The Irish National League and the 'unwritten law': rural protest and nation-building in Ireland, 1882-1890

Past & Present, Feb, 1998 by Donald Jordan

Conventional wisdom has it that from its inception the Irish National League was the political handmaiden of Charles Stewart Parnell and the advanced wing of the Irish parliamentary party. Certainly, this was Parnell's intention and during the general elections of 1885 and 1886 the League performed splendidly its assigned role in Parnell's electoral juggernaut. However, in the absence of general elections or dramatic moments in the nationalist movement, what Theo Hoppen calls in an earlier context the `local, the immediate, and the everyday' provided the focus for the scope and the activities of the branches of the League.(1) At least in the most active regions, the branches of the National League can be seen as representing the will, the values, the tensions, the solidarities and the divisions within rural. Ireland. By no means were these fixed. They were dynamic, reflecting both the resilience of long-held notions of access to the land as a near-sacred, inviolable entitlement that bound the community together, and the surging power of contemporary and potentially divisive notions of political economy and nationhood. In an environment in which Home Rule was at the top of the political agenda, and where the land acts of 1881 and 1885 had opened the door for peasant proprietorship, the members the local branches embraced the idea, maybe borrowed unconsciously from the notables of Grattan's parliament and fuelled by Daniel O'Connell and numerous subsequent political leaders, that they were the Irish nation. They seized the opportunities provided by the League to rule in its name. The fact that the Irish National League had been established by Parnell in October 1882 with the clear purpose of using it to secure Home Rule lent legitimacy to the local branches, which as Perry Curtis has said, became `a self-constituted authority with powers parallel to those of the established government'.(2)

Certainly many contemporary observers believed that the National League was not just a pliant electoral tool for the parliamentary party, but rather the only recognized authority in Ireland. In a letter to the Times following a tour of Ireland in the fall of 1887, Montague Cookson, an unsuccessful Gladstonian candidate for Brixton at the late election and a proclaimed Home Rule supporter, put this view most succinctly:

It is too late to inquire whether Home Rule shall be established in Ireland.

It is already there ... The strength of a government consists of its power

to enforce its decrees. The decrees of the Government of the Queen are

set at naught in the three counties I have mentioned [Cork, Limerick,

Clare], while those of the League are instantly and implicitly obeyed. Its

instruments of torture are always in order, and can be applied at any

moment to coerce refractory spirits, the number of which is rapidly

diminishing under the prevailing reign of terror. The `boycott' is a

far more ingenious and cruel invention than the thumb-screw.(3)

Numerous Resident Magistrates, landlords, estate agents and other notables supported this assessment in testimony in October 1886 before the Cowper Commission looking into the land acts of 1881 and 1885. As one substantial grazier near Loughrea, Co. Galway told the commissioners, `everything proceeds from the ...National League. They have absorbed everything into them'.(4)

In many ways the National League was the product of the unfinished business and dashed hopes of the Land League. Especially for the small western farmers the hopes raised by the Land League lay in considerable disarray by 1882, while the divisiveness, bitterness and hardships that characterized its last year defined the response of many in rural Ireland to the new league. In The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, Michael Davitt captured the spirit of the country at the time of the founding of the National League:

The country had passed through a grave crisis, and the fruits of all that

had been sown and suffered for were neither matured nor in evidence.

On the contrary, there were a large number of `wounded soldiers', or

evicted tenants, and others who had seen the seamy side of the battlefield,

and the position and claims of these were a discouraging factor and

argument with those who had lost less.(5)

In this environment the local branches were often reflective of what Margaret O'Callaghan has called the `multitude of local squabbles, immemorial disputes and recalcitrant grievances' that characterized rural Ireland.(6)

Ironically, these divisive forces often provided the sustaining dynamic of the agitation. The most active of the local branches attempted to bring some order to this situation by administering justice, regulating trade and commerce and, most importantly, controlling access to the land. The text of these efforts was one that:

drew upon the informal regulatory rituals inherent in the society -- or

the brutal cruelties of control if one wishes to put it differently -- and

formalised them. In so doing it attempted to set against the official law