Tenant Right League

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The Tenant Right League, established in August 1850, was an organisation which aimed to secure reforms in the Irish land system. Formed by Charles Gavan Duffy, it united for a time Protestant and Catholic tenants.

A constitutional movement, it sought the adoption and enforcement of the Three Fs, namely:

  • fair rent;
  • fixity of tenure;
  • free sale. (These would all have aided Irish tenant farms, all of whom lacked them.)

The political background to the movement was the Encumbered Estates Act and the resultant change in land ownership at landlord level. In the North of Ireland, Protestant and Presbyterian ministers feared that the new landlords would destroy the "Ulster custom" of tenancy, which compensated tenants for any improvement undertaken. Concurrently, in the South of Ireland politically minded young Catholic priests were agitating for the adoption there of the Ulster custom as a measure of reform.

The Tenant Right League met with considerable success. It had the support of the surviving Repealers in the British House of Commons; and of a number of English Radicals. It was agreed, all around, that a Land Act embodying the three F's would be a real gain. In the 1852 general election, some fifty Tenant Right candidates were returned to parliament, where they sat as the Independent Irish Party. Its manifesto read:

Rent must be fixed by valuation of the land; the power of raising rents at will, or of recovering a higher rent that one so established must be taken from the landlord. The tenant must have a fixed tenure; he must not be liable to disturbance, so long as he paid the rent established by valuation. If he chose to quit, or could not pay he must have the right to the market value of his tenancy. Nothing shall be included in the valuation, or be paid under it to the landlord , on account of improvements made by the tenant in possession, or those under whom he claims, unless these have been paid for by the landlord in reduced rent, or in some other way.

The League's success was short lived and was ultimately destroyed and weakened when a number of members broke away and established the Catholic Defence Association (the Pope's Brass Band).

The League finally petered out in 1859, its cause however taken up again by the Land League in 1878.