James Daly (Irish Land League)

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James Daly (born in County Mayo, Ireland in 1838; died in County Mayo in 1910) was an Irish nationalist activist best known for his work in support of tenants' rights and the formation of the Irish Land League.

1 Beginnings
2 Leadup to the April 20 1879 Irishtown Meeting
3 The April 20 1879 Irishtown Meeting
4 T M Healy's view of the Irishtown meeting
5 Following the Irishtown Meeting
6 Quotes
7 References
8 External Links

[edit] Beginnings

Daly was a conservative Catholic from a comfortably-off Mayo farming family. He served from 1869 on the Castlebar Board of Guardians and as a guardian for the Litterbrick Division in Ballina union.

Daly took up the emerging political cause in the West to establish tenants rights against largely absentee landlords and participated in the meeting in Louisburgh in 1875, convened to establish a local tenants defence association.

From May 1876, Daly and Alfred O'Hea supported Matt Harris's Ballinasloe Tenants Defence Association.

In February 1876 together with Alfred O'Hea he purchased the Mayo Telegragh, renamed the Connaught Telegraph in 1878, and became sole owner in 1879 on O'Hea's death. The Connaught Telegraph became the early publicity vehicle for what was initially a Mayo-based land movement.

[edit] Leadup to the April 20 1879 Irishtown Meeting

In January 1879 local Irishtown tenants asked Daly to take up their cause against landowner Canon Burke.

Michael Davitt was also in Mayo at the time investigating land issues. He is generally credited with having the vision to extend the scope of tenant land protests from the local to a coordinated national context. Davitt and a group of Fenians including John Walshe met with Daly and his local organizers, Fenian tenant farmers James Daly and Daniel O'Connor of Irishtown, and two shopkeepers from Claremorris, Thomas Sweeney and John O'Kane.

Daly publicised the grievances and advertised a mass protest meeting on February 22 1879 in the Connaught Telegraph. The meeting had to be postponed until April. The day before the meeting, on Saturday April 19 1879, Daly's announcement in the Connaught Telegraph read :-

IRISHTOWN TENANT-RIGHT MEETING
On to-morrow (Sunday) a mass meeting of the tenant farmers of Mayo, Galway, and Roscommon will be held at Irishtown, a few miles outside Claremorris, for the purpose of representing to the world the many and trying ordeals and grievances the tenant farmers labour under. There will be several leading gentlemen present who will speak on the occasion, amongst whom will be John O'C. Power, Esq., M.P., John Ferguson, Esq. Glasgow, and J.J.Louden, Esq. Westport. The meeting, it is considered, will be one of the largest ever held in Connaught.

[edit] The April 20 1879 Irishtown Meeting

The Connaught Telegraph's report of the meeting in its edition of April 26 1879 began :-

Since the days of O'Connell a larger public demonstration has not been witnessed than that of Sunday last. About 1 o'clock the monster procession started from Claremorris, headed by several thousand men on foot - the men of each district wearing a laural leaf or green ribbon in hat or coat to distinguish the several contingents. At 11 o'clock a monster contingent of tenant-farmers on horseback drew up in front of Hughes's hotel, showing discipline and order that a cavalry regiment might feel proud of. They were led on in sections, each having a marshal who kept his troops well in hand. Messrs. P.W. Nally, J.W. Nally, H. French, and M. Griffin, wearing green and gold sashes, led on their different sections, who rode two deep, occupying, at least, over an Irish mile of the road. Next followed a train of carriages, brakes, cares, etc. led on by Mr. Martin Hughes, the spirited hotel proprietor, driving a pair of rare black ponies to a phæton, taking Messrs. J.J. Louden and J. Daly. Next came Messrs. O'Connor, J. Ferguson, and Thomas Brennan in a covered carriage, followed by at least 500 vehicles from the neighbouring towns. On passing through Ballindine the sight was truly imposing, the endless train directing its course to Irishtown - a neat little hamlet on the boundaries of Mayo, Roscommon, and Galway.

"Advanced" land-reformer and Home-Ruler John Ferguson's resolution stated the goal of the Land War :-

That as the land of Ireland, like that of every other country, was intended by a just and all-providing God for the use and sustenance of those of his people to whom he gave inclination and energies to cultivate and improve it, any system which sanctions its monopoly by a privileged class, or assigns its ownership and control to a landlord caste, to be used as an instrument of usurious or political self-seeking, demands from every aggrieved Irishman an undying hostility, being flagrantly opposed to the first principle of their humanity - self-preservation.

Michael M. O'Sullivan, teacher at a Catholic College and early tenant right activist from Galway, drew the greatest audience response :-

. . . the past two seasons have been very bad, and disease in sheep has crept in to accumulate the distresses of the farmer. Under such circumstances does any man for a moment consider that the tenant farmers of Ireland can afford to pay the present exorbitant rents for their lands, or that the lands are worth those rents?
(Cheers, and cries of "They are not".)
It follows, then, that the present rents being too high, justice demands their reduction.
(cheers)
But, judging from the past, we know that, unfortunately, there are landlords. in Ireland who do not look to what is just, but to what the law will permit.
(hear, hear)
If, then, the landlords who are now demanding exorbitant rents do not lower them to meet the requirements of the times and the altered circumstances of the tenant farmers, let the tenant farmers themselves meet together, and consult together, and settle among themselves what would be fair, equitable rent, and if that is not accepted by the landlord - why, let them pay none at all.
(great cheering, and loud cries of "None at all.")
A Voice - Let them do that (great cheering)
Mr. O'Sullivan - Let it not be considered that in councelling [sic] this I am acting thoughtlessly, unwisely, or impracticably.
(no, no)
I have given this question a great deal of thought. I have seen the Land Question in parliament brought forward with unanswerable eloquence, but with what result?
(Cheers, and a voice, "It was kicked out.")
What, then, are the people to do?
A Voice - Pay no rent at all.(cheers)
Mr. O'Sullivan - They cannot pay unreasonable rents, they wish to pay what is fair and just and it must be accepted. If not let the landlords who refuse take the consequences of refusal on their own heads.
(cheers)
It is...fearful to contemplate those consequences in their fullness ...extermination of the people on the one hand, and - we cannot shut our eyes to the lessons of the past - extermination of the exterminators on the other.
(applause)

[edit] T M Healy's view of the Irishtown meeting

T M Healy's comments on the Irishtown meeting indicate both that Parnell had not yet seen the potential of a Land War, and also the importance of the coverage provided by the Connaught Telegraph, one of only two newspapers (the Tuam Herald was the other) which covered the event :-

No reporters attended the meeting. Power called on me when he returned to London to give an account of it. From what he said I realized that a new portent had arisen out of a leaden sky. He related that footmen in legions and horsemen in squadrons gathered round him to demand reductions of rent. The horsemen, he declared, were organized like cavalry regiments. The police were powerless, and Power foreshadowed that Ireland was on the verge of a movement which would end a dismal chapter. Yet his meeting was unnoted, save by a local weekly, the Castlebar Telegraph, owned by James Daly.

King-Harman, M.P. (afterwards Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Ireland), who read that paper, came upbraidingly to Power in the House of Commons. He and his class watched the trend of politics as stockbrokers do the money markets, for £ s.d. to them was the kernel of the Land question.

When Parnell heard of the success of the Irishtown meeting, he asked Davitt (who had been told to "boycott" it) to get up a second gathering there the following Sunday. At the second demonstration fresh speeches were made which attracted universal attention.

Davitt afterward explained that he would have attended Power's meeting only that he "missed the train." He was a lofty and generous character, yet James Daly, who helped at both gatherings, coined the jibe that Davitt would be "father of the Land League if he had not missed the train." Power refused to come to the second meeting, but the fire they kindled spread into a blaze which inflamed all Ireland.

[edit] Following the Irishtown Meeting

Daly was chairman of the Westport meeting on June 8 1879 , addressed by Parnell and Davitt which finally gave national political impetus to the Land Reform movement.

Daly became vice-president of the new National Land League of Mayo on August 16th 1879, and was elected to the committee of the Irish National Land League founded in Dublin on October 21 1879 when the Mayo Land League was absorbed into it.

Daly was not comfortable with the centralized control of the movement and what he perceived as a drift away from the West, the real area of need, and also was concerned about issues of physical force. He returned to local politics and left the Land League. He sold the Connaught Telegraph to T.H. Gillespie in 1888 and became a full time farmer. He continued in local Government and served on Mayo County Council and Castlebar Urban District Council.

[edit] Quotes

Davitt would be "father of the Land League if he had not missed the train" : reponse to Davitt's explanation for not attending the Irishtown meeting.

"I am a Land Leaguer myself, and I would not be a Land Leaguer if it had anything behind it like revolution. I would fight against it." : to the Bessborough Commission 1881.

[edit] References

Anne Kane. Chapter 4 : "The Emergence of the Land Movement" (pp. 126-174), in Redeeming Ireland: The Formation of Nationalist Identity During the Land War, Duke University Press, 2004.