Cast into destitution by the landlord, Joseph turned to the only means of lawful survival open to him and joined up with the very Crown forces that had turned out his family. In his early teens, O’Connor became a soldier with Her Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot. The British Army saved him from starvation.
But these were the last years of the old landlordism. Sixteen years after the O’Connors were driven onto the roads of north Kerry, the rest of rural Ireland was gripped by an agrarian revolution that, for the most part, eschewed the gun in favour of civil defiance. By the time the Land League was formed in 1879 the whole edifice was ready to topple. The Famine had wiped out the rents on which many landlords depended. Rates became impossible to pay. Bankruptcy stalked the landed gentry. ‘An Irish estate is like a sponge,’ wrote one lord, ‘and an Irish landlord is never as rich as when he is rid of his property.’25 Gladstone had already begun the process of strengthening tenants’ rights in 1870. Reform created its own momentum. The Land League would take care of the rest.
Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt were second only to Michael Collins in my father’s pantheon of greats. It was Parnell, Eamonn said, who gave people back their dignity. Parnell and Davitt were very different men, in temperament and background. Parnell was a Protestant landowner, liberal and nationalist, a brilliant political tactician and leader of the Irish Party at Westminster. His fellow MPs knew him as a man of ‘iron resolution … impenetrable reserve [with] … a volcanic energy and also a ruthless determination’.26 Michael Davitt was the child of an evicted family from County Mayo, brought up in the north of England where he went into the mills as a child labourer, losing his arm at the age of eleven in an industrial accident. Davitt began his political life in the Fenians and in 1870 was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour for treason. He was twenty-four years old at the time and endured a harsh regime as a political prisoner. Yet Davitt emerged from jail convinced that violence would never achieve a complete revolution. In this he foreshadowed by a century the experience of the IRA prisoners in the Maze prison. Davitt became an internationalist in prison, seeing the Irish farm labourer as part of the worldwide struggle of the oppressed. Passionate, approachable, he provided the organisational genius of the Land League.
My father occasionally spoke of him, but always the doomed glamour of Parnell, Pearse and Collins shut out the light. Yet Michael Davitt did more than anybody to change the lives of my forebears. I only came to appreciate him in later life – this internationalist and socialist and campaigning foreign correspondent, who made the journey from revolutionary violence to a true people’s politics.
In later life, as a journalist, he revealed the horror of the anti-Semitic pogrom at Kishinev in the tsarist empire in 1903. He arrived in Kishinev ‘a striking figure with a black beard, armless sleeve, and trilby hat’, and set about interviewing the survivors and witnesses.27 His journalism seethed with righteous indignation but was always supported by a meticulous attention to the facts. Davitt came across a house where a young girl had been raped and murdered: ‘The entire place littered with fragments of the furniture, glass, feathers, a scene of the most complete wreckage possible. It was in the inner room (in carpenters shed) where … the young girl of 12 was outraged and literally torn asunder … the shrieks of the girl were heard by the terrified crowd in the shed for a short while and then all was silent.’28 His reporting created an international outcry.
He also went to South Africa as a correspondent during the Boer War, where he felt conflicting emotions as he encountered British prisoners of war: ‘[I felt] a personal sympathy towards them as prisoners; a political feeling that the enemy of Ireland and of nationality was humiliated before me and that I stood in one of the few places in the world in which the power of England was weak, helpless and despised.’29
In Ireland, Davitt had started the Land League campaign with the alluring slogan: ‘The land of Ireland for the people of Ireland’. Huge meetings were held across the country during the late nineteenth century in support of what became known as ‘the Three Fs’: Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, and Free Sale. Predictably the agitation brought a return of violent customs in the north Kerry countryside. The targets were not only the old Protestant landlord class. Rural Ireland now had a large body of Catholic bigger, or ‘strong’, farmers, who became targets of the League.
At the height of the land agitation, in the crucial years 1879–85, the colonial government was forced to install a permanent military garrison in Listowel. A bad landlord, a greedy big farmer, might expect retribution in the form of boycott, or a visit from ‘Captain Moonlight’ or the Moonlighters – agrarian raiders who hocked cattle and burned hay barns. Catholics who rented land from others who were evicted or who paid rent in defiance of a boycott were frequent targets. The French writer Paschal Grousset met a man in north Kerry in 1887 whose ears had been mutilated and whose cattle had had their tails docked. The man’s crime was to have accepted work on a boycotted farm. ‘Let a farmer, small or great, decline to enter the organisation,’ wrote Grousset:
or check it by paying rent to the landlord without the reduction agreed to by the tenantry … or commit any other serious offence against the law of the land war, he is boycotted. That is to say he will no longer be able to sell his goods, to buy the necessities of life; to have his horses shod, corn milled, or even exchange a word with a living soul within a radius of fifteen to twenty miles of his house. His servants are tampered with and induced to leave him, his tradespeople shut their doors in his face, his neighbours compelled to cut him … people come and play football in his oat fields, his potatoes are rooted out: his fish or cattle poisoned; his game destroyed.’30
And if he refused to accede to the threats? Grousett put it starkly: ‘Then his business is settled. Someday or other, he will receive a bullet in his arm, if not in his head.’31
Another man, who had shaken the hand of a hated landlord, was forced to wear a black glove on that hand. A seventy-two-year-old writ-server had his left ear sliced off. The land agent S. M. Hussey was forced out of the area after his home was destroyed by dynamite in 1884. There were sixteen people in the house at the time. Miraculously no one was hurt. ‘To show how matters stood,’ he wrote, ‘one of my daughters reminds me that I gave her a very neat revolver as a present, and whenever she came back from school she always slept with it under her pillow.’32 Hussey aroused particular loathing because of a rent rise intended to pay for a £100,000 mansion for one of his landlord clients, and the burning down of several evicted tenants’ houses. The land agent for Lord Listowel, Paul Sweetnam, evicted the O’Connell family at Finuge for non-payment of rent, as a contemporary report described.* ‘When Mr O’Connell came on the scene the eviction was almost completed … He had no place to shelter himself or his family. He came into town and asked the agent for a night’s lodging in the home from which he was evicted. The agent refused.’33
The bigger Catholic farmers watched the violence with alarm. The attackers were nearly always the ‘men of no property’, the rural underclass made up of the sons of small farmers or farm labourers. The land campaigners promised them a stake in the soil they worked. Land would be redistributed. By the beginning of 1880 worsening agricultural prices and poor weather reduced many of the peasantry