County Mayo: An
Outline History
by
Bernard O'Hara and Nollaig ÓMuraíle
Part 4 - 1800 to 1900
Mayo
before the Great Famine
The early decades of the 19th
century saw a new outbreak of agrarian agitation with the rise of
the 'Ribbon Societies' in Connacht. These sought to protect
tenants against eviction by landlords who wished to clear their
lands for grazing - to avail of the high prices for cattle
prevailing in the years immediately after the Napoleonic Wars.
Ribbonism had a strong sectarian tinge, being influenced by
inflammatory pamphlets which were widely circulated at the time
and which predicted the imminent overthrow of 'the Reformation'.
Sectarian tensions were further
increased in this period by the activities of evangelical
Protestant missionaries seeking to 'redeem the Irish poor from
the errors of Popery. One of the best-known missions of this kind
was that founded at Dugort, in Achill, in 1831 by a
Meathman, the Rev. Edward Nangle. The activities of the
missionaries and bible societies were strongly disapproved of by
many, perhaps most, of the clergy of the Established Church, but
they received important encouragement from two successive
Protestant bishops of Tuam. Their staunchest opponent was the
Mayo-born Catholic archbishop of Tuam, John MacHale, a supporter
of Daniel O'Connell, a promoter of the Irish language, and a
sturdy polemicist, who died at the age of ninety in 1881.
These too were the years of the
campaign for Catholic Emancipation and, later, for the abolition
of the tithes which a predominately Catholic population was
forced to pay for the upkeep of the clergy of the Established
Church.
Early in the nineteenth century,
there were a number of famines in Ireland, culminating in the
Great Famine of 1845 - '49, when about a million people died and
a further million went into exile. The population increased from
an estimated figure of four and a half million in 1800 to over
eight million by 1841. The pressure of this vast increase
exacerbated the fragile subsistence economy of the period, as
land became subdivided into smaller and smaller plots.
Destitution was already a fact of life for many and evictions
became regular occurrences in the Irish countryside. Most of the
impoverished population depended on the potato as their staple
food product. Disaster struck in August 1845, when a killer
fungus (later diagnosed as Phytophthora infestans )
started to destroy the potato crop. The green stalks of potato
ridges became blighted and within a short time the rotting crop
was producing a terrible stench. About a third of the national
potato crop was destroyed that year, and an almost complete
failure the following year led to a catastrophe for the remainder
of the decade. By 'black forty-seven', people were dying in their
thousands from starvation-related diseases. The workhouses, built
in the early 1840s to relieve appalling poverty, were unable to
cope with the numbers seeking admission. Various parsimonious
relief measures were inadequate to deal with the scale of the
crisis. The number of evictions increased. This process of
'clearance' (as it was called) was aided by the 'quarter-acre
clause' (the infamous Gregory clause, called after its proposer,
Sir William Gregory MP of Coole Park, Co. Galway) in the Poor Law
Extension Act 1847 which excluded from relief anyone who had more
than a quarter acre of land. Any such unfortunate person who was
starving had to abandon his holding and go to the workhouse if he
and his family wanted a chance to survive. Conditions became
worse in 1848 and 1849, with various reports at the time
recording dead bodies everywhere.
The catastrophe was particularly
bad in County Mayo, where nearly ninety per cent of the
population were dependent on the potato. By 1848, Mayo was a
county of total misery and despair, with any attempts at
alleviating measures in complete disarray. People were dying and
emigrating in their thousands. We will never know how many died
in the county during those terrible years. The 'official'
statistics for the county show that the population dropped from
388,887 in 1841 to 274,499 in 1851, but it is accepted that the
actual figure in 1841 was far higher than the official census
return. It can safely be said that over 100,000 died in Mayo from
the famine epidemic and emigration began on a big scale (there
was some emigration before the Great Famine). Most emigrants from
the county went to the USA, Canada, England and Scotland, to
become part of the big Irish diaspora scattered throughout the
world.
There are numerous reminders of
the Great Famine to be seen on the Mayo landscape: workhouse
sites, famine graves, sites of soup-kitchens, deserted homes and
villages and even traces of undug 'lazy-beds' in fields on the
sides of hills. Many roads and lanes were built as famine relief
measures. There were nine workhouses in the county: Ballina,
Ballinrobe, Belmullet, Castlebar, Claremorris, Killala,
Newport, Swinford and Westport.
Rather ironically perhaps, the
great reduction in Mayo's population, and especially the virtual
annihilation of the formerly numerous class of landless cottiers
who had been hardest hit by the Great Famine, enabled those who
remained to considerably improve their standard of living in the
following decades. The new National Schools - despite the
opposition of those, such as Archbishop MacHale, who regarded
them, with some justification, as agents of Anglicization -
succeeded in reducing the rate of illiteracy by almost half in
the forty years between 1841 and 1881. The result was a
population with rising expectations, and with growing confidence
in their own strength and in their ability to bring about a
change in conditions, and so, when bad harvests in 1877 and '78
and a disastrous one in 1879 brought the threat of another
serious famine, particularly in the west, the people were far
better prepared to protect themselves than they had been thirty
years before.
A small poverty-stricken place
called Knock, County Mayo, made headlines when it was announced
that an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and St.
John had taken place there on 21 August 1879, witnessed by
fifteen local people.
The
Land War
The people who remained in County
Mayo in the wake of the Great Famine soon showed that they were
resilient in the face of adversity. A national movement was
initiated in County Mayo during 1879 by Michael Davitt, James
Daly, and others, which brought about the greatest social change
ever witnessed in Ireland. Michael Davitt (1846 -1906), who was
born at Straide, County Mayo, saw his family evicted at the age
of four, emigration to England, and experienced many hard knocks
and disappointments in his voyage through life. He became
Mayo's most famous son on the pages of Irish history and one of
the great patriots of his country. James Daly (1835-1910), who
played a crucial role in the early land agitation in Mayo, came
from Boghadoon, near Lahardaun, and was editor of The
Connacht Telegraph newspaper. The land agitation started
at a meeting held in Irishtown, near Ballindine, County Mayo, on
Sunday 20 April 1879. The meeting, which was attended by a crowd
variously estimated at from four to fifteen thousand, arose out
of a threat to evict a number of tenants for arrears of rent from
the estate of a local absentee landlord. The meeting led not only
to the cancellation of the proposed evictions but to a general
reduction of rents. Of far greater consequence, however, were the
wider political effects of the meeting, whose reverberations were
to be felt throughout the whole of Ireland over the next quarter
of a century.
On 1 June 1879, the Fenian leader,
John Devoy, Michael Davitt and the county Wicklow landlord and MP
for Meath, Charles Stewart Parnell, met in Dublin, and apparently
agreed on 'the new departure', whereby the Fenians and the
constitutional nationalists agreed to combine in a struggle to
reform the Irish land-system. One week later Parnell urged a
meeting of tenants in Westport 'to hold a firm grip on your
homesteads and lands'. His call came as potato blight was
spreading once more through the west, and the number of evictions
for non-payment of rent was rising steadily. On 16 August, under
Davitt's leadership, the National Land League of Mayo was founded
in Castlebar, and two months later the campaign moved well beyond
the borders of Mayo with the inauguration in Dublin of the Irish
National Land League, with Parnell as its President, and Michael
Davitt, its acknowledged father, as one of its secretaries.
The story of the 'Land War' over
the next two decades is part of Irish history rather than of the
Mayo story specifically. Mayo, however, played a prominent, and
sometimes violent, role in the struggle. Almost half of what were
termed 'agrarian outrages' (maiming of cattle, destruction of
property, wounding and even killing of land agents, landlords,
and those who were considered 'land grabbers') in the early 1880s
occurred in Mayo, Kerry and west Galway. At the same time, Mayo
attracted international attention, and in the process gave a new
word to the English language, by initiating a rather novel form
of non-violent protest. This involved a campaign of ostracisation
against Lord Erne's Mayo agent, a Norfolk man named Captain
Charles Cunningham Boycott, whose efforts to secure the harvest
from the estate on the eastern shore of Lough Mask necessitated
the importation of some fifty Orangemen, mostly from Cavan, and a
force of about a thousand soldiers and police to protect them.
The campaign against the 'Boycott Relief Expedition' was
orchestrated by Father John O'Malley, parish priest of Kilmolara
(resident in the Neale), and it was he who suggested the term
'boycotting' as being easier for his parishioners to pronounce
that 'ostracisation'. The unfortunate Boycott realised by late
November 1880 that all his efforts had been in vain (the harvest
had cost over 10,000 - 'a shilling for every turnip dug' said
Parnell), and so, taking his family with him, he returned to
England until the agitation had subsided. The land agitation was
gradually resolved by a scheme of a state-aided land purchase,
under which the tenants became full owners of the land. A series
of land purchase acts provided the finance which enabled the
tenants to purchase the land from landlords and repay the loans
with interest over a number of years. Tenant farmers became
owner-occupiers within a generation and in the process created
the foundations for the politically stable society we enjoy
today.
Thanks to the vision of Mother
Agnes Morrogh-Bernard (1842 - 1932), the Foxford Woollen Mill was
established in 1892. She made Foxford synonymous throughout the
world with high quality tweeds, rugs and blankets.
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... Particularly in the west, the Irish were suffering now
perhaps more than at any other time since the Famine. Rain
and cold weather had diminished the grain crop, produced a
shortage of food for cattle and pigs, and encouraged again that
old black rot of potatoes which the aged had not seen since the
catastrophe of thirty years past. In Michael
Davitt's Mayo, where a cholera epidemic struck the chickens, and
the blight the potatoes, the twin terrors of famine and eviction
hung over people, some of whom in resisting eviction fought armed
police with stones. The weather had been so torrential as
to prevent the drying of turf to keep the families of the west
warm.
"So
O'Reilly observed with enthusiasm, from the American side of the
Atlantic, the Irish Land War, an extraordinary and largely moral
struggle, which began with a rally at Irishtown in County Mayo on
20 April 1879 ... Hopeful tenants, men and women both, dressed in
their best and marked in military formation behind bands and
horsemen bearing pikes. They cheered speakers who condemned
landlordism ... (Charles) Parnell accepted Michael Davitt's
invitation to attend in June a meeting of tenant farmers at
Westport, in County Mayo, where Fenians, ex-Fenians, land
agitators and politicians were all on the platform, and it was
this meeting which helped create a formal structure, the Land
League of Mayo, and the Irish National Land League." pp
575-576.
"It
became evident through the Irish census of 1881, that all the
plans, all the hopes, captures, imprisonment, destroyed loves,
violated secrets, blunted loyalties and ruined youths arising
from Irish nationalist protests had not halted ruin. The
population of Ireland had declined a further 21 per cent in the
past 30 years and was now just over five million. The rest of
Europe boomed; Ireland withered. Migration, as Davitt was
only too happy to point out, was still the Irish way. Sligo,
Mayo, Clare, Galway, Roscommon - counties where land tenure and
life were most insecure - were on their way down to a third of
their 1841 numbers. …" -- pp 577-578
"But
Gladstone's Land Act of 1881 was working to allay some of the
defiance of Irish tenants. The act gave legal status throughout
Ireland to the Ulster custom, by which farmers would be paid for
improvements they had made upon the land. It enabled land
purchase - three quarters of the purchase price could be advanced
by a land commission to be repaid over thirty-five years at 5 per
cent. But less than 1,000 tenants would be rich enough to buy
land under this system, and the most important reform for the
mass of tenants was the right to take their rents for review to a
new Land Court. The Land Court was much used by farmers, who
generally ended up with a reduction in rent of up to a quarter.
What this first Land Act had not done, however, was to give
comfort to those who were already in arrears of rent, who had
already been evicted, or who were either starving or under the
threat of starvation. It was estimated that 280,000 Irish
families, representing 1,500,000 or more people, plus those
already evicted, were not helped. " -- p 578
"For
these people, nothing was altered. But the Land League had given
them coherent stratagems, including the stratagem of the boycott.
The method had first been proposed by (Charles) Parnell at a
speech in Ennis in County Clare in 1880. In some versions of the
speech the first four instances of the word 'show' are rendered
as 'shun.' 'When a man takes a farm from which another has been
evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you
must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at
the shop-counter, you must show him at the fair and at the
market-place and even in the house of worship, by leaving him
severely alone, by putting him into a sort of moral Coventry , by
isolating him from the rest of his kind, as if he were a leper of
old, you must show him your detestation. … If the population of
a county in Ireland carry out this doctrine. there will be no man
so full of avarice, so lost to shame, as to dare the public
opinion of all right-thinking men within the county.' The first
victim of this device was Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, a
land agent at Lough Mask in Mayo. Local people refused to deal
with him or take his crop in. A work force of fifty Orangemen had
to be escorted by 1,000 troops every day to and from Lough Mask
to harvest Boycott's crops. As a result of the Boycott affair in
the early 1880s, landlords had now to deal with an Irish tenant
class who would no longer speak to them, servants who would not
fill their glasses, shopkeepers who turned their shoulders or
closed their doors. There were few communities where instances of
this moral revolt were not seen. Ordinary people had discovered
their power." -- p 578
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