involved in the movement. Lee has shown how individual members like Harris had acute social antennae and often ignored the directives coming from the Supreme Council as they became involved in the agitation in the west. Doctrinaire Fenians such as Kickham were quite hostile to this and in 1877 Harris warned Kickham that his intransigence was unwise because of the impoverished social conditions in Mayo at the time.Footnote ¹⁷

Harris was hostile to clerical influence in political and social issues, arguing that:

He was determined to construct an effective lay leadership in order to challenge clerical zeal, the unrepresentative nature of aristocratic politicians and the opportunism of merchants who were primarily interested in ‘respectability’ rather than the alleviation of poverty. The establishment of the Ballinasloe Tenant Defence Association in May 1876 represented an attempt by Harris to create a movement free from these influences. He thought that the clergy and lower classes could not work in harmony because wealth and religion were inextricably intertwined and becoming more powerful and he felt that this needed to be challenged.Footnote ¹⁹ While there were clergy involved in the association, none were members of the executive. James Daly's Connaught Telegraph recorded approximately twenty meetings between 1876 and 1879 and succeeded in bringing both the association and Harris to greater national attention.Footnote ²⁰ The first meeting of the Land League of Mayo that took place in Irishtown on 20^th April 1879 is often seen as the spark that soon spread throughout the countryside, yet it was Ballinasloe that laid the seeds for a movement that reflected the desires of small tenant farmers. Harris called its establishment ‘a new phase in Irish politics and a very hopeful one’.Footnote ²¹

Harris, James Kilmartin (farmer) and Michael Malachy O’Sulivan (teacher) were instrumental in the establishment of the Ballinasloe Tenant Defence Association in 1876. The disparate make up of the leadership reflected the growth of political participation amongst the lower classes in Ireland, which paralleled the growth of popular liberalism under Gladstone. The Reform Act of 1867 and Secret Ballot Act of 1872 shepherded these changes and encouraged the move towards a more democratic political framework.

Samuel Clark identified twenty-nine Farmers’ Clubs and Tenant Defence Associations in The Social Origins of the Irish Land War, while thirty-six are recorded in the John Sweetman papers in the National Library of Ireland.Footnote ²² Two of the best known were the Kerry and Ballinasloe Tenant Defence Associations. Donnacha Seán Lucey has recently contended that while the Kerry association had a Fenian element in its earliest manifestation, the leadership was soon dominated by the local merchant class and clergy, with the O’Donoghue of the Glens acting as the overall leader. With the exception of the Ballinasloe association, the executives of many of these associations were strongly dominated by the clergy.Footnote ²³ Efforts to unite small farmers and town tenants by Harris resembled similar action taken in the United Kingdom in the 1830s when endeavours were made to bring the Cambridgeshire Tenant Farmers Association and the London Workingman's Association into an alliance in 1836. Following the legal recognition of trade unions by the British government in 1871, mass meeting were held in villages across Britain that culminated in the foundation of the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union. It is therefore likely that Harris was influenced by the ‘Great Awakening’ of agricultural labourers in the early 1870s, as well as by P. F. Johnson's attempts to organise the labourers in Kanturk around this time.Footnote ²⁴

Tenant Defence Associations were established as a response to the inadequacies of the 1870 Land Act which failed to provide for leaseholders and along with Farmers’ Clubs, they were part of the ‘challenging collectivity’. These consisted of ‘combinations formed by and claiming to represent the interests of tenant farmers [that] became the predominant type of agrarian collective action in the post-Famine period’.Footnote ²⁵ These movements emerged from the early 1870s and began discussing the weaknesses of the land legislation and of the representation provided by Members of Parliament at this time, yet they have been neglected in historiography until recently.Footnote ²⁶ While there was no serious agitation because stomachs were generally full until 1878, ideas of class consciousness were still evoked at general meetings, with radicals, the stronger farmers and others involved in the nascent nationalist movement remaining on message together until 1881.Footnote ²⁷

The topics discussed at meetings of the Ballinasloe Tenant Defence Association included reform of the land system and criticisms of landlords and graziers, which were driven by Harris. While he dismissed any sympathies expressed towards good landlords at these meetings, he was keen that no injustice be served upon them, but bad landlords needed to be weeded out.Footnote ²⁸ In 1880 Harris remarked that ‘one of the greatest defects in Mr Gladstone’s, and even Mr Butt's bill, is the absence of any provision that would ensure, even approximately, a fair valuation as between landlord and tenant’.Footnote ²⁹ He believed that the act gave effectual protection to larger farmers, further contending that a petty culture of small farms over monster farms was the best for the country on economic grounds.Footnote ³⁰ Despite its inherent weakness, the significance of the 1870 act cannot be overestimated. It represented a realisation on the part of the government that they needed to put aside their concerns about interfering in the land holding system in Ireland and bring in some measures to counteract the hostility towards it.

Like the coffee shops of E. P. Thompson's England, the pubs, reading rooms and mass meetings of late Victorian Ireland played an important role in the making of an Irish rural working class as efforts were made to inculcate ideas of liberty into the minds of small farmers. In On the Political Situation (1880) Harris rhetorically asked whether liberty had deep roots in Ireland: ‘or is it a thing on the surface, propped up by poets and dreamers, a pretence, a mockery, a sham, a toy for children and fools to be amused by and wise men to scoff at?’Footnote ³¹ He consistently stressed that the class divisions in the countryside were significant and remained hostile to unity of action because he saw it as a threat to smaller farmers and labourers, contending that stronger classes would be able to consolidate their positions and move into the spheres of influence held by landlords.Footnote ³²

While calling landlords the embodiment of an exclusive and unrepresentative body, Harris acknowledged the presence of good landlords in the country, but said ‘the greatest enemies of the good landlords are those persons that would make a barrier of them to protect the bad ones’.Footnote ³³ During the Land War, he also praised the efforts of Lords Clancarty, Clonbrock and the O’Conor Don in their efforts to alleviate acute distress in the countryside, although he would criticise the same landlords on occasion.Footnote ³⁴ In 1876, he said that there were three forms of landlord oppression: ‘the landlord who is fond of changing his tenants is a bad man; the landlord who, after evicting his tenants, amalgamates their farms, is still a worse man; but the landlord who, after doing both these things, lays down the land in grass is the worst of all’.Footnote ³⁵ Such criticisms of landlords did not occur with the same regularity at Tenant Defence Association meetings elsewhere in the country as the lack of clergy on the executive in Ballinasloe removed any restraining influence on these ideas.

Harris was a young adult during the worst ravages of the Famine, and it is obvious he was concerned that something akin to it would return if the land question were not resolved. His ideas were reflective of a wider sentiment felt amongst popular Liberals in post-Chartist Britain as they sought to challenge the power of privileged aristocrats.Footnote ³⁶ While Chartism was a movement that had disappeared by 1848, it left a legacy that inspired later activists. The 1867 Reform Act and the 1872 Secret Ballot Act were influenced by Chartist activity and the extent of this influence in Ireland warrants greater investigation. Eugenio Biagini has also noted that by the 1880s Home Rule had begun to capture the popular imagination in Britain in connection with ideas of liberty and citizenship as it became part of a wider imperial question,Footnote ³⁷ although the social problems created by access to land were the most pressing issues in the west of Ireland. In On the Political Situation, Harris declares that: ‘before condemning the land movement, sincere Irishmen, should . . . ask themselves whether the cause of the Irish farmer is not the cause of liberty and humanity . . . as in the days of the French Revolution the cry for bread should be mingled with the cry for liberty’.Footnote ³⁸ There had been threats to aristocratic rule in the aftermath of the French Revolution, with the clarion call of liberty, equality and fraternity ringing loudly in the ears of the working classes in Britain, with Thomas Paine acting as a guiding light for many. However, the economic prosperity of the early nineteenth century saw privilege maintain and even increase its influence, with many believing that ‘providence had indeed favoured their way of life and that hierarchy and tradition had won out over democracy’.Footnote ³⁹

III

The changing attitude towards aristocratic privilege was manifested in the expression of anti-landlord sentiment on Land League platforms. Landlords were portrayed as heartless evictors who cared little for their tenants, treating them capriciously. Harris contended that landlords ensured that the lower classes were the ‘bondholders of civilization . . . oppressed by the aristocracy of wealth’ and if they were to achieve real improvements in Ireland, the lesser cause, which was land, needed to be pursued in order to ensure that farmers were secure in their farms.Footnote ⁴⁰

The agitation that emerged as a result of the economic depression of 1877 was different to anything that had occurred before, coming as it did after one of the most prosperous periods witnessed in Ireland. J. S. Donnelly called it ‘a product not merely of agricultural crisis, but also a revolution of rising expectations’. Donnelly concludes that ‘for the generation of Irish farmers who remembered the hardship of the Famine there was no desire to return to it; for the generation that had grown up with economic prosperity there was no great desire to relinquish it’.Footnote ⁴¹ Small farmers in the west of Ireland were in a particularly vulnerable position, feeling the effects of the downturn quite acutely because they were heavily indebted to both their landlords and shopkeepers. Moreover, as Biagini argues, ‘genuinely held values of liberty and popular participation could, and were, also turned into ideologies of social control’.Footnote ⁴²

The rise of the urban bourgeoisie and the emergence of a market economy in post Famine Ireland saw an increased interdependency of towns and the rural hinterland and this resulted in the Land War becoming a ‘bitter conflict between two sets of creditors’. While the urban milieu had a disproportionate influence upon the land movement, it could not have achieved the proportions it did without their assistance. The involvement of shopkeepers in plans to remove landlordism was not because of any particular ideological inclination but rather represented a desire to remove a competing creditor. The extension of credit could be problematic as shopkeepers frequently charged steep interest, with one apparently charging a rate of forty-three per cent. Tenants were compelled to accept goods on credit and shopkeepers resented being so reliant on the trade of farmers. These groups formed a pragmatic alliance during the Land War, with shopkeepers providing the bulk of the leadership. The union appeared on the surface to be ideological, because the shopkeepers had links with tenant farmers through the association. Irish towns and villages pulsated with the rhythm of the agricultural season,Footnote ⁴³ so it was necessary for farmers to have successful harvests in order for merchants to survive and this serves as a further explanation for both the involvement of shopkeepers and the begrudging nature of the alliance.

Irish farming had become increasingly pastoral after the Famine, with eighty-four per cent of land in Connaught being used for grazing by 1876. The expansion of a livestock oriented economy in the 1850s and 1860s created ideal conditions for radical political activity to grow. However, the lack of interest amongst Fenians in the land question during this period rendered the idea of such agitation questionable, but ‘the speed at which economic adversity renewed hostilities indicates that, underlying the apparent harmony that prevailed during most of the 1860s and 1870s, there remained a basic weakness in the Irish landlord-tenant relationship’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Communal solidarity along class lines was lacking in the Irish countryside as there was no sense of shared identity amongst farmers because their self-sufficiency from working the land gave them no reason to become involved in such organisations. The intensification of the crisis that arrived in the late 1870s saw the yield in potatoes collapse in 1877, with average yields of 1.8 tons being recorded that year. This was in comparison to an average of 3.3 tons per acre being produced between 1871 and 1876. There was a further collapse in 1879, as average yields of 1.4 tons per acre were recorded.Footnote ⁴⁵ Until 1879 harmonious landlord–tenant relations existed as tenants generally paid their rents promptly, but ‘when prosperity came to an end in the late 1870s, the groundwork had been laid by the challenging collectivities . . . for the greatest challenge to established power in nineteenth-century Ireland’ with James S. Donnelly contending that a great leap of the imagination was the only way one could have anticipated the violence associated with the Land War.Footnote ⁴⁶

In Land Reform: A Letter to the Council of the Irish National League (1880),Footnote ⁴⁷ Harris set out a detailed proposal for a solution to the vexing land question. While much that was proffered in it was idealistic and primarily aimed at counteracting grazing, there were salient demands for housing reform, which are outside the remit of this article. Furthermore, they reflected the ideas articulated by Harris in numerous speeches and letters to newspapers. While arguing that peasant proprietorship was the only way to abolish landlordism, he acknowledged that there were many good landlords and it would be unjust and a form of robbery not to compensate them adequately. He appreciated that there would be no satisfactory reform to the land system that would please all, but contended that ‘the man who tills the soil has the best right to own it’ in spite of there being good larger farmers.Footnote ⁴⁸ Neither was he in favour of the immediate overthrow of landlordism, but rather a gradual process of deconstruction. He declared that:

While landlords were subject to most criticisms during the Land War, Harris ensured that graziers did not escape public odium either and land grabbers were especially despised. His contempt for them stemmed from the consolidation of small farms by landlords in the aftermath of the Famine.Footnote ⁵⁰ Graziers were treated with suspicion in the west of Ireland because they saw themselves as socially superior and a replacement to the gentry and aristocracy in spheres of influence such as local politics. Eugene Hynes argues that this suspicion was because they did not fit well into traditional communities as they threatened the subsistence of the most vulnerable farmers. He suggests that ‘In Mayo, more than a few were foreigners, (English and Scottish) and were detested for their foreign faith as well as their economic practice’. He further stated that all (my emphasis) graziers were derided in the local community:

Harris also linked their behaviour with the deteriorating condition of towns, claiming that ‘the decay in towns, the want of labour, the depression in trade . . . are in the highest degree traceable to the extension of grass farming’. Because this contributed to a general loss for the community as a whole, it needed to be abolished.Footnote ⁵² He contended that the government needed to compel landlords or graziers with farms larger than fifty acres to build suitable housing for labourers, provide one acre of good grass-land to rear a cow for twelve months and one hundred boxes of turf. He believed that this, with the construction of villages and the correct management of commonages, would prevent emigration and the depopulation of the countryside. Harris also suggested that the boundaries of large towns could be extended into the country for land that could support working families that could not afford the ‘bribe [necessary] for a townpark’,Footnote ⁵³ while ensuring that any individual would not be ‘entitled to a larger proportion than would be necessary to supply his wants’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Harris further proposed that the government should take possession of waste lands if crown or quit rents were not paid and suggested that if this land were next to pasture, some of this could be provided, with a piece of good land given with each portion of bog or waste. He also wanted to see grazing tenancies voided because they locked ‘up the earth against tillage [with] chains on the plough and spade’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Harris asserted that there was no employment to be had on grass farms, contending that it was bringing the country back to barbarism through the prohibition of tillage.Footnote ⁵⁶

Furthermore, he was sceptical of the financial robustness of many graziers, believing them to be ‘the most unreliable and worse agents government could advance to’.Footnote ⁵⁸ These groups in the countryside remained a focus of criticism by Harris during the Land War because he believed that they did ‘nothing to improve their country or themselves, and what is worse; they prevent others from doing it by their selfishness’.Footnote ⁵⁹ He wanted fixity of tenure restricted to farms of sixty acres or less because he was concerned that graziers would gain greater powers in the countryside if it were extended to them. He believed that they did not have the same sentimental attachment to the land as landlords may have had. It was because of such a stance that Harris was accused of begrudging farmer prosperity.Footnote ⁶⁰

In his superb British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906 of 2007, Biagini saliently maintains that ‘the legitimacy of the law was contested not because it came from a colonial power, but because it tended to enshrine landlord and farmer interests’,Footnote ⁶¹ with small farmers and labourers losing out. Stephen Ball asserts that small farmers were opposed to the capitalisation of farming and the denial of what they saw as their natural rights and that grazing threatened this. Hugh Brody also shows how efforts to maximise profits went against traditional social understandings and customs and how grazing was simply a business in which farming was subordinated to the making of profit. This was in conflict with the mentality of subsistence that generally existed amongst farmers.Footnote ⁶² While Brody was writing about Ireland in the mid twentieth century, his arguments are certainly applicable to the Ireland of two generations earlier. Despite Harris's efforts to turn some animated criticisms towards graziers, their influence during the Land War succeeded in ensuring that landlords were the focus of animus as they slowly became the common enemy of all farmers.Footnote ⁶³

IV

The worsening economic crisis was crucial in removing any popular sentiment that may have remained for landlordism and L. P. Curtis argues that: ‘Land League leaders had made it clear that their long-term goal was to eliminate landlords, no matter how benevolent individual landowners might be’ and that ‘forelock-tugging and cap-doffing to one-time social superiors were consigned to the past’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Agrarian violence increased in the latter half of 1880 and this coincided with the increasingly forceful rhetoric of speeches and a breakdown in order in the countryside. While landlords and graziers were of course derided, the most abhorred individual in the countryside was ‘the grabber’. Throughout 1880 and 1881, more and more meetings took place and speakers began to forecast the fall of landlordism. This resulted in a full-scale confrontation between landlord and tenant now becoming unavoidable, with the likes of Harris stoking the fire of antagonism between classes. Traditional notions of respect and deference were being explicitly challenged and as Laurence Geary argues ‘the tenant involvement in land agitation shattered their inherited sense of deference towards their landlords’.Footnote ⁶⁵

The ‘revolt of the tenantry’, a term coined by William Feingold, was part of a gradual democratic preparation and the popular political participation of the 1870s laid the foundations for a more coherent agrarian movement.Footnote ⁶⁶ Harris astutely remarked that gentry, grazier and shopkeeper came to monopolise the various political boards, and he believed that if artisans, labourers or small farmers began to seek election or participate in these boards, then the ruling classes would laugh.Footnote ⁶⁷

Until the 1870s landlords could dictate the outcome of local government elections and even general elections. This changed in two ways. Firstly, the Secret Ballot Act of 1872 meant that electors could vote without fear of the consequences if they went against their landlord's preferred candidate and secondly the landlords’ grip on local government loosened considerably as nationalists began contesting elections to the Board of Guardians that were responsible for the management and operation of workhouses and relief works. Nationalists began to realise that these elections could help them win influence at a local level. There was significant respectability attached to such positions of local authority and with the increasing embourgeoisement of towns, the urban middle classes, such as shopkeepers and publicans, along with tenant farmers desired the respectability and influence once held by their aristocratic overlords and this intensified in the late 1880s. This metamorphosis of Poor Law administration in Ireland saw it cease ‘to operate as a branch of landlord–dominated local government and became tenant controlled assemblies’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Harris also believed that there were nationalists who used the Poor Law elections for expedient purposes, without actually caring about the condition of the poor. He remarked that they ‘will hardly approach a mechanic, least (sic) he might soil his broadcloth by contact, though he seldom approaches any man except for the purposes of fleecing him’.Footnote ⁶⁹ He said that such nationalists were ‘strictly monarchical and aristocratic in their ideals’.Footnote ⁷⁰ To challenge their influence, he argued that artisans and small farmers needed to seize this power and use it for the benefit of humanity: ‘artisans have a higher and holier object than ministering to the diseased appetites, the insatiable desires of those who possess wealth, and those who use wealth to degrade and enslave the men who have created it’.Footnote ⁷¹

Evictions were not as widespread as orthodox historiography would lead one to believe, but when they took place, they were emotive spectacles that captured the imagination of the people and consequently mobilised them to resist. In his efforts to encourage farmers to engage in a more proactive struggle against process servers and bailiffs, Harris told a crowd in Loughrea in January 1880 to:

Harris told the Parnell Commission that pressurising grabbers to stop evicting farmers was one of the most important roles of the Land League because grabbers were seen to be enemies of God and man.Footnote ⁷³ The language used at these meetings was frequently ambiguous and open to interpretation. Tenants often resorted to violence against evictions and grabbings, so that Harris was accused of encouraging some with his fiery rhetoric. The weekly mass meeting played an important role in marshalling the countryside. It was generally held after Sunday mass or on a market day, which would make it more likely to attract a crowd. Harris was one of the most active participants and prolific speakers and it is difficult to quantify the number of meetings he attended. The moral pressure of the ‘crowd’ could result in tenants conforming to the laws of the league, for fear of extreme consequences if they did not.

One of the most celebrated moments in Harris's career prior to his arrest under the terms of the Protection of Person and Property Act, was the case of Martin Bermingham's eviction and Murty Hynes's taking of the holding on the Dunsandle estate at Riverville, Loughrea. Martin Bermingham had been evicted from his holding by Lord Dunsandle. Hynes defied Land League orders about taking an evicted holding and was subsequently denounced by Harris as a traitor. Such was the moral pressure exerted upon Hynes and the threat of violence against him that he soon relinquished the farm. A song was penned by T. D. Sullivan, recounting what happened, initially admonishing Hynes, then extolling him as a great Irishman succumbing to this great moral pressure:

As well as paying homage to a once misguided land grabber, this song also captures the difficulties faced by tenants in paying their rents in the midst of an economic crisis. Geary argues that:

Lord Dunsandle, like his neighbour the Marquis of Clanricarde, did not have a favourable reputation amongst people in the Loughrea/Athenry region. But the idea of taking a neighbour's farm challenged unwritten rules and notions of community in rural Ireland. It was a reprehensible action akin to scab labour. Grabbing evoked memories of Famine clearances and in this case Hynes was made an example of. The tenant that took the farm after him was shot dead for doing so and this region was a hotbed of intense agrarian crime during the Land War.Footnote ⁷⁶ The role of Harris and others in creating this sense of an imagined community of tenant farmers that were oppressed by an alien landlord class was critical in fostering a sense of oppression and maltreatment. The ambiguity of language in speeches meant that the various classes listening could interpret them as they saw fit.

Harris's language focused primarily on the landlord and grazier system rather than British rule as the cause of woes. While reflecting on other revolutions in a speech possessing traces of Enlightenment influence, Thomas Brennan told a meeting at Clonmacnoise on 5^th September 1880 that:

At the same meeting, Harris said that it was important for the people to work together ‘against this beastly system, if you had done this . . . [landlords] would tremble before you’. They had to:

East Galway became one of the most active areas for agrarian violence by 1881. The most recent scholarship by L. P. Curtis and Pat Finnegan, along with that of Donald Jordan, has shown how the government failed to understand fully what could be crudely described as a ‘peasant mentality’, with resistance to threats to traditional societies frequently being met with violence.Footnote ⁷⁹ Irish historians have been slow to appreciate the clash between official and unofficial rules of law that existed in the countryside, especially in more isolated regions that had still to fall to the vicissitudes of modernisation.Footnote ⁸⁰ Furthermore, Biagini has argued that ‘the legitimacy to the law was contested, not because it came from a colonial power but because it tended to enshrine landlord and tenant interest’ with paternalistic concession going hand in hand with coercion.Footnote ⁸¹

V

‘The land for the people’ was the rallying call during the Land War. However labourers were excluded from what constituted the people. Rural labourers were frequently treated with contempt and were always at the precipice of destitution, but a more despised individual in provincial Ireland was the urban labourer and Harris was almost a lone voice advocating reform for them during the Land War.Footnote ⁸² There was no help forthcoming from rural Ireland to assist labourers, meaning that they were isolated from the focus of nationalist discussion of the redistribution of land. There was a purity about the feckless labourer for Harris: ‘the poorer he is, the lower he is, the more despised he is, the better’.Footnote ⁸³ While Harris blamed government apathy for their condition, he also contended that their own indifference limited their ability to improve their condition. He further apportioned blame on those ‘who traffic on the wealth which industry produces and produce nothing themselves’. He also suggested that education needed to be the labourers' priorityFootnote ⁸⁴ which would allow them to escape the cycle of poverty they were in and counteract the condescension of paternalism.

In an effort to further the cause of labourers, a branch of the short lived Labour League was established in Ballinasloe in July 1882. Harris said labourers were the backbone of the Land League and if the organisation was left to those who benefited the most from it, the farmers, the League would never have assumed the proportions that it did.Footnote ⁸⁵ When questioning the competence of the gentry and the middle class, Harris argued:

Harris genuinely believed that the participation of labourers in a separate struggle would bring about improvements in their condition. He felt that the urban poor were generally neglected in a mass movement as stronger classes consolidated their influence.

In order to challenge this situation, he told the initial meeting of the Labour League in Ballinasloe that ‘if you want to improve your own condition and raise yourself in the social status, then it is to your own class that you will have to look’. He also argued that ‘the working men of Ballinasloe [need to realise] the great and absorbing necessity [that] there is for union amongst themselves’ in order to remove the ‘shackles of slavery’ that had ensnared them.Footnote ⁸⁷ However, the evidence suggests that he failed to mobilise them in anything resembling an independent movement, and the embers of this effort eventually burned out. In subsequent years, flashes of tension emerged in discussions relating to the provision of housing for the urban poor, with the local ‘shopocracy’ sneering at the plight of this group.Footnote ⁸⁸ Methodists were heavily involved in the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union in Britain as they frequently preached the gospel to the lower classes in society and were staunch critics of the land system as the cause of national impoverishment.Footnote ⁸⁹ The same could not be said for the majority of the Catholic clergy in the west of Ireland, as they sought to stymie any hint of radicalism, fearing the challenge to their authority from communistic propaganda.

VI

By the end of the first phase of the Land War, nationalists succeeded in portraying landlords as heartless oppressors and the English press treated them with a disdain that was often thinly veiled contempt and this intensified from 1886. Landlord apathy, which frequently bordered on arrogance, isolated them from even their most ardent supporters in the Conservative party, who were becoming dismayed by their lack of action. L. P. Curtis has recently argued that the reputation of landlords had been irreparably damaged due to the attitude of the eccentric and volatile second Marquis of Clanricarde, who ‘single-handedly did more to tarnish the reputation of his class than any other landowner’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The miserly Marquis was dubbed Clan-Rack-Rent and even ignored pleas from his land agent, Frank Joyce, to grant a universal reduction of twenty-five per cent on the Woodford part of his estate where land was desperately marginal, stating that he would only deal with individual cases.Footnote ⁹¹ His belligerence led to the second phase of the Land War from 1886 that became known as the Plan of Campaign.Footnote ⁹²

The second half of the 1880s saw Irish landlords haemorrhaging support. Their response to the agitation was insipid as they naively believed that tenant loyalty would spring eternal. Their remaining source of power, their estates, was slowly disintegrating as a result of the land legislation being enacted. While the Conservatives were the natural allies of landlords, they began to see Irish landlordism as a liability and hoped that the enactment of Land Purchase legislation would quell discontent because the basis of moral force Unionism was that ‘every native has his price’.Footnote ⁹³ Such a changing attitude towards landlords was mostly due to the speeches made at Land League meetings, which focused upon the system of landlordism as the root of suffering for the people of Ireland and it was only through its destruction that things would improve. Harris played a significant role in this as he ‘had enlivened many an anti-landlord platform with his fiery rhetoric’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Harris had a great belief that the Land League could bring about change if utilised in the correct manner and felt that the holding of meetings, followed by their reporting in the local and national press, would eventually bring the plight of farmers to greater attention. Harris's rhetoric was emotive and could be quite forceful and violent, resulting in his arrest under the terms of the Protection of Persons and Property Act in 1881. He was attuned to the condition of the people and recognised the problems that unity of action would present. In general, he was not an abstract political theorist, rather his ideas were formulated from observations and discussions with those whom he sought to represent and his writings reflected this. His arrest in 1881 removed the final radical element in the land movement. He did not encourage unity of action and despised the self-serving mentality of the stronger farmers and clergy. He believed that these groups were not interested in assisting the lower classes in the countryside, but were primarily concerned with self-preservation and the consolidation of their position as a nascent elite ready to replace the landlords. He called it the alliance of the shark and the prey. P. K. Egan said ‘there was a live zone of Fenianism about Ballinasloe and South Roscommon’, which centred on Harris.Footnote ⁹⁵

Nationalist politics moved beyond the land question after the Kilmainham Treaty and became more conservative in its nature as efforts turned to Home Rule. Nevertheless, Harris's radicalism remained, even though he was not as visible as he had been prior to his arrest. While the Irish National League now turned its attention to Home Rule, Harris still stressed that it was the land question which was of most concern to western farmers. It was more important to them than Home Rule and the idea of an independent parliament which was being pushed by the stronger classes. While the central leadership stressed unity of action in order to achieve Home Rule, it was obvious to Harris that unity of action was merely a fig leaf for the stronger classes to pursue their aims and efforts at achieving respectability at the expense of others in the countryside. He stressed that ‘we must often begin with the less in order to achieve the greater . . . the land movement, due to its class basis, is in its essence, national’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Harris's language had obvious Chartist connotations and as he was of that generation, his language was also inflected with Enlightenment thought. He was probably influenced by Thomas Paine, a Chartist staple, along with Fergus O’Connor, who put forward the Chartist Land Plan in the 1840s. Contemporary radicals in the Social and Democratic Federation and Lib-Lab politicians also drew upon such influences.Footnote ⁹⁷ While the extent of these influences on Irish radical thought needs to be investigated further, Harris's evolution from Chartism to agrarian radicalism was natural, considering his advocacy of the rights of smaller farmers and labourers, along with his embrace of democratic systems.Footnote ⁹⁸

Despite the numerous clashes and hostility between Harris and others, he was respected because of his acute sensitivity towards the crisis that presented itself in Ireland. The police called him a ‘dangerously clever man’ and his actions were an effort to give a coherent voice to subaltern groups in the Irish countryside that previously had none. He showed that political participation could be the instrument for achieving real aims and his actions were symptomatic of the ‘anti-parliamentary orientation of much radical politics and ideology during the period 1877–1906’.Footnote ⁹⁹